D&D 3.5E: Eberron

"You were the chosen one!"

Here is another thing D&D 4E killed. We never got into Eberron, but it did feature some in our 4E games. By the time 4E came around, everyone had left for Pathfinder 1e, and Eberron sort of fell away from the gaming consciousness.

Everything has this attitude and style, a graphic novel style, pulp adventure, and youthful energy. It feels inspired by World of Warcraft, a dynamic world with history, strong factions, power, and mystery. Some JRPG elements were here, too, like airships. It went big, with drama and style, emphasizing grand, sweeping, almost matte-painting grandeur. It embraced Steampunk without the top hats and corsets and went entirely into an "iron-fantasy-punk" world style without guns and modern technology.

It also has a solid Final Fantasy feel, with those airships, warforged, magic trains, castles, armies fighting with swords and steel, and magic bolts sailing overhead. This is what defined fantastic settings were before we got Harry Potter, and we ended up with the mess we have today.

Wizards tried to transplant the look and feel of Eberron into all of D&D 4E and made every setting into an Eberron-like reboot.

Which destroyed all the other campaign worlds. The Eberron style doesn't fit the Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Dark Sun, or Ravenloft. It just doesn't, and it feels dumb. You can't rewrite these worlds for "punk attitude," and you will take away their strengths (lore, history, feeling) for some fake identity.

Eberron should be left as-is.

That place players say is "awesome."

A world that mixes Final Fantasy, World of Warcraft, and D&D into a beautiful mess.

The gaming community embraced Pathfinder 1e and Golarion and fled back into the cave. Eberron died on the vine. The OSR pulled us deeper into the cave, and Harry Potter warped the view of fantasy gaming for a generation.

Fantasy gaming was "modern, identity-aligned, pop-culture, bucket list experiences - the "us" in other-worlds. Everyone became the wisecracking anime protagonist, overly smarmy and cocky, with a permanent smirk, one raised brow, and a know-better look chiseled on everyone's faces. The typical 3D movie poster, with its 'tude look, ' is a cancer on modern gaming.

Eberron was down and gritty, dirty, and sweat-covered, which made it cool. This felt more like a Heavy Metal graphic novel than it did anything D&D, and then that style became the genesis of the modern fantasy look.

These books also contain a lot of Wayne Reynolds artwork, pre-Pathfinder. Eberron was D&D's Golarion before there was one. Paizo was where all the mojo ended up. In some ways, Eberron feels like the "beta test" for Golarion. Unlike Golarion, the artwork in Eberron is balanced with some excellent comic panels. It wasn't predominantly one style and had this fantastic mix of artists.

By comparison, Greyhawk and the Realms were fuddy-duddy, thee-thou places of cone-hatted princesses and jousting knights carrying flowing banners. This was modern and cool without being Harry Potter braindead barista nonsense. Evil was evil here, and while the war between the dragons and demons ended (aka Dragonbane), the world was shattered, and evil remained - and could return in a big way to finish the job.

And you could still be your favorite human bard in this world. The traditional things still worked. Like World of Warcraft, your heroic identity fits into that world, too; you just have a lot of cool new stuff to interact with. You can ride a magic train but still depend on that character sheet filled with 3.5E statistics.

And don't start me on a 5E conversion, either. D&D 3.5E combines settings and rules far better than 5E's generic "be anything" fantasy game ever does. Yes, 5E is more accessible, but if you want me to point at a character that could live in Eberron and fit in, I will point to a 3.5E character designed with the 3.5E sourcebooks every time.

A 5E paladin-warlock multiclass abomination is a 5E character, not an Eberron character. This is the massive problem of 5E; you try to play the Forgotten Realms and get generic fantasy McCharacters.

At least today, we have the D&D 3.5E PDFs and the Eberron sourcebooks. Game preservation keeps the memories of the past alive. We can still play in this world, like it was, without modern rules and assumptions turning the experience into over-processed food.

Wizards of the Coast, that silly content warning aside, deserves thanks for these preservation efforts. I may be walking away from 5E, but I can still turn back the clock and play in these worlds as they were. The company and the team there have made many mistakes, and they have a severe lack of writing talent, but preservation is the one thing they do that deserves praise.