[OSSR]Earthdawn (1st Edition)

[Ancient History]

OSSR: Earthdawn

FrankT:

The year is 1993, and FASA (the makers of Shadowrun) have decided that they want to make an actual D&D clone. They had done very well with their Tolkien/Cyberpunk mashup, and it was in its 2nd edition. So the step to bringing the fight to D&D's doorstep by making a fantasy adventure RPG probably made sense to somebody. In order to tie it to their earlier (and more successful) work, FASA made their fantasy adventure game set in Shadowrun's distant past – an earlier age of magic.

Ancient History and I are coming to this book from very different places. At the time, my reaction to Earthdawn was basically “What the fuck is this shit?!” I sort of expected that if I got promised an “earlier age of magic” that I would be given something that could at least maintain plausible deniability as to being the real history of the Earth. Because Shadowrun takes place in a world that is supposed to look like our world until December of 2011, so any previous age of magic would kind of need to be superficially similar to our actual history. Instead, we get a high magic crazy time where the Black Sea is on fire and the Earth has been nearly scoured of life by roving demon hordes. There is absolutely no fucking way that historians could have not noticed this time period. Also, it's full of anachronisms and it really pissed me off.

The Earthdawn writers weren't actually trying to make something that was remotely plausible as the secret history of Earth. And that's right there where they lost fourteen year old Frank. What they were trying to do was to create a world where the basic tropes of D&D adventuring actually made sense to the people in-world. And I might have given the game more of a chance back then if they had leveled with me instead of selling it to me on false pretenses.

AncientH:

Depending on how you look at it, Earthdawn is either the most or least ambitious project that the Freedonian Air and Space Administration ever put out. It is unequivocally a shot across the bow at Dungeons & Dragons and all its many clones, released at a time when AD&D was dying, showing how a newer, more vital company could give a new and loving approach to the old grognard's standard. They brought with them all that they'd learned of roleplaying games at that point - high production values, outstanding presentation, a colorful and engaging setting that was carefully integrated with the rules system, and not buying model designs from American licensees of Japanese animated robot shows.

As Frank mentioned, it's pretty much supposed to be the age of magic before Shadowrun. In fact, in early (early early early) promotional materials it was explicitly called that. But it was set in a corner of the world no-one fucking recognized (at least I didn't) and it was, as he pointed out, a weird mishmash of stuff, which later sourcebooks didn't exactly help with.

But it was...fun. It was a fun setting. It had colorful books that were well-written and illustrated. It answered a lot of gaping flaws in the D&D concept, and it did it well. Not all of them, but a lot. It was amazingly consistent, as FASA products were, and surprisingly resilient. After FASA cancelled the line, Living Room Games picked it up for a 2nd edition, and then RedBrick Ltd. picked up another license for a 3rd edition, and now FASA is back and releasing a revised 3rd edition or something.


This is the cover to one of the German Earthdawn comics. Fucking Germans get everything nice.

FrankT:

Earthdawn is 328 pages long, which doesn't seem like a lot today. But in 1993 it was definitely on the long side. This is the forward edge of the word processor revolution that would eventually drown all major RPGs in word bloat. The font size is not overly tiny and there are a lot of pictures. All told, this book clocks in at a bit over two hundred thousand words. And honestly, that's about right. It's longer than what came before it, and that was OK. Unfortunately, it is historical reality that the same processes that led to Earthdawn being over two hundred thousand words eventually led to shovelware crap like Scion and Geist to be over three hundred thousand words. It would have been nice if somehow there had been a general agreement to leave new game books at the size of Earthdawn, but it was not to be.

AncientH:

A moment to talk about the title: "Earthdawn" is, like Shadowrun or Battletech, an evocative and ultimately pithy title. It speaks of new things, primeval times, and all that. But it is also very specifically the name of a ship, an airship sent out to investigate the world which disappeared. It's kinda weird to think of it like that, because it puts me in mind of The Voyage of the Princess Ark.


Yes, I made a Mystara reference. Sue me.

FrankT:

Earthdawn is developed by Mulvihill, Dowd, and Prosperi – three names that you would recognize from the front covers of a lot of Shadowrun books. RPG writing is an incredibly incestuous field even today, and in the days before people could send writing samples through the internet tubes, it was even more so. FASA really wasn't that big a company, and while they made more of an attempt to be international than most companies of the period, their available talent pool was still pretty small. The names on this credits page could have been copypasta from the credits page of any Shadowrun book of the time and you wouldn't know.

One thing I will say in its favor is that the writing team is refreshingly small. There is one guy on “Design” and four names on “Additional Material”, which means you basically have a five person writing team, one of whom is in charge of “design,” three of whom are in charge of “development” and one of whom has to get coffee for the other four dudes who all outrank him. Compared to the dozen author shovelware products of the mid-2000s, this is an amazingly tight and coherent focus. And it shows in the final product. Earthdawn looks like material that was actually written as a unit rather than the essays of a dozen people lazily strung together and then edited by a website. That shouldn't be a thing we have to comment on, but considering where the industry was ten to twenty years later, we actually do.

AncientH:

The incestuousness continues with the art team, who are predominantly Shadowrun artists. The most fondly-remembered of these is Jeff Laubenstein, and any of his elf, dwarf, ork, or troll characters in ED could pretty much stand in for their SR counterparts. Later books even got a Brom cover.

