[OSSR]Earthdawn (1st Edition)

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Sun Jun 15, 2014 10:01 pm

Skills
Not all people in the world are Adepts. Some of us learn our trade the old-fashioned way.
-Harrok, Blacksmith

Spoiler Alert: They never actually come clean on how many people are like that anachronistic blacksmith and how many are player character material. Seems like an important piece of world building, but it's all in vagaries like “some” and “many.”

Most characters actually learn to read as a semi-mystical Talent, and would thus use their Talents to pay the bills.

FrankT:

Skills function the same way as Talents. They have a rank value, you add that to your stat dice step, and then you pull out and roll your action dice. You know, exactly like Talents.

No. Dice step.

The primary difference between Skills and Talents is one of theme. A Talent is learned in a magically assisted way, while a Skill is learned the old fashioned way. And by old fashioned, I mean old fashioned.

Back when D&D was young and people were making crap like RuneQuest and Warlock and such (because the original D&D was literally unplayable as written and people needed to basically rewrite the game in order to play it), spending money for training was a big thing. You still see it in cRPGs and shit, but I don't think I've seen an MC who took training costs seriously in Table top since the election of President Clinton. But back in the day it was the kind of thing people took seriously. Like level limits for demihumans and shit.

The authors of Earthdawn are really sure that paying money for mundane training is totally a thing your GM is going to demand that you track, because this game is all about making really old school D&D tropes into non-metagame things that really happen in setting. So perhaps the central distinction between Skills and Talents is that Skills require you to spend money on training. This distinction is the driving force for why they are in an entirely separate chapter.

AncientH:

Tl;dr: Skills suck.

Skills have their place in ED because there are some things you want to do, like read Ancient Throalic or weave baskets, that you're not going to be able to do with magic (probably), but it's not like their are big areas of antimagic anywhere were your Talents just cease working. But still, as a way of buying up things that aren't on your Talent tree, skills have a place.

Like Shadowrun, there is no definitive spell list, so you can make up knowledge skills as necessary and your Artisan skill scrimshaw or whistling or poledancing if you want to. And despite what Lokathor said, Artisan skill was supposed to reveal if you were horror-marked or not, but it never got any actual rules involving that, so it was more of a flavor thing than anything else...at least, in 1st edition. I kinda avoided 3rd edition because I didn't like the RedBrick guys.

However, also like Shadowrun there's a pre-defined list of set skills, so nobody does something stupid like in Underground Armies and just writes down "Dragon Summoning" or "Home Ec."

"Son, that's not a super power. That's Home Economics."

FrankT:

There are three kinds of skills: Artisan Skills are how you pass shiboleth tests to prove you aren't a horror marked infiltrator; knowledge skills are things you know (but totally different from shit like reading books, which is handled with Talents), and finally “General Skills” that do anything else.

Some of the skills are non-magical versions of Talents. And other than costing more to advance and having lower caps, they function pretty much the same. And the list includes Air Sailing, so it's maybe possible in this game to completely non-magically learn to keep a ship in the air with your mind. But maybe you can't, because as previously noted the actual description of Air Sailing unambiguously states that you cannot crew an air ship if you don't have a rank in Air Sailing as a talent. So um... yeah. I don't fucking know how that's supposed to work.

Perhaps the biggest deal in the “talents as skills” list is that there are some Talents that are normally pretty high on class lists. The aforementioned Second Weapon Talent comes online to Swordmasters at 5th Circle, but it's available as a skill from chargen. So if you want, you can totally fuck yourself over in the long run by heavily investing in a low cap skill that mimics a high level ability but doesn't lead to anything later one.
Pretty explicitly “power now for power later.”

It's like wearing all your shrovetide sweets.

AncientH:

Back when I cared about this, I'm sure I cared about this. But whatev.

The nice thing about skills from a GM point of view is that you can totally make an efficient non-adept NPC by just giving them a bunch of skills of sufficiently high rank to be a challenge, but without having to deal with remember how they could spend karma or any of that crap.

Much better than MC-penis NPCs who are so much more special than you.

FrankT:

The actual knowledge skill list is a short one that leans heavily on the idea that players and GMs will roll their own. But even with a short list, it drops some doozies. For me, the big standout knowledge skills are “baking” and “alchemy.” Because those skills imply the ability to actually do things, and are not distinguishable to me from an “artisan” skill. Really, the difference seems to be that they don't even pretend there are rules. If you want to make a danish or an equally anachronistic vat of alchemist fire, your GM is supposed to pull a difficulty number out of his ass and then you roll action dice. I know that at its core, that's pretty much how table top RPGs have to work, but it would be nice to have some guidelines. This is strongly at odds with some of the rules descriptions of what knowledge skills do, where it assures you that knowledge skills don't enable the character to perform an action. But there honestly isn't any obviously available distinction between knowing how to make Greek Fire and being able to make Greek Fire. The Czech language distinguishes between “to know about” (vědět) and “to know how to” (umět), but there are a lot of gray areas and a lot of fields where the distinction doesn't ultimately make sense.

The jars themselves have to be crafted, but the contents are knowledge based. I guess.

The big trick with Knowledge Skills is that they are supposed to go up with years of study. Or maybe it doesn't, because it also has a page citation to the character advancement section to get more information, and that section does not list separate costs or timeframes for advancement of different types of skills. Of course, advancing pretty much any skill takes longer than most games are likely to allow for down time, so it's kind of a moot point.

AncientH:

Alchemy is supposed to maybesorta be a thing in this game, but it's not quite. I mean, not like in D&D3 where there's a skill and set target numbers. So while you can totally buy potions (and let us take a moment to appreciate the game where there really is just a potion shop in town you can go and buy shit from), I don't remember there being any place in the rules where they talk about brewing them up. Maybe in the magic sourcebook, but I don't think so. Which is sad, because I still maintain that Magic: A Manual of Mystic Secrets is the best magic supplement ever!

Really, it's cool!

FrankT:

So the Skills chapter manages to be even longer than the Talents chapter, and you might think that is weird, considering that Skills are basically the same thing as Talents and the game is heavily focused on Talents and games without a lot of downtime in them literally forbid players from even learning skills, because it's the 70s 90s and go fuck yourself. This is mostly achieved through redundancy.

Redundancy.

In addition to having all those rules about how you can take a large amount of the Talents as Skills in order to do some sort of accounting thing, and all that stuff about how you can make up whatever fucking knowledge skills you want, there's also a list of General Skills that are stand alone. These include things like Animal Handling, which is totally different from taking the Animal Training Talent as a Skill. And then you can take General Skill: Artist (Painting), and that's different from taking Artisan Skill: Painting because go fuck yourself. Or maybe it isn't different, because they actually point out in the skill description that it literally is an Artisan Skill, so why it is taking up space in the General Skill List is something I do not understand.

AncientH:

There's also a thing where because of different point costs, when you get higher up in your Discipline it's sometimes more cost-effective to buy up the skill of the lower-level Talent than it is to increase the rank of the actual Talent. This works best for, say, Speak Language and Read and Write Language, where actual ranks matter less than "Can I get Theran?"

One of the more important skills (though you wouldn't know to look at it) is Streetwise, because it's something that none of the Talents really address very well: legwork, knowing where to go in town to get a pint of baby's blood, how to spot a clean ork prostitute, that sort of thing.

FrankT:

Skills don't have any indication as to which of them can be used untrained. Some of them are things like “Bribery” or “Seduction” that I would hope any character would be able to attempt if they had a shiny enough gem, whether they had a skill or not. Others are things like “Acrobatics” or “speak language” that seem to be the kind of thing that you might restrict to people who had relevant training. If there is any list, I don't see it. And of course, none of these skills have any such indication in their individual writeups.

A Troll attempts to use seduction without any ranks. I have no idea if he even gets to roll the dice.

3rd edition D&D appears to have been written with exactly this headache in mind, what with the existence of “Exclusive” and “Trained Only” skills that are labeled as such both on the master chart and in the headings for the writeups themselves. The people who said 3rd edition D&D was inspired by Earthdawn are not wrong. The hand of someone who was annoyed at the Earthdawn book layout is obvious throughout 3rd edition D&D's player's handbook.

AncientH:

Tattoos and body modification in general seem to be pretty popular in Earthdawn, and Artisan (Tattooing) is as good an artisan skill as any. I vaguely recall that there might be a specific artisan skill associated with installing blood charms or growing living crystal armor or something, but if so I'm pretty that's covered in the magic supplement.

Also not covered here: the Questor powers! You'll have noticed that the Disciplines as such didn't include the Cleric type, which is a result of a) everybody seriously has magic healing as standard, b) all the spellcasters have access to some healing magic, and c) there are no real gods in the setting. We'll get to that a little further on, but just keep that in mind: no clerics.

FrankT:

Speaking a Language is available as Talent and as a Skill. This is totally different from the list of Talents that can be purchased as skills. Really.

AncientH:

I like this dwarf.

I mentioned before that Spellcasting is totally a skill here, but not in other editions. Other editions tried to "fix" the problems in Earthdawn 1.0, to varying degrees of success, and one of the common fixes was nixing that. I'd feel sadder about it but, really, it didn't come up much to have a non-adept spellcaster or a non-magician discipline spellcaster. Still, I liked the opportunity.

The reason that Ancient doesn't like the LRG and RB editiosn is because for all the stuff that they "fixed," the books were generally pretty shit, full of recycled old art, bad new art, and silly new blood charms, disciplines, etc. None of them were what the game needed in a new edition, which was a complete strip-down and overhaul. They were all, more or less, pretty backwards compatible, only changing a bunch of details you'd barely noticed unless you were telling the game to turn it's head and cough anyway.

Plus, all efforts by RedBrick to port the game setting to another engine. Just...no. Why? What the fuck purpose does that serve. It may not be perfect, but you have a revolutionary game system here with untold system/setting integration, one that fits like a glove, and you want to toss it for fucking Savage Worlds or Pathfinder? You lazy, unethical, nearsighted, moneygrubbing fucks. I hate you all. ALL.

FrankT:

The Artisan Skills are very important to the setting, but they don't get a lot of love in the rules. The whole section fits on one page, and half that page is taken up by a picture. And half the remaining space is taken up with a table listing plausible Artisan skills. That table raises more questions than it answers. What is the difference between sculpting stone and carving stone? Those are apparently different skills.

The primary purpose of the Artisan Skill section is to make me know less about skills. It tells us unambiguously that the difficulty numbers on Artisan skills are low because “everyone in Barsaive regularly practices Artisan Skills.” That seems to violate the basic logic of Ranks and Difficulty. If everyone practices these skills a lot, shouldn't they get more ranks rather than trying against a lower difficulty? It's the end of the chapter, and it just takes a parting shot across the bow of my understanding of the intrinsic logic of the game system.

AncientH:

Next up is the magic chapter, which is where things get a touch complicated. Now, keep in mind that this is a bit like Shadowrun, where they were probably already planning out the Grimoire while this was still being written, but Earthdawn's magic system is often considered one of the best and most highly admired parts of the game, and that's a game where you can play Lizardman Zorro.

Lokathor · Post by **Lokathor** » Sun Jun 15, 2014 11:32 pm

Yeah, in 1e there was a "Horrors" book, which (pg98) had sections on "effects of a horror mark" and "detecting horror marks", both of which totally fail to outline clear rules about the effects of the mark or how you'd detect such a mark. Though, the detection section at least suggests that you'd probably Astrally Sense the marked target's True Pattern and then you'd need a really good check to notice anything wrong. Both sections don't even mention the artisan skill thing.

In the GM's Guide for 3e, they have the same sections and with almost the same text, but there's an extra paragraph at the end of the "detecting horror marks" section in the 3e version:

Game Master's Guide, ED3 wrote:Determining if a character is under the influence of a Horror
by having him perform an Artisan skill is unlikely to result in real
proof—this widespread tradition is the result of centuries of legend
and superstition. However, that does not necessarily mean that
this method never works—some Horrors do pervert the Artisan
skills of their victims, such as the Horror known as Fla Tra Lys
(see Minor Horrors, p. 286).

Anyway

Frank wrote:So if you want, you can totally fuck yourself over in the long run by heavily investing in a low cap skill that mimics a high level ability but doesn't lead to anything later one.

