Tell me the "what Ebberon does for me" part of your story. That's probably what I'm missing. And how is it any different than Planescape?
... What matters is that we be creative. That we dream. That's D&D's secret gift. The things we should be buying are the things that will help us do that. Maybe, for you, that's Ebberon. Skimming through it yesterday, for me, it felt like donning mental shackles. Hey, Baker! Get your crappy imagination outta my head! If I want a book full of someone else's stories, I'll read a novel!
Maybe we have become too accustomed to buying other people's dreams. OD&D was a radical shift, ludo imperfectus---a game-incomplete. Something the world had never seen before...a game that demanded far, far more from you than what was in the box. It leveraged our shared myths---thousands of years old, but that was really it, it forced you to "Bring It". It shouted,
All right. What Eberron does for me.
Well for starters, while I have never played Planescape, I think I can safely say that it is nothing like Planescape because by and large you never leave the planet. Until very recently the planes weren’t somewhere you went, they were used for their influence on locations in Eberron, like ley lines but weirder.
That has changed in the last month since DMSGuild now lets Baker publish his own ideas, and he put some work into the planes. But from what I can tell from the Planescape thread, his are a lot better at suggesting what you are actually going to do there.
For example, Fernia, the Sea of Flame is NOT just the Plane of Elemental Fire, where everything is on fire and fire elementals hang out. It is the representation of all the things that earth and fire represent, and each of its various layers (the exact number of which are not detailed, so you can make up your own) represents some aspect of how people perceive fire or earth in their non-natural aspects – destruction, comfort, mining, industry, consumption. The City of Brass, for example, is a realm that represents conspicuous consumption, where efreeti compete to outdo each other with the most outrageous parties and spectacles and displays of fabulous wealth. In the tunnels below are foundries and deep halls where azer toil to produce everything that the efreeti want to consume, and dao artisans compete to create the coolest stuff. Fernia is the source of various magical substances that can be found nowhere else, a few of which are detailed but most of which you can make up as you need them. It’s not just hot, there’s stuff there you might want.
But discussing the planes is just a diversion from the main topic. I think the reason I like Eberron so much is the politics and culture hang together so well. The descriptions of the major NPCs, factions, houses, even the national character of the countries are all, as Bryce would say, sticky. I have mentioned before that a lot of my games are character driven. Well, the various factions are characters, interesting characters that are fun to play, and they react to the PCs.
The players go out and cause ripples in the world, and you immediately know who is going to care, and what they might be prepared to do about it, usually in a very indirect way. It is very easy for PCs to get themselves into hot water without being outright slaughtered, and lots of temptation for them to do it. There are lots of buttons to push, and you don’t have to do a bunch of prep or background reading to adlib the consequences of pushing the buttons that arise through play. There is just enough structure for me to riff off, and not so much structure that it is constraining. And like a good dungeon key entry, there is enough flavour to inspire you to run something, without burying you in a bunch of crap you don’t need.
But a good purchased dungeon only inspires you to help you run that dungeon. A good campaign setting inspires you to help you run the whole damn world. The Eberron milieu is different, industrial revolution with magic (say 1760 to 1914) instead of the middle ages with magic (probably 1066 to 1450ish), but beyond that the world is just so incredibly open. It is a huge sandbox, with so much to do and so many possibilities. It inspires me the way parts of the 1e DMG inspired me – the parts that hinted at the world behind the game.
And there is a lot more in the DMG that informs the way an AD&D world looks than you think. Treasure tables, random monster tables, urban encounter tables, tables delineating followers, rules for obtaining henchmen, rules regarding sages, all these and more informed what was in your AD&D world and how frequently it appeared, and pushed you towards a certain culture that you had to work actively against if you were not going to adopt it. You would say that is a feature, not a bug, and I would agree; but I would say the same thing about how Eberron is presented.
Creativity never comes in a vacuum, it always builds on the works of those who have gone before. I don’t really see what is wrong with that. I don’t know what you read of Keith Baker’s yesterday that made you feel like you were putting on “mental shackles”, but I’m going to suggest that being infected by someone else’s imagination is a
good thing. Isn’t that what Appendix N was all about? It happens to me on this site all the time. And I know Baker wouldn’t want you to feel constrained, he would just tell you to toss anything you didn’t like. Hell, the man games in other people’s versions of Eberron. It’s hard to imagine Greenwood doing that (or am I doing him a disservice?).