A word on the layout and incidental art - there's an odd combination of influences going on here, a sort of deliberate mishmash of ancient styles, especially a heavy Mayan/Aztec influence. I think this was part of their plan to throw people off their game as to what to expect...or maybe there was one guy that really liked drawing pseudo-Mayan heiroglyphs and giant stone heads. It sort of came to a head with the Parlainth boxed set, but I think it says something about how early FASA was at least trying to show a more multicultural product, even if it was all being done by a bunch of white people in Chicago.



Age of Legend
The heroes of today are the legends of tomorrow.

FrankT:

Earthdawn begins every chapter, even very short chapters, with an in-world quote. I approve. I do the same exact thing in my work, because I had my formative years in the early nineties as well. It's a good way to ease people into a chapter, and it sets a continuous tone for the work as a whole. By the mid-2000s, most game companies had stopped doing this, and it's a mistake.

Anyway, the “Age of Legend” chapter is about as short as they come – just three pages. And one of those pages is less than half a page because it's the intro page and is in a big font. This is an introductory preamble more than a chapter as such, but it still gets an opening quote.

AncientH:

It's also an excuse to get the "what is Earthdawn?" and "What is roleplaying" crap out of the way as quickly and succinctly as possible.

FASA publishes game supplements and adventures to aid the gamemaster, but talented gamemasters always adapt the game universe to suit their own style.

FrankT:

The opening is actually where Earthdawn lost me in 1993. It lost me in the second paragraph:

Once, long ago, the land grew lush and green. Thriving forests sheltered plants and animals, and people grew and prospered off the land's bounty. Then the Horrors came, and drowned the world in darkness.

My problem with this is that there was really obviously not a period in the last couple thousand years where the trees and animals of the Earth were driven to extinction by Horrors. That is not a thing that fucking happened. So basically, Earthdawn to me was like The Phantom Menace. Someone had announced that they were making a prequel to a property I loved, and then when I picked it up it turned out they shat all over canon and made something that was in no way compatible with the stuff I actually liked and I was pissed off.


The Horror!

But really, the tie-ins with Shadowrun were always 2nd order or 3rd order. It really makes more sense to look at this like an alternate universe or something. There are references to each in the other one, but they aren't really the same world and you'll only hurt yourself if you try to make them fit together. Essentially, this is like cameos from old cartoons in the dark future of Samurai Jack – it's homage rather than an indication of real setting compatibility. The authors of Earthdawn assume that you're familiar with Shadowrun – which is why the T'skrang and Windlings get brief descriptions on the first page and Orks, Trolls, Elves, and Dwarves all just name checked. But that's really as far as it goes.

Not that they ever really explained that in any satisfactory way. If they had, 14 year old Frank probably wouldn't have put this book down in disgust. At least, not this early in the reading.

AncientH:

The origins of Earthdawn precede the actual publication by a fair bit. The 1st edition Shadowrun rulebook had hints about ancient elves and previous ages of magic and "where the fuck did dragons and Sperethiel come from anyway?" The whole core conceit of the Shadowrun setting was the magic comes back. So eventually they decided to actually write the game.

Now, like Frank said, while this was obviously a Shadowrun tie-in, it was equally obviously made not to be a game where you could port characters back in forth. Earthdawn is set in some indeterminate past -- well, until Findley gave a date for the destruction of Atlantis in Tir Tairngire and a bunch of geeks (including yours truly) broke out their calculators. Anyway, yeah, it doesn't jive with what we know about the geology and paleontology of the Earth, and it's actually not set far enough back into the dim recesses of pre-history to work either (and that's before we get to the Theran Empire sourcebook). But if you keep in mind that this is just set arbitrarily far back into the past of Shadowrun and that magic eventually erased all the evidence of mass extinctions and shit, it's all in good fun.


Boxed sets are another thing RPGs have gone away from.

FrankT:

The intro is surprisingly information dense. This is actually the kind of economy of language that modern RPG writing really needs to get back to. They lay out the basic premises pretty tightly: the world was destroyed by demons from the depths of astral space, but before that happened people hid themselves in magical fallout shelters. Now, the space demons are on the wane, and it is time for badass heroes to wander the post-apocalyptic wasteland and try to reclaim the world and re-establish contact with the bomb shelters that made it, and explore and loot the ones that did not.

In short: it's D&D. There's a presented reason why there are dungeons full of monsters and treasures and evil humanoids, and there's a presented reason why heroes get into small groups and invade those dungeons. And there's a presented reason why the wilderness is full of chimeric monsters and why some of them would be quite close to civilized lands. It is, in short, a pseudo-scientific reboot of the typical D&D world. They even have an in-world rationalization for characters leveling up. Looking through this, this really looks exactly like it was somebody's homebrew AD&D campaign setting, and that it was given its own game system because the D20 system wouldn't come out with a license allowing people to make officially D&D compatible games for 7 more years. The Shadowrun connections in particular seem like a last minute inclusion.

AncientH:

Well, we'll get to that. 5 of the 8 player character races are pretty explicitly ported from Shadowrun. But yeah, ED doesn't require any knowledge of Shadowrun to appreciate, nor does Shadowrun require any ranks in Earthdawn Lore to meander through it's plot and sourcebooks. It was really just a very extended series of Easter eggs for dedicated fanboys like me.