Ehhh, I mean kinda. Almost all games will stop short of 8th Circle because that's where the basic book ends and that's where most published adventures tend to end, and that's also where the spellcaster/fighter issue comes up as you've noted. However, skills do go up to Rank 10, and your rank in a skill/talent is usually expected to be no more than 1 above your Circle anyway, so skill will basically always be within the same rank range as talents are expected to be. All told, Skills are a perfectly alright thing to spend Legend Points on for most of the game. For example, the Sky Raider and Warrior both don't get Wound Balance in ED1. The only downsides are that you're supposed to spend out the ass on training time/money with some trainer somewhere.

There's also rules for "aligning" a skill and a talent where you lose access to the skill as a skill and it feeds those ranks into your new talent. So if you want you can train up the skill version of a talent you'll get later on and then align them and you don't lose many LP. Plus you got early access to that ability, so the LP doesn't really just go into nothing.

The (possibly) weirdest thing about skills is that there's no Durability skill. So, the only way to make yourself tougher is via being an Adept. Which makes for a good explanation of why you don't find many non-adepts ever adventuring. You can totally spend all your LP on boosting your talents without ever bothering to increase your circle much, but you really gotta get that Circle 2 so that you can unlock Durability.

In ED3, Alchemy became a skill of its own. What's the effect you might ask? Why, you can make all the potions and shit that you'd want by paying 1/10th the normal market price in materials. So your party can actually have a decent amount of healing items without spending every silver you earn just to keep people alive. Which is a simple enough patch to the game instead of just lowering the costs, I guess. One party member spends some of their starting skill ranks on Alchemy and then the whole party gets cheap healing.

Also, every skill in ED3 has a very clear "Detault:" entry, which says yes or no to if you can default on the skill to use it untrained.

Orca · Post by **Orca** » Mon Jun 16, 2014 1:48 am

Wasn't there another difference between skills and talents where the former were generally more limited? I think wound balance (edit: or avoid blow? I haven't got a copy here and it was a while ago) had worse results on a failure as a skill than it did as a talent for example. Nothing consistent, just a lot of little differences.

Korwin · Post by **Korwin** » Mon Jun 16, 2014 10:32 am

FrankTrollmann wrote: but I don't think I've seen an MC who took training costs seriously in Table top since the election of President Clinton. But back in the day it was the kind of thing people took seriously.

'The Dark Eye' 4th and 'Anima'

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Mon Jun 16, 2014 10:37 am

Korwin wrote:
FrankTrollmann wrote: but I don't think I've seen an MC who took training costs seriously in Table top since the election of President Clinton. But back in the day it was the kind of thing people took seriously.
'The Dark Eye' 4th and 'Anima'

Training costs and times have certainly been presented, at least as an optional rule, in a lot of RPGs. But they are normally cordoned off from the rest of the game and ignored. Even training times are normally only used in games which have "winter phase." But Earthdawn has the training costs and training times front and center, and it's really pretty hard to remove them.

-Username17

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Tue Jun 17, 2014 1:25 am

Workings of Magic
Magic is the key to our civilization and the source of our greatest challenge. Without magic, our world would be far more primitive, but at least we wouldn't have faced the Scourge.

This quote seems to be more based on out of game information than anything else in this book, but it's really what it says.

Oh shit! Shit's gone primitive!

FrankT:

This is a 12 page chapter that gives you an overview of how the magic system works and two out of three of the magic systems in the game. The third one is “spell magic” and honestly takes up more space than the rest of the magic systems combined, so it's reasonable enough. There's also Horror Magic and Dragon Magic, but those “don't count” so we'll talk about those later still. Now most game systems just throw down a bunch of magic effects and what rules of magic there are have to be worked out from the available materials. Earthdawn goes the other way: laying down a heavy framework of magic explanation and then deriving available magical effects from that.

This is a Horror Frog. It squeezes its bones out through its skin in order to make claws when threatened. We'll get to the Horror magic later on, but it's kind of like that.

Working forward from magical theory has advantages and disadvantages. There are some things that are really quite powerful or weak for their level on the grounds that they seem like things that would be easy or hard given the presented magic system – but no more so than the expected amount of spells that are strong or weak simply due to mysterious choices in design. I mean, AD&D had fucking glassteel in it, and 2nd edition AD&D let you reverse abjure. So it's not like designing from the effects backwards was ever any protection against unbalanced spells. All in all, I favor this approach, and think more games should adopt it.

The makers of Earthdawn refused to accept this. And they were probably right to do so.

AncientH:

Earthdawn came out after Shadowrun, and as anyone who has heard Frank or I rant about Shadowrun knows, we like to bitch about it's magic system - but we kvetch about it for completely different reasons than we would bitch about AD&D. Dungeons & Dragons is a very low magic setting, and by that I don't mean that it has less magic, but that the magic doesn't follow set rules - you can totally do some Lewis Caroll or medieval fairytale bullshit in D&D and who can call you out on it? Shadowrun, on the other hand, was written by a couple people that were actually into the occult an they built a system of metaphysics first, with the magic that player characters can do as an expansion of that. As a result, Shadowrun has a very versatile magic system where you can design your own spells and foci (and later, traditions) and you can have lengthy arguments on the astral plane and barriers and spirit possession, exactly if you were actually arguing parapsychology in the real world.

D&D players can argue about spell effects out of character. In character, not so much.

Earthdawn is...somewhere between the two. It's an effort to build a system of metaphysics you can hang a ruleset on, but the end goal is something recognizable to Dungeons & Dragons players. More to the point, it's building a system to address real and perceived flaws in the traditional D&D setting. For decades, players and Mister Caverns have been aware of the issues with magic items not growing in power with relation to their owners, of PCs blinging out with magical gewgaws, of the desire for PCs to make their own magical items, of the desire for PCs to use sympathetic magic. This is the kind of system built to address those needs.

It begins with a brief overview of the Cycle of Magic, and goes straight into talking about Astral Space.

FrankT:

Astral Space is described as being another dimension and another plane. Both of these are wrong. It's actually another space separated from our own by a non-spatial dimension. I know that people who describe magic worlds use those terminologies all the time and that Earthdawn isn't remotely the worst offender here, but by attempting to get all technical and exacting about these things, the fact that they mess up the basic geometry terms is irksome in a way it wouldn't be if it was just Gygax pulling shit out of his ass.

There's a big mystery that is supposed to be going on about how the projected time of the Scourge was 600 years, but it ended 80 years ago and that was only 400 years into the Scourge period. But since there are still Horrors running around eating people, I'm not sure what the mystery is supposed to be.

[AH Note: the Scourge was supposed to be only 400 years long, but the tail end has lasted longer than it was supposed to, the magic level of the world just stalling out before all the Horrors disappeared. This is generally supposed to be Thera's fault.]

Why are there no monsters in these woods!?

Shadowrun style astral projection and astral perception exist, but people in Earthdawn don't use them because the Astral Plane is still full of Horrors and if you made yourself dual natured you'd get eaten by a floatcat horror. People in Earthdawn use what Shadowrun people would call detection spells to figure out where astral forms are and what they are up to.

AncientH:

Earthdawn's astral plane is also full of corrupt astral energies, which is why if you cast spells without using some sort of spell matrix, you're liable to get damaged or Horror marked. If your head doesn't just explode.

The dangers of astral space and the general low skill level of Earthdawn magicians means that a lot of the abilities that Shadowrun magicians take for granted...don't exist, or exist in limited form not available to everybody. Which actually works in the context and purpose of the setting, because it neatly gets around the issue of magicians casually looking through walls and teleporting, at least at low circles.

Magic itself is based on patterns and names, which is why the major sentient races are called Namegivers and every Discipline has a threadweaving discipline. The basic idea is that everything in the world - everything and everyone - has a pattern, from the simple to the complex. When you Name something, you define that pattern, and from that point on Namegivers can weave threads to it. So you can name your axe El Kickasso, and you can weave a thread to it and gain some magical benefit thereby. And the thing is that as patterns gain history and people talk about them, they grow more complex and powerful, so that El Kickasso grows more and more kickass as you use it to do kickass things and weave stronger threads to it.

Patterns are visualized as Celtic knotwork. Because this is '93 and it looks cool.

Spellcasting is all about completing the pattern of spells by weaving threads to them. The whole Discipline this is even about adepts tying their pattern closer to the master pattern that represents their Discipline. It's a pretty tight and flexible system; for example, if you're hunting a dragon and find one of its discarded scales, that might be a pattern item that you can weave a thread to and gain a bonus against that dragon.

In Earthdawn, your legend determines how powerful you are.

FrankT:

Earthdawn's magic system very carefully explains why people gain levels, why people prepare the spells to cast later, why player characters are better than farmers, and why characters adventure to gain the levels. It is, in short, very carefully written to explain the weird shit that goes on in Dungeons & Dragons. It's been halfheartedly ported to a new system, but that's basically what's going on.

The fundamental idea is that Astral Space is “bad” and casting spells would involve connecting to Astral Space, but you don't want to do that. Because it's bad. But you have these “spell slots” in the form of spell matrices that you can grow spells into where they won't get astral ick on you. And then you can cast your memorized matrix spell later on without having your head explode.

So much of the description of how magic works simply assumes that you'll be using a spell matrix to memorize contain your spell before casting it. But because the people who brought us Shadowrun worked on this, there is – almost as an afterthought – the ability to cast without a spell matrix, which really hurts because astral space is still bad. So essentially we have an explanation for why things work like they do in D&D, with an additional explanation on top of that for why they work more like Shadowrun. The D&D explanation makes more sense, presumably because it was being worked on for upwards of fifteen years, and the Shadowrun explanation is a little bit lacking. I'm genuinely not sure why we can't just open up astral rifts wherever we want and make people we don't like explode by getting the astral funk up in their junk.

I understand why I don't want to do this to myself, but the explanation for why I can't hit other people with it is not terribly clear.

AncientH:

The downside to the pattern thing, they don't go into it in detail here, is that 1) most PCs can't really interact with it until 4th circle. This is a bit of a bummer, because it's sort of fundamental to the magical system of the game in many ways, and all the magic items are built into it. The actual introductory adventure for this game sort of requires it, but because PCs are 1st circle and don't have access to it, the game has to fudge its own rules to let you complete the adventure. That's lame.

You're worthless without a thread.

2) Threadweaving - permanent threads, anyway, the kind you want to bind a magic item to you - cost LP. More than that, it requires Key Knowledge - some important factoid or bit of history about the pattern item or magic item you want to weave a thread to so you can unlock your power/bonus. I'm tempted to say it's a bit like someone dropped some Call of Cthulhu research rolls in the middle of a D&D game, but fortunately there are some specific talents and skills that help you figure this stuff out.

FrankT:

I'll let Ancient go over the long of the whole “pattern” thing, but the short of it is that things interact with each other on a magical level through their names. Thus, knowing the name of something or someone is important and gives you power over them. You can use true names to compel demons and would rather that your enemies didn't know your name, and so on.

But Earthdawn really goes the extra mile. I mean, to begin with it's basically Truenaming, but 13 years earlier and also actually fucking works because it's built into the game engine instead of a late and lazy tack-on. But there's also a rant about how the reason you get power from your adventures is by having your named ass interacting with other named things through events that are themselves worthy of being named. So it's totally in character that you get XPs for having awesome adventures and not for hanging out in a Kaer practicing swordplay or magic. This is really the kind of thing that makes Earthdawn a kind of jaw dropping experience – even the stupidest and most metagame aspects of the D&D experience have been meticulously over analyzed until they can be worked into the setting as something that characters can discuss in-world as things that are actually happening. This is a game where there is an in-world explanation for fucking hit points and quest based XP.

AncientH:

So, just to draw a scenario, as 1st circle characters you can totally Name every object you own. Hell, you can Name your house and potentially weave a pattern to that so you get a bonus whenever you're there. However, unless you're a spellcaster or doing something weird, you don't have threadweaving at 1st circle and can't actually do anything with those items until you hit 4th circle and weave your first thread to them.

Another thing that players might not get used to is that as Namegivers, they themselves generate pattern items. These are objects or places related to the character in some way that have a connection to them, and the player's allies or enemies or complete strangers can weave threads to these items and gain bonuses when dealing with the PC. At low circles this isn't a huge deal, since you have like one minor pattern item and somebody can weave only one low-rank thread to it. But at higher circles and if you do really impressive stuff, the sword that your arch-enemy used to cut out your eye with might actually gain a major bonus when used against you. It doesn't come up much, but I like that it can come up, and it's not something you see a lot of in RPGs.

On the other hand, you can collect your own pattern items and weave threads so you gain a bonus when healing yourself or something.

