Eberron and Dark Sun were always two of my favourite settings that don't get a lot of love from wotc
When it comes to Dark Sun I mean I can understand why, but there's gotta be some way for them to do a low fantasy sword & sorcery Hyborean Age style setting without all the slavery.
But I feel like there's not much excuse for Eberron getting left behind.
Honestly, they need to just get over being frightened of fictional slavery. In reality slavery is disgusting. As a narrative trope it's not for everyone, but is as valid a use for a narrative as any.
They need to just slap a huge disclaimer in the front of the book, bite the bullet, and let the creatives (that they haven't fired yet) create interesting narratives in different settings.
You can't tell the story of Gladiator, without slavery. You can't recreate Darth Vader's origin story without slavery. You can't make your cleric not-Moses trying to free his people, without slavery.
If we measure the limitations of storytelling by the breadth of tropes that we accept in reality, we'd have far fewer stories to tell, and the lessons in those stories would be lost.
Real violence isn't okay either, but like, try taking it out of your medieval dragon slaying game.
(This was mostly a rant, I thank you for reading it, but I've had these thoughts rolling around in my head for a minute as a fan of Dark Sun)
Yup, FR is a solid, Crown Wars alone is great fodder for left over magic items from an age long past.
GreyHawk is also a very well detailed setting I like, it is very human-centric, with migration maps to track the influx of various human origins & shows quite clearly how static the other players races are, almost never changing their borders or setting up new settlements.
At the very least Eberron got an official setting book for 5th Edition. Unfortunately can’t say the same thing for Greyhawk or Dark Sun. Or Ravenloft for that matter, which imo is pretty weird considering how popular Curse of Strahd is.
Its alright, I suppose. Adds a few races, adds some dark gifts that you can give your players, new subclasses that are pretty cool.
Setting wise its basically summaries of many domains of dread (including Barovia) that you can use to kind of create your own homebrew campaign in them, also instructions of how to make your own Horror campaigns.
I personally would have liked some Statblocks, especially of the several Dreadlords. And Barovias depiction in the book is, at least compared to curse of Strahd, a bit lackluster. But it is a fun read, and I currently use it to give my Curse of Strahd campaign more accurate lore, and also to possibly expand it in the future.
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u/Zanthiel_ Warlock Dec 19 '23
Hell, in eberron it’s like that by default!