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My guess is that in the early stages of the campaign setting contest, Keith Baker's descriptions of Eberron were a lot more pulpish and/or noirish. But at some point his vision ran up against one huge monster of a design restriction: Eberron had to account for and allow for everything in the three core rulebooks, including all those spells and every single one of those Monster Manual monsters. It had to be a setting that any existing D&D campaign could ease into, and not only that, it had to provide plenty of crunchy bits (new feats, classes, and other doodads) that existing D&D campaigns could loot without actually having to be set in the world of Eberron. In the face of requirements like that, odd quirks and genre flourishes of any proposal were bound to be watered down.
Don't get me wrong: this is a good thing. D20 is a system designed for Dungeons and Dragons, and the attempts to make it a universal system and map the package of classes, levels, and StrDexConIntWisCha onto other settings and genres have all been failures to one degree or another. D20 is a system designed for high fantasy and the dungeon crawl, and if Eberron had been truly noir or pulp, neither of those concepts would have fit in very well, and it would have cried out for a system of its own.
What makes Eberron a great campaign setting -- and it is -- is not that it introduces a bold new flavor for D&D. What makes it great is that it takes all those disparate elements of D&D 3.5 and presents a coherent world where they all have their place. It's fitting that the first edition of the game with a functional, elegant ruleset should finally have a functional, elegant world to go along with it. The Eberron Campaign Setting, as a book, is not without its faults, but the world it describes is fertile ground for D&D games, and it carries great promise for a vital line of supplements and adventures in the future. Here follow some specific comments, organized by chapter.
Introduction
It's a good thing for WOTC that I had already purchased the book on the strength of its chief author, because if I had browsed the first couple pages in a hobby store, I would have set it right back down. The intro features groaners like this:
In the wake of this Last War, action, adventure, good, evil, and a thousand shades of grey paint the landscape in broad, powerful strokes, and ancient mysteries await discovery so that they too can influence the world and its people
What a meaningless mess! I hope those mysteries are patient as they wait to join their friends "action" and "grey" in painting boldly and influencing, um, the world. I realize that vapid language like this is nothing new in the world of RPG writing, and it crops up periodically throughout this book, but thankfully the worst of it is over right here in the beginning.
The "Movies to Inspire You" sidebar is another dud, presenting an incoherent assortment of films that have little to do with each other, let alone with Eberron. The problem here, and elsewhere in the book, is the attempt to convey the tone and unique flavor of Eberron by simply asserting that tone and flavor, instead of relying on the actual substance -- things like new rules, and descriptions of places and people -- to do the job on their own.
Character Races
The changeling (shapeshifting dude), the kalashtar (psionic dude), the shifter (animalistic dude), and the warforged (construct dude) are the additions to the bunch, most of whom (except the changeling) have a clearly defined place in the setting, and all of whom I wanted to make a character for right away. They seem a little powerful, considering their lack of level adjustments, but this is balanced somewhat by the fact that they do not have access to dragonmarks (see below) like the traditional races do.
Just as interesting as the newcomers is Eberron's take on the elves. As befits a race whose lifespan is an order of magnitude longer than the others, Eberron's elves tend to be set apart, whether it's the jungle-dwelling, death-obsessed Aerenal elves or their aggressive cousins from Valenar who are interested in conquering territory rather than sitting around in the trees. Unfortunately, there are drow, but at least they're stuck off in a corner of a distant continent so I can pretend they don't exist.
Character Classes
Eberron's new core character class is the artificer, who will play a supporting role in the dungeon crawl, but who gets "craft reserve" points every level that can be used in place of XPs when creating magic items. Best of all, an artificer can deconstruct existing magic items (like that stupid +1 club your party found) for additional craft reserve points. How cool is that?
Heroic Characteristics
In terms of actual rules, the "pulp" flavor of Eberron is supported solely by Action Points, which allow PCs to modify die rolls after the fact, and to do much more interesting things in concert with a few new action-point feats. They are a splendid addition to the game -- I don't know if they make things "cinematic," but they definitely give the players more control in the face of that twenty-sided die, which is, especially at low levels, a pretty wide range of luck to fall afoul of.
