D&D General What do you like about Eberron?

[Bayushi_seikuro]

I like that, in my limited experience, it allows many types of campaigns, unified in one world. I know that could be said about any game, but..

I feel it's more 'baked into' Eberron. You want to go to dinosaur land? You can do it. You want to explore post-World War I? Not a problem. You want to run a campaign where adventurers come from a college, and their adventures are things towards graduation? Go for it.

I could be wrong, but that was how it was explained to me and how I now visualize it

 

[Voadam]

The way it divorces divine magic and gods and alignment.

Clerics following any religion can be any alignment and cast spells. It allows a diversity of religions in the D&D game. It allows schisms, and heresies and faithless and false and corrupt priests. It allows competing pantheons and cosmological theories and allows non pantheistic religions such as ancestor worship and philosophies.

It allows Thrane and the Church of the Silver Flame to be LG paladin themed but have room for overzealous inquisitions that get out of hand and political and even evil bishops within the good Church. It allows the Blood of Vol to be a big serious thing even though originally setup to be a person's cult.

It allows a lot of plot points and world themes that can't be used in one where a cleric's power can be taken away by a god feeling they have strayed from a one true path.

I had been doing similar things in my own campaign before Eberron, but I was glad to see this in Eberron which provided a lot of stuff I could adapt for my own game.

 

[Voadam]

I feel Eberron has strong faction identification stuff.

Karrnath with their Necromancy. Thrane and the Church of the Silver Flame. Blood of Vol. Dragonmarked Houses. Interesting factions with identity that can be riffed on.

 

[MarkB]

Distant gods. Religion plays a strong part in every culture, but direct divine intervention just doesn't really happen, making religion a matter of faith rather than fact.

"PCs are special." Back when it was first released and there were actual NPC classes, it was rare to see an NPC with a PC class, and even those that had them often only had a couple of levels interspersed with NPC class levels. And something made clear more in accompanying articles than the core books was that earning XP and quickly progressing through multiple character levels was not something that happened to most people. Generally speaking, anyone who wasn't a PC, even dedicated adventurers, would take months or years to progress in character level. No retired 20th level adventurers running the tavern in this setting.

New spins on established races. Whether it's spiritualist orcs, information-state gnomes or barbarian halflings, there's a place for everything but it's not necessarily the place you were expecting.

 

[kigmatzomat]

Didn't really like Eberrron when I saw it at Gencon. It was Earthdawn d20, which is funny because Earthdawn was 1e AD&D with all the RAW turned into in-game meta combined with Horrors. My Earthdawn group at the time had an airship, an ork Wizard, a troll weaponsmith and an obsidiman Troubador who licked Horrors to rob them of power. So airships, people constructed of mystical stone and wood who could be artificers and ork bards, all of whom lived in fear of demons beneath the ground really felt derivative. It was a lot of points of commonality.

By the time of 5e it was a bit more nuanced (and Earthdawn did what many Fasa-properties do and cycled editions stupidly fast between devs). The multi-way war meant borders everywhere, grudges that formed over multiple generations, and several big mysteries that were topics of pub-conversation in-game.

 

[Autumnal]

Why everyone else said. Maybe my meta-favorite thing is that there’s no presence of medievalism - it’s unabashedly fantasy with more modern touchstones. I’m good with that.

 

[Corinnguard]

Why everyone else said. Maybe my meta-favorite thing is that there’s no presence of medievalism - it’s unabashedly fantasy with more modern touchstones. I’m good with that.

Eberron is what our Industrial Age would have looked like if it went magictech.

 

[MarkB]

Eberron is what our Industrial Age would have looked like if it went magictech.

That's another thing I really like about the setting, it has a sense of progress. Many established settings have been in medieval stasis for centuries, and there's a sense that the most powerful magics are those of a lost age, but in Eberron there's a sense of forward progression, and great and powerful artifacts are just as likely being forged for the first time in some dragonmarked house's workshop as they are to be found in an ancient ruin.

 

[Corinnguard]

Eberron's signature species. This setting was the first to introduce (AFAIK):

• Warforged, D&D's first Construct PC species
• Changelings, a PC version of the Doppelganger.
• Shifters, a species descended from lycanthropes
• Kalashtar, a human-like species who share their minds with psionic entities from another plane of existence.