FrankT:

Earthdawn pretty much assumes that you've played RPGs before, and at least some of the authors seem to be assuming you've played Shadowrun before. They even suggest that the “What is Roleplaying” section may be old news to you and you might want to skip it. However, I think it's interesting to see where a group of authors are coming from when they write an RPG. The “What is Roleplaying” may not be a helpful section for an experienced roleplayer to read, but it's an important section to read if you want to know if you're on the same wavelength as the author(s).



Earthdawn's “What is Roleplaying” is pretty much straight Arneson. It's like a movie or a book, but you get to decide what the characters do. This is almost word for word Dave Arneson's thing about how people in fantasy books do stupid shit and he felt that he could do better. It gives this book a very old school D&D feel.

AncientH:

This is from one of the French additions. See that image in the lower-left? If you turn the page in the English-language hardback 1st edition rulebook, that's a full-page illustration on the right-hand page. The caption is "Lorm was an unhappy troll..."

I love Earthdawn.

Inheritance
When the Scourge ended, we were determined to reclaim our heritage. But we were not yet ready to pay the price.

FrankT:

This chapter is a story. It is 8 pages of fiction, but one of those pages is a fullpage line drawing of a trollface.


Not exactly.

The actual story begins with an anachronism. The story teller would like a Dwarf stout. But of course, stouts were invented in the 17th century CE, so Dwarves or no Dwarves that shit wouldn't be available for a couple of thousand years. Which gets us to the real point, which is that this setting is only set in the ancient past when it remembers. It looks like it was originally some dude's long running D&D campaign, which means it was probably supposed to be set in the future rather than the past before a last minute marketing decision decided to make it into a prequel.

Anyway, the fact that they use a Troll major character is significant, because it suggests that the story was hacked out quite late in the design process. Simply put: Trolls are in the mix because they are in Shadowrun and the company wanted the tie-in. Elves, Humans, Dwarves, and Orks are in because it's a D&D setting, and the T'skrang, Windlings, and Obsidimen are in the mix because everyone who made themselves a custom D&D setting in the late seventies and early eighties made themselves some custom races. We're just lucky there aren't Ducks or Chuweros. Trolls almost certainly weren't in the original draft, which means that there's like an entire decade of proto-Earthdawn material where Trolls as we know them don't exist. So there's probably a major character Troll in the opening fiction because someone went through the book and put in Troll references so they wouldn't feel “tacked on.” It almost works.

AncientH:

The 8-page intro fiction was pretty standard for FASA. It was standard for every edition of Shadowrun they ever put out, and the basic idea was always the same: get the best writer you can and have them churn out an evocative piece of fiction that will drag the readers into the game world. I'm with Frank in this that the piece was done late in the process; I wouldn't be surprised if it was done last, after all the setting material was written and in layout already.


This is a troll viking skyraider jumping out of an airship.

FrankT:

The actual story itself is about a team of adventurers going into a dungeon and failing to kill a Horror. The Horrors are the big bad of the setting. The story takes time to write up some of the Earthdawn magics, and the descriptions are quite evocative. However, the characters don't really do anything bad ass. One of the characters wounds the demonic antagonist with an ax and then escapes with his life. This establishes the enemies as powerful and a thing to be feared, but it doesn't really establish the potential PCs as big damn heroes. I think this perspective is why in my experience, Earthdawn has always appealed more to GMs than to players.

The book spends a lot of time fapping to how unbeatable the big villains of the setting are, and a lot less time discussing how your player characters can make a fuck's worth of difference.

AncientH:

This is something I think...I don't want to say it was Mike Mulvihill or Tom Dowd, but one of those guys had a hard on for certain inevitability in life. They like the idea that there were some things you couldn't fight, some wars you couldn't win. Superman can't punch poverty, Earthdawn can't fight all the Horrors - one or two of the Horrors, if you're powerful and lucky, but not all of them, not all at once. They wanted to paint the people that cowered and hid under the earth during the Scourge as the smart monkeys; it makes the people who didn't - like the Blood Elves - and what they did to themselves to survive all the more plausible. It adds an element of horror that D&D never really established, even in Ravenloft. Desperation, impossible choices, nasty magic - and I mean nasty magic! Shadowrun had always played up blood magic, but Earthdawn actually let you play with it...


This is a living windling trapped in amber. It was the major artifact of the initial Earthdawn anthology Talisman, and it was created by blood magic. That windling was awake and screaming, eyes trapped open staring at the Horrors for the entire Scourge. It was a good anthology.

Next up... And So It Came To Pass...

[JesterZero]

Alright...time to find out if teenage me made the right choice by doubling down on Shadowrun instead of splitting birthday money between SR and ED.

I know it's been alluded to in other posts, but if either or both of you would like to wax on about ED-horrors vs. SR-horrors and the disconnects therein when we get to that part, that would be wonderful.

[Silent Wayfarer]

I just like the tie between mechanics and setting. And the Thread Magic system is appealing.

[erik]

I just like the tie between mechanics and setting. And the Thread Magic system is appealing.

Until you actually spend 2 rounds to cast a spell in combat. That becomes tedious.

[Silent Wayfarer]

I just like the tie between mechanics and setting. And the Thread Magic system is appealing.

Until you actually spend 2 rounds to cast a spell in combat. That becomes tedious.

I meant the Thread Item system and enchanting a group with Legend and shit. I know the actual spellcasting system sucks.

Which interests me; if ED is more high magic than SR, how come their magic sucks so much more?

[Username17]

Which interests me; if ED is more high magic than SR, how come their magic sucks so much more?