FrankT:

Magic items in Earthdawn grow with the character. In-world, magic items have potential powers that you discover over time, and as you learn what the powers might be you can unlock them by spending XP. What this means in practice is that your GM can decide that your flaming sword needs to be able to defend you better and have you “find out” that it can do that and then let you buy that power. It's pretty much what the Weapons of Legacy crap was trying to do, but it actually holds together.

Now this comes with obvious problems. While the ability to keep unlocking powers of your magic sword means that you don't need to swap it out for a new sword, the fact that doing so costs XPs means that whatever sword you have is a sunk cost and players are not going to want to switch even if they find Excalibur.

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[/img]

It seems like someone could thread that needle, and have magic items grow with the character so that you didn't need to swap out your gear every few levels – but didn't actually have items abscond with your XP making it so that you still could. And actually, K and I pretty much wrote such a system, but it was more than a decade later and there's no shame in not being there yet in 1993.

AncientH:

There's also not much more than basic guidelines for how thread items grow in power, and by "guidelines" I mean "look at these cool thread items we made as examples!"

Aside from pattern magic, the other big take-off from Shadowrun is the prevalence and availability of blood magic.

Blood magic in Shadowrun was such a big no-no that even after five editions the Sacrificing metamagic is NPC-only and relegated to Aztec mages chopping the hearts out of virgins and crap like that. Not in Earthdawn! In Earthdawn every single Namegiver can use blood magic, which doesn't have quite the stigma that it does in SR, although maybe a little bit of a stigma because of, say, the Blood Wood and stuff like that.

Remember: The specialest elves of all in this setting fucked up bad and now step in scabbed-over puddles of blood every morning.

FrankT:

Blood Magic is the art of paying hit points for stuff. Ideally, you're supposed to pay permanent hit points. There are ways to avoid that cost, but the basic idea is actually terrible. But the thing to remember is that Enchant Item used to work like this in D&D. You got to do the cool thing, but you were just permanently easier to kill. So, like many things in D&D, Earthdawn should have said “This is stupid and broken! Let's change it so it is more game mechanically sound!” but what they actually said was “This is stupid! Let's change the fluff so that it's totally associated and in-character that this is actually what's happening in the world the characters are living in!”

It's a puzzling goal, but I guess they did achieve it for the most part.

AncientH:

Most of the really awesome blood magic is saved for further supplements, like Blood Oaths. Technically any talent that uses Strain is blood magic, but few people care; a couple of spells let you use blood magic to boost the effects, but none of the "let's carve someone's heart out and see what effect it has on the ritual" is included in this book. What is included in this book are blood charms, which are little magical cyberware doodads powered by your living blood. It's elegant and cool and I will fight anyone that says otherwise.*

* Yes, the new blood charms introduced in subsequent editions are largely retarded. I blame Steve Kenson, because I can. But in this edition, in this book, they were new and awesome.

Next up: Spell Magic!

Lokathor · Post by **Lokathor** » Tue Jun 17, 2014 3:39 am

Later ED1 books introduced the idea of "common magic items" which just give bonuses and don't have any special powers and I guess they're the example items that you'd use as the chassis to stick some cool powers on when designing your own Unique items. It makes the Earthdawn magic items seem a lot more interesting when they've got some guidelines that everyone can see, because Core ED1's take on magic items was the same old ADnD deal of "oh they'll be really cool I swear! Ask your DM if he thinks you're cool enough for you to find one and they'll tell you what it does. No you don't need to know anything about it ahead of time, they won't be miserly about it, no way". Sadly, I did play ED1 with the miserly type of GM.

And yeah, blood magic charms are pretty nifty.

One thing that you guys didn't quite bring up is that there's even a reason for adventuring parties to stick together: Your squad can get a name, and then you can weave threads to the Group True Pattern, and then you get your bonus stats whenever you're doing anything with the group, not just with one enemy or another. So since people have spent all this LP on getting stat boost with a particular group, it encourages folks to stick together over time instead of trying to kill each other for extra treasure. Helps reduce the "Alignment: Chaotic Stupid" problem a bit.

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Tue Jun 17, 2014 3:53 am

We didn't mention it because a) it's not in this book, but one of the supplements, and b) it's not their best effort. I agree, it's a reason why you would call yourselves Four Daves...

Or whatever.

...and adventure together forever, but the mechanics are perhaps less than to be desired. It's a group LP sink, I grant.

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Tue Jun 17, 2014 11:08 pm

3rd edition D&D appears to have been written with exactly this headache in mind, what with the existence of “Exclusive” and “Trained Only” skills that are labeled as such both on the master chart and in the headings for the writeups themselves. The people who said 3rd edition D&D was inspired by Earthdawn are not wrong. The hand of someone who was annoyed at the Earthdawn book layout is obvious throughout 3rd edition D&D's player's handbook.

Of course, sensible games like Champions had been doing the same for years. For instance, my 1989 copy of 4E Champions has a suggested list of Everyman skills, as they call them.

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Wed Jun 18, 2014 1:02 am

AncientH:

An aside before we get started, to address something Lokathor brought up. There are magic items in Earthdawn that aren't thread items: I've mentioned blood charms and potions, but besides that there are a number of magical gadgets and perhaps more importantly magical technology. Most of this is done via using True Elements (little magical embodiements of one of the five elements) or bound spirits; consequently, the major magic-item-making disciplines are Elementalists, Nethermancers, and Weaponsmiths. True Elements you might remember from the early talk about kaers in the first chapter, and are basically applied magical phlebetonium that can enable levitating castles and airships (using True Air to make them light and True Earth to make them strong), "fire cannon" (True Air + True Fire in an orichalcum chamber = kablammo), self-heating or self-cooling mugs (True Fire or True Water), glowing crystals, and pretty much anything else you can think of. All of this stuff is actually handled in some detail in the magic supplement, and is rarely taken to complete industrial magitech ends...although no one is ever quite sure why. ANyway, we now resume your regularly scheduled OSSR.

Spellmagic
The way of the magician carries both power and danger. A spell, like any other thing of power, is often a two-edged sword.

The end result of Shadowrun magic was that it was supposed to look like magic real people believe in.

The end result of Earthdawn magic was that it was supposed to look like magic from early editions of Dungeons & Dragons.

FrankT:

There are three ways to cast a spell. You can prepare a spell in one of your spell slots, you can cast a spell directly out of your spell book, and you can hurt yourself to cast spontaneous with raw magic. And it is here that Earthdawn most clearly wears its creative origins. Spell slot casting is because the setting was written for a D&D campaign, drain casting is because the authors just finished an edition of Shadowrun, and grimoire casting is because the proto-system was a homebrewed version of old editions of D&D.

See, Earthdawn actually has a pretty good and incredibly in-character explanation for why people have to prepare spells. But that had to have been written at some point in time. Before they had that explanation, they had to have been using the default D&D explanation for limited spell slots, which was actually pretty dumb. OK, it was very dumb. In old D&D, you “memorized” a spell out of your spell book, and then in casting it you forgot it. That shit gets parodied in early Terry Pratchett books, because it is dumb. No one fucking liked that explanation, but every so often you hear grognards talking about “memorizing spells” rather than the preferred verb of 3rd edition D&D: “Preparing.” It all has to do with some Dying Earth books, but even more it has to do with miniatures battles where “wizard” units would get spell cards that they could play once each during the battle – because that is far and away the easiest and best resource management system to use for wizards in a miniatures battle game.

Much of the plot of The Colour of Magic revolves around how dumb spell memorization is.

Anyway, back in the 70s and 80s, a lot of people asked why, if they were supposed to memorize spells out of the book to cast them later, that they couldn't just read the spells right out of the book to cast them while they were fucking reading the fucking book. And a whole lot of DMs agreed that this was a fundamentally reasonable question and that for the sake of realism that they should be able to do so. Usually by taking extra time or accepting a spell failure rate (which is basically the same thing, when you think about it).

So when we look at Grimoire Casting, we recall that this covers a need which simply doesn't exist in Earthdawn as it exists. It was written into the world fluff as a concession to realism based on another piece of fluff that has since been replaced. But it's still here, like a vestigial organ. Its primary purpose in the completed document is as archaeological evidence of the source material it was working from.

AncientH:

Grimoire casting is, if anything, a late graft from the Lovecraft or Sorcerer's Apprentice tradition where you find a musty old book or scroll in a forgotten kaer, read the spell aloud and oh shit something happens. Grimoire-casting was actually seen as quite the hack in 1st edition, as it didn't matter how many Spell Matricies you had, or what Circle the spell was, and casting from a grimoire wasn't particularly dangerous - no strain, no chance of a Horror mark - it is more difficult, but other than that not too bad. Unfortunately, it often led to the silliness of spellcasters deliberately not learning spells so they could squeeze some more use out of a grimoire.

Some later supplements added a couple twists - blood matrices are blood charms that contain the essence of a 0-thread spell; you cast them by taking Strain, but otherwise you can have as many blood matrices installed as you want until your pattern destabilizes (that was added in a much later book to counter excessive blood charm use). Forced Spellcasting was a knack which basically combined the benefits of Shadowrun spellcasting with the benefits of Spell Matrices - you cast a spell that's in a spell matrix, but you don't have to weave the spell threads, you just take X amount of Strain and roll to cast. Both options were considered fun and probably munchkinny as hell, but no-one really cared.

We don't talk about the Earthdawn Shaman, but that came later as well.

FrankT:

You actually learn spells by copying them into your Grimoire. Because that is how D&D Magic Users worked. This is especially odd in that spells you know do not require you to monkey around with your grimoire at all when you are popping them into your spell slots.

This entire section reads like it was IP scrubbed fairly late in the process and rewritten by people so familiar with the system as it had been that they didn't need to say things or check that their page citations weren't dead links. So there is a thing called “reattunement difficulty,” and when it is described it gives you a page citation to the spell list. But actually, nothing in the spell descriptions is called reattunement or attunement or anything like that. It's actually listed under “Weaving Difficulty,” which you would know if you read the second paragraph of the description of Weaving Difficulty, which comes three pages after you were given a page citation to a totally irrelevant and unhelpful page.

This is about as helpful as many of the page citations in this book.

AncientH:

The basic mechanic is: you attune the spell you want into your matrix. This can be a Spell Matrix talent, or an Enhanced Matrix talent, or a Spell Matrix item, or anything else that counts as a spell matrix. Attunement can be a simple and painless 10-minute ritual, or a "oh fuck I need this now" in the middle of combat and you roll difficulty. Then you weave any number of threads and cast the damn thing. This effectively emulates the multi-action/multi-round D&D spellcasting process while simultaneously being much more versatile and interesting. Hell, you could even attack the spell matrices in astral combat (they get better), which is why at higher circles spellcasters get Armored Matrix talents.

"Raw Magic" is basically Shadowrun casting: you point one of your known spells at the intended target. You still weave threads and roll to cast the spell, but a) no need to muck about with attuning or matrices, and b) it will hurt. It's like Drain in Shadowrun, except it depends on how tainted the local astral space is and whether or not any Horrors nearby notice and decide to give you a Horror Mark.

Was that supposed to happen?

Higher-circle threads have higher difficulties involved with weaving and (often) more threads to weave, but it's important to remember that the Circle of a spell is NOT tied to the Circle of the spellcaster. Higher Circle spells are more difficult to learn and cast, and may require more threads or a higher Rank spell matrix to hold it, but...that's it. Your apprentice really can cast the 15th Circle City in a Bottle spell if they find it laying around in an old grimoire or spell matrix and pump enough Karma into the rolls. Hell, a non-magician with the Spellcasting skill could cast any spell that doesn't require you to weave a spell thread, theoretically. It is a very open system, which is quite refreshing in many ways. Later editions tightened it up a bit.

That said, it should be remembered these aren't Shadowrun spells. These are slightly-Shadowrunized versions of D&D-style spells. These spells have unique mechanics and do lots of stuff from the mundane to the highly-specialized. They summon spirits and buff and debuff and heal and harm and everything in between. Remember, there are no clerics as such in this game, it's just spellcasters...and they're not all made equal.

Also, there's no such thing as an armor restriction or penalty. Go nuts.

FrankT:

The spells themselves follow the traditional formula of having a small amount of game mechanics at the top, with the majority of the spell's effects contained in the body of the text. And the text body is just written in a conversational style with no attempt at standardization. The first page of the spell list has four spells on it, and there is something unparseable in three of them.

