Player's Guide to Eberron
By James Wyatt, Keith Baker, Luke Johnson, and Steven "Stan!" Brown
Wizards of the Coast product number 953687200
160 pages, $29.95
Player's Guide to Eberron is the latest release in the Eberron campaign setting, and it's by far the best book I've seen thus far in the line. (I've heard some very good things about Sharn: City of Towers, but I haven't seen that book for myself.)
The cover art is done in the standard Eberron style: Wayne Reynolds paints a picture of adventurers in action (which is printed in full on pages 2-3), and the illustration is cut into various chunks for the front and back covers. This time around, a female shifter examines an ancient scroll in a drow-infested set of ruins, while her human archer and warforged companions fight off a drow/scorpion hybrid and a dracolich (or dragon skeleton, in any case), while a female drow spellcaster approaches with a dagger from behind. (And while she's at it, it looks like she's animating a couple of undead drow as well!) Wayne does his typically excellent job with this piece, providing a great level of detail, authentic-looking ruins (that is without a doubt the best-looking ancient scroll I've ever seen), and an overall sense of urgency in the scene depicted - once again, it looks like if the adventurers don't do something fast, they're about to be screwed over big time! In addition, this painting only reinforces my belief that Eberron has the coolest-looking drow of any campaign world, bar none. (And I'm one of the apparently diminishing number of people who still like reading the occasional Drizzt Do'Urden novel.)
The interior artwork consists of 58 full-color illustrations by 10 different artists, as well as 13 full-color maps by cartographer Lee Moyer. The maps are universally well done: easy to read, well-scaled, and very practical. The artwork is well above average overall, with some really nice pictures: I especially enjoyed the dead-motifed elves by Francis Tsai on page 19 (the female elf's armor consists in part of a pair of skeletal hands covering her breasts - quite a disturbing image, but one that drives home the close association that Aerenal elves have with the dead); Lucio Parillo's dragonmarked characters on page 49 (if you look, the half-elf's dagger is held at her side, but her shadow has it raised as if ready to stab - a very nice touch!); Prince Lorrister on page 99, a winged aasimar (I think it's by Steve Prescott, if I'm deciphering the glyph he uses to sign his work correctly; in any case, I like the cockatoo familiar/animal companion); and the warforged in an "Alas, poor Yorrick!" pose on page 151, by Draxall Jump Entertainment. There were no really poor illustrations that bothered me; the worst artwork in the book is still about at industry average.
I typically find the background stuff describing campaign worlds to be somewhat dry reading - I still haven't gotten around to finishing reading through the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting, having floundered when the book started describing each of the various nations and geographical regions. Here's where, in my mind at least, Player's Guide to Eberron really shines. They decided to take the encyclopedic approach with the book: after an 8-page first chapter providing 11 character archetypes that you might wish to use to build your player character upon, the rest of the book is encyclopedia-type entries on the various things that an Eberron character would be expected to already know about his home world.
I really like this approach. It makes it very easy to find things, even without the extensive Table of Contents and 2-page Index in the back. If you want to know what your PC might know about warforged, just flip over to the Warforged entry on page 150. Thinking of creating a cleric or paladin, and are curious about the various gods worshipped on Eberron? Page 138 has the Sovereign Host entry and the Church of the Silver Flame details are on page 26; or, if you're feeling a bit on the evil side, you can flip over to page 32, which describes the Dark Six. The various entries range from 2 to 8 pages each, and in almost every case the write-up seems very natural and "fits" the pages allotted to it very well; there were only a couple places where the information I was reading seemed like "filler" material that served no other purpose than to eat up space. (The main culprit here seemed to be the letter from a father to his son in the "Monastic Traditions" section.)
The entries also have various Knowledge check tables, where you can see what you'd generally know about the subject at hand depending upon your Knowledge (history) (or Knowledge (nobility and royalty), or Knowledge (geography), or Knowledge (arcana), or whatever the case for the subject) roll. This is a very cool feature, one seemingly snatched from the recent "Ecology" articles in Dragon magazine, where I first noticed the concept being applied. While some people might worry that the listings give the reader access to more information about the subject than his character might be expected to know, I don't really see any way around this short of coming out with a Player's Guide to Eberron for Players Whose PCs got a "10" on their Knowledge (history) Checks, Player's Guide to Eberron for Players Whose PCs got a "15" on their Knowledge (history) Checks, and so on - not a very practical option.
Proofreading and editing was at a very high level this time around, even for a Wizards of the Coast book (and they generally have some of the best proofreading in the industry). In all, I only noticed a very small handful of errors: one instance where "Monster Manual" wasn't italicized, one instance where "aberration" was spelled "abberation," one instance of "ite" being used in place of "its" (a simple typo), one instance of "no" being used instead of "none" (as in "no of these companions can be of the same kind"), one instance of a word being dropped from a sentence ("home glittering cities" should have been "home of glittering cities"), and an "a" being used in place of an "an" before a word starting with a vowel. For a 160-page book, that's downright phenomenal - my hat's off to editors Michele Carter and Scott Gray and Editing Manager Kim Mohan - great job, guys!
For those of you who read John Cooper reviews to check out the "unofficial errata," I'm afraid I'll have to disappoint you this time around. Since Player's Guide to Eberron is a player-focused book (as opposed to a DM-focused book), there are no stat blocks at all in the book.
There are, however, a couple new prestige classes and organizations to which the PCs might wish to join. My favorite - by far - of these is the High Elemental Binder, a 10-level prestige class on pages 104-106. These guys can summon specific elementals (meaning not just a Small fire elemental, but Z'norkak the Small fire elemental), who serve as a kind of cross between full-time animal companions and summonable paladin mounts - they're specific individuals who serve the Binder, but who can be summoned and dismissed. What I really like about the prestige class is that the High Elemental Binder is able to absorb his summoned elementals into his weapons, his armor, and eventually his own body, deriving various benefits by doing so. It's a very flavorful prestige class, which is high up on my own personal list of "things a prestige class should be." I should also point out the Manifest Spellshaper, which is unique to my experience in that while it has all of the hallmarks of a prestige class (with entry requirements and everything), it isn't a prestige class at all; rather, it's a collection of 13 feats that a Manifest Spellshaper can take to expand his spellcasting abilities based on his knowledge of the ebb and flow of various other planes. I just though that was a neat way to go about it.
Taken as a whole, I think Player's Guide to Eberron is the standard by which all Player's Guides should be compared. (Of course, this being the first Player's Guide I've ever seen, for all I know it is the standard format for a Player's Guide. I know there's a Player's Guide to the Forgotten Realms, but I haven't picked it up yet.) There are a couple of things that might have been done better - for one thing, there are a couple of places where some "DM purview" facts should maybe have been dropped out of a book that Eberron players are expected to read - but I'm not going to let that drop my final score below a "5 (Excellent)." If you're running an Eberron game, I'd highly recommend getting a copy of this book for your players to use (and there are plenty of useful maps and adventure ideas in the book for the DM as well).
James, Keith, Luke, Stan! - well done, guys.