The short answer is because in Shadowrun, Mages are designed to be useful to a team where the members ride around on motorcycles and shoot automatic weapons while Earthdawn Mages are designed to be useful to a party where members run around on foot trying to get into range to swing swords. The Warrior Adepts of Earthdawn are simply much less powerful than the Street Samurai of Shadowrun, and in an amazing display of self awareness and restraint, the makers of Earthdawn concluded that they had to make Mages weaker as well for game balance.

There's various fluff about how the aura of the world is still unstable from the Scourge and it's actually a long time ago and people don't really know what they are doing because they don't have six billion people and the internet to bootstrap their understanding of magic via shared investigation. And there's also the baggage which comes from this game-world having a long history as a D&D setting with all the "level 1 character" support that implies. But really when it comes down to it - it's just a straight game balance thing.

-Username17

[Silent Wayfarer]

The short answer is because in Shadowrun, Mages are designed to be useful to a team where the members ride around on motorcycles and shoot automatic weapons while Earthdawn Mages are designed to be useful to a party where members run around on foot trying to get into range to swing swords. The Warrior Adepts of Earthdawn are simply much less powerful than the Street Samurai of Shadowrun, and in an amazing display of self awareness and restraint, the makers of Earthdawn concluded that they had to make Mages weaker as well for game balance.

Very sagacious. I approve.

There's various fluff about how the aura of the world is still unstable from the Scourge and it's actually a long time ago and people don't really know what they are doing because they don't have six billion people and the internet to bootstrap their understanding of magic via shared investigation. And there's also the baggage which comes from this game-world having a long history as a D&D setting with all the "level 1 character" support that implies. But really when it comes down to it - it's just a straight game balance thing.

-Username17

That reasoning seems flimsy; of those six billion people, less than 1% are going to be magically active, and even if they are, the magical traditions are not very compatible with technology and can't be reproduced and researched the way advanced technology can. Plus, magic is influenced enough by personal paradigm/POV that I seriously question how much mages can share their theory and practice with each other. I suppose the closest you can come to that is magical colleges run as tertiary institutions, but even those are rare, by all accounts.

Whereas, Earthdawnverse has magic being around for thousands of years and even the kaers were fallout shelters where people had nothing better to do than to practice somatic paths of magic for centuries while the Scourge was raging outside their walls. Adepts don't necessarily have centralized institutions of learning but they're common enough, and once any Adept is initiated into a Discipline, they can use a literal magic internet connection to train themselves in it from the True Pattern of the Discipline.

But I'm perfectly willing to accept it as a game balance thing. If anything, it reconciles itself better with the magic swordsman archetype that I like than anything else.

[Username17]

That reasoning seems flimsy; of those six billion people, less than 1% are going to be magically active

So? 1% of 6 billion is 60 million. At the time Earthdawn is set, the entire human population of the Earth was 7 million. Demographically, Shadowrun posits more Mages in the Federated States of India than Earthdawn posits People on the planet. And people in Shadowrun are able to talk to each other all over the globe rather than having spent most of their lives locked in an underground fallout shelter with the other people in their village. And of course, the fact that there are books at all in Earthdawn is wildly anachronistic, while Shadowrun people live in a world where anyone on the planet can tweet trideo feeds.

It's not wildly out of the question that more magical progress would have been made in the 43 years since the Awakening than in the 1506 years since the founding of the Kingdom of Throal. Certainly, we would expect more progress to be made in every other field in the 43 years between 2011 and 2054 than in the 1500 years between 5500 BCE and 4000 BCE. Magic, as you've noted, has a number of things about it which call that claim into question, but it's not an unreasonable idea even so.

-Username17

[Nath]

That reasoning seems flimsy; of those six billion people, less than 1% are going to be magically active, and even if they are, the magical traditions are not very compatible with technology and can't be reproduced and researched the way advanced technology can. Plus, magic is influenced enough by personal paradigm/POV that I seriously question how much mages can share their theory and practice with each other. I suppose the closest you can come to that is magical colleges run as tertiary institutions, but even those are rare, by all accounts.

Whereas, Earthdawnverse has magic being around for thousands of years and even the kaers were fallout shelters where people had nothing better to do than to practice somatic paths of magic for centuries while the Scourge was raging outside their walls. Adepts don't necessarily have centralized institutions of learning but they're common enough, and once any Adept is initiated into a Discipline, they can use a literal magic internet connection to train themselves in it from the True Pattern of the Discipline.

Shadowrun assume spell formulae can be sold and bought from shops, so you can learn a spell without ever meeting the magician who first designed it. Then you could still astrally project for a workshop on the other side of the continent. And the point was somewhat moot for shamans, people overusing the assumption that totems could visit you to teach any spell you really wanted.

There is also a fundamental difference in scale. If you're into, say, some Romanian-only school of magic, there's still 200,000 awakened people out of 20 millions in the country. As far as History is concerned, that was the population of the entire planet circa 4000 BC. The largest cities on Earth were still under 100,000 before first millenia BC. A Vivane-only school of magic would be more likely to have a few dozen or practicers at the time.

[phlapjackage]

Which interests me; if ED is more high magic than SR, how come their magic sucks so much more?

It's not a ED/SR magic level thing, it's that the manasphere has been basically nuked by the Horrors, so players have to take extra measures if they want to protect themselves.

