Eberron 4e, part two

Following on from my read-through of the "Eberron Player's Guide", I've been reading the "Eberron Campaign Guide". Where the former is really the player's book for the setting, this latter is the DM's guide to the setting. It covers much the same material in more detail, and also discusses 'secret' information about the setting - basically, anything the DM should know but the players should not.

And it is an excellent book, even for a non-4e DM.

In 3e, Eberron was detailed across a series of some 13 hardback books. The original campaign setting book is also an excellent work, but it suffers a little in that when it was written large elements of the world had not yet been fixed on. The later books then gradually fleshed things out, adding a lot more detail to the world. However, the effect of this was that there was a huge amount of information spread across a lot of text.

The 4e campaign guide therefore takes that information, condenses it to "what you really need to know", and then presents that. And, because very little has changed, it remains true that if you need more detail, you can always refer back to the 3e texts. Huzzah!

(The 4e books also do a really good job of fitting in the new races from the 4e PHB - the tieflings, the dragonborn, and the eladrin. In fact, so good was the job that they actually persuaded me that the eladrin actually have a place in the setting, where previously I had felt there was no place for them in the game. In fact, of the three new races, they are the one whose addition has added most to the setting. I was impressed.)

The 4e campaign book is also very rules-light. This is obviously good for a non-4e DM, but it's actually good even for a 4e DM, given that any and all stats in the book have long since been rendered obselete by the ongoing revisions to that game in DDI. The other key advantage of this is that the 4e campaign guide actually includes more information about the setting than did the 3e version - about a third of which was necessarily filled with new rules elements. That's good for us... probably not so good for WotC's sales, though.

All in all, where I was rather unimpressed with the player's guide, I am well pleased with this book.