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I'm aware of this campaign world but what is it's theme exactly? WotC is pretty vague about. Can anyone give me the gist of it to satisfie my curiosity?

Okay, Eberron is the new D&D world and the new generic setting. Greyhawk will still be in the PHB but Eberron is the new golden boy. Like the Realms was 10-15 years ago.

Eberron is pretty much a generic fantasy setting about as different from the Realms as Dragonlace is. Standard swords and sorcery.
The only difference is Eberron is designed to mimick the pulp and high adventure feel of some movies. Indiana Jones flicks, the Mummy, Zorro, etc. More high flying action in outrageous settings with ancient ruins, cults, jungles, huge cities, intrigue and the like.
Magic is also much, much, much more common. People regulalrly use small amounts of magic and mystic equivalents of trains and planes allow for easy travel. The big city (Eberron's Waterdeep) is a huge city of towers that stetch miles into the sky filled with bridges and the like with the highest sections hovering in mid-air.

A very good comparison is the short lived Image/Cliffhanger comic Battle Chasers that features super-heroes in a fantasy world (w/o masks and tights but essentially with super powers).

It struck me as neat and fun but uninspired and stereotypical. Larger than life adventures might make a good basis for a campaign but hardly a whole setting.

Evil. That's all you need to know.

Seriously though, Ebberon is best described as someone's home-brew world, but made into a product.

Supposedly, when it was first produced it was exaulted as a "cinematic" game - one which captured the feeling of Indiana Jones, the Maltese Falcon, and D&D. Unfortunatly, this was a serious exaggeration and these claims have convieniently been forgotten by Wotc.

In essance, Ebberon is a world where magic is made common. For example, things like flying machines powered by elementals are used as transportation, much like blimps were in the early 20th century. In of itself, that should have been a pretty good hook - but the developers kept beating the horse.

Things like ethical trends in traditional races change - so expect goblin paladins and ect... There are races made of magic - special emphais is placed on the warforged - a race of humanoid robots. These buggers have a silly tendancy to end up as druids or wizards or something like that. There are also Shifters, who are half-breeds of lycanthropes and dopplegangers and things of that nature.

There are many little sub things like Dragon Marks, which are supposed to be herriditary magic abilties. In truth, these marks are pathetic - the abilties are really quite minor.

I could go on and on, really, because Ebberon goes on and on. There are a lot of nations, lot of new races, new magic types. There's a whole lot of items that alone could have been hooks, but together create a setting that's just to overcrowded.

As I said, its just like someone's homebrewed campaign given way too much promotion.

Well you do know it was a home brew world and campaign, right?

Wizards ran a competition a while back for most interesting new setting. The prize was that the winner would have that setting published. Evidently Forgotten Realms isn't as fresh as it once was and Wizards wanted to try something new (without making the mistake of TSR by having lots and lots of different settings).

The winner was a guy who did free lance work as a fantasy and supplement writer and thus Ebberon was born. I'd describe it as somewhat of a cross between Planescape (for sheer crazy new stuff factor) wihout any real 'planescape things' and Forgotten Realms (for the amount of detail they are putting into it).

I glanced through the Eberron campaign setting and I have to say it's for gamers who want their adventures fast-paced, sorta like Indiana Jones.

From here:

First of all, what is Eberron all about?
To put it simply, Eberron is unlike any of the other official settings. While you can say that the Forgotten Realms are differant from Greyhawk is differant from Forgotten Sun is differant from Dragonlance, when it boils right down to it, they're all pretty much clones of the standard high fantasy campaign. The PCs are one group of many adventurers, they go around raiding dungeons, fighting monsters and dragons, the same old same old. The general idea is that the PCs have to make a name for themselves by doing rather Tolkien-esque things.

Eberron is differant though. Eberron does not have the High Fantasy feel of all the other campaigns. Elves are not the highly graceful, nearly etheral beings they normally are. The gnomes are not happy go lucky tinkerers. And chances are, you will never even see a dragon, much less fight one. The feel of the campaign is focused much more around the Noir (essentially, the dark, gritty stuff), flashy action, and a world of grays instead of the black and white good and evil of other settings. It even has a short blurb of suggested movies to watch to get into the feeling of Eberron, movies like Indiana Jones, Pirates of the Carribean, The Mummy, and others. I would personally add The League of Extraordianry Gentlemen to the list as an excellent example of the tone and feel of Eberron.