It's been awhile since I've played ED so I could be misremembering this, but the "takes 2 rounds to cast a spell" thing comes from spell matrices. A spell matrix allows a caster to cast a spell safely, not subjecting themselves to the degraded and Horror-infused manasphere. There are still options to cast spells without using a spell matrix (so more quickly), but this can be dangerous to the caster, like trying to breath in a burning building without a gas mask. Like using saidin instead of saidir (in SR world, I think that if a mage had a spell matrix, they could cast spells with no drain.)

Also, I THINK that the 2 rounds thing is just to tie threads for the spell to the spell matrix. So once you've got the threads in place, you can cast the spell all day.

Man this is making me want to play ED again. I really liked the way the mechanics tied into the actual setting. Yeah the die-steps were clumsy, but whatcha gonna do?

[Ancient History]

There are options in later sourcebooks that make magic faster, but the best ones both basically amount to casting-from-hit-points.

[GnomeWorks]

That reasoning seems flimsy; of those six billion people, less than 1% are going to be magically active, and even if they are, the magical traditions are not very compatible with technology and can't be reproduced and researched the way advanced technology can. Plus, magic is influenced enough by personal paradigm/POV that I seriously question how much mages can share their theory and practice with each other. I suppose the closest you can come to that is magical colleges run as tertiary institutions, but even those are rare, by all accounts.

I think a better discipline to compare magic to would be philosophy. I may disagree with Hume, but through studying his works and arguing philosophical points with Humeans, I gain a better appreciation for his position and my own, with a deeper understanding of why Hume held his positions and refining my own position at the same time. Coming up with reasons why I think Hume is wrong, within my philosophical framework, forces me to answer questions or further explore ideas that I hadn't necessarily thought of prior, improving my position as part of the discussion.

I imagine magic would work similarly, if my understanding of how magic in ED/SR works: you have some kind of personal paradigm of magic, and understand it in your own way. But that doesn't prevent you from talking about magic, in the abstract, with other people; and even if they can't teach you directly, you gain more knowledge in discussing the differences and such.

[Ancient History]

Guys, I'm going to put it this way: magic is pretty much explicitly technology in this setting. Not terribly long before the period this game was set, the whole threadweaving thing was damn near literal. Magicians wore elaborately woven robes which acted as spell matrix items because they didn't have spell matrices tied to their aura 'cause they didn't know they could do that. But we'll get into all that later.

[Stahlseele]

Oooh, another Ancient History and Frank Trollman OSSR!
And of Earthdawn no less o.O

If one were interested in getting started with Erthdawn, which edition would you suggest to go for?

[Concise Locket]

FASA recently wrapped up their Kickstarter for 4th edition. They were shooting for IIRC a September release date. You might wait for that if you want to jump on to the latest version.

I'm partial to 3rd but only because that was the first version where I was actually able to rope people into playing the damn game. I like it better than D&D but like any game it has its issues. I'm hopeful that 4th will patch some of them.

Don't expect anything resembling Shadowrun other than the art. It's a completely different animal.

[codeGlaze]

I think the exposure to other material via OSSR/FauxSR/Drunk Reviews/etc is definitely one of the best things about this forum.

[Stahlseele]

@Conchise Locket:
Ah, thank you.

[codeGlaze]

Important inquiry!
Do any of the fucks ftom CGL's Shadowrun 5e have ANYTHING to do with the current incarnation of FASA and ED4e?

[Ancient History]

Not to my knowledge. Catalyst doesn't hold the license, and I'm not aware of any cross-over in their writer pool...though admittedly, I haven't been paying a lot of attention of late.

Re: edition - Most Earthdawn editions stick pretty close to the original source material. 1st edition isn't without flaw - we'll get into that - but 2nd and 3rd edition, whether or not they tried to "fix" things, ended up adding a lot of stupid crap.

[Lokathor]

Also, I THINK that the 2 rounds thing is just to tie threads for the spell to the spell matrix. So once you've got the threads in place, you can cast the spell all day.

You get 1 action a round (plus your move). A typical spell requires 0 - 2 spell threads (usually 1) to be active on the spell's matrix before you can cast it. Casting the spell is its own action that must be taken separately from the weaving process.

For a 0 thread spell you can cast every round. This is like the "i cast magic missile" really basic stuff. Not even all the magician classes have 0 thread attack spells.

For a 1 thread spell you can cast it every other round. One round you weave, then one round you cast. Note that you can also fail your weaving test, so then that round is just wasted.

For a 2 (or more) thread spell it's important to note that, in addition to the fact that you can fail to weave a thread, you can also potentially weave more than one thread at once by jacking the target number way high. So you could maybe still cast them every other round, but only if you're an expert or lucky. Otherwise you cast them every 3rd round and so on.

Once a spell has all the threads woven, you have to cast it with your next available action or the spell threads fizzle. Once you start weaving you can only spend actions on weaving tests or the spell threads fizzle (failing a test on a multi-thread spell is fine though, you just lose time). Also, some of the advanced types of Spell Matrix that you can get have a thread "pre-woven" to them, so that you need to weave one less thread than normal every time you cast a spell in that matrix.

If one were interested in getting started with Erthdawn, which edition would you suggest to go for?

They're all about as similar to each other as the pre-3e versions of DnD are. You can quickly port Earthdawn 1e suppliments into 3e and back and so on. I'd suggest Earthdawn 3e myself, because it has some improvements over 1e, but I never played 2e so maybe that's alright too. Mechanically, the differences are that the 3e books reorganized where 1e's expansion material went, and so some of it is even in the core book and stuff.

