Sharn?

Mercule

Adventurer
I've got to say, I really like Eberron as a setting. They did a good job and I'm looking forward to a game using the setting.

One thing that I'm not tickled about, though, is Sharn. For some reason, the city doesn't do anything for me. In fact, I'd probably set up an Eberron campaign in such a way to minimize Sharn and hope to not see it in play. I'm not sure, but I think it's things like air cars and absurdly tall towers. I haven't read through the Sharn book, yet, so that might change my attitude.

Anyone else have similar feelings, or am I the only person who likes the setting, but doesn't like its shining jewel?
 

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I love the concept but fear that it will not be carried through to its logical conclusions. And I also fear it may be a long time, if ever, before we see it in as much detail as we've seen cities like Waterdeep. I like that much detail in a city setting. But then I haven't seen the Sharn sourcebook yet.
 

Sharn, I'm falling in love with more every day. I purchased the Sharn - City of Towers Hardback, and I like it for several reasons:

1) The city is vastly DIFFERENT from any other previously published D&D city (except maybe Bluffside). It screams "out there" compared to cities like Waterdeep or Greyhawk. If anything, the city has more in common with Greyhawk than Waterdeep; portions are run by gangs or, in some cases, completely lawless, the wards of the city have characteristics all their own, and you can genuinely grasp the differences between different wards in the text.

2) The characters that Keith Baker and James Wyatt populate this city with are not only colorful, but they are as entertaining to read about as use in play. Flamewind the prophetic Sphinx, the prophetic little gnome who sits on a pillar all day and offers advice to passers-by, the Red-Light Madam who sits on the city council, the Cook who's been practicing her craft for 300 years, the ass of a Gnomish Bard who acts as social conscience with his satrical plays - Every time I turned a page there was someone else to introduce my players to.

3) The city evokes film noir and modern-style grit like no D&D city previous. I can feel the spirits of gumshoe detectives, femme fatales, corrupt bureaucrats, and the mass unwashed of the 1920's and '30s come alive in their fantasy equivalents in Sharn, thanks to the new book.

Much like Waterdeep, they worked to build a city that has all the necessary elements of adventuring, all in one place - only unlike my perceptions of Waterdeep, they worked to make the arrangement more logical as to why things are where they are, and WHY they are.
 

though i'm only about 70 pages into the sourcebook, i'm absolutely loving it! this book [and its general concept] is everything i've been looking for in a city sourcebook since the later days of first edition. henry's analysis is right on the money. plus, the book is littered with crunchy rules bits that answer many of the questions i've always seen raised in attempts at urban adventuring in the past: how to incorporate the adventurers into a community [bonuses to gather info in their local pub, for example], how to find a shop that fills their needs in a particular neighborhood, etc, etc. these rules bits make logical sense and make urban adventuring more feasible from a dm-ing standpoint. bravo, keith and james!
 

Mercule said:
I haven't read through the Sharn book, yet, so that might change my attitude.

You should read the book. It's good. Magical transport and strange architecture are not overly detailed ( or even covered much at all ), but there is a lot of intrigue, politics and flavor that really make the city come alive. Probably the best city product I have seen yet.
 

Definitely the best city-as-adventure-site book ever. Just the way it's presented is better than any three Waterdeep books put together. Admittedly, I like Undermountain very muchly - but Sharn is just more...usable than any other starting place I've seen. It makes sense, rational sense, so you can pretty much intuitively know the city better than a lot of places in roleplaying games. There's not only a reason for the city to exist and be huge (industry, unique location, trade routes) but there's also those tons of tiny details that "fill out" a city like districts where you can point at and reasonably go "this is where your mother would live Redgar, because you said she was a dentist." That is, people have business AND places to live AND places that they recreate. It works on scale too, you could fairly reasonably have a game that never left a single district or run a game where Sharn was simply someplace on the way to somewhere else and you only used it in the grossest sense.

Heck, I'm not even sure I ever intend to run an Eberron game and Sharn:CoT is looking like one of the best gaming purchases I've made this year.

/cheerleading
 

I've got and read Sharn, and it's a great city book, but I still don't like the city itself. The characters are great (the aforementioned gnome on a Pillar, and there's an invisibile gnomassin too!), but the actual city layout still scream "eh?" to me.

It's five plateau's, and they built up. They built on ancient ruins, but the ruins make no sense since they were raised up anyway. The caverns are nice also.
I'm not sure what makes Sharn a good location for a city, let alone everyone using it through the centuries. There isn't a natural harbor, nor anyway to naturally raise the goods from the docks to the city (it's done using cranes and lifts and whatnot).

I'd have prefered if Sharn were a large valley, the harbor at the mouth of the valley, the city filling the valley upwards into the heavens, eventually passing the peaks of the cliff's and pushing into the clouds. Filling the walls of the valley with homes and bridges and such.

The book also makes it seem a little more spread out and sparse than the original setting book did, but I think that's just because of the way the maps were drawn. (2d maps are limited when expressing 3d cities.)

The only problem I had with the book was the layout. They have maps by level (upper, middle, lower, etc) but then organize the descriptions by district (so, you'll read Upper central, middle central, lower central, than upper whatever, lower whatever, etc. As opposed to Upper central, Upper Whatever and so on) no index makes this irritating.
 

Vocenoctum said:
It's five plateau's, and they built up. They built on ancient ruins, but the ruins make no sense since they were raised up anyway. The caverns are nice also.
I'm not sure what makes Sharn a good location for a city, let alone everyone using it through the centuries. There isn't a natural harbor, nor anyway to naturally raise the goods from the docks to the city (it's done using cranes and lifts and whatnot).
The manifest zone to Syrania, its location at the mouth of the Dagger River, and its proximity to Xen'Drik are what make the location important.
 

Vocenoctum said:
The only problem I had with the book was the layout. They have maps by level (upper, middle, lower, etc) but then organize the descriptions by district (so, you'll read Upper central, middle central, lower central, than upper whatever, lower whatever, etc. As opposed to Upper central, Upper Whatever and so on) no index makes this irritating.

I'm keen on someday convincing my players to try Eberron and I'm equally keen on getting and using Sharn. Your comments point to the source of my one hesitation. Do you feel swamped by the abundance of material? Do you need to flip through the book every couple of minutes to describe the new district the PCs are travelling through? I feel my memory is my limiting factor in breathing life into a setting and if the locations aren't so distinct as to be indelible then I can see page turning problems arising.
 


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