Earth Blend is a magic spell that makes you hard to see as long as you don't move, and the spell result sets a difficulty for other people to see you with physical perception. How does that interact with mundane stealth, hiding places, distance, distractions, poor lighting, or anything else that would make it hard to see you? I have no idea. If the difficulties add, you're basically completely invisible, otherwise not so much.
Earth Darts is a magic spell that turns a handful of dirt into some short range magic missiles. The spell description says “more knowledgeable foes can retreat out of range of the spell if they see the crystal darts forming.” But the spell is an instantaneous attack. I understand how that's supposed to look in like an Earthdawn movie or something, but I have no idea how that's supposed to be represented in the game.
Flameweapon is a spell that makes a weapon do an extra d4 of flame damage. Remember that dies explode when they roll max, so that's actually pretty good. Anyway, when the fire damage explodes, the wielder of the weapon takes 1 damage from high heat. Does that allow defenses such as armor and fire resistance to come into play or not? It doesn't say. Also, thematically it seems like it would be pretty weird for the flame burst to do any damage to you if you were using a ranged or thrown weapon, but that isn't mentioned.

Honestly, the spell list goes on for 32 pages, we really can't go spell by spell and call attention to all the brain bleeding. There's a lot of it, is my point. The bottom line is that while Shadowrun spells are known for their economy of language and clear resolution procedure (I don't think I've had an actual argument about what a Shadowrun spell could do since hashing out the limits of animal transformation in 1994), Earthdawn spells are not. This reads not only like an OD&D spell list, but like the second draft of an OD&D spell list. There'd be room for about 9 of these spells per page if they cut out all the art. As is, each spell level for each class gets a number of spells equal to eight or how many they could think of, whichever is less. It works out to about fifty five spells per class, or a bit less than 7 spells per page. I've seen worse, but Shadowrun does much, much better.

AncientH:

Again, it's because they were deliberately trying to invoke D&D, not "Shadowrun 10,000 years ago." It's also true that they added a bunch more spells in the supplements, and even some really wonky multiple discipline spells for anybody that managed to munchkin their way that high.

As D&D spells go, the best you can say is that they're less complex than most D&D spells, but more complex than the most compact 3e spells. They are also, however, no general spells. Earthdawn doesn't have summon monster I to summon monster IX, each spell that summons spirits or horrors or undead is basically unique not only at its circle, but at all circles. Part of this is because in the magic supplement, they introduce summoning elementals and spirits of the dead for elementalists and nethermancers respectively, and that's non-spell magic with a completely different ruleset.

You might notice that Elementalists and Nethermancers seem to be getting a lot here - they're the best at making magic items, they get to summon spirits, Elementalists are good at finding True Elements and making orichalcucm, Nethermancers get to raise zombies...well, I'll let Frank start on that.

FrankT:

With four flavors of spellcaster to worry about, game balance is predictably pretty wonky. But it's not really as simple as how Wizards are better than Sorcerers in 3rd edition D&D. First of all, each circle has a very small number of spells on it – often as few as five. So if your class advances to a circle with some clunkers in the spell list (like how at Circle 3 a Nethermancer gains access to the spell Pack Bags, which, um... packs your bags. With evil power.), that hurts. A lot.

Another major issue is that there is quite a bit of expansion material, and that affects spellcasters in a way that it simply doesn't affect a Cavalryman or Thief. Disciplines don't get more talents, but they do get more spells. If you look at people's combined spell lists, there are seriously more spells on it that are not in this book than spells that are. Obviously,how much of that expansion material you have access to is going to completely shift the balance from one flavor of spellcaster to another.

And then we're back to spellbook casting. When you do Grimoire casting, you cast a spell without a spell slot. This means, explicitly, that you don't personally need to be high enough Circle in your discipline to actually have a high enough level spell slot to put the spell in question into. Yes, really. This means that with a little down time and access to some high level spell scrolls, you can just cast high level buffs.

Basically, there's various bullshit that a caster can do that allows them to be better than characters of their level are otherwise allowed to be. And non-casters can't do those things.

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[/img]
Well, like a spellcaster anyway.

AncientH:

More on that, the spellcaster classes in Earthdawn are not created equal. The most practical is probably the Elementalist, which interacts with Earthdawn's five elements of Air, Earth, Fire, Water, and Wood (we won't get into Orichalcum spirits, because we like to pretend the in-character narrator of that chapter in the shitty supplement was high when they wrote it - and yet somehow Shadowrun picked it up later. Ow, the pain.) Anyway, Elementalists fill a lot of the basic survival/healing/badass druid roles because they have spells for hurting, buffing, purifying water, and improved healing...all at First Circle. And that's just the stuff in the main rulebook. At higher circles, Elementalists are appropriately badass can walk through iron walls and call up earth walls and call down death rain and shit.

Illusionists don't get many things, but the things they get are generally very nice. They're a combination of magical legerdemain, mindfuckery, and at higher circles fucking with reality with stuff like the Flying Carpet spell, which has to tell the reader "This spell is not an illusion." At fourth circle they get the Glamour special ability, which basically lets them go to town with minor illusions, and they're one of the most effective face characters in the game. Also most of their magic is a bit like D&D shadow magic in that yes, illusions can hurt you.

Nethermancers are necromancers by any other name; they deal with corpses, the undead, night creature, horrors, and astral space. They're a combination of the necromancer wizard specialist and the cleric undead specialist, in that they can raise them up or put them down, and then have the Horrors over for tea. They get a lot of spells that call minor spirits over for various uses, and at high Circles they don't fuck around but straight-up give people heart attacks and flay the flesh from their bones...or give a boost to your life force so you heal faster. They can actually teleport (with restrictions) using a 7th Circle spell, which is another example of things that Shadowrun magic has verboten.

Wizards are specialists in magic itself. They don't to play with the elements, or deceive the unwary, or call up the undead. What they do get is faster access to better spell matrices and a lot of anti-magic and meta-magic spells relatively early on. In some respects this means they're generalists, because they get a lot of spells that seem lolrandom or "shouldn't Ignite be an elementalist spell?," but at higher levels they can boil the blood in your veins and share the difficulty of casting a hard spell, or cast Karma Cancel so that the fucking Windling NPC finally fucking dies.

This isn't the stupidest windling picture in existence.

FrankT:

Attack spells are pretty much assigned to levels completely randomly as near as I can tell. At Circle 3, the Nethermancer gets access to the zero-thread, single target spell Pain which causes bullshit small damage but also immobilizes the target for a variable number of rounds. Basically, any single target spell you ever get after that is pointless, because that spell already just outright makes you win and has the smallest possible casting time. But not only do you continue to get single target attack spells, you continue to get single target attack spells that are demonstrably worse in every way. So at Circle 4 you get Visions of Death, which is essentially Pain except that it requires weaving a thread to cast it, the difficulty for the target to end the immobilization is 1 lower, and it does zero damage instead of any damage each round of torture. At Circle 5 you get Wither Limb, which requires three threads to be woven and causes a lasting injury to the target but doesn't actually take them out of the fight for any rounds at all. You don't get a genuinely “improved” version of Pain until Circle 7, and even then Constrict Heart is just Pain that does more damage per round and has a slightly higher difficulty to end the immobilization. You could just go your whole career with the 3rd level spell and it would make you win every single battle that casting a single target attack spell could make you win.

Wizards are even worse about this shit, and get mysterious crap like Slow: a Circle 5, 2 thread touch spell that makes the target easier to hit in melee rather than killing them or something. All around, Wizards are a total mess. To the extent that their spells have a theme at all, it's “those D&D Magic User spells that were converted to this game but didn't fit thematically into the other caster disciplines.” So you get Mage Armor, Sleep, and Spider Climb Wall Walker. But crap that D&D Magic Users got at 1st level shows up on the Wizard list at like Circle 5 and 6. All in all, it's a jumbled and terrible discipline. Though no doubt there's some ridiculously killer app hiding in the Wizard's expansion spells somewhere.

AncientH:

It's not quite as bad as Frank makes out, because pretty much every one of them has at least one damage-dealing spell at each Circle even in the main book. Wizards for example get options of Crushing Will, Flame Flash, Ignite, and Mind Dagger all at First Circle. But keep in mind that like in D&D you have to go find these fucking spells, because it's not like in Shadowrun where you can just download the fucking formula whenever you feel the need. That said, I do think that the supplements strongly improved the overall issue of spellcasters not having the spells they need and can cast at a given time...or, well, at least the availability was increased somewhat.

FrankT:

There aren't a lot of summoning spells in this book. Summoning is a thing that exists, and it's just a matter of learning a spell to get a new spirit buddy. This is one of the few things in the game that is actually worth spending hit points on to extend for a year and a day. Anyway, the summoning spells are actually way better than they look, because they give you their stats in terms of die steps rather than literal values. So since the one is three times the size of the other, the summons look nearly useless but are actually extremely powerful. I can't even figure out where it says that – it might not say that anywhere in the book. But you can figure out that that is what they mean by comparing the derived stat effects to the master attribute tables, which is what I did.

AncientH:

As I mentioned, Elementalists and Nethermancers get access to better summoning later, but these spell-based summons never stop being useful. Hell, you can even bind these minor spirits into items to make magic items!

Also, spirits get stronger the more you summon them, which is good and bad. Do not call up that which you cannot put down.

FrankT:

Being a Spellcaster means being better than everyone else. But it also means a lot more micromanagement and reading than other people have to put up with. And when it comes down to it, it's actually quite deep into the game before you get to win battles on turn one, and the swordmasters and archers can do pretty convincing killbot imitation even so. So Earthdawn casters don't really feel overpowered. Though to be honest they mostly achieve this by having the characters be really weak. It's not just that you have to get to 7th circle before you can do most of the things a Shadowrun magician can do for getting up in the morning and writing “Magician” on his character sheet. It's not even that you have to be a 4th Circle Warrior before you can even use a magic sword. Although both of those things are pretty front and center. It's that the game only goes up to 8th Circle in the core book and spends most of the first six circles handing out abilities that characters in other games take for granted. This is a game where you play apprentice heroes, for the most part.

The Illusionist doesn't overshadow the Warrior because the Illusionist is Willow and the Warrior is Samwise.

This is the Illusionist you get to play.

This is the Warrior you get to play.

If the game went on long enough, you'd get to the issue where Bavmorda can indeed turn all the Warriors into pigs from outside combat range and only the casters can do anything at all about that. Or you'd get the issue where a powerful nethermancer could simply raise an army of ghost soldiers who were individually the equal or superior of any one of the sword wielding player characters. Or any of a number of other well known magic users versus fighters issues. But you don't normally see that in Earthdawn, because while the setting goes up to the power levels where you'd see that, your campaign is very unlikely to.

AncientH:

Even when you do get up into the rarified highest circles...the results are unspectacular. The only reason Earthdawn never ran into the issues with Epic Spellcasting that D&D3 did is because you never even approach limited wish in terms of power. The very few 13th-15th Circle spells are really powerful and often specific, ritual spells that affect entire forests or cities or mountains. They're not "Invoke the Wrath of God and Wipe the Horror from Existence" spells. They're not Meteo. They're not combat spells at all. They're plot devices, often fueled by teams of point-eared magicians and blood magic, sometimes at the same time.

Ha ha, no.

D&D existed in a context where archmages were expected to unleash their most powerful magics in combat, and while they always did a shit job of administrating what exactly a limited wish couldn't do, that was something that high-level PCs could legitimately plan to get up to. In Earthdawn...yeah, you can get up there, but the given spells are not exactly going to set your world on fire. You can do cool stuff, but it's pretty explicitly there that by the time you can cast those spells, you're about at the limits of what normal Namegivers can bend reality over and call it their bitch.

15th Circle Wizard. Could remove your Horror Mark. Probably won't.

A thing we also haven't mentioned is that like SRII, in addition to the copious black-and-white artwork of varying quality, there are these glossy tipped-in color plates. It's nice. Really classes up the book.

Next chapter: Combat!

Lokathor · Post by **Lokathor** » Wed Jun 18, 2014 2:20 am

And now I can mention my favorite spell in any game: Razor Orb.

It's an orb.

It's sharp.

Fuck yeah.

TiaC · Post by **TiaC** » Wed Jun 18, 2014 4:29 am

Ancient History wrote:[*] Flameweapon is a spell that makes a weapon do an extra d4 of flame damage. Remember that dies explode when they roll max, so that's actually pretty good.

Don't exploding dice just result in a value n/(n-1) times greater than an normal n-sided die? It's not that impressive.

Lokathor · Post by **Lokathor** » Wed Jun 18, 2014 5:15 am

str is probably step 6, weapon is probably step 5, that's about 11 average damage. an extra +3 average damage helps out a lot.