The other main difference is in the assumed setting. By the time 3e came around a lot of boxed set and timeline stuff had been printed, so the implied start date is pushed forward a bit and the major "timeline" boxed sets of 1e become the tail end of the "what happened up until now" story that 3e has in the first few pages.

EDIT:

Unfortunately, the Success Table is not very intuitive, and the numbers don’t really follow an easily identifiable pattern. Even experienced gamemasters need to check the chart to find the success level of a given result (at least some of the time).

Oh come on devs! There's an obvious pattern! Here let me get my notes it's...

Code: Select all

public static int resultLevel(int target, int result)
{
	if (result >= 9 + (int) (target * 1.47))
	{
			return 4;
	}
	if (result >= 6 + (int) (target * 1.395))
	{
			return 3;
	}
	if (result >= 3 + (int) (target * 1.29))
	{
			return 2;
	}
	if (result >= target)
	{
			return 1;
	}
	if (result >= -1 + (int) (target * 0.67))
	{
			return 0;
	}
	return -1;
}

Yeah that's totally logical and easy to remember.

[hogarth]

I just realised that I have been mixing up Earthdawn and Jorune for as long as the former has been in existence. Live and learn.

[Ancient History]

How It Came To Pass...
Though we must be thankful for the here and the now, we must always remember what was. Some things must never be allowed to happen again.


History is not this book's strong suit.

FrankT:

Shadowrun of course had a very similarly named chapter that was a list of events major and minor to give people a feeling of how our world of 1989 differed from their world in 2050. So Earthdawn essentially allots itself 12 pages to do the same thing. Except... not. Earthdawn takes place in the Ukraine in about 4,000 BCE. While one could go through and meticulously make a “secret history” of the region such that it could at least possibly leave behind the archeological evidence that we're familiar with, these guys don't even really try.

If you ever went to a con in the 80s, sometimes you'd get trapped somewhere and some dude would start telling you about the history of his game world. If you were lucky, it was only as stupid as Dragonlance. Recall that in this era, The Forgotten Realms was so dramatically better thought out and written than other people's works that TSR gave Ed Greenwood a product line. It was... not a high bar to rise to. So if this was indeed “some dude's D&D campaign world from the 70s or 80s with a coat of paint” we'd expect the history to be a long winded rambling diatribe full of names we don't care about spanning hundreds of years.

The saga of Thera begins nearly one century before the founding of the dwarven kingdom of Throal.

Fuck.

AncientH:

It's not that bad. The nice thing about most of the ancient history here is that even by the standards of the Earthdawn contemporary times it's of minor importance because they had an 800-year apocalypse between the time all that shit happened and now. So for most people, this is their first generation or two born outside a kaer.

And, I think it needs to be said again it is amazingly compact. We're talking two or three sections per page, usually no more than five or six hundred words each.

Also, we still haven't seen a map yet. When we do, I'll tell you about Shantaya's sextant.

FrankT:

This is not an account of how our world was left over from an earlier magical world. It's the fifteen hundred year pre-history of some dude's D&D campaign. This D&D campaign is different from many (but obviously not all) others because the main villains are Lovecraftian demons who thrive on pain and suffering. So we get to read about some dude writing some books of prophecies (though of course “books” are themselves an anachronism for the time period), long lists of names of various Elves who got mad at other Elves, and various other TL;DR material like that. Although even within that context, there are some clunkers.

Unable to support the enormous tasks of physical labor required to keep up with the swelling population and commerce, the Therans must import workers from other lands.

Yes. Really. They have too many people, so they had to import more people to get enough man-hours to provide all the labor that all their people need.

AncientH:

Let's get this out of the way: the modern site of Thera on the island of Santorini is postulated to have been the site of the volcanic explosion which destroyed the Minoan Civilization, and possibly caused a Dark Age around the Mediterranean when it went cablooey. Some smart guys that didn't realize Plato was making shit up have speculated that this might be the "truth" behind the legend of Atlantis. So Thera == Atlantis. Except that it's modeled on a magical Rome with just as many slaves and blood magic that actually works.


Hey guys, let's build on top of a volcano! What could go wrong?

The read-between-the-lines in this backstory is that the guys behind Thera are maybe-possibly-probably immortal elves that were rejected from the Elven Court. Yeah, seriously, these guys got kicked out of the Elflands and wandered down to the Mediterranean to found their own magical island (with blackjack! and hookers! Ooh, elemental earth!)...and basically became the dominant power in the world inside a few generations.

FrankT:

Even on its own terms, this history sort of loses the plot from time to time.

Other grumblings surface as well, rumors that Edro is using unnatural magics to extend his life and those of loyal human and ork followers. Of course dwarven adepts had long ago developed life-extending magics for themselves...but this is different.

Even on its own terms, that's lame as fuck. You literally cannot play the “unnatural life extension” card if you also have magical life extension that the good guys use. You just fucking can't. That paragraph could have been about extracting oil from sunflower seeds, or hunting pygmy hippos for food, or fucking anything at all that had been established as being innocuous and uninteresting in the setting.



“Of course dwarven adepts had long ago developed hair-cutting magics for themselves...but this is different.”
Fuck off!

AncientH:

On the other hand, the game makes no bones about the fact that there's totally life-extending magic available. It's a high-circle Nethermancy spell. Now, there's some other versions that aren't stat'd out, but we'll maybe get to those later.

