The following question came up on one of the Dragonmark threads:

Is there any plans to advance the Eberron timeline for 5e? Perhaps addressing (among other topics) the Cannith leadership dispute?

The short answer is that I don’t know. I’m not a WotC employee, and I don’t think that any decisions have yet been made concerning the level of support that Eberron will receive in D&D Next, let alone whether the timeline will be advanced. But it’s definitely a topic I’d like to discuss with those of you who will actually be affected by it. What do YOU want to see? Would you like the timeline to advance? If so, how far?

When 4E first came out, I was looped into discussions about what would be done with Eberron in 4E. We considered the possibility of advancing the timeline to 1000 YK. We had a few ideas for what would happen in the intervening time. One was that Lhesh Haruuc of Darguun would die; IRRC, these discussions resulted in Don Basingthwaite’s Legacy of Dhakaan trilogy, and I think that sets Haruuc’s death in 999 YK. We considered the idea of Droaam and Breland going to war, something that’s also set up in The Queen of Stone (also set in 999 YK, IIRC). We considered a lot of different ideas. Ultimately, we ran into a few major issues, though.

* The setting hadn’t been out that long.

* There are still many aspects of the world that hadn’t been explored in depth.

* 998 YK is a huge boiling point. The Mourning is the only thing keeping the next war at bay. The political situation in Karrnath is highly unstable. Cannith is held together with duct tape. Aurala wants a war. Do we start the Next War? Do we jump past it (and will the Five Nations survive?)? If we advance just a few years, we run a significant risk of treading on your adventures. Perhaps we eliminate your arch-villain, start a war in a region you’d worked hard to pacify, etc. This is easier to avoid the further we go – if it’s been a decade, well, there’s more time to explain how things got from where you left them to where we are now and explain the role your characters played. But it also means the world will be less connected to the one you know.

In the end we concluded that while we had lots of interesting ideas, the point of Eberron is that it’s YOUR story. Change should be driven by your characters. So we decided to stay in 998 YK. I think that was the right decision for 4E. But is it still the right decision today? The argument I’ve heard is that without an advancement, there’s no real point to a new campaign setting book. What do YOU think? Bear in mind that the campaign guide would have to make the world accessible to people who’d never played in it before… so you can’t just say “I want to stay in 998, but to have five times the detail on the Mror Holds in the next book” without figuring out what is lost in the exchange. Would you prefer the setting remain in 998 YK, or would you like it advanced… and if so, how far? Why? What else do you want to see?

Please post your thoughts below!