Community

13thMark wrote:

DITTO . . .

Players would be best served by a 4E ECS book if it was well organized and easily referenced. All the travelling PCs do in the course of ONE adventure neccessitates easily accessed tables compiled in ONE book. We don't want to have to access three different books to find this info.
We also don't want to have to bring a laptop to the table to access the cosmology tool. We really don't need it to show us when a plane will be coterminous 500 years from now. How many DMs are running campaigns 500 years in Eberron's future? A nice 20 20-50 year spread ought to do it. Either that, or the times when the planes are coterminous could be shortened significantly.

Doesn't the chart for the coterminous planes have a random start point? There's no reason to take the approach of canonizing exactly when each plane will be coterminous; in fact it hinders the individual DM. The planes are coterminous when a DM needs them to be. The book tells you how long of a window that is, and how long it will be before the plane is coterminous again, but it doesn't give you dates because making a plane coterminous is a DM tool that should be used when appropriate, not when the publishers tell you to use it.

Jason_Sunday wrote:

More Kalastar... I love the Kalastar!

The kalashtar are why I love Eberron. So definitely like seeing more of them.

What do I want out of a new Eberron Campaign Setting Book?

• A nice table of contents
  
• No more than 100 pages of rules, dedicated to warforged, changeling, kalashtar, shifter, artificer, magewright, infusions, equipment, vehicles, and Eberron-specific monsters
  
• A 200-page gazetteer/glossography/encyclopedia of the entire world, including:
  
  
  
  • roughly 100 pages on Khorvaire and Aerenal
    
  • roughly 60 pages on Sarlona (mostly Riedra and Adar)
    
  • roughly 20 pages on Argonnessen
    
  • roughly 20 pages on Xen'drik
    
  • the Frostfell entry from Player's Guide to Eberron and a similar entry for the Everice
    
  • a fold-out poster sized map of Khorvaire using a conic projection (or a better one), with random encounter tables on the back for each area (as in, "Breland Mountains", "Talenta Plains", etc.). Make sure the EL's make sense and jive with the general difficulty of the region. Khorvaire will mostly be EL 1-7, Khorvaire wilderness and Xen'drik might be more like 7-17, Sarlona might be around 10-20, and Argonnessen might be 21-30. Also put tables for monthly rainfall and temperature (low/avg/high) for each area for each month).
    
  • a fold-out poster-sized world map combining all the continent maps from the 3.5 ECS, Secrets of Xen'drik, Secrets of Sarlona, Player's Guide to Eberron (the Frostfell map), and Dragons of Eberron, with an Eckert IV projection. On the back, put the random encounter tables for Sarlona, Xen'drik, Argonnessen, Frostfell/Everice, and the oceans, along with weather conditions for each area
    
  • Two single-page polar projection maps of the Frostfell and Everice, respectively
    
  • NO stat blocks other than name, alignment, race, class, religion, loyalty, and then a few short paragraphs of background text (that goes for the rules sections too - no iconics!).
  
  
• No timeline advancement or major changes to the 3.5 lore - combine and reprint the currently published timelines without embellishments
  
• A calendar for 998 YK, showing the phases of the moons and planes, possibly with eclipses and occultations noted
  
• A good index
  
• Mostly cheap black and white illustration used sparingly, except for the maps and four full color full page pictures
  
• Hire the guy from the "epic campaign maps" thread that made the satellite-photo-looking maps, to do the maps. At any rate, make sure the artist understands map projections. I have an equirectangular Frostfell map if it helps any.
  

Basically I want nice big maps with real projections applied, a handful of rules for the races and classes, and tons of fluff glossing over the whole planet.

And if possible, give it the look-and-feel of the 1987 FR Gray Box.

I mainly just want them to make sure they don't ruin the feel of Eberron. It is my favorite current setting and in the top 3 of my all time favorites. One of the reasons it the over the top/pulp/high adventure feel it has.
I like the idea of both the PHB and DMG, but the quality and content better be worth shelling out $40+ for both.

I have to confess, while I think lots of the suggestions here are great (especially the idea of separate PHBs and DMGs for Eberron), I really love the maps in the Eberron books -- they're one of the features that jumped out at me when I was browsing RPG stuff before I knew what Eberron even was. Maps that look like overhead satellite images pull me out of the time period and setting -- maps in Eberron would made from the ground level, and drawn by hand, not photographed from space. Projections might be okay, but only to a degree; nothing more advanced than your typical medieval map.

I do understand the scaling thing between maps, but Wizards did put out that super-high resolution cohesive map of Khovaire, along with lightning rail lines and distance markers between stops. I took it to a Kinko's and had it printed in its native size on high-quality, durable paper and though it wasn't cheap (~$40), the result is a beautiful, crease-free 32"x20" map that feels like an artifact from Eberron itself. I did it over the Christmas holiday, or I might have tried doing it through my college's print shop for cheaper -- didn't think of that until I got back. Other groups might try that too, especially if they know people who work in college libraries (one GM I know who did that got a bunch of city maps printed and laminated basically for free).

And I'm totally behind a unified world map, but I'd like to see it as a PDF with varying levels of information -- PCs generally shouldn't know where the majority of cities on Argonessen are, for example, but a variety of PDFs (or, even cooler, Photoshop files with layers) would cover the groups that decide to start as 1st level barbarians on Argonessen, etc.