There are many, many excellent new feats. Shifter and Warforged feats allow a those races' special abilities to keep up with their class abilities. Different druidic sects get feats to set them apart from each other. Knight Training and Monastic Training allow easier multiclassing for paladins and monks, respectively. And of course there are the Dragonmarks -- inherited magical tattoos, limited by race, that grant spell-like abilities corresponding to one of the twelve guildhouses that shape the economy of Khorvaire, the center of the action in Eberron.
Only a couple of low spots here: the Investigate feat allows a PC "to find and analyze clues at the scene of a mystery" with the Search skill, while the Research feat allows the use of Knowledge skills to "extract information from books, scrolls, and other repositories of facts and figures." Those seem like pretty straightforward uses of the respective skills to begin with, and requiring a feat to perform those specific actions (instead of just having the feats give bonuses to those actions) is too constraining.
The religions of Eberron are a welcome replacement for the inherited mishmash of the Player's Handbook. As only makes sense in a polytheistic society, the main pantheon of gods, the Sovereign Host, are revered individually but often worshipped as a whole. Same goes for their nasty counterparts, the Dark Six. Fundamentalism finds a referent in the Church of the Silver Flame, which is obsessed (often to the point of excess) with hunting down evil monsters. As an added perk, Eberron does away with the whole silly notion of prescriptive alignments. They're still there, but they're fluid, and no race or creature is necessarily restricted by alignment. This is a no-brainer change to make for any campaign setting, but it fits especially well with the ambiguous, war-torn political intrigue of Khorvaire and a world history that is very rarely binary, morally speaking.
Prestige Classes
This is where the rubber meets the road with all that talk of pulp and noir, with classes like the Master Inquisitive and the Extreme Explorer directly reinforcing the intended tone of the setting. Other classes, too, help to clarify and describe the world of Eberron, and all seem quite playable besides. For the intrigue-crazy guild schemer there's the Dragonmark Heir; for the thirteen-year-old power gamer there's the Weretouched Master in bear form (+16 Strength!). Everybody's happy.
Magic
Eberron is advertised as a "high magic" setting, which is a slight exaggeration. Magic is much more pervasive here than in other settings, but that's because Eberron is a world that's modeled consistently on the core rulebooks, which themselves imply a world chock-full of magic. The setting-specific additions come in the form of the Dragonmarked Houses, guilds organized around their members' spell-like abilities, and the magewright, an NPC class with limited spellcasting abilities. Throw in the artificer's knack for harnessing elementals, and you've got message stations, lightning rail, airships, and a banking system. But it's important to note that all these things are specific applications of clearly-explained abilities -- the world they exist in is still fundamentally fantasy-medieval. It still feels like magic, not like technology with a pseudo-magical explanation.
One of the strongest elements of Eberron is its cosmology. The outer planes whirl around the Material Plane like electrons around a nucleus. Each of their descriptions include effects for when their orbits bring them coterminous with or remote to the Material Plane. Eberron is also sprinkled with "manifest zones" -- areas that tend to fall under the influence of one plane or another. The upshot of all of this is that the planes are an integrated part of the whole world, and not just a distant destination for the high-level play that most campaigns never get around to.
Life in the World
This chapter provides the basic geographic and political overview of Eberron, focusing almost entirely on the northwestern continent of Khorvaire. It's a daunting amount of information to absorb all at once, but it leaves no shortage of exotic locales and adventure ideas. As the campaign begins, the lesser races have just finished an all-out war that has fragmented a unified kingdom into many smaller nations with a complex web of relationships. There's plenty of room for courtly intrigue alongside the exploration of old ruins, and the magical transportation systems mean that the PCs won't have to wait for their cleric to learn wind walk in order to take it all in.
One usual aspect of this chapter is the magnitude of the class levels assigned to the major NPCs. The ancient figures and big bads are high level, but kings, queens, and guildmasters rarely go beyond mid-level. King Boranel of Breland, one of the larger nations, is a 8th-level fighter/2nd-level aristocrat, for example. This is an incredibly refreshing take on how class levels play out in society, for a couple of reasons. First, it keeps the focus on that 5th-15th level of play that is the sweet spot for D&D -- beyond that in either direction, things tend to get strained. Second, as befits a setting that wants cinematically heroic protagonists, the PCs needn't languish in low-level obscurity for as long. By the time they're 5th level, they're power players. Unfortunately, this somewhat radical take on level distribution in society is never commented upon explicitly -- for example, there's no information to supersede the DMG's description of level distribution in different-sized communities, which clearly can no longer apply. Worse, the typical members of various organizations, as statted out in the following chapter, tend to be much higher level than you'd expect, given the descriptions of NPCs here. For example, a "typical" House Thuranni assassin is 7th level, while the head of their entire House is 8th level.
