The Forgotten Forge

The interesting thing about the included adventure, The Forgotten Forge, is that it is a perfect highlight of exactly why I believe Eberron needs to be remixed. The adventure comes in three parts, and all three highlight how Eberron was never able to "overcome" its D&Disms. The first part was a Noirish mystery type set-up, but as written, it comes across as more of a very typical, static tactics kind of combat encounter, with only a little opportunity for investigation or roleplaying or anything like that. The combat and the tactics described are very 3e D&D, which doesn't have that swashbuckling action movie vibe that Eberron was reaching for; the addition of modest action points will do little to change that. But that's just baked into the system itself moreso than the module; although it will be readily apparent here, Part I at least does show what the tone and mood of Eberron would be like.

But then we have parts II and III, which are nothing more than very predictable dungeon-crawls in the sewers beneath the city (part II) and in the forgotten forge itself, a more "classic" little temple dungeon (part III.) It boggles my mind that the entirety of the fiction source material that supposedly informs D&D has nothing that really resembles a dungeon-crawl at all, and yet D&D-players and developers alike seem to struggle to figure out how to do anything other than dungeon-crawling when playing the actual game. Yes, I realize that a dungeon-crawl is a very easy set-up to write for a developer, and that dungeon-crawling is relatively easy to run for a DM, but it really stunts the potential of the entire RPG experience to be so mired in a dungeon-crawling paradigm that that's all that you ever really offer. Even for gamers who like dungeons, and I know that there are many, surely if you're pitched a game that is billed as swashbuckling, pulp-like action and noir-like mystery and intrigue, you don't really expect to just go dungeoncrawling much, if ever, do you? Even in the list provided in the campaign setting of movies to inspire you, and they list nine of them, only two have anything that could in any fashion whatsoever be likened to a dungeon-crawl; the ten minute opening sequence of Raiders of the Lost Ark and the brief (again 10-15 minutes tops, and its only that long because of character-moment dialogue and conversations) exploration of Hamunaptra by Brendan Frasier and his team and the rival American treasure-hunters.