TiaC · Post by **TiaC** » Wed Jun 18, 2014 7:16 am

True, but a flat +1d6 would still be better.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Wed Jun 18, 2014 8:40 am

TiaC wrote:True, but a flat +1d6 would still be better.

Only barely. A straight +d6 averages 3.5. An exploding d4 averages 3.3333. The average difference is one sixth of one point of damage.

But more importantly, that's not what you're being offered. Most damage bonuses come in the form of a die step - which in most cases means swapping out a die for a another die with more sides. Bigger averages, but smaller chances of explosion (with a couple of instances where you instead swap our a big die for two smaller dice and get an even smaller increase in average but a larger chance of explosions). This means each die step is worth a bit less than +1 on average.

Getting an extra 3 and a third average damage from rolling an extra die is almost equivalent to getting four die steps, which constitutes a really large damage bonus for this game.

-Username17

TiaC · Post by **TiaC** » Wed Jun 18, 2014 11:07 am

Ok, that's reasonable. However, it looked like you were saying that the exploding nature of the die was what made it good.

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Wed Jun 18, 2014 10:48 pm

Combat
Soon after we re-emerged into the world, we found our lives filled with conflict. It was then we realized that the days of battle were far from over.

Fights in Earthdawn involve people falling down. A lot.

AH Note: I found my original FASA mail-in postcard. Back before the internet, they would include these in books and magazines and ask fans to mail them in to receive feedback on their products. Apparently I've been using mine as a bookmark for 20 years.

FrankT:

I'm tempted to say that there's basically nothing in the 14 page Earthdawn combat chapter you haven't seen before, but if you didn't play a lot of D&D variants from the 70s and 80s, some of this might be new to you. Earthdawn initiative requires that you announce what you are going to do in general terms, then roll your initiative value, then declare and resolve your specific actions in order of initiative value. This sort of “declare then roll” shenanigans was a thing that D&D used to do. It wasn't super coherent and chances were very high that you played sort sort of house rules that had little to do with what was written in the books. But if you were trying to play old D&D “by the book” (and you weren't using really crazy optional shit like Weapon Speeds), then when you finally Oberonied it into something at least vaguely playable, you'd have something that looked a whole lot like this.

In this game you have to be a serious badass to roll a d20 in your initiative dice.

AncientH:

'93 was after SRII, but the game is trying to ape AD&D so the lessons learned are rather few. Again, I'd like to have seen what FASA would have done to this in a second edition, because I think stripping a few of the AD&D things from it and adopting more of the Shadowrun way of doing things would have sped it up and simplified things tremendously. As it is, while a lot of D&D3 looks like it was inspired/ripped from Earthdawn, the combat in 3e (with its multiple action types/economy) looks more like it was swiped from Shadowrun than anything else.

In modern terms, for example, we would probably say that during any given Earthdawn Combat Round you could perform a move action, a simple action, and a talent action; but back then they put it down like:

During each Combat Round, you character can do several things. In a single round he can move, perform a simple action, and use one talent that requires an action.

Then there are special actions, which "most often take the form of Combat Options, but can also include unusual actions such as surrendering to an opponent or retreating (perhaps cowardly, but sometimes wise)."

FrankT:

Basically, you get a move, a standard action, and as many minor actions as the MC will let you get away with. Which is honestly how most such games work. But as noted previously: the terminology here is really clunky.

Movement is on a hex grid but the game is supposed to be played without a battlemat. You can attempt to wrap your mind around that or just accept that it's basically how a lot of games worked in the early 80s. Which is to say: not terribly well. There is a reason that Mike Mearls obliquely suggested that D&DN might work that way, and also a reason why the internets responded to that announcement like this:

Sadly, no one's head literally exploded. But it was not for lack of trying.

AncientH:

Initiative is...ah...well, simpler than Shadowrun in some respects. The character that rolls the highest Initiative goes first. MCs (or should that be Mister Kaers?) are encouraged to roll Initiative for a group of like critters, so if you face a horde of orks they all act at once instead of rolling Init for each single frelling one of them.

11.

Characters can also deliberately lower their Initiative to act later in the stack, which is called "reserving actions."

FrankT:

The basic rule is that you roll your action dice against the target's Defense Rating, and if you roll equal or better, you hit and roll damage. Armor reduces incoming damage, but if the enemy rolls better than twice your defense rating they ignore your armor entirely. Essentially it means that while nominally there is a space for an easy-to-hit but heavily armored brute warrior, in actual fact this is a god damned lie. The only stat that really matters for how good you are in combat is Dexterity, which means that Elves and Windlings are the best front liners and Orks and Trolls are pretty much comic relief for the most part.

Enemies who are regular monsters (like Griffins) or evil fighters or whatever the fuck have defenses of about 7 or 8. Really tough monsters (like Gargoyles) have defenses of like 12. As a starting character, you are probably going to have a die step of 10 or 11 in your attack of choice. That works out to you rolling two variously sided spindles and connecting with basic enemies most of the time and hitting really tough enemies about a third of the time. When you have a bunch of legend points under your belt, you'll have a die step of like 18, which means that you'll be stabbing those Griffins more than ninety percent of the time and connecting with
the Gargoyles more than three times in four. But because of the way die steps work, you'll never get to the point where you don't miss a sizeable chunk of the time – but you will get to the point where your chances of missing bullshit monsters aren't a whole lot different from your chances of hitting tough monsters. The creature list actually wastes a lot of page count on unique super demons that will slam dunk any character you can aspire to be with the rules in this book – but we'll get there when we get there.

Characters also fall down in combat. A lot. Like, really a lot. There's a whole thing where every time someone hits you in combat and they do a bunch of damage, you have to make a strength test or fall down, but that's not why you fall down. You fall down because every time you fail an Avoid Blow roll, you fall down. You get to make an Avoid Blow check once per round, and since it's a one blow system that pretty much means that you'll be doing that every single time you get attacked. So pretty much every time a blow connects at all, the target is also going to fall down.

AncientH:

Yeah, Knockdown Tests are a thing. Remember Wounds? If you take as many points of damage as your Wound Threshold in a single attack, you get a Wound and have to check to make sure you're not knocked on your ass.

I'll be honest, combat in Earthdawn can be pretty brutal, particularly at low levels when you're facing something like Cadaver Men (which are like fast zombies with 4 attacks). It's not so much a glass ninja thing (although that can happen, since you have three axes of Defense: Physical, Spell, and Social), as "you only have X damage you can take before you're out of the game" and "you can only deal Y damage per round, when you hit." The nice thing is that there's little ineffectual flailing where neither side has a high enough score to consistently miss the other, the bad thing is you generally need to score some solid hits if you want to survive.

There are a lot of closet trolls, and a kaer is one big closet.

This is basically why they have both the unconsciousness rating and the healing surge recovery test. The UR means you don't do something stupid like fight until you're literally on your last hit point (well, at least until you buy the high-Circle Talent that lets you do that), and the Recovery Test lets you get back in the game when the dragon does toss you like a ragdoll, because you can make them even when you're unconscious.

I'm going to admit, I hated healing surges in D&D4, and I like Recovery Tests in Earthdawn. This might be because I'm a stuck-up nerd with a burning rage boner for D&D4, but I like to think of it this way: in the terms of the Earthdawn setting, everyone is a magical adept and instinctively uses the magic of the earth to help heal faster, and they have lots of magic items and spells and talents based around people actually figuring that out and working to augment it, or use it to cure diseases and recover from toxins and shit. In D&D4, it's part of the generic bullshit where now everybody has powers for no reason and its never adequately explained within the context of the setting.

See, I can forgive Earthdawn a lot because the setting and the system tie together so well that the one often provides justification for the other, while D&D4 does stupid shit which goes away from the traditional D&D aesthetic. Earthdawn might have nearly broken itself trying to be the game D&D should be, while D&D4 bent over backwards to be a pen-and-paper clone of World of Warcraft. So while both games might want many of the same things and even have similar mechanics, Earthdawn is at heart a good game and D&D is a cowpat they call a frisbee, charge you too damn much money for and tell you you're having fun when your friend throw it at you.

FrankT:

There is an entire section for special combat maneuvers. These are... at least they are short. I will say that in their favor: they do not take up overly much space. They are not terribly well through out. It is a relatively trivial task for a Windling or Elven Warrior to grapple and pin an Elephant. The attacker rolls Dexterity + Unarmed Combat and the target is stuck until they beat that result with a Strength + Unarmed Combat roll. Tinkerbell, mistress of headlocks is a pretty viable character. I don't even know how to feel about that.

In Earthdawn, literally any of these people could piledrive a gorilla.

It's a one blow system, but monsters get multiple attacks because we're playing D&D. Player characters can get a second attack only by paying HP or XP every round of combat. Gargoyles get two attacks because they so fast go fuck yourself.

That might have seemed like a pretty odd segue, but it's because the organization here is kind of sketchy. Specifically: it gives a couple of combat options, then it tells you how to read a monster's entry, then it lists some more combat maneuvers. Look, I don't fucking know, OK?! But this is where you find out that there is a combat option called “Called Shot” that is totally different from activating the Talent called “Called Shot.”

AncientH:

The organization is largely following Shadowrun: you have your basic (not complicated) stuff about attack rolls, then go into melee, missile, and unarmed combat pretty much in that order.

(As Frank mentioned, the grappling rules are not really taking Windlings into affect, so yeah technically if a Windling's Unarmed Combat or Dex result can overcome their Physical Defense, they can just hug on to the bastard and keep them from doing anything. The Windling Bumrush could theoretically conquer an empire.)

There are sections on mounted combat (because fuck, one of the disciplines is Cavalryman) and Aerial Combat (because windlings and dragons can fly); there's a section on creature combat which I think is probably unnecessary, and then they get into the actual combat options, which are what the "special actions" section pointed to. These can technically apply whether you're firing an arrow from the back of your Orkish war mammoth or practicing Windling Acupuncture with your living crystal sword, but it's basic stuff like "all out attack, defense suffers," attacking to knockdown, attacking to stun, called shot, etc. This is really the exact same kind of crap that d20 covered in "Special Attacks."

A lot of this crap is really just the results of 20+ years of agglutination of combat wonk on the part of roleplayers. Someone back in the first couple issues of Dragon magazine decided they wanted a non-lethal attack option and came up with Strike-to-Stun rules, and so in 1993 and 2003 and 2013 we have hit-to-stun options cluttering up RPG combat chapters, even though it's ridiculous and Earthdawn doesn't even have a stun track like Shadowrun and has to bend over backwards to work stun damage into its damage/healing system.

Then there's some stuff with shields, and my eyes go dim, so let's move on. The next bit is "situation modifiers," which covers shit like trying to hit someone in the dark or when surprised or Harried ("being swarmed by many smaller creatures" - presumably windlings that didn't make their grapple checks).

FrankT:

Earthdawn's die step system is incredibly swingy. This is normally not much of a problem, save that it makes figuring out how likely you are to succeed at a task be a fairly non-trivial math problem. Especially considering that if you have any bonuses or penalties you'll be rolling dice with different numbers of sides. But while I wouldn't even attempt to compute percentages without a computer in this game, it is fairly easy to determine what your “average” result is at any die step, and thus whether your chances of successfully performing an action are better or worse than 50/50.

But one place where the swinginess of the RNG makes a big difference is in the damage system. Because you're rolling a small number of dice which may have a lot of sides and in any case explode. A character who does 13 steps of damage (which is not difficult to achieve at all) rolls a d10 and a d12 and adds them together – resulting in a 12.5% of doing less than 7 damage and an equal chance of doing more than 17 damage.

AncientH:

Like many FASA games (and RPGs in general), the damage/injury/healing fill up the back of the combat chapter. There's not a lot to talk about here; you're rarely going to be regenerating more damage during a fight by spamming Recovery Tests faster than the enemy can hit you, because restrictions. For starters, when you wake up after a full night's sleep, unless you're at full health and no wounds you auto-spend a Recovery Test, and lots of PCs only start out with 1. It's meant to mimic D&D's "you heal X hp a day after full rest." Likewise, you normally have to wait an hour (a relaxed hour, at that) between Recovery Tests, so unless the fight is a long grind, it's not likely to come up.

Likewise, Wounds are there so that you can get injured and it means something, since healing wounds takes longer. Not like, a lot longer: one night's full rest and a Recovery Test will heal 1 wound (provided they have no other current damage).

Adventuring in Earthdawn
Of course, it's a stupid idea. Some of our best plans started with stupid ideas.