The portions of Eberron outside of Khorvaire are briefly described and clearly meant for development in future publications; conveniently enough, they are also designed to provide challenges for higher-level characters. It's all pretty typical genre-fantasy stuff, so what works so well about Eberron as a whole is hard to describe, other than saying that it just . . . hangs together well. There's a long timeline describing the previous ages -- Demons, Monsters, Giants -- against which the current civilization of the lesser races seems like the tiniest blip on the radar, save perhaps for the potential carried by a bunch of enterprising heroes. And all those creatures from the Monster Manual have their place in the framework in such a way that you'd think that it was Eberron that came first and the Manual second. I don't know how big a difference any of this makes for Jane DM needing a book to help her make adventures, but from an aesthetic perspective it's very satisfying.
Organizations
Most of the groups mentioned here have already been brought up in other contexts. Between that and the confusing issue of level distribution described above, there's not a whole lot here that's helpful. The same goes for . . .
An Eberron Campaign
. . . which, the description of the Magewright NPC class aside, is an extended attempt to reinforce the "noir" and "pulp" elements of the setting just by describing what Eberron adventures should look like. Simply put: saying it don't make it so. Either the rules that are provided (and the published adventures, as they arrive) will be condusive to a particular style of play, or they won't. Either the players will perceive and embrace that style, or they won't. Advice like "end your sessions with cliffhangers!" serves as little more than padding.
Magic Items
There's lot of meaty goodness in this section: dragonshard items that interact with the dragonmarks, cool construct bits to upgrade your warforged character with, excellent examples of powerful, setting-appropriate artifacts. The dragonshards are a good example of what makes this setting strong: they're not just a cool effect that's shoehorned in -- their existence has a clear place in the history of the world, just as their function interacts with specific characters at both the rules level and the society level. Like I said, it hangs together.
Monsters
Everything that's in this chapter is great, but it's too short by half. Too many of the monsters are high level, there to provide concrete stats for important elements of the setting, but not particularly helpful in a just-starting-out campaign. Still, the templates for the Inspired (a race specially bred to host possessing outsiders from the land of dream) and for Living Spells exemplify the creative thinking and elegant use of the rules that make me excited to run an Eberron campaign.
The Forgotten Forge
This 1st-level adventure is too short to take on the difficult task of introducing the setting and setting the tone all at once. If you grant that, given the space and scope, it has to be linear and straightforward, then it's reasonably well-done. It's clearly meant as a prequel to Shadows of the Last War, the first of the published adventures. If that and the following adventures can live up to this one's clean writing and anticipation of troublesome number-crunching on the part of the DM, I'll be content.
Like most DMs, the reason I'm interested in a published campaign setting is because I don't have anywhere near enough time in my life to do all that legwork myself. And, like most DMs, I'm confident that if I did have the time then I could come up with a totally kick-ass campaign setting on my own. Therefore the two most important tests for a setting are as follows:
1. Is it going to save me bother and time?
For Eberron, the answer is definitely yes. There's the initial investment of reading and familiarization, of course, but once you get past that you have a setting upon which riffing new NPCs and adventures is a cinch.
2. Does it have elements that make me say, "Huh. I don't think I would have thought of anything that cool"?
Dragonmarks. The Inspired. The Gatekeepers. Shifter feats. Manifest zones. Eberron is full of cool, original stuff like that -- so much so that I feel bound to confess that I may not be able to come up with a setting as kick-ass as this one, even if I did have the time. It's when I realized this that I knew that the Eberron Campaign Setting would be well worth my time.
(Full disclosure: I used to hang out with Keith Baker from time to time, usually in the context of playing the On the Edge collectible card game. I was also in a LARP he ran once. Haven't heard from him in many years, though. Bonus points to anyone who can identify the On the Edge card that bears his picture.)
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