If you're a Shadowrun fanboy, there is vast amounts of conspiracy wank material here, from the Blood Wood and Elven Court to the names of the Great Dragons. The Blood Wood probably deserves a bit more mention.

There's a thing in Tir Tairngire where they talk about an old old old painting of some elf with thorns growing out of her skin and The Laughing Man goes on about "our blood queen" and Aithne Oakforest commits spousal abuse because his wife planted a rose garden. Well, that refers to this:

See, during the Scourge the Wyrm Wood (long story, but yes, dragons were involved) was home of the Elven Court, the Scourge was coming on, and the Therans offered the rites of protection from the Horrors for a price...and the Elf Queen Alachia refused. She made a kaer of magic wood. Which, well, didn't fucking work. Horrors beat wood, I guess. So because they figured that the Horrors only thrived on pain they created, the Elves did a massive blood magic ritual and turned themselves into Blood Elves, with thorns growing out of their flesh (and that of the local wolves and windlings), the constant pain of which made them unpalatable to the Horrors, and the blood that dripped from their wounds fed the blood magic enchantment which corrupted the Wyrm Wood into the Blood Wood.

Which is fucked up however you look at it. And, of course, Alachia and Aithne et al. are all immortal elves that show up (however briefly) in both games.


We won't talk about the Thorn Elves in Crucible.

FrankT:

The short version of all of this is that the Theran Empire wasn't well liked, but it did manage to get people to build fallout shelters before the magic nukes started flying. Demons or their allies broke into some of the fallout shelters but not all of them. So now there are a bunch of demon infested dungeons full of corpses and treasure and no one is super keen on restarting the old empire. You start in the Dwarven stronghold of Throal, and the biggest regional dungeon is called Parlainth.

This is actually kind of a long walk for “You start in the generic Dwarven underground stronghold, and there's a big dungeon you can go to if you want.” But it genuinely is much more tightly thought out than the vast majority of D&D settings, sad as that is. If your players start asking “But... why?” about Parlainth, you can go like five or six levels of answer before you have to say “Because it's a genre conceit, shut the fuck up.” While with something like Castle Greyhawk, you're there in like two.

AncientH:

Long story short: Parlainth was the big Theran city in northern Barsaive, and rather than set up a kaer they decided to vanish into another dimension for a bit and make people forget they existed. Worked, but the Horrors got them anyway, and eventually (in a trio of tie-in novels) the city was refound and came back as a giant open-air dungeon. You should have seen the box set. The maps were awesome.

This isn't the map of Parlainth. This is the map of the tiny outpost on the edge of Parlainth that grew up specifically to cater to the people that wanted to loot the ruins. The map of Parlainth is much bigger. Have fun!

FrankT:

It turns out that the reason the setting is called Earthdawn is because some dwarf dude who is better than you had an airship named “Earthdawn.” I did not know that. I thought it was called Earthdawn because it took place on Earth and happened in the distant past and was thus like the dawn of history or something. Frankly, I think most of the authors probably thought this too, which means that they got as glassy eyed when asked to read some dude's circa 1982 D&D campaign world history notes as I do.


This is like four years before Mirage.

AncientH:

The Earthdawn does eventually show up again later, but it's in one of the 2nd edition books which were terrible and were pretty much openly ignored by the folks doing 3rd edition.


Left: FASA, Brom cover. Right: Living Room Games, inferior DeviantArtiste.

Game Concepts
The magic of the world follows rules. Understand them and use them, as others will surely use them against you.

FrankT:

The Game Concepts chapter is an 8 page rundown on how the game works. Like most chapters, it has a full page illustration and a heading on the first page, so it's really like six and a half pages. It starts with a “what is Roleplaying” bit again, in case you skipped the last one. This one is much shorter and goes into less detail, and serves mostly as a giant middle finger to the idea that the GM and the players are competing against each other. So basically, these guys sympathize with Arneson and kind of resent Gygax. I feel much the same way, to be honest.

AncientH:

If there was ever a doubt that this was supposed to be a D&D-done-right heartbreaker and not a Shadowrun-in-a-mythic-past thing. Shadowrun is just a bucket of d6s.



Whereas Earthdawn uses the whole spectrum...but in a creative way.

FrankT:

Earthdawn uses all the polyhedral dice. And this is basically a bad thing, but before I get into that, I want to draw attention to a somewhat odd statement in this book when it describes how to roll dice:

When rolling a twenty-sided die, read a “0” result as a 20.

That may seem weird to you. Because, well, d20s don't have zeros on them. And if you go back to when there was only room on a die for a single digit, they had two zeroes on them and were used as d10s unless someone wrote in a tens place on half the numbers. So I guess it's time to tell an old person story.

Back in the original D&D materials of 1974 and before, Gygax ranted about “zero to twenty dice.” The astute will realize that the numbers 0 to 20 comprise 21 numbers and that is more sides than an icosahedron actually has. What he meant of course, was one to twenty, and he wrote “zero” because the old materials were unedited and written stream of consciousness by people who were making shit up as they went along. This shit got ironed out quickly enough, and if you ever picked up an AD&D book, you'd never know that ever happened. But back in the early fucking seventies, when people were trying to hack together something they could actually play from those bizarre screeds, it was an open question whether to mark the icosahedrons as “1-20” or “0-19.” And the Caltech people went with the latter rather than the former.

That one of the authors thinks this is a thing he has to say is a strong indicator that he has gamed with people playing Warlock. Which in turn means that this setting was being worked on not since the mid-eighties, but the mid-seventies. It's a subtle tell, but it's there.