The link above is really quite informative and should, together with this, cover most topics. Personally, I'm rather interested in the setting. It has neat ideas and flavor, is well detailed without drowning a newbie in information, and is very different compared to the other, somewhat dull, standard fantasy settings. Besides, I think my players need a break from Ravenloft and Call of Cthulhu before they go completely insane.

It's advertised like that (the above quote), but it's not really that different. Just more fantastic and higher magic. Sorry, low and wide. Still more common than any other game I"ve seen. It's a more 3E setting with mosters being much more likely to have character classes and things like goblins and kobolds much more likely to be PCs. And the less restrictive alignments. And I definetly agree with ScS that the world is crowded.
They didn't take the "one concept" that defined earlier world and instead took one concept and slapped on six or seven other ideas.

As for the whole "new because it is different from Tolkien and makes players do different things in a darker world" I have two words: Dark Sun. Which was a far more original, darker and unique setting than Eberron could hope to be.

The whole "not high powered" thing, well that will come with time. Give the novels a chance to slap in some high level crap. Plus, Dragonlance did the low-level thing too. Realms didn't start out mega-high powered. The creator just stuffed in his player's high level survivors to make them canon.

The other big selling points (the creator is just another guy and that there isn't copious amounts of material) are equally flawed. The guy is a nobody, amature and non-professional. Okay, he may be around and may even know know what he's talking about but he is still an industry rookie. I give him a year before he gets so fed up with the fans that he's harder to get ahold of than Greenwood or Gygax. The non-copious amounts of material are simply because they're not out yet. The setting is less than a year old and it has minis, a Campagn Setting, a HC expansion, two adventures and several trilogies of novels in the works. In five years there will be as much Eberron stuff as there is 3E Realms and probably twice as much as Dragonlance.

Malus Black wrote:Personally, I'm rather interested in the setting. It has neat ideas and flavor, is well detailed without drowning a newbie in information, and is very different compared to the other, somewhat dull, standard fantasy settings. Besides, I think my players need a break from Ravenloft and Call of Cthulhu before they go completely insane.

Well not to clog up this great RL board with talk of Eberron, you may want to pop over to Worlds. We have the creator of the game, Keith Baker, as a regular contributor to the boards so you will be able to ask any questions.

We have just done a book club for the first Eberron novel, The City of Towers, which was a very interesting read and made this world actually feel part of D&D.

Don't knock it until you try it, I always say.

Regards

I agree with you to a point. Yes, the "pulp noir" gimmick seems wrong when so much of the world is very standard fantasy. Yes, some mediocre author or another will invent a new Drizzt at some point. Yes, saying that Keith Baker is "just another guy" isn't much of a selling point. However, as I said, the underlying ideas are interesting. The main problem, in my opinion, comes when one person's vision of the world meets others' visions, not to mention the WotC marketing department (or whoever it was who changed the name from Codex Anathema to Lords of Madness. But I digress). An example of this can be seen in the newest Eberron adventure. It is apparently written by someone with no understanding of the setting, and is just a dungeon crawl set in Xen'Drik rather than in the ruins of Castle Greyhawk or wherever. This, I feel, will prove damaging to the setting over time (indeed, it has already begun). The authors simply don't have the same idea of the setting that Baker has, and make it more standard fantasy.

Looking back at that, I seem to be trashing my own arguments, which I probably am. So why do I recommend this setting? As I said, it's different. Of course, there have been many "different" settings over the years (more on this later), but the thing about Eberron is that it is a viable alternative to the Forgettable Realms, which I am very sick of. It is also not too reminiscent of past non-standard settings (you mention Dark Sun, which, while a neat setting, is something entirely different, and probably not as attractive to new players), and is a fresh start for those who want something, you guessed it, different and officially supported.

Of course, if they were to publish a setting in the first place, I'd rather they revived a classic setting, like Dark Sun or preferably Planescape. Of course, seeing the dumbed-down version in the Manual of the Planes and some rather odd ideas in the Planar Handbook, it might be best to leave these settings in the hands of fans (Athas and Planewalker, respecitvely).

And now I'll try to end this rather long and rambling post with a point. If you want to know about Eberron, read the links above for a heavily biased look on the setting. Then read David's and ScS' posts above for the complete antithesis . Finally, go down to your local gaming store, skim the campaign setting and some of the supplements, and make up your own mind.

