Straight Dope on Eberron . . .

[Cinerarium]

I'm also interested in seeing how Eberron plays with the concept of XP....

My home-brewed campaign setting took a turn that's strikingly like Eberron a few years ago, with a similar group of 'working class' mages. And when I got into 3E shortly thereafter and grokked the XP requirements for creating magic items the same kinds of problems occurred to me.

On the one hand, I see the need to balance item creation with an XP cost; on the other hand, it's completely illogical. Anyone who makes something gets BETTER with practice, not worse. It'd be like a blacksmith forgetting how to make horseshoes the longer he does it.

So I'd echo Midget's point, I'm interested to see how they do it and see what I can copy to my own world. I'm all over Eberron!

 

[Vaxalon]

..."hard-drinking dwarven detective who always falls for the wrong dame" ...

You wouldn't happen to be a fan of Glen Cook's "Garrett" novels, would you?

 

[Nightfall]

I'm think he is Vax.

 

[Plane Sailing]

Keith, I really appreciate you posting here, and although at first blush I'd not been interested in the idea of Eberron this thread and some of the things I've now read in other places have changed my mind.

there is a strong use of one of my favorite outsiders, which in my opinion havn't seen enough use in other settings.

I wonder if this could be elementals? Some of the hints in the booklet suggest it as an idea. Although I wonder if you could get machinery that was run by "infernal combustion engines"

I'm really keen on seeing an Eberron-specific cosmology. For me, that is an important aspect of any campaign setting (particularly because I've hated the default "great wheel" cosmology since the day it was invented!)

As a slight note on "Everything in D&D is in Eberron", that doesn't mean that everything is crammed together. The goal is to provide some place in the world where a particular creature/whatever makes sense. Since you can travel across the world, if you really like that creature, well, here's where it belongs. To take drow as an example: Drow exist in Eberron. They are not the Drow of FR, by any means, but they are still dark elves. As things stand, they do not play a major role in the game -- they are not in Khorvaire, the continent players are likely to call home.

This is the other element that I wanted to pick up and say I'm really looking forward to. I heartily dislike the default greyhawk/D&D setting where everything seems pretty homogenous across an entire world. FR didn't seem much better to me (although I'll admit to not being an expert on FR).

The whole geography/ different races interaction thing is something I've used in my homebrew campaign for yonks and I'm keen to see how it pans out in Eberron.

Cheers,