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Message: <blockquote data-quote="airwalkrr" data-source="post: 5844593" data-attributes="member: 12460">There is a reason I bought every single 3e Eberron source book and adventure. I LIKE reading about Eberron because it spurs my imagination. Even if I do not intend to use Eberron exactly as printed in the book (and I do not), I love having lots of detail to pull ideas from and adapt to suit my own purposes.But I think we are on the same page here on some level. One of my favorite Eberron books was Secrets of Xen'Drik. What I like most about it is that it presented a dozen or so seeds for adventure in various but non-specific parts of Xen'Drik. It was sort of a template for adventures in various types of settings, but it did not say exactly where those settings had to be. There was a ruin of a giant city, a hive of abeils, and so on, but you could pretty much put them wherever you wanted. I thought that idea was pure gold. And the Eberron books tend to have a lot of stuff like that. In fact, I find Eberron to be a very customizable setting, because aside from the city books (Stormreach and Sharn) there are very few stats for named NPCs aside from alignment, class, and level. What I like most about Eberron is that it is light on detail but heavy on ideas. That is something the 3e Forgotten Realms books did not do very well in my opinion.Nevertheless, I feel compelled to point out that sometimes the setting really makes the game. My favorite setting and game system of all time is <a href="http://www.palladiumbooks.com/index.php/questions/what-is-rifts" target="_blank">Rifts</a>, published by Palladium Books. Rifts does two things very well. First, it has a very detailed setting with an elaborate background and some fantastic characters and locations that are heavily detailed. Second, it has vast swaths of the world map that basically say "Here there be Dragons," leaving these areas wide open for GMs to develop on their own. In my opinion, it is the best of both worlds. And Rifts is chock-full of books with random tables for generation of new alien races, cultures, cities, and groups. It also has lots of tables for GM-guided generation of the same kind of stuff. In a sense, Rifts is an elaborately detailed setting that gives a GM with little free time plenty of stuff for his players to explore while at the same time leaving the majority of the world open for GM creativity and development. But the system really expects that the GM is going to put his own creative touch on the setting, and Kevin Siembieda (owner of Palladium Books) has said as much countless times in many books.I think if there are going to be world-building tools for D&D Next, that is great. But there should be significant support for a core setting (be it Greyhawk, FR, etc.) to help out fledgling DMs to at least give them a place to start and (more importantly) to show them what a well-developed setting looks like to spur their imagination.</blockquote>

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