E is a setting that was bought and enhanced with the idea of selling the video game and movie licenses some time in the future.

Because of that, it's very spectacular, but really unfitting for traditional P&P, especially for newbies, in my opinion.

For me as an older gamer, it has no attraction because everything it provides has been seen somewhere else in a different variation.

AFAIK, the game line proves to be a considerable flop for WotC, scaring most RPG veterans away to revived DL or some d20 setting...



*I know why I play Ravenloft*

I would hazard a guess that the biggest flaw in Ebberon is that it is artifical.

The best gaming worlds did not begin as such - rather, they evolved organically from adventures and fiction. Ravenloft, for the best example, began as an adventure, then expanded and eventually became a whole setting, and afterwards became two setting (Ravenloft and Masque).

The more popular worlds, such as Forgotten Realms and DragonLance have similar histories. Dragonlance didn't begin as a world of 5 ages, with Soth and Rastalin and the Cataclysm all plotted out. Toril didn't begin with the Hordelands and Maztaca already written, nor were all the stories of Comyr and the Dalelands plotted.

Though the creators may have known that they wanted to create a whole world, they started with a small base and added to it over years. The setting evolved from one concept and expanded as the fans and fiction writers added to the world.

Today, these worlds are riddiculously crowded with characters and races and classes and ect... but each and every addition was only made canon after it had stood the test of playtesting and fan critique.

Ebberon is the antithesis: it is an artificial world created whole from the begining. The creators crowded the world right from the start, trying to create a whole setting before the fans and fiction writers could even decide if they liked it or not.

I think a good analogy is life itself.
Older settings are like living beings, created organically - each addition springs from the same DNA code and is thus interrelated and integrated with the rest of the whole.
Ebberon is a Frankenstein's monster, created by stiching full grown parts together. Many of these parts don't match the others, some ever war with one another, just like transplant organs being rejected by a host. As a result, Ebberon was born a full grown - but it is as ugly as sin.

Clearly, this is a lesson all prospective DMs should learn - you can't force the hand of nature in creating a world.

Very right.

But I am pretty sure that, although WotC is desperately trying to promote Eberron, it won't stand the test of time.

After all, the elder gamers alwys have been the back of the gaming companies; as E doesn't appeal to gaming veterans (well, usually), I don't expect it to be around so long...

Desdichado wrote:After all, the elder gamers alwys have been the back of the gaming companies; as E doesn't appeal to gaming veterans (well, usually), I don't expect it to be around so long...

Always have been? Not so much in my mind. Wizards has been trying to rope in the younger generation for a while now and Eberron to me sounds like a great setting for a young teenager (or younger).

Plus D&D was really a 'young man's game' it is just that the original generation has grown older but has more money now so they can buy more. They have also been trying to get women into it (which is one of the conspiracy arguments for why they now use the word 'her/she' for generic reference).

Coan wrote:]
Always have been? Not so much in my mind. Wizards has been trying to rope in the younger generation for a while now and Eberron to me sounds like a great setting for a young teenager (or younger).

But did they have success in it? - I believe they didn't... Not that I had any numbers to proof it... But with today's gaming possibilities, do you really think that an average teenager, asked if he wants the new gameboy-touch-screen-super-engine or a TABLE TOP box that costs more or less the same? (Or the books you essentially need to play that cost about the same, too.)

After all, much of the current *state of well-being* of FR is due to the numerous video game adaption, starting with Ice WInd Dale, ending with Never Winter Nights 2, that is supposed to be released this year...

However, just my opinion. Eberron being a hit or a flop doesn't bother me at my gaming desk.

ScS of the Fraternity wrote: I think a good analogy is life itself.
Older settings are like living beings, created organically - each addition springs from the same DNA code and is thus interrelated and integrated with the rest of the whole.
Ebberon is a Frankenstein's monster, created by stiching full grown parts together. Many of these parts don't match the others, some ever war with one another, just like transplant organs being rejected by a host. As a result, Ebberon was born a full grown - but it is as ugly as sin.

Clearly, this is a lesson all prospective DMs should learn - you can't force the hand of nature in creating a world.

And how is a Frankenstein's monster a bad thing, given as how the majority of this board's members are fans of Gothic/Horror RPGs?