I like playing D&D. Of all the various roleplaying games and rules I've experienced, it's the one I've played the most, and the one I like. I prefer it in its 3rd edition, perhaps because I was introduced to that iteration of the rules when it was new, and they seemed more intuitive to me than the rules of earlier versions.
D&D had several established settings at that time that were carried over into 3rd edition: Dragonlance, Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms. All of them are traditional 'high fantasy' settings, worlds populated with elves, dwarves, halflings and gnomes surrounded by powerful magic and ancient ruins. But a few years after 3rd edition rules were released, the game's owners at Wizards of the Coast decided they needed a new setting and they held a contest to choose the new setting. The winner was a world called Eberron, designed by Keith Baker, and as soon as our gaming group started using that setting it was a winner with me, too.
In many ways Eberron was another high-fantasy setting like Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms. It still had elves and dwarves and halflings and gnomes. It had classic D&D monsters like zombies and owlbears and dragons, ancient ruins to explore, and powerful magic artifacts to acquire. But it stood out from the crowd by introducing some appealing differences. Most of the other settings for D&D inhabited a universe with many dimensions existing in parallel, known as planes, that could be accessed magically: the Abyss, the Plane of Air, the Plane of Earth, Elysium, and so forth. The quantity of planes kept increasing with every new iteration of the game rules. Eberron dispensed with all the planes but a few, meaning that players didn't have to worry about so many different varieties of extraplanar creatures (creatures from other dimensions) showing up to bother them.
Instead, players in the Eberron setting had to worry about running into daelkyr, immortal lords of Xoriat, the Realm of Madness; or more likely into their minions in the mortal realm, the aberrant dolgaunt and dolgrim. The quori of the region of dreams and their possessed humanoid servants the Inspired also provided foes for the player-characters, taking the place occupied by demons and other extraplanar creatures in other D&D settings. The quori and the creatures of Xoriat all had a somewhat Lovecraftian bent to them, appearing as amorphous entities with too many eyes and mouths that were designed to inspire terror.
Along with eliminating the proliferation of extradimensional planes, the Eberron setting set some limits on magic. Magic was everywhere in Eberron, even more so than in the other settings. But it was low-level magic. Powerful spells, especially spells that could bring the dead back to life, were very rare. This added a level of danger to games set in Eberron that didn't exist in the other settings; if your character died in the Forgotten Realms setting and you had enough wealth and could get to a high-level cleric, the character could be resurrected. In Eberron you had to work harder at keeping your character alive. But while some magic was rare, the common magic included replicating things that exist in the real world. Magic brought Eberron flying ships, railways, and a city of floating towers. The people of Eberron didn't need high-level teleportation spells, because they could get on the lightning rail or an airship and travel to their destination much faster than on foot or by horseback. Any citizen of Sharn, the city of floating towers, could carry a feather fall token to prevent instant death if they managed to fall from one of the towers. Shops selling low-level magic items were commonplace in urban areas, and ordinary homeowners could have magic lanterns than never ran out of fuel. Much of the magic in Eberron revolved around objects called dragonshards, which were highly sought after and could be used to craft magic items. These dragonshards were believed to be remnants of the three great dragons that had created the world.
Magic also brought Eberron a moral dilemma. The setting assumed that games would take place just after the conclusion of a great war, during which the magical crafters of Eberron had created artificial soldiers and imbued them with life. Basically, they created the magical equivalent of androids. These Warforged were declared independent individuals after the war, but not everyone was comfortable with that, and the warforged were still trying to find a place for themselves in the world aside from being soldiers. None of the warforged had existed before the war began. The war had been composed of a series of conflicts over the past century and had officially ended only two years prior to the beginning of 'campaign time', so no warforged in existence was likely to be more than a few decades old. This offered some interesting roleplaying opportunities for players who wanted to challenge themselves by playing characters with little history beyond warfare and few cultural traditions of their own.
In addition to providing the warforged as a playable race, Eberron also introduced three other new races exclusive to the setting: changelings, kalashtar, and shifters. The changelings were shapeshifters capable of assuming the appearance of any other humanoid race, a secretive people who often didn't reveal their true appearance to anyone due to the distrust of them by other races. Shifters were a kind of lycanthrope, but instead of being afflicted with lycanthropy as a disease, it was their heritage and they could control to a certain extent how human or bestial they appeared to be. The kalashtar were a race of people endowed with psionic abilities by their connection to some of the quori that dwelled in the Region of Dreams, but unlike the Inspired the kalashtar weren't trying to take over the world and weren't enslaved by their quori. The presence of the kalashtar also meant that psionics were an integral part of the setting rather than an add-on as occurred with other settings.
