D&D General What do you like about Eberron?

[humble minion]

When it comes to writing (as opposed to other creative industries like filmmaking, video game production where the budget/investment is much higher and the teams much bigger), it can often be true that 'made by committee' primarily means 'someone who needed an editor, got an editor'. And that's almost always a good thing.

 

[Blue]

I mean, to be fair, Eberron IS a kitchen sink setting. They took great care to include everything D&D into Eberron. "If it exists in D&D, there's a place for it in Eberron" was the motto for a while (and still is maybe?)

It's a fancy, designer-model kitchen sink that fits in a specific house aesthetics, but a kitchen sink nonetheless. And there's nothing wrong with that.

That was part of the requirements of the setting search that produced Eberron -- that everything from D&D had a place in it. I remember, I submitted my own one page pitch for the first layer of the search. However, it didn't automatically add things that came to D&D later, which is what makes something a kitchen sink.

 

[jdrakeh]

I like it because it feels different. Specifically, it's not Fantasy Europe, which I feel several official D&D settings are. I don't feel that it's dieselpunk (I think proper dieselpunk is grittier, dirtier), but it falls into the clockpunk/steampunk range for me. And I like both of those things. The most entertaining D&D I've played in the last five years or so has been set in Eberron (one short AL campaign and one traditional D&D campaign).

 

[Thommy H-H]

Lot of overlaps with other posts, I'm sure, but for me Eberron always feels like a kind of alternate universe version of D&D. Like, what if we take all the familiar elements and scramble them up to see what happens. Except instead of "what if Superman had landed in rural Russia during the Cold War instead of Kansas?" it's "what if goblins were the precursor empire?" or "what if orcs were druidic guardians?" And the thing is, those kinds of interpretations aren't unusual at all now, but that's because (for D&D at least) Eberron paved the way.

It's a different, internally consistent take on the classic D&D elements, and the great advantage of that in the modern era is you can drop elements right into other settings if you want. Warforged have shown up with their own sligthly different backstory in Netheril, Faerun, etc. Everyone uses shifters because it's an obvious consequence of lycanthropes existing. Want a theocracy? Here's the Silver Flame. Underdark not weird enough for you? Throw in some Khyber. It's a great example of what you can do within the framework of "D&D" and I really like how that's now reflected in the core books too.

 

[Reynard]

When it comes to writing (as opposed to other creative industries like filmmaking, video game production where the budget/investment is much higher and the teams much bigger), it can often be true that 'made by committee' primarily means 'someone who needed an editor, got an editor'. And that's almost always a good thing.

This isn't true in the rpg space in my experience. Most RPG books are written by freelancers and everything is meches together by a developer. RPGs are made much more like video games than they are like novels.