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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lancelot" data-source="post: 4812443" data-attributes="member: 30022">Hoo boy, am I gonna draw some flak for this... Eberron. And not for the obvious reasons. I have no beef with Warforged. I like the dragonmarks, I like Sharn, and I love what they did with aerenal elves and the dino-riding halflings. I like the magical trains. In fact, I like all of the "trappings" - the weird little things that add spice to the world. The problem is: The Big Bad Evils are deadly dull. Compare with other TSR campaign worlds... Greyhawk has Iuz and the Scarlet Brotherhood. Ravenloft has Strahd and Azalin. Planescape has the Abyssal Lords and the Lords of the Nine. The Realms have the Zhentarim and the Red Wizards. Birthright has the Gorgon. Spelljammer has the illithids and the neogi. Krynn has the dragon highlords. Now, sure, all of those campaign settings have many other big bads (Rary the Traitor, Vecna, yugoloths, Cult of the Dragon, etc, etc, etc), but there are a couple of groups which are marquee villains. You have instantly recognizable protagonists with clear motivations. They have history and "weight". I don't think Eberron has done enough to establish 1 or 2 "signature" Big Bad Evils. You've got (in no particular order, and I'm no Eberron expert): the Lords of Dust, Blood of Vol, Shadow in the Flame, undead from Kaarnath, scorpion-drow, abominations from Xoriat, the Lord of Blades, weird psionic mind-monsters... it's all over the place. That's good, in that it creates immense flexibility for DMs and adventures. But I think it's also bad in that, for a newcomer at least, there seem to be a hundred different evil groups out there. And (deep breath) few of them are particularly interesting. <ul style="text-align: left"> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The drow are like other drow, but... uhh... they have scorpions instead of spiders. And their driders are sort of... drorpions. And they're... uhh... patriachal instead of matriachal.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">We've got warforged so... let's have a bad warforged who wants to conquer the world in the name of the warforged.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Demons and devils have been used so much in the past (chained up, but striving to break free in Greyhawk, Realms, etc), so let's use rakshasas for a change. They're pretty close to fiends anyway.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Let's randomly create some uber-aberrations to create and master all the other aberrations. Let's diminish the mystique and horror that already surrounds mind flayers and aboleth by making them merely experimental creations of the mighty... uhh... daelkyr. Who you've never heard of before.</li> </ul> There do seem to be some truly unqiue and fascinating evil groups. The Blood of Vol (from what I've seen of it as a player) is a cult of death-worshipping elves who are fascinated with immortality. That's *interesting* to me - I haven't seen it in other campaign worlds. The concept of the Shadow in the Flame is also interesting. Again, frow what little I've seen as a player, it seems to be a hidden heretical sub-cult within an overtly Lawful Good religion. Very different. I think Eberron would be a more interesting world if they focused heavily on (say) two of the more interesting evil groups and really promoted them as a deadly threat. Keep the rest very loosely defined as options for individual DMs to explore further. On a side-note, I also find the nations themselves kind of dull. As a player (who doesn't own any of the Eberron supplements) I can only really identify Kaarnath as unique: it's the the slightly-crazy, militaristic undead nation. The others all seem to be pretty generic "fantasy nations" with the unusual range of slight cultural differences. </blockquote>

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