(D&D 3.5) Eberron Campaign Setting

J.R.R. Tolkien once famously claimed that electric street lamps have no place in fantasy. And because he shortly thereafter wrote one of the most influential classics of modern fantasy, we have been saddled with that hot take for decades. It's actually kind of shocking how ubiquitous "vaguely and selectively medieval, with thousand-year anachronisms" became in fantasy worldbuilding. Somehow, everyone just sort of decided that swords and horses and castles and monarchies went hand-in-hand with wizards and monsters and never mind that the cannon predates plate armor. That's just what fantasy is - a world without gunpowder and electricity.

Eberron (Keith Baker) doesn't quite break with that tradition . . . but sometimes it feels like it does. I'm going to sound real weaselly talking about this, but I swear, it's the book being weaselly, not me. There's this thing, called "The Korranberg Chronicle" and it really sounds a lot like a newspaper. I think that's how you have to interpret "folded broadsheets, nested together to form simple books." But what is not mentioned, even in the description of Korranberg itself, is the existence of the printing press.

A printing press must exist. It's the only thing that can possibly explain Eberron's news industry, but the closest we get to confirmation is "magic and the arcane arts allow for effects that in some ways mimic technological marvels that didn't appear in our world until the 1800s." Which marvels, you might ask . . . well, that's something that's present on an ad hoc basis, occasionally requiring extra-textual inferences.

Which seems like kind of an odd choice, for a setting that was really trying to do something different. I mean, there's a train, and that's cool. But the extent of the railway network is unclear because each nation gets its own separate map and . . . I guess the red-dashed line represents the course of the lightning rail, but it's only a guess because there isn't a map key and it's sometimes difficult to remember where the various nations are, relative to each other. I'm pretty sure the longest possible rail journey is from Sharn in Breland to Krona peak in the Mror Holds, but I'm not sure sure. I had to consult something like four different maps to reach that conclusion.

It's not a big deal, but it does speak to a misalignment of priorities. Why is there a train? Obviously, so there can be murder mysteries on a train. So that spies carrying important documents can be waylaid and bamboozled with the ol' switcheroo. So that you can have dramatic fights on top of a train, or even grapple with a villain on a rain-slick rail bridge while an oncoming train bears down on you and your friends are screaming "Let them go! It's not worth it!" and you're screaming back, "I can't let them get away, not after what they did!" and screech! It's too late! Together, you and your nemesis tumble over the side, into the turbid waters below!

And maybe you don't actually need a complete rail map for that. In fact, you probably don't. But c'mon. If you don't even think to include one, can you really say you're as horny for trains as the pulp genre demands?

That's Eberron all over, though. It carries itself like it's trying to get away with something. You'll see modern aesthetics and themes - trains, private detectives (called "inquisitives"), urban noir, the geopolitical fallout from a continental war that used weapons of unprecedented destructiveness and ended in a fragile treaty regime that no one quite trusts - but then it takes pains to remain D&D fantasy. As the introduction puts it, "The setting combines traditional medieval fantasy with pulp action and dark adventure . . . Even so, it is a 'same but different' approach that allows us to make elements of the new campaign attractive to all D&D players."

On the balance, I really enjoyed Eberron, but make no mistake, that "traditional medieval fantasy" is basically dead weight. You've got these feudal monarchies and bucolic villages with their artisan crafts and it all seems woefully insufficient to explain the best parts of the world. In fact, it often seems like it's only there because that's what you'd expect a fantasy world to look like, in the absence of some force that would make it otherwise.

Sharn is a city of 200,000, living in skyscrapers that no one really knows how to build, and what are they even doing there? It's got working class neighborhoods, but nothing like a factory. And I wonder if this is another one of those things where I should assume that they're there, because that would make the world make sense, or whether it's a very deliberate choice. Magic replicates some 19th century technology, but it's still an individual craft, so you can't automatically expect a 19th century world. This is a setting with a purely secular cure to every disease, but it's under the control of medieval craft guild/merchant family. It exists. Your character can say, "Oh no, I've got cholera. I'll have to go to the Healer's Guild to get it cured. That's 125gp I won't see again." But that 125gp is beyond the reach of the 99%. Magic has been commodified, but it's so expensive that it barely changes the world.

I don't think it's possible to square these influences, at least not without going into a level of sociological detail that the book is clearly uncomfortable with. I think, if you're going to get the most out of Eberron, you have to go off book and assume that its industrial magic is as transformative as the real world's industrial technology. You are playing a game set in a world recovering from a century-long war in which the belligerents deployed massive armies of robots (warforged). After the war, a fanatical splinter group of those robots decided to retreat into an environmentally devastated wasteland and plot the downfall of humanity. Just own it. There's no part of this that needs to be backported into Greyhawk. Literally, the only people with anything to gain from that were Wizards of the Coast's sales department, c. 2004. 

Anyway, my verdict with Eberron is that it has potential. I can see why it won the open call setting contest all those years ago. However, it's going to have to pick a lane if it wants to impress me. I've got high hopes. I don't think you can make a dozen supplements for a world like this without eventually getting weird about it.

Ukss Contribution: The elves of this world worship their ancestors through a form of bullshit "positive energy necromancy." The island where they live has a "City of the Dead" where the reanimated (but not undead, I swear) elvish ancestors wander around, doing whatever they do with eternity. As a consequence, an elf character can select the "Right of Counsel" feat, representing their legal right to visit the City of the Dead and ask their ancestors for advice. In-setting, the Right of Counsel is tied to a family relationship, but I like the idea that it could just be part of citizenship in a modern administrative state. "You have an unalienable constitutional right to consult the ancient mummy."