Another thing that is interesting about these Eberron modules is how poorly suited they are to the goals of the setting. The original plan for Eberron was to have it support noir (think The Third Man, the Maltese Falcon or Chinatown) and pulp adventure (pulp westerns, Tarzan or Indiana Jones). And the setting very much does that (although it also supports a more classic or OSR game, for reasons that I think I have discussed elsewhere). But it is pretty clear that module-writers didn't have a great idea of how to pull it off.
The noir modules lean pretty heavily into very linear, largely event based adventures, where (it seems to me from reading it) the players are really just along for the ride. So the characters may be "inquisitives" (Eberron speak for private investigators), but there is not a lot of actual room for investigating; one scene just moves to the next, one after another, until the (combat) climax encounter.
It seems to me like it would be much better to give them, or allow them to choose, investigative resources. So they have some sort of capital to spend, but instead of getting gear, you get contacts, all of which have pros and cons. This gives the party a way to evaluate evidence if they can't figure it out on their own (and let's be clear, DMs and module writers aren't great about recognizing what will or will not be figured out by the players). But each contact comes with a price and a level or risk, so you have to choose who to ask for a favour, or pay fees/bribes to. And you can't just go to all of them, because there is time pressure in the form of randomly occurring encounters with the villain's agents, people with a score to settle against you or your client, the city watch that thinks you are the criminal, rival inquisitives, etc.
Same with the pulp stuff. The usual model tries to emulate an Indiana Jones plot, following a string of clues from exotic location to exotic location. And the locations are exotic! But you would never know that from the modules. In Raiders, Peru was tonally different from Nepal, which in turn was different from Cairo, and the events, resources and dangers in those locations have a local colour. The modules don't do that at all, every location seems the same, and every NPC is culturally generic D&D. The example that I just read yesterday is particularly irking me; if you travel to a nation that is literally governed by goblionoids for goblinoids, why is your main contact an ex-pat human? This is your chance to showcase something really cool from the setting, and show why it works, why are you blowing this? (This is more a critique of WotC than the author, I am aware that parts of the module suffered from executive meddling.)
I mean, at the least you could distinguish places by the weather. Is it too hot to wear armour? Does snow slow travel? Is there a cold, sustained drizzle that makes it harder to recover when you rest (and you thought the canvas tent would be too heavy!). Does a blizzard impair visibility? Does the town just stop in the afternoon, because there is a regular downpour? Is it too windy for arrowfire? Are the streets always blanketed in a dense fog?
Plus they don't do travel well. Yes, in an India Jones movie, travel is handwaived with a red line on a map. But even that is a more interesting transition, because it gives you a sense of time, distance and location. When most of the game takes place in the players' heads, you need more than an announcement that you have arrived at your destination. Particularly if the planned travel is interrupted. Like when Jones and Marion are interecepted by the Nazis when sailing in the Aegean, that may be a surprise for a movie audience; but if you do the same thing in an adventure that handwaives travel, it is obviously a planned encounter that probably has nothing to do with the player's choices.
Plus, some sort of travel minigame gives another opportunity to show just what makes this exotic locale different from the last. I'm not saying every transition needs to be a hexcrawl, but I do think that the choice of route, conveyance, and travelling companions should have an impact on the risks of the trip. Do you join the slow, well guarded caravan, or buy horses (and from which dealer), or charter a sloop from the shady captain, or book passage on the passenger ship that won't leave for another 3 days, or blow a ton of cash chartering an airship?
In general, these modules don't handle transitions well. You are at one place, then you are at another. Sometimes there will be one planned encounter on the road. This does not work when you are working in genres that include interruptions in travel that occur because of the choices of the protagonist.
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