Post/Author/DateTime	Post
UltimateReality 04-22-05, 12:01 AM	So I was thinking of running a short campaign this summer, when I don't have to worry about school and exams. It would need to last from May to the start of September, once a week at most, once every two weeks at least. And I was playing around with some ideas for campaign settings. My last one was set in Faerun, but the players never ran into any of the iconic NPCs there. I liked the pre-made world because it had enough gaps for me to improvise on, but enough to keep me from being totally lost if the players head off in a weird direction. I was thinking about doing steampunk, except I don't know what sourcebooks exist and which are any good. I was also considering Eberron, and wondering what the upsides, downsides, strong and weak points in the setting were. I was even pondering doing a homebrew, but I think that will take too much time. Ideas? Suggestions? Wisened words of enlightenment and sage advice?
belgarath97 04-22-05, 09:34 AM	The advantages of eberron IMHO stem from the fact that it's new. You can create it to be whatever you want, but all the ground work is already laid out for you. I'm trying to start one myself, and like the idea of the freedom from the history Forgotten Realms has.
Kash Darreder 04-22-05, 09:42 AM	Find one of the "I hate FR because..." threads. They are full of descriptions of other settings. You might get some ideas from them. KD
Talon Blackhart 04-22-05, 09:44 AM	I'm getting ready to DM Eberron here shortly. It's a really neat looking setting, especially if you like a lot of fluff. It definitely has some steampunk aspects, but it still stays well within the fantasy genre. Up until a month or so ago, I was very against settings of any sort (I would have rather done my own homebrew). However, upon perusing Eberron in the bookstore, I decided to use it. Eberron gives you a really nice balance between laid out information and room to improvise. Especially with the ECS, Sharn: City of Towers, and Races of Eberron all out. My favorite part of Eberron: It's really different. There a lot of really uniique fantasy aspects in the world. The Mournlands in particular is really interesting. Downsides to Eberron: It's really different. Alignments are grey areas (evil gold dragons and such), a group of positive-energy channeling undead (The Deathless of Aerenal), goblinoids have their own established kingdom. My suggestion: Check out the Eberron boards, read the Dragonshards and Under Glass articles on the Eberron site, (I don't think the Sharn Inquisitive articles are really great, but they're there, too) and borrow a copy of the ECS or scan through it in a bookstore, and see what you think.
Dayglo_Sword 04-22-05, 10:04 AM	If you want something a little different then try Ghostwalk! (but dont forget the 3.5 upgrade doc for it). Its a nice ready-made world but not with too much detail (and plenty of off the map stuff you can create yourself - thats if you can find the map in the first place!). If anything the fluff is better than the rules (the setting is based on ghosts - but not Undead! it is not Ravenloft Jnr) with nicely defined countries, its own gods, and a number of short adventures\settings included which can with a bit of work be chained together (and i think the word drow only appears once in the book! What a refreshing change! :) ) Another Good\Bad thing about it is that, although an official WotC product theres no support or future releases planned. So you can do whatever you like to your hearts content and not have to worry about whether its cannonical or not. Want to add warforged? then go ahead - but do they have souls? (a big point in a GW campaign.)
CzarGarrett 04-22-05, 10:07 AM	I'm going to suggest either a Greyhawk adventure arc OR something for Eberron. FR has been done with your players, and unless they really, really liked the setting, it wouldn't hurt to have a bit of variety. Plus, with Greyhawk, you can usually throw it into a campaign setting.
Kaligrad 04-22-05, 10:16 AM	It's easy to do a homebrew by the seat of your pants. All you need to do is draw up a continent, give a vague backstory about each country, and make up everything else as you go along. After all, you get a week's worth of warning every time. I should know, I do this every week.
Lord Ian Stark 04-22-05, 10:24 AM	It's easy to do a homebrew by the seat of your pants. All you need to do is draw up a continent, give a vague backstory about each country, and make up everything else as you go along. After all, you get a week's worth of warning every time. I should know, I do this every week. Me too. Sometimes that week ends pretty quick. ;)
Loopy 04-22-05, 10:30 AM	I am a DM, but I am a player in an Eberron campaign and I must tell you it's great fun. The setting is very well supported by WotC and the ready-made adventures would be perfect to run through the course of the summer.