Frank Note: The commas appear to be in the wrong place in that sentence, but that is how it is written. I would have put some sort of stress on the word “course” and used no commas at all.

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[/img]
These are some Earthdawn adventures. Not what they mean.

FrankT:

This 14 page chapter is a jumble of plot seeds, antagonist descriptions, wilderness travel rules, dungeon features, precious metal exchanges, curses, and some other stuff. This is, in effect, the “other stuff” chapter. Many essays on a variety of topics that had little to do with each other were sort of stuck together end to end. And now they have something in common: proximity.

AncientH:

Which you need sometimes. Hell, there are entire sourcebooks built around the concept. Volo's Guide to All Things Magical is just a bunch of Ed Greenwood's random magical ideas in collated form. So this just covers the basic perils and realities of adventuring that 20+ years of D&D had jackhammered into players' and game designers' heads as absolutely essential, rules for stuff like climbing, falling damage, fire damage, poison, etc.

I'm always amazed by the adventurers and shadowrunners that run around without a tape measure, a hammer, and a screw driver. Hell, duct tape rope and WD40 oil have gotten me through more dungeon crawls...

FrankT:

When you make a game, there are a bunch of things you sort of need to cover that are like hitting people with swords but also unlike hitting people with swords in important ways. Your game is going to have a system to hit people with swords, and you're going to playtest that bit a lot (well, more than playtest other things, that's for damn sure). So anything that can be modeled as a sword strike has a tendency to be modeled in that manner. So if you cast a magic spell that shoots a lightning bolt at a dude, it's tempting to structure that the same as poking them with a spear or shooting an arrow. Attack roll, damage roll, the end.

But some stuff doesn't work like that. You have things like falling, where obviously “not hitting” is not on the menu and one wouldn't expect heavy armor to be of much help. You've got things like fire and poison, where the character is going to die at some point in the future unless they get their condition treated in the meantime. And in pretty much every game, these kinds of effects are horrendous kludges. Which is kind of to be expected, because by definition these are the things you need rules for that the core combat resolution mechanics cannot satisfactorily model.

All that shit has to go somewhere, and no one really expects these rules to be especially elegant or good. In Earthdawn, they go in the Adventures chapter. Which is as good a place for them as any.

AncientH:

While not immediately apparent, a lot of low-level D&D and D&D-like games such as Earthdawn double as survival horror. In Dark Sun, this is because the world is a post-apocalyptic hellhole. In Earthdawn, this is also because the world is a post-apocalyptic hellhole. Heck, it's Fallout without guns and power armor, and you know how fucking hard it is to stab those radioactive golden geckos to death?

My point is, at low levels where magic is scarce and silver is scarcer, just surviving to get to the kaer (underground dungeon) or citadel (aboveground dungeon, usually a walled and domed-over city) is a small feat of heroism to the point that you'll probably want to camp outsite and train up from all the LP you gained killed six-legged squiggly beasts and shit. But you may also run out of food and fresh water and show up there half-starved and with festering, half-healed wounds. Welcome to Barsaive, don't panic and I hope you brought a towel.

Also, if you look at any of the 2nd or 3rd edition art, your liver may take 2d4 points of damage per session.

There's actually a couple expansions of these generic adventuring rules in later products, but they never went quite full-hog with it like the Dungeonomicon or Stormwrack books.

FrankT:

The basic unit of thing to explore in D&D has from the beginning been the “dungeon.” Hell, it's in the name. Dungeons are mazes filled with monsters, traps, and treasure. This is good for people who are mapping the dungeon with graph paper and allows for the characters to be confronted with structured challenges and incremental rewards. It's sort of ideal for a basic “beat successive challenges, get successive rewards” scenario. I mean, dungeon conquest isn't ever going to be Shakespeare, but it gets the job done.

The rationale in world for such structures has generally been more elusive. The best ideas that D&D has come up with have usually revolved around “this wizard be crazy, yo!” Earthdawn does its level best to explain the dungeons from an in-world standpoint. And I'd say they are most of the way there. They have an in world reason why people would make underground mazes full of all their cultural and literal treasures, and then lock them up for several centuries. Then they have an in world reason why some of those mazes would be wholly or partially overrun by monsters and still have treasures in them. That's some pretty tight design work, to be honest. Where they kind of lose me is the traps. I genuinely don't get why there would be mazes full of monsters and traps guarding the treasures. These mazes were designed as long term human hotels before they got overrun by monsters, and it doesn't make a lot of sense to me that people would have spikes that shoot out of the walls in a place where their children play. Also, I don't understand who is supposed to have been resetting the traps once the monsters got through the downtown obstacle course of death.

To be fair, it's relatively difficult to come up with a reason for there to be traps and monsters in the same dungeon.

AncientH:

The in-game argument is that the road to the kaer's front door (and back door, if there is one) are often lined with magical and physical traps. Because, remember, these aren't just primitive generational fallout shelters, these are physical and astral wards that are supposed to keep the worst monsters in history out and they're known to sometimes fail. So people had fifty-odd years to get as paranoid as they could be, and as a result they sealed themselves up in the most secure deathtraps that precious metals and blood magic could buy.

"Now, if you pull this lever it releases the lava and burns the entire world. But I'm not going to label it."

In practice, traps don't come up that much. They come up in Parlainth, but mostly because Parlainth is infested with a type of minor gremlin-esque horror that seriously spends its days picking at its exposed brain-tissue and building traps. I shit you not.

Likewise, there's a section on curses, which doesn't come into play too often. I don't think there's even a bestow curse spell, although I'd have to check the later books. Mostly it's just MK fiat/dickery about whether you touched the Forbidden Dildo of Throal which had been corrupted by the Horror Heineytroll.

FrankT:

Earthdawn can't go a whole chapter without reminding you that the Horrors are very powerful and don't have to follow your rules (man!). This is roughly equivalent to how Paizo authors can't get an erection without mentioning a Demon Lord who is at least CR 26 and Dicefreaks authors can't even get out of bed without the promise of adding thirty levels to that. I actually think it represents a fundamental douchiness of the authors to obsess this much about enemies that the players aren't supposed to beat. But it was sadly typical at the time, and it's sadly typical today.

In this particular chapter it comes in with the “curses.” The description of curses runs a bit over a page, and basically comes down to: Curses can do whatever the fuck the GM says they do, fucking deal with it. They are divided into “Minor Curses,” “Major Curses,” and “Horror Curses.” The examples of Minor and Major curses aren't very numerous and to a casual reading they overlap totally. A Minor Curse might give you step penalties when calculating what dice you roll, while a Major Curse might penalize your attributes... which would give you step penalties when calculating what dice you roll.

Anyway, the third category of Curses are Horror Curses, and they are different because they are the most powerfullest and specialest of all the curses and it can bypass other rules of the game and generally give you a shitty day. There are actually kind of a lot of ways for an Earthdawn character to end up crippled to the point where it would be better to just start a new character, and curses are one of them.

AncientH:

There's a section on mapping, which in ED if you forked out for the Barsaive boxed set involved a map the size of a poster and Shantaya's Sextant. Which looks like this:

The idea is that directions were given by placing the center of the sextant on a spot, aligning the Greek letters to known landmarks, and than using the provided ruler to mark out how many days of travel to get there. At which point you'd whip out the sextant and map and ruler again, take more reading, and continue from there until you arrive at your destination. It works, and is sortof authentic (the edge of the map was labelled with constellations and quite a bit of thought went into it), but it is unwielding and the average unit of distance is "day's travel/horseback" and "day's travel/airship."

FrankT:

Overland travel is in miles per day. The numbers aren't especially crazy, but the extremely vital information of how many miles it is between points of interest is rather lacking. The map isn't in this chapter at all, but it looks like this:

Yes, the starting city is really called “Bartertown.”

Hopefully, we have that out of our system now.

The Dragon Mountains are the Caucasus. Death's Sea is the Black Sea, Scarlet Sea is the Sea of Azov, and the Aras Sea is the Caspian Sea. The Servos Jungle is centered on Volgograd, Russia. Kratas is Luhansk, Ukraine. Things are, importantly, not to scale. At least, not to the actual sclae of the map Barsaive was traced from. Crimea is shown as being about 80 miles from end to end, when in reality it is about 180 miles from Sevastopol to Kerch. So... I don't know.

More importantly of course, the places you might actually care about are not on this map. You're not going to be making the trek to Jerris, you're going to be going into the Jungle of Servos to break into a Kaer and loot it if you aren't eaten by ghouls first. And that Kaer is not on that map. Or on any map that I'm aware of.

AncientH:

And some areas of the map just never get super-detailed. Blood Wood and the Serpent River both get their own gamebooks, but the north and west is all kinda hazy.

There's a paragraph on Theran slavers in this book, because just to make double sure you know Thera are the bad guys, they totally do send slaving raids into what they nominally consider one of the farflung provinces of their Empire just so they have a study supply of blood slaves and...er...regular slaves.

Yeah, whatever.

FrankT:

D&D used to use gold pieces that were ten to the pound. Yes, really. This offended a lot of gamers, because that is a ridiculous fuck tonne of gold to pay for a backpack. So most game worlds designed in the 1970s reject the gold piece standard altogether and use silver piece standards instead. Also, they usually aren't ten to the fucking pound. Certainly, my father's D&D campaign from that period used silver pennies. Earthdawn is very much cut from that cultural cloth.

Earthdawn Silver Pieces basically look like this.

The antipathy towards the hated Gygaxian gold piece is so strong that gold coins apparently don't even exist. Acknowledging that players are going to need bigger currencies to handle the kind of bullshit adventurers need to buy, there are coins more valuable than silver – but they are all magic bullshit coins. The book goes on for half a fucking page about true air coins and orichalcum coins and whatever the fuck. No one fucking cares.

AncientH:

Really, Elemental Coins are rarer than dragon teeth in Earthdawn books. Surprisingly, gems (another old D&D standby) are also not terribly common outside the very earliest adventures. Orichalcum pieces, as mentioned, are mainly reserved for bullshit and expensive magical rituals like the Ritual of the Ghostmaster, a Talent that lets any Discipline summon an ancestral spirit of the appropriate Discipline to teach them shit so they don't end up in the middle of Bumfuck, Barsaive with lots of LP to spend and no-one of an appropriate Discipline to teach it to them.

Next up: Building Your Legend

Red_Rob · Post by **Red_Rob** » Thu Jun 19, 2014 10:52 pm

Ancient History wrote:The creature list actually wastes a lot of page count on unique super demons that will slam dunk any character you can aspire to be with the rules in this book – but we'll get there when we get there.

Whoo boy, yeah. The one thing I took away from Earthdawn was they really, really wanted you to know just how much bigger than you could ever hope to be some of the bad guys were. It's like if the 3e Monster Manual went up to CR30. Like, some of the Horrors had stats higher than the players could get and then you realised monster stats are listed in steps so they are twice as high again.

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Thu Jun 19, 2014 11:34 pm

Building Your Legend
How do you recognize a hero? Simple. When you've heard stories of his bravery, tales of his adventures, and songs of his courage, that's how you know someone is a hero.

That would be a good start.

FrankT:

This chapter is 10 pages long, but two of them are full page pictures and only one of them is actually about fame. The remaining seven pages are pretty much about character advancement. This is not very much page space, but on the other hand it's kind of a ridiculous amount of space to talk about character advancement considering that all the abilities and numbers being advanced are completely described in other chapters and this chapter doesn't even hint as to how many XP you actually get. This entire chapter is basically the equivalent of an XP cost chart that most games would use a page (or part of a page) for. It gets dragged out for seven pages because advancement is unnecessarily complicated.

AncientH:

The in-game justification for leveling up is tied back into Naming and pattern magic. You do something awesome, people tell the story, and the more they tell it and the more awesome they think you are, the stronger your Name and pattern are and the stronger you become. The bad-asses in Earthdawn are literally the people you think are badasses, to a certain extant.

Now, from a thematic viewpoint, there's two flaws in this: 1) what if you have no witnesses to how awesome you are, or a stutter or something and can't explain that it was you, Gug the Magnificant, that kicked the dragon in the cloaca using only your sock? and 2) does this mean that someone really good at marketing and propaganda could become a memetic-powered demigod in the setting?

Right! So who writes the saga?

It's actually not a small thing in the context of the game. These are actual in setting questions that people struggle with. From a magical theory standpoint, if everyone thought the Horrors were sweetness and light they would be. So while I'd detract points for setting up the situation, I also award points for making it a fluff issue that players can talk about in character while Mister Kaer calmly but firmly just applies the rules as written.

