Diarrhea Silverhands

There's a really annoying little guy who showed up on ENWorld recently who calls himself Aria Silverhands. He's mostly annoying in that he clearly believes that his tastes, preferences and opinions are self-evident "truths." This isn't so bad by itself except that he feels compelled to post comment after self-righteous comment about how wrong people are for, say, liking Eberron. Which he claims to know all about even though clearly he's never read it.

There was some good to come out of Aria's diatribes, though. At one location that has a tradition of finding and pointing out the posts of exactly these kinds of losers, we all had a pretty good laugh at his expense. He also prompted me to give at least a little thought to what I like my fantasy to be like and why.

Now, I like Eberron quite well, and in the interest of full disclosure I should say that up front. It appeals to me much more than, say, Greyhawk which is almost the anti-setting, simply being the D&D baseline, or Forgotten Realms which started out as a weak liberal utopian version of Tolkien that has since accreted various and sundry D&Disms like a magnet grabbing up iron filings.

In contrast, Eberron shows consistency and a strong focus. The "Indiana Jones meets the Maltese Falcon... in D&D" theme is quite strong and carries through from the setting material, to the adventures, to the art. Interestingly (again, highlighting Arai's lack of familiarity with the setting, notwithstanding his vociferous claims otherwise) I think Eberron has the strongest and best developed theme of any of the current settings, and it is as consistent and well-developed as any of the 2e era "themed" settings like Spelljammer, Birthright, Planescape, Dark Sun, etc. Its simply a more subtle theme than some of those—closer to the themeless settings like Greyhawk or Forgotten Realms in "feel" at least, even if only superficially.

I prefer a theme like this. "Generic" high fantasy bores me these days, frankly. When I was in junior high I used to enjoy dabbling in warmed over Tolkien rip-offs, but no more. Now, my first question about a setting is, "what sets it apart and makes it unique?" and if there isn't something significant that can be articulated in just a few sentences, my interest tends to plummet.

Another dubious claim Aria makes about Eberron is its verisimilitude-breaking inclusiveness. Although I can't really argue that point directly, I can make two counter points: Eberron is not designed to include everything in D&D, as Aria claims, it's designed so that individual DMs have a logical place that they can fit any given D&D element, if they so desire. The distinction is significant. Also, Eberron is not, at least, any worse in terms of inclusiveness than Greyhawk or Forgotten Realms, and in fact is considerably less problematic than either of those, in my opinion.

A frequent complaint I hear from folks that is along this same train of thought is the "D&D has become as kooky as the Star Wars cantina scene, with all its crazy races." I say: it hasn't become that way, it's always been that way, and that's a strength of the game, not a weakness. If I want something more limited in theme, I've got better choices already: Decipher's Lord of the Rings game, Mongoose's Conan game, Green Ronin's Black Company or Thieves' World or even Hârn. D&D from the get-go was designed as a fantasy melting pot that took Tolkien, Howard, Leiber, Vance, fairytales, Arthurian romance, Greek mythology, Norse mythology... and any other source that caught Gygax's eye and mixed it all together. Sure; after nearly 35 years, its become even more diverse, but it always has been and that's always been a consistent theme with D&D anyway.

Anyway, there's more to Aria's ranting. He also holds it against Eberron that it was created specifically to be sold via the setting search, but since even he admits that's not rational, I won't argue with it.

At the end of the day, I like Eberron. It's not my favorite published setting for D&D (that would be Iron Kingdoms) nor my favorite game setting to use (since one of the things I like best about DMing is building the setting, nothing ever beats a good homebrew.) But it's good because it provides a strong and compelling theme, and it has some neat twists and stand out from generic fantasy Greyhawkiana. I like fantasy settings to feel exotic, not run of the mill. New races and strange cultures are a plus, not a negative. A sense of lurking danger, intrigue and horror is a plus. A bit of moral realism rather than "black hats" and "white hats" is a good thing.

I like Eberron because it does all these things.