Talkback: Eberron

Welcome back to the Rascal Reading Club! This episode, I am joined by Duamn Figueroa Rassol, game designer and Eberron afficionado. This is a talkback episode so as usual, we are responding to people's responses about my discussions questions from our last episode.

Excerpted Responses

Iris on the appeal of the setting: I am very fond of Eberron for what it is, no doubt, but more than anything Eberron excites me for what could have come next but never did. While it abandoned just enough of D&D's moral essentialism and divine realism to make noir and pulp sorts of play possible (my, my, clerics of ostensibly "good" deities could be just wretchedly bad people, the troll who worshiped ostensibly "evil" deities could be a decent sort just trying to get by day-to-day), it had just enough historical depth and social complexity to rupture those tropes from the inside and suggest a socially complex world outside of genre conventions. The paucity of high-level characters helped, too. There were very few characters in the setting who could twist it any direction without a lot of help.

Darrin on campaigns they've run: I ran a D&D3.5 campaign in which the PCs were all warforged trying to discover where their souls truly came from. They discovered an illegal Creation Forge in Sharn, made a deal with Merrix d'Cannith to take them deep into the jungles of Xen'drik, racing against servants of the Lord of Blades to be the first to reach the site where House Cannith rediscovered the technology of the ancient giants used to "invent" Creation Forges. 

Nik T on the "encyclopedia style": I like the style, but I dislike how Eberron does it. I think Stonetop’s approach (which I would still consider encyclopedia style) of an alphabetised list of major topics works much better: from an organisational standpoint, the book is communicating that to run a session involving some topic, you only have to read the 4-10 pages on that topic (and then you can peruse cross-referenced sections at your leisure, like you might do on Wikipedia). Eberron is assuming I’ve read it textbook-style, which makes lots of the information feel awkwardly spread out, and also means I have to invest a lot of time before being able to play it. 

Schedule

Listeners have been asking for a schedule of the show so they can also read ahead and participate in episodes easier. Also, we'll be skipping the rest of the month and syncing up the episodes with the new month so it's easier to reference.

November - Realis (Austin Walker)
December - Stars without Number (Kevin Crawford)
January - Wildsea (Felix Isaacs)
February - Blades' 68 (Tim Denee)

Thanks for tuning in!