psionichamster 04-22-05, 12:41 PM	eberron pros: warforged are cool, as are the other races well supported...what with 5 or so books out since last yr? novels: at least 2, easy enough to plow through em and get a good feel for psych/character for a lot of the archetypes artificer: c'mon, this guy's just cool action points: i don't know if you play with them, but we do, and it allows low-level PC's to make it to higher levels (as well as pull off some incredibly stupid stunts, and making it) the art in the book is my personal favorite collection of all the DnD books...the comic-noir style has a nice feel for me freedom: you can throw any urban story you can think of, and it'll work. true to form, next game i run will start somewhere on the Talenta Plains, with a "world-wide martial arts competition" can't wait, personally, just another few weeks ---------------------------- cons: be prepared for character death. low-levels and high-strength critters means dumb pc's die messily. magic can become "commonplace" (not sure if you'd prefer to keep the mysterious and occult side, but meh...) if players get their hands and meta-read the ECS (especially if you're looking to run the modules) it's no fun. it's a published setting, with all the normal provisos and caveats therein...all in all, i highly recommend Eberron, especially if you want to run a more tech-based game. also check out Dragonmech...basically introduces mecha-combat and giant walking cities to a generic steampunk (or dwarven, or gnomish, or even DnD without too much trouble) Check out Prescott's work on the warforged...simply MAH-velous! namaste' the hamster
UltimateReality 04-22-05, 01:22 PM	Okay, so I flipped through the ECS again after posting. All I can say is: :OMG! . When I first skimmed the book, the art wasn't terribly appealing to me, especially the full page, no borders pieces. But reading the book itself, it's got a lot of flavours and ideas...it seems very, very cool. A couple things stood out to me, though: 1) power level. All the NPCs are low to mid-level, often with NPC classes. This seems like it might lead to issues later where the PCs easily overtower everyone else in the setting. Now, I'm not asking for FR-like epic NPCs, but what was the reasoning behind this conscientiously applied choice? 2) DM and player suggestions. The book was awesome with these! The little section with questions to help write a background for your character just earned my "favourite passage of the book" award... :cloud9: 3) Prestige classes. Why so many 5-level and 3-level ones? They don't seem quite as strong/broken as others in the Complete cycle, but then Eberron in general seems much more rp-based. Also, I may be wrong in terms of power level relative to campaign setting. I did only skim the thing, after all. 4) Flavour. OMG. It was like a DM's wet dream. I must go buy this book. Now I'm off to check out the books Talon mentioned. As for novels, I never was much of a novelization person, but I'm sure I can hunt them down in the library. Are they actually worth reading, or is the writing as bad as most commissioned series?
Talon Blackhart 04-22-05, 02:21 PM	1. Consider the difference between political power and physical power. Just because a person is really strong/ really good at magic/ etc, doesn't mean that there's a lot of political power there. There was a whole big debate on this in the Eberron boards somewhere. 2. I agree. :D 3-4. A lot of Eberron does seem more fluff-based than crunch-based, with a lot more role-playing aspects. Seeing as I really like fluff, this is a good thing for me. It was actually one of the reasons I decided on the setting. The lavor is great. And Sharn is almost all flavor. I drool over that book even more. Oh, wow, my suggestions are actually being taken! :D :cool: The novel by Keith Baker (title for which is escaping me at the moment) was okay, but not as great as I had hoped. I haven't read the other one (Marked for Death by Matt Forbeck), but one of my players claimed it was good. *shrugs* I'm not normally much for that sort of reading, either, so...
psionichamster 04-22-05, 02:34 PM	Marked for Death is about par with most of the FR or DL books decent read, about 4-8 hours time for me (BA in English, so i may be fast/slow...) like i said, the stories aren't so much for the story but to see how they're addressing things like warforged slang, racial tensions, shifter attributes, accceptance/knowledge of the war, all kinds of things i love the help they provide, and i wouldn't worry too much about mid-high level characters... you can give things symbiont grafts, send a few rakshasa at em, and just expect them to be the big men/women on campus wherever basecamp is not really a bad thing, IMO...of course, an office ON the lightning rail, some really nice friends in house Cannith to help finance that elemental airship, you know plus, you always have Breland, Aiundair, and New Yor....Sharn...to rely on Xen'drik will likely be the big focus of my game... i think the world is designed with the lower levels in mind, so the prevalance of 3 and 5 lvl PrC's reflects that...a rogue 5/ extreme explorer 3 is nigh-untouchable when it comes to traps...(and is rolling d8's on his action point rolls, and keeping any 8's that come up) dragonmarks can be fun, with progressive powers. gnomes really benefit here, since their racial cantrips can get even more use but it was the art that originally sold me...like i said, once they posted that first warforged pic on the main dnd page, i was in! namaste' the hamster