AncientH:

The big thing about the ED system is what's called the "Step" system. In games like Shadowrun, if you have an Attribute of 3 and a Skill of 3, you add 3+3 and roll 6 dice. In AD&D, you roll a dX and add a number to the result. In Earthdawn, things are a bit more complicated. Your basic attribute - say, Strength 10 - gives you a step which is derived from that number, and then you add the ranks in your particular skill or talent to arrive at your step number. Then you take your step number and go over to a chart and look up what dice you roll. So if you have Strength 10 that might give you step 5, which gives you an "Action dice" of d8. But if you want to hit someone with a sword, and add your 1 rank in Melee Weapons, that gives you step 6, which is a d10.

It sounds clunky, and it takes a bit of getting used to, but once you get used to it it's kinda elegant, since the step size follows a logical progression. d6 -> d8 -> d10 -> d12 -> 2d6, etc.



The only problem is, there's a muck-up in the table around step 20 or something, I forget exactly where.

D&D maybe sorta kind borrowed some of this when it used attribute modifiers in 3rd edition.

FrankT:

The FASA people were not afraid to design outside the box. This has certainly advanced the field. They essentially invented the dicepool (Ghostbusters had something called a dicepool in 1986, but it was a “roll and add” as opposed to the “roll and count hits” system that Shadowrun pioneered and which we now associate with the term “dicepool”). But with innovation and a devil-may-care attitude towards the limits people put on themselves (man!) comes the capacity for great failure. Great big colossal stinky failure. The Earthdawn mechanics are basically a mess.

You roll dice of different size and add them together and look for a difficulty number. If you roll maximum on any one die, you get a bonus die. This means that smaller dice are shittier, but more likely to generate bonus dice. So depending on what your difficulty number is, it is entirely possible that you will be marginally more likely to succeed with worse action dice. The thing is... this was bad but new ground in 1993. Savage Worlds makes the same mistake and it was written ten years later. Seriously man, what the fuck? Why don't people learn from the mistakes of the past?

The tests made in Earthdawn are interpreted or used in one of four ways.

Yes, that's obtuse and incoherent. But I just don't care anymore.

This chapter is incomplete. Apparently if your roll meets or exceeds the difficulty number, you get “average success,” and if you roll “somewhat better” you get a “good success.” But how much better is better enough to qualify is not explained here. Also, failure is called “poor success” which is probably the worst terminology I could imagine implementing.

AncientH:

The whole "Action Dice" thing reminds me unsubtly of Nexus: the Infinite City. I don't think the designers intended that, I just think it was something in the water.

FrankT:

There is in-game fluff about how everyone is an “Adept” who harnesses magic power into their “discipline” to give themselves super powers. Which is a really long walk to explain how character classes are totally in-world things that people talk about by name. The magic abilities you get are called “talents” and those talents have “ranks,” and to get better or higher ranked “talents” you need to advance to a higher “circle” within your discipline. Which is to say that the world recognizes levels in addition to class. Because this is somebody's nearly two decade old D&D campaign world, and they've put really a lot of thought into making in-world justifications for weird idiosyncrasies of D&D mechanics and genre conventions.

AncientH:

Yeah, you tell anyone in D&D you're a 5th-level Fighter, you'll get ugly looks at the table. But if you tell someone in Earthdawn you're a 5th-circle Warrior adept, everyone knows what you're saying, and can probably even calculate how much of a badass you might be.

I say might be because...well, I should save this for other chapters, but fuck it...Earthdawn has levels, but eschews a level system. It's much more similar to Masonic initiation than levels in D&D: getting higher up in circle just unlocks better talents. You can stay 1st circle in Earthdawn and just upgrade your 1st-circle talents and you'll be a real badass, you just won't have as many tricks to be badass at. If you want to be J'onn of Swords and be a 1st-circle Warrior with 10 ranks in Melee Weapons, that is a cool and viable character choice.

My point being, Earthdawn was an effort to bring Shadowrun-style flexibility of character generation and upgrade to a D&D-esque level system, and as clunky as steps are and as weird and broken as it sometimes get, it's brilliant in that regard.

There's a lot of other stuff this section just touches on to get players and gamemasters familiar with the concept - there are Karma dice (like in Karmal pool in Shadowrun) in ED, though they work a bit different, and experience is called Legend Points (LP). In addition to blood magic, name magic is a big thing, and instead of gods (and clerics) there are things called Passions (and Questors). We'll get into all of that in a bit.

Next up... Major Races of the Ukraine Barsaive.


Beastmaster is a legitimate Discipline in Earthdawn.

[Lokathor]

Okay, now I'm starting to remember the 1e / 3e distinctions more. 3e cleaned up some of those weird terminology things (all the "success" stuff is now a "result", which makes a "pathetic result" more sensical), and adjusted the step chart to take out the d4s and d20s (which makes results more smooth, although the target numbers are still weird as hell). Also, while they did reprint the world history word for word, it's in the GM's guide and has little sidebars with timeline notes (kinda like Shadowrun 4A had). Also 3e has a better font.

[Ancient History]

Also 3e has a better font.

Shut your cocksocket.

[Blade]

Yes IIRC 3rd Ed has a slightly better step charts, but it's still a weird system. Characters in 3rd Ed also start with more skills, which can help give them a little personality outside of their class and race.

But I have played only a little 1st Ed and one game of 3rd, so I don't know all the details.