They also published Expedition to Castle Ravenloft, which wasn't really a setting per se, but which brings the Ravenloft setting into the edition kinda sorta.
Of course, this was also the era of the OGL and the d20 License, so there were plenty of unofficial settings published by third party publishers, and many of them were at least as good, if not better, than ones published by WotC. Not that this is comprehensive, but off the top of my head, I'm trying to remember the settings that I bought: Rokugan, Midnight, Dragonstar, Sovereign Stone, Iron Kingdoms, the Black Company, the DCC setting (whatever it was called) and Thieves World. Very late in the era I got the Pathfinder setting book, which was released as a 3.5 book before it became a Pathfinder book. I probably have some others that I'm not remembering off-hand too. I didn't have a gazetteer, but I had some scattered Scarred Lands books too. Not to mention downloadable stuff, like World of Xoth, etc.
But Eberron was kind of special. Because I submitted my own 1-pager submissions to the setting search contest (2 of ~11,000, apparently) I felt kind of invested in it. I was there from the ground floor, which wasn't true for any other D&D setting really, at least not one that had a long product line. (That may be one of the reasons I've always liked Freeport too, for that matter.) And, I kind of liked Eberron for what it was. D&D meets Raiders of the Lost Ark meets Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, set in a kinda sorta Cold War interbellum? What's not to like? On top of that, it was well written, and had some cool ideas. Eberron wasn't necessarily what I was looking for, then or now, but there was always a lot to like about it, and other than my own homebrew settings, it's probably the one I'd be most likely to use. With some possible significant updates. Not counting, of course, Freeport which I'm reading with an eye to adapt.
I had previously decided that I wanted to re-read my Eberron stuff—before I decided to do the Freeport Trawl, even, although it was a more casual endeavor, and I hadn't really started it. But I needed to read, of course, the original setting book again before I could do that, because it's been at least three years since I've done so. That's the bottleneck I'm in right now; I'm trying to finish Eberron before I can pick up Black Sails Over Freeport. After that, they won't interfere with each other too much, because I've got Eberron hard copies of plenty of things to read (Sharn would be next) while most of my Freeport stuff is pdf. But I've got a lot on my plate still this year for physical gaming books, so I don't know how much of that I anticipate getting done in the next few months. I'll read Eberron and Sharn, and then we'll see what's next. I don't necessarily intend to re-read everything from Eberron 3e.
One thing that I find more egregious than I remembered is that there isn't a ton of setting stuff, relatively speaking, in the book. I'm almost at page 100 (out of ~315), and almost all of the actual setting info has been incidental and offhand so far. 3e was so heavy into mechanics, that they've spent 100 pages and given almost nothing of setting info, except what you can pick up in the subtext of prestige classes and races. There is a big section of setting info, coming up soon in my case, but it's really only about half of the book.
That does tend to make the book harder to read than I remember. I've been reading and reading and expecting it to get somewhere, and it's still not there yet... This is a big part of the reason why I got tired of 3e eventually. It was fun while it lasted, but it was also tedious the entire time. Of course, almost all of my gaming product is... 3e. I have other stuff here and there, but it's (relatively) thin and far between. And frankly, most of those other systems weren't interested in splatbook bloat anyway. They have relatively fewer products to collect. And even when they were interested in splatbooks, like some of the old 90s White Wolf stuff, it was actual setting info, not more mechanics.
3e was the first system that was created with an actual business model behind its design. The OGL and d20 licenses were to facilitate getting product to consumers that would strengthen the ecosystem, but not cost WotC anything (third party modules, was mainly what it was meant to do) but most of what WotC themselves released was mechanics that were useable by players, and products that were specifically meant to be purchased by players; a play by WotC to increase their sales of books by targeting them to everyone instead of mainly GMs.
The (perhaps) unintended side effect of this, however, was that the game developed into an overly complicated super-rulesy game, and the focus started to move to power-building, because players had all of these tools to play with. At first, they were probably intended to be roleplaying tools, but even I, who am not a power gamer at all, remember building Henrik whatsisname in my Age of Worms campaign; a shifter barbarian/ranger/reachrunner/someotherprestigeclass craziness, because that's just how you had to build your characters in those days. Sigh.
I can see why it was done, but the end result was really bad for gaming, and especially bad for the kind of gaming that I enjoy. That's one (of two) big fat reasons why I'm not a huge fan of Paizo and their approach; they carried the torch of the player-centric power-gaming wicked build style of gaming that the OSR and 5e (to some degree) abandoned. Although 5e is migrating back to that model slowly but surely. Not because its good for the game, but because it juices sales somewhat in the short term.
In any case, although it hardly needs be said that Eberron didn't invent these concepts, Eberron brought to d20 and to D&D overall several ideas that were absent from D&D. They were also kind of vague in fantasy and folklore and it was nice to have them, including concepts even that I use today in Old Night. The shifter race, more or less, is the genesis of my woodwose race, even though I use an old medieval word for the concept, they wouldn't exist without Eberron and it's shifters. The pseudomage is based in part on Massha, the "mechanic" from the M.Y.T.H. Inc. series of novels by Robert Asprin, but it probably wouldn't exist either without Eberron and it's plentiful low level magic, its magewrights, etc. I developed my own concept of pseudomages for my Eberron Remixed project first, and only then decided that they were a good enough fit for Old Night too.
Sadly, I don't think Eberron does a great job of meeting its own promise, though. It was held back by having to be too D&D, when it was really deliberately reaching towards stuff that isn't... careful tactical combat in a dungeon.
Anyway, I've got a list of books on my Freeport Trawl; but what am I thinking of re-reading in the near term from my physical game books? Let me make a quick and dirty little list:
- Eberron Campaign Setting
- Monster Manual II
- Monster Manual III
- Monster Manual IV
- Monster Manual V
- Fiend Folio (all 3e, of course)
- Monster Compendium
- Heroes of Horror
- Expedition to Castle Ravenloft
- Fiendish Codex I: Hordes of the Abyss
- Fiendish Codex II: Tyrants of the Nine Hells
- Libris Mortis
- Stormwrack
- Sharn: City of Towers
- Secrets of Xen'drik
- Secrets of Sarlona
- Dragons of Eberron
- City of Stormreach
- the Eberron adventures (I think there were 5-6 of them)
- Expanded Psionics Handbook
- Complete Warrior
- Complete Psionic
Most of those last titles are all Eberron stuff, obviously. And I may add more Eberron to that; when's the last time I read Races of Eberron or Dragonmarked or Forge of War? But I don't want to be as rigid on this list as I am on my Freeport Trawl, so this is just a vague roadmap of what I'll probably read. No doubt a few of those titles will fall off or get pushed back, and other titles will pop up that aren't on my radar right now, but which I'll end up wanting to read. And the order isn't meant to be indicative of anything. It's just a list, not an ordered list.
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