Like I said, in some respects it's a very elegant game.

On the other hand, your developing reputation requires you to track both current Legend Points (LP), which you spend on Karma, threadweaving, and buying up skills, talents, and attributes; and total LP, which determines how much of a memetic badass you are in terms of how many panties (and, let us be fair, manties) drop when you stroll into town.

"My manties will drop for you."

FrankT:

Earthdawn charges you XPs to advance your stats based on how much they have improved since you were a starting character. And remember that you can get permanent and semi-permanent bonuses and penalties to your stats and stuff as well. So you have to record your current base value, your original value, and your current effective base value as well. This is a clusterfuck, and the only thing it does is mean that buying up an attribute to a specific level might cost 800 LPs for one character and 5,500 LPs for another character even though they are buying the same attribute to the same value. The maximum you can raise your stats in this manner is 5 each, and there's a die step breakpoint every 3 points, so min/maxxing for a short campaign looks totally different from min/maxxing for a really long campaign.

This all probably sounds unnecessarily complicated and kind of stupid. And it is. But this was also written in response to old versions of D&D. And you have to remember that D&D used to have advancement systems that were very bad indeed. Earthdawn basically has dual-classing, complete with getting hit points based on your first class and thus having it be better to start as a Warrior and become a Wizard than vice versa. But at least there isn't a separate set of rules for different races and you don't have to spend a period arguing about whether hitting people with a sword constitutes using a Fighter class feature or not.

AncientH:

The way Earthdawn figures the formula is that F(N) = F(N - 1) + F(N - 2), where F(-1) + F(-2) = some number somebody came up with. In other words, it looks like this:

Code: Select all

Increase  LP Cost
     1       100
     2       200
     3       300
     4       500

...and so on, and so forth. It's an Fibonacci sequence instead of a geometric one, and there are reasonable reasons for using that kind of a progression over an arithmetic [ F(N) = F(N-1) + X or F(N) = X] or geometric sequence [ F(N) = N * X], but again it ties into "This is based on D&D, and in D&D advancement slows down as you go up in level."

For example, if you have a game where the costs to advance are static [F(N) = 3] (3...3...3...3...), then for every X points you spend, you attribute goes up by 1; it doesn't matter how high your attribute is, the cost to improve is static and progression is linear. If you want it to get harder, you can increase the steepness of the slope with something like [F(N) = F(N-1) + 3, F(-1) = 0] (3...6...9...12...) If you want increasing attributes to be much harder, you go for the ever-popular geometric series [F(N) = 3N] (3...9...12...15...)

But the Fibonacci sequence has a very inviting low-entry cost with increasing costs that give you a middle ground between "improving is easy!" and "improving is hard!" (F(N) = F(N-1) + F(N-2), F(-1) = 1, F(-2) = 2] (1...2...3...5...)

But at the highest circles (which you will never, ever get to in-game), you're still talking about paying hundreds of thousands of LP to improve a Talent 1 Rank, which you might remember is 1 step die increase. So you definitely have a point of diminishing returns, and that's around about Circle 8 where the main book cuts you off.

FrankT:

Even though you're supposed to be the big damn heroes of the setting, you also need to train with people who are better than you to get better at stuff. If this seems like it serves to make it so that the player characters never feel like they are even the locally relevant badasses... yeah. It kind of does.

But because player characters are on the move and may actually be the baddest dudes in the region (or the only dudes in the region, considering how often you're supposed to be clearing out ruins), they let you use rituals to train with ghosts. Yes. Really.

AncientH:

Seems legit.

Learning from a Ghost Master requires you to take the Ritual of the Ghost Master Talent (yes, you have to pay /more/ XP for the privilege!) On the other hand, they just come out and admit in other books that a Nethermancer could probably bind a Ghost Master if they wanted to, or if they were bored or something.

To increase your Circle (which, I remind, is entirely optional, and costs for talents go up from Circles 4-5, 8-9, and 12-13) you have to have minimum ranks in a minimum number of Talents.

There's also a thing called the Training Pledge involving a pledge coin, which isn't at all like joining a fraternity or military pledge coins.* Instead this is a thing where you pinky-swear on an orichalcum coin which you cannot spend to train any snot-nosed farmer that comes asking you for training, in exchange for which the trainer agrees to train your unqualified ass...because they in turn had pinky-sworn on the pledge coin to do the same thing at your age. If they have never pinky-sworn, they can tell you to fuck off.

*

Military pledge coins (also known by other names) are non-precious metal medallions, typically featuring the local military unit's crest, motto, and various jingoistic trimmings; they usually retail for about US$10. The purpose of the coin is to settle disputes - at any time someone can issue a "challenge," and everyone produces their pledge coin, and whoever doesn't have it has to volunteer for the odious duty or buy the next round or grease the pig or whatever. Many civilians and not a few officers think this is stupid and juvenile and don't participate, but some guys get really gung-ho about the whole thing.

FrankT:

As previously noted, the cost of stuff isn't really based on how good it is, but on how difficult the authors think it would be to learn it in-world. Learning semi-magical abilities is cheaper and better than learning to do the same things non-magically. Getting stronger doesn't cost more at the game mechanically relevant break points, but from how close you are to your personal potential (which is in turn based on your starting strength value). It's not balanced. It's not even supposed to be balanced.

AncientH:

There's also stuff in here about leveling in multiple Disciplines. If the Disciplines are closely related, like Elementalist and Nethermancer or Warrior and Swordmaster, with lots of overlapping talents, this can be pretty damn broken because, as mentioned, some Disciplines get Talents like seven circles before others.

Status is a measure of panty-dropping, based on how many LP you've accumulated. Level 1 kicks in at 10k LP, or about Circle 3-4 depending on how you're spending them; Level 5 kicks in at 2,560,000 LP, or about...uh...Circle 10 or 12, I think, if you're following normal advancement. It's hard to tell.

A 10th-Circle Horror Stalker? I want to have your tainted babies!

Gamemastering Earthdawn
Rules are meant to be broken, or at least twisted into a more pleasing shape. But the Passions protect their rules. Those you had best obey, lad, as courteously as you can.

They mean a different kind of Passions.

FrankT:

The Gamesmastering section is 20 pages long, and parts of it really could have been in other chapters. The most glaring is that the actual rules for getting XP are in this chapter, while the rules for spending it are in the previous chapter. You gain XP in little dribbles over the course of an adventure, and at low levels you gain enough XP to add one or two points to a Talent or half a point to an attribute each session. But the cost of raising your stats and talents goes up a lot faster than the amount of XP you get, so after a flurry of getting several +1s in short order, things stall out. Since this information takes less than a page, it really should have been in the Building Your Legend chapter, but it wasn't.

Anyway, most of this chapter is actually advice for running a game. Indeed, the chapter starts out with a “What is Roleplaying” tirade, which for those keeping track at home is the third such essay in this book. They want to assure you that they won't get up in your junk for making house rules and that it's OK to switch which of the players is the Gamemaster if you're some kind of sexual deviant who is in to that sort of thing.

AncientH:

Not much to say here; FASA was generally good about "Don't be a dick, but don't let a player run rampant and ignore the rules and ruin everybody's game either" kinda thing. It's a bit more old-school than Shadowrun's MK advice, but I think that comes from trying to mimic old-school D&D pronouncements where the Gamemaster is Always Right.

FrankT:

The generic advice for MCs drags on for about four pages of platitudes like “be fair” and “be flexible” that could have been copypasta from any RPG written in the last forty years. The writers of Earthdawn suggest cheating in order to keep PCs and major villains alive. There are... people who agree with that. I don't happen to be one of them. Then we get into some world specific stuff about the opposition. Your choices here are Horrors, the Theran Empire, Horror Corrupted Passions, and Horror Corrupted People.

They don't mention the Ork or Troll raiders, and I don't actually care.

I think this is actually the first place in the book where we get any Passions by name. There's a whole thing about how there are some not-quite-gods called Passions, and some of them are insane and there are people who work for them called Questors, who are a lot like the people on the Avatar's Path from Unknown Armies, but of course this is many years early. This is also four chapters early, because absolutely none of this is in any way explained so far in the book. Passions are explained (to the extent that they are explained) in chapter 19.

AncientH:

Not included in that list are: people that are just assholes, animals and plants (and some rocks) that want to do you bodily harm, the general hostility of trying to survive in the wilderness, and your generic criminals. The nice thing about Horrors is that they're the closest thing to a definitive evil alignment there is in the setting, so they fulfill the same memetic space as Fu Leng and the Shadowlands do in Legend of the Five Rings.

FrankT:

A good deal of ink is spent on “Gamemaster Characters,” which are what Earthdawn calls NPCs. They have a social mini-game. It has more functionality than most such systems (especially for the era), but it has most of the problems that social minigames in D&D style games have. It makes it substantially easier to get people to believe half-truths than outright fabrications, and it has seven categories of NPC attitudes. So... a bit more functionality than 3e D&D's diplomacy system. Of course, 3e D&D's Diplomacy system is a flaming dog turd, so that's not much of a recommendation. In Earthdawn people somehow have their base attitude toward you set before you make a first impression on them, and then your first impression modifies that up or down one category out of seven. I think this is how the Horrors managed to overrun so many towns – since regular towsfolk are presumably neutral before you meet them, and a first impression of you leaping through the window with skin flayer claws out can only drop them one category to “unfriendly,” the people in overrun Kaers never had a chance to draw their weapons.

And yeah, high level people have higher social defenses, which makes them more likely to become hostile when people talk to them. Also, the whole thing violates the basic system in some key ways, where your basic difficulty doesn't change no matter what you are telling someone, but the quality of success you need to succeed does (so “average success” can be a failure on social tests). So... better than most social systems, still laughably terrible in a lot of ways. Also... really not sure why all this stuff is supposed to be Gamemaster information and not written up somewhere where the Troubadour player is supposed to read it.

AncientH:

There are tables and charts here to help Mister Kaer decide what a reasonable target number is based on their PCs' abilities and how hard he wants them to succeed or fail, but by this point I'm losing the will to live...I didn't refer to this stuff back when I ran Earthdawn games as Mister Kaer.

FrankT:

Much of this chapter is just micro-essays about how putting maps on the table is a good way to bring out some of the feels of the environment. But there are things that you actually do need to run the game – like the suggested difficulties table. It's... kind of weird. They tell you what would be an easy or hard number for characters of different skill levels to succeed at. Which is not as helpful as you'd like. The information you want is what kinds of tasks require what kinds of rolls, and what the actual chances of characters of different power levels have of completing those tasks. That information is not actually in this book. Because go fuck yourself.

The Success Table is here. It is full of madness and despair. There is a mathematical progression here, but as previously discussed it is weird as hell. Also, I genuinely have no idea what all the success levels mean. I make an attack on the Ghoul. I need a 7+ to hit, and I need a 15+ to penetrate armor... but there are two more success levels on that roll. “Good” success kicks in at 12 and “Extraordinary” success kicks in at 19. I have no idea what happens when I roll a 12 or 19.

I... don't know.

Also, this seems like really important player information, and I don't know why they waited until page 246 to show what is essence the core mechanic of the game.

AncientH:

Some math major put a lot of thought and care into the success table.

I know they're all thinkin' I'm so White and Nerdy...

FrankT:

The chapter ends with some perception and visibility rules that are different from the perception and visibility rules in the Adventuring section a couple of chapters back. I am not sure if this is supposed to be a gotcha for the players or if this is just an editing mistake.

Either way, visibility is poor.

AncientH:

Like I said, this could have used another edition to tighten it up a little. It's not bad as gamemaster chapters go - it's no Unknown Armies - but it is very characteristic of RPGs at that time, where entire chapters look like grandma's attic of random rules and rules-advice. Part of the reason is, I think, despite what we say I don't think the setting was firmly nailed down at the edges yet, and they had made this new thing but nobody had really come up with a firm concept of what playing it would be like and what directions the setting and adventures would go. As with many first-edition RPGs, it was feeling its way.

Next up: Goods & Services

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Sat Jun 21, 2014 2:20 am

Goods and Services
Of course I can help you, sir. Step right up and take a look at these wondrous treasures.
-Garrn Devia, Dwarf Merchant of Bartertown

Frank Note: This book came out 8 years after Beyond Thunderdome, so it is inconceivable that they didn't know what they were doing when they made a place called “Bartertown” that was run by Dwarves.

