Eberron/Headscratchers


 * What bugs me about Eberron isn't the setting itself, which I think is great, but the tendency of the supplemental material to shy away from the complicated morality that makes the whole thing so interesting. Example: King Kaius III may well be a ruthless chessmaster, but in "Five Nations" it's observed, as an example of said ruthlessness, that "he killed his own wife in vampiric bloodlust." This conveniently neglects the fact that Vol the lich triggered his vampiric bloodlust when Kaius refused to become a mindless puppet of the Blood of Vol cult and that, when he discovered he'd killed his wife, Kaius went into exile for eighty years and broke all ties with said cult in an effort to atone and regain control of his nation. It's sort of like calling someone ruthless for shooting his wife while failing to mention that someone else put the gun in his hand and physically forced him to pull the trigger. Meanwhile, the Silver Flame comes across as squeaky-clean, their tendency toward zealous extermination completely glossed over. It's as if the writers who came along later were more comfortable with the black-and-white morality of previous campaign settings. It's irritating.
 * I concur. In fact, many of the new and exciting additions from the original campaign setting are skewed in the supplemental works. The two most glaring: Orcs and Dragons. Orcs passed from being a new take on the Always Chaotic Evil into becoming a neutral race of Druids and Shamans leaving in the swamp with a rich history and a destiny to defend the realm from nameless horrors, along with belonging to one of the Houses and acting as bounty hunters and adventurers. In 4e, they were regressed into the Rape, Pillage and Burn assholes but explaining that those in the campaign are (the extremely low) exceptions. Then Dragons passed from being a powerful race of draconic wizards who had played eons long schemes to invincible Gods who could conquer the world in an instant if they so much wished. The examples they take are the destruction of Xen'drik (which, if one remember, it was done after the Giants had defeated an entire race of Eldritch Abominations and were in the middle of a Civil War) and their attacks to Aerenal were Retconned into a love letter. Instead of the Dragons attacking the Elf for mysterious reasons and the Elves having enough strength on their home turf to fend them off, it resulted that the Dragons were sending their weakest younglings to train the Elves into some nebulous battle in the future... Wo ah!. It's like they were scared of becoming originals.