The more familiar races of D&D also underwent some changes in the Eberron setting. Half-elves were not the direct offspring of biracial parentage, but were a distinct race that bred true, created by a long-ago relationship between elves and humans. Halflings were not the cheerful hobbit-inspired pastoral people of most other settings, but instead were a nomadic people known for keeping various species of dinosaurs as mounts. Gnomes, often portrayed as chaotic and eccentric in other settings, in Eberron are shrewd and conniving people of great wealth who were responsible for building all of the magical airships.
But the race that was most interesting to me, perhaps because I really like playing elves, were the elves of Aerenal. Living separately on their island continent, the elves of Aerenal were not the immortal or long-lived people of other settings, though they did live longer than most other races. But among the elves of Aerenal those members of elven society who were considered most valuable and respected would be given the honor of becoming Undying, benevolent undead who oversaw the governing of their people. Other elves aspired to become Undying and sometimes showed their admiration of the Undying by making themselves look gaunt and cadaverous like undead. Despite their affiliation with the Undying, the elves despised other kinds of undead and opposed the people of the nation of Karnath, which had an entire army made up of undead soldiers.
In addition to the elves of Aerenal, the setting also offered elves who had lived for centuries on the continent of Khorvaire (the settings main location for adventures) and were more normalized with the other peoples and cultures of Khorvaire; and the Valenar elves, a warrior society of elves who had left Aerenal and sought to revive the spirit of their heroic ancestors rather than aspiring to become Undying. I am a great fan of Tolkien's elves and all the fantasy elves that have been inspired by them, but it was nice to see a different twist on the elves and their culture.
The Eberron setting also put forth an interesting section of society in Khorvaire that allowed players to be part of a bigger organization while also gaining some special abilities. These were the Dragonmarked Houses, which controlled most business on the continent of Khorvaire. The Dragonmarked Houses resembled a mixture of noble houses and craft guilds, and were all organized around dragonmarks, strange birthmarks that granted certain special talents to those born bearing them. Not every member of a Dragonmarked House necessarily had a dragonmark. Each of the twelve distinct dragonmarks could only be found among one race, with the exception of one dragonmark that could be found among both orcs and half-orcs. A few of the races, such as changelings, shifters, and kalashtar, didn't manifest dragonmarks, except for aberrant marks. These aberrant dragonmarks could appear on anyone but were considered outcast, and there was also a thirteenth dragonmark that was believed to be extinct. A player could choose to make her character a dragonmarked character by selecting a dragonmarked feat, and could take other feats that would increase the abilities granted by that dragonmark. A player-character with a dragonmark didn't have to join one of the Dragonmarked Houses, but they could, and could then take advantage of extra perks available to members of a House.
To accompany the Dragonmarked houses, the prevalence of magic, and the presence of warforged, the Eberron setting offered a new character class: the artificer. Artificers were magic-users whose magic all revolved around crafting magical devices. Artificers created the warforged and the lightning rails and the airships. One of the Dragonmarked Houses was focused on this kind of crafting, so a player who chose to play an artificer could choose that dragonmark, become a member of that house, and gain access to more crafting resources.
The continent of Khorvaire was the most thoroughly developed geographical region in the setting, but there were other places that a player-character could seek out for adventuring posssibilities. These included the elven continent of Aerenal; Argonnesen, home of Eberron's remaining dragon population; and the exotic continent of Xen'drik. Xen'drik had once been home to the elves, who at that time were enslaved by the giants, but they had escaped to Aerenal thousands of years prior to campaign time. After the giants were defeated Xen'drik became the Eberron setting's equivalent of Conan Doyle's Lost World or Burroughs' Pellucidar, a place of legend waiting to be explored by the intrepid adventurer. Exploring Xen'drik was made more challenging by lingering giant magic, strange lifeforms that existed nowhere else, and the fact that the geography of the continent seemed to be in constant flux. I'm sad to say that I never got a chance to send one of my characters to Xen'drik, something I always wanted to do.
While the Eberron setting isn't vastly different from other fantasy roleplaying settings, it has enough differences to make it interesting, and I had some of the most fun I've ever had while involved in a campaign using that setting. I still miss it, and I hope that someday someone will want to go there again. I still want to take our adventuring party's airship to Xen'drik, and I'm still hoping someday to find an opportunity to play an Eberron-specific character I made for another campaign that I never got to play. Our group were actually playing Eberron using Pathfinder rules, which are very similar to D&D rules version 3.5, and it wouldn't be difficult to continue that practice. I know we'll probably never go back to the campaign in which our characters had acquired their own airship, but I'd still happily go back to that setting if someone presented me with an opportunity.
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