Mogun, Orc fashion model, displays the fall collection

FrankT:

This chapter begins, as such chapters do, by explaining that you get to buy stuff at character generation with generic silver pieces directly from the price list, but that in-game purchases have to be from an NPC merchant that actually has what you are looking for. Note that this is being told to us on page 248 of the book (which is actually the 272nd page when you consider the unnumbered color illustration pages), which is a bit over 200 pages after we were directed in chargen to buy our equipment. This book is nowhere near as bad about this particular thing as Shadowrun is, but you can definitely tell that this was a FASA product.

Actually getting things... I don't really understand how this is supposed to work. You go to a Merchant and ask for a thing, and then they check to see if they have it by rolling their Haggle step against a difficulty of their their Haggle step modified by the item's rarity. What? First of all, I can't tell by reading this (or even from the example), whether we're talking about just their literally skill ranks or whether we're talking about their skill + attribute die step. Secondly, this is just really weird. Increasing difficulty and die step by 1 increases the difficulty more than it increases the average. So master merchants are actually less likely to have average availability goods. A die step of 3 succeeds against a difficulty of 3 50% of the time, while a die step of 12 succeeds at a difficulty of 12 45% of the time. But when die steps go up, variance increases. And that makes very rare items much more likely to be on hand for a high tier merchant. A die step of 3 succeeds at a difficulty of 12 just one time in sixty four, while a die step of 12 succeeds at a difficulty of 21 one time in ten.

But the real bottom line of course is that no matter how it's exactly supposed to work and no matter what the skill level of the merchants I am talking to, the chances of turning up a rare item I want are pretty low. Which means that I'm going to have to talk to a lot of merchants before one of them has what I'm looking for. This seems like a place where the game would provide some sort of bazaar montage rules... but it does not. You'll also note that shopping at low levels is not that bad: maybe you have to go see another merchant because the guy you are talking to doesn't have the bow and trail rations you need, but fifty fifty the guy in the next stall does. But for high circle characters, shopping is a nightmare – you talk to NPCs one at a time and they each have a ninety percent chance of telling you that your princess is in another castle.

AncientH:

I think Frank misread the basic availability rules. Mister Kaer decides on the item's Availability Rating (Everyday, Average, Unusual, Rare, Very Rare) and Difficulty Number (Merchant's Haggle step + Availability Rating modifier), to see if they merchant has it, they make a Haggle Test against the DR. I assume that the DR-scales-with-Haggle is to prevent high-Haggle merchants from having, well, everything on hand.

But the important take-away from this is that this is the sort of shit you used to have to deal with all the time in Old School RPGs. Just buying shit was an adventure in and of itself unless Mister Kaer got bored or frustrated enough to just let you buy shit off the charts without checking if West Bumfuck, Fantasyland #3 actually carried Pearl Dragon Scale Mail Bikinis (Half-Orc sized); even Shadowrun has equivalent number systems to make it harder for PCs to just spend money on buying certain shit. While it's kind of hard to understand today when you probably could buy an adamantine short sword +4 off of Amazon and get free two-day delivery with Prime, in the relatively recent past buying basic shit could sometimes be a real hassle.

Buy it now?

If you were doing a computer game where the merchants randomly rolled to see what they had in stock, nobody would give a shit; it would be just one more minigame to see what would crop up at any given visit. In a pen-and-paper game, though, this is the sort of shit where I normally think Mister Kaer needs to man-or-woman up and just make a fiat decision about whether or not the fucking item is available instead of rolling many dice behind a screen.

Also, prices.

D&D fantasy economies are almost uniformly bullshit. We care. We care so hard. Earthdawn put maybe less thought into this than others: it's assumed that 90% of the people in Barsaive that player characters are going to interact with use Throalic currency, because Throal is the major economic power in the region, and Throalic currency is a copper-silver-gold D&D standard using fantasy metric 100:10:1 ratios, with copper and silver as common and some arbitrary bullshit elemental coins and gems for large purchases. It's straightforward, and discussions about old coins from dead kingdoms looted from ruins or the wreckage of foreign caravans is mentioned only out of knee-jerk response to decades of reading Dragon magazine articles about treasure.

This reminds me of a scene from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court where Mark Twain accurately shows that not every village merchant can break a gold piece and provide change, and that trying to do so will make you look like a prat and maybe get you a hammer to the skull for your troubles.

FrankT:

You might have thought that weapon size limits would be under the combat rules, but they are not. They come right out and tell you that there are size limits of what size of a weapon you are allowed to use in one hand or two hands. Reading earlier in the book, you might have thought that weapons were sized relatively – that a short sword for a Dwarf and a short sword for a Troll would be different pieces of metal. And that might have made sense, since the damage output is weapon step plus strength step. But as they explain on page 251, this is not how they are doing it. Bigger races have higher strength bonuses and they use bigger weapons that have more base damage. You might think that this “double counting” would make the big races over powered, and you'd be totally wrong – because damage and taking damage are split into Strength and Toughness, while
Dexterity counts for both attacking and defense. So Dexterity is inherently double counted even more, and it's totally the Elves and windlings that dominate melee. But the bottom line is that you aren't allowed to use oversized weapons. Full fucking stop.

Sadly, none of this is allowed in Earthdawn.

There are 6 weapon sizes, though I cannot understand why. Size 1 weapons are the largest weapons that a Windling can use one handed, Size 2 weapons are the largest weapons that a Windling can use two-handed, Size 3 weapons are the largest weapons that Elves and Humans and shit can use one-handed, size 4 weapons are the largest weapons that Trolls and Obsidimen can use one handed, and Size 6 weapons are the largest weapons non-Windlings can use two handed. There are Size 5 weapons, but I cannot for the life of me figure out why that would be. You'd think it might come up in parrying lengths or some kind of optional combat rules, but weapon size isn't mentioned in the combat chapter at all.

There straight up was a weapon chart on page 193 in the combat section, but the “real” weapon chart (the one that includes cost, weapon size, and damage) is on page 263. Also includes weapons that weren't on the chart in the combat section because reasons.

The long and the short of it is that a Windling can't use a trident but can use a sling for some reason. Windlings are stuck using short swords two handed (4 damage) or a knife one-handed (2 damage), compared to the 5 damage broadsword that an elf would use one-handed, or the 8 damage pole axe that full size people will use two-handed. Also, Windlings can't use shields for some reason. This probably sounds like a lot of damage and/or defense lost – and it kind of is – but Windlings still own in melee and there is no point in crying for them. In ranged combat, it's even less of a penalty – the Windling Bow has a shorter range but only 1 less damage than the normal human bow. So considering that you get to be a flying archer, the Windling Archer is one of the better combatants.

AncientH:

This is like D&D3.whatever's weapon size rules, but a couple decades early.

Weapons themselves hit most of the generic fantasy highpoints, while not going into the finer details of polearms. Also, for reasons not completely clear, the Trident is also labeled as the Trispear.

Also, total aside rant at this point: what the fuck is up with the trident as a melee weapon? I get that Aquaman and Namor have them because they're both harkening back to statues of Poseidon, and I know the Roman gladiator retarius famously used them with a net because lol-you're-going-to-get-stabbed, but as fishing spears go they're not exactly common once you get down to it, and they were seldom if ever used militarily, so I just don't see the appeal.

Also, yes this is an unknown number of thousands of years ago, but Earthdawn has crossbows. Yes, it's silly, no I don't care. There's an Elven warbow too, just to make the pointy-eared bastards more special (on the other hand, trolls get Troll Swords and Troll Slings, so it evens out a bit). Special mention should go to the Hawk Hatchet. I can't find a picture of it, but it's the stupidest throwing weapon since the Glaive. It looks like a double-ended tomahawk had dirty sex with a yin-yang symbol.

I love this game.

Armor starts out with no-bullshit stuff like Padded Cloth, Leather, and Chainmail, and then it goes insane. Fewnweave is a living armor made out of plants that you have to water every day. Blood pebbles are a type of blood charm where rocks are literally woven into your skin. Obsidiman Skin armor is the actual hide of a dead obsidiman, which is a bit like showing up to a fight wearing the cover of the Necronomicon and liable to elicit about as good a reaction from the rock-men if they catch you wearing it.

Doom is intrigued!

And there's normal armor made out of living crystal like crystal ring and crystal plate, and Living Crystal Armor which is again just blood magic that you straight up implant into your skin.

Plus, you're all set for the rave.

FrankT:

The special rules for special weapon effects are here. And not in the list of special combat maneuvers list from earlier in the book. The descriptions of weapons tell you what special attacks you can make with them, but not how much damage they do – so there is a lot of page flipping. It turns out that bolas are extremely good at Tekken juggling people. They do damage and also make the target spend at least one action disentangling themselves and cost one action to draw and throw. So if you keep hitting, you keep winning. Which is one of the reasons that people fight like they were characters in He-Man, and also one of the reasons why Dexterity is the “I Win” stat for combat.

Entanglement is good in this game.

AncientH:

I think I mentioned this before, but minor magical items are just worked into the setting. These are non-thread items and the game doesn't give you any particular bullshit about nobody using magic or lack of magitech in the setting: everybody uses fucking magic. So a dwarf in a pimp lizard-scale cloak that gives a Mystic Armor bonus is just considered fashionably well-dressed.

Gaze upon my finery and know I am slightly more resistant to magical damage!

Most of these things aren't anything the PCs can actually make on their own, and I'm kind of cool with that, actually. It's not like many people today are going to balk at buying an iPod and go build their own. Also unlike D&D, they decided to keep the long list of shit-you-can-buy somewhat reasonable.

FrankT:

You can buy various services and clothing and domesticated animals and stuff – it's all pretty much as mysterious and random about what it includes (and what it leaves out) as any price list in any fantasy RPG. There are also some straight up magic items – Blood Charms and such. But the real magic items are in the next chapter, which is called “Magical Treasure.”

AncientH:

Magical items basically consist of potions (of the healing variety, including phoenix down last-chance salve), light quartz (glowing rocks! child safe!), and blood charms.

I'm upset I can't find a single decent fucking picture of a blood charm. Stupid internet, you have failed me for the last time!

Anyway, these guys are straight forward: it's a magical knick-knack sewn into your flesh, like an earring or nipple-ring or subdermal implant, and your blood goes through it and powers it.

Sanity check!

0/1d2

Some of them let you cheat death, or ward off a blow, or give a desperate boost to a spell; those are mainly one-shots. More permanent versions replace one of your eyes with a hollow magical crystal full of a ravenous glow-worm or something that gives you windling-like Astral Sensitive Sight or improves your targeting abilities with ranged weapons.

I don't know what the word is for pre-steampunk. Bronzepunk, I guess? This needs to be more bronzepunk.

And that's pretty much the chapter, except for the tables. Remember you only start out with 120 sp, so most of this shit you can't even afford. No worries!

Magical Treasure
Keep that gleam in your eye, boy. Treasure such as I have seen gleams even more. See what I have seen, and you too will risk death to hold it, to call it yours.

This is the Mask of Oltion, one of the legendary treasures of Earthdawn.

FrankT:

The Goods and Services chapter is 20 pages, and the Magical Treasures chapter is 16. So really, it's like there was a single 36 page chapter on swag. Considering how low tech everything is supposed to be (not that they don't have crossbows in 4,000 BCE, but whatever), that probably seems excessive. I'm of two minds about it. On the one hand, it's kind of more wordcount than I want to spend on the process of growing crystals on shields or the materials that darts are made out of – but on the other hand I don't think it really does magical items justice. I don't think anyone would accuse Dungeons & Dragons of being efficient with its word use, but the 3.5 DMG spends 88 pages on magic items alone. Certainly, I think you could cover all that functionality in a lot less pages by spending a bit more time on the magic item theory and a lot less time on magic item examples, but I don't really think Earthdawn succeeds at that.

What we mostly get is a quite well thought out explanation of why and how magic items work, but relatively little rumination on what they actually do. So it's established in-world that magic items grow in power by you having them longer and learning more about them and investing XP into them. That's not just a game mechanic to establish that the magic items you get have powers kick in over time so that the initial acquisition isn't a game upending event and also that an item you've had for a while will be good enough that you won't throw it out for a new item – that's really how it fucking works in the setting. And when you do great deeds involving a magic item, it can gain new higher level powers to unlock. That's not just a workaround so that items which were balanced for your 4th circle ass can keep up when you're a 7th circle master of badassery – it's again a totally in-character thing that really happens in the game world.

But while great pains have been taken so that magic items can do level appropriate things, I'm not sure what the authors consider “level appropriate” to be. The high level design work is done, but the mathhammering hasn't been. I really have no idea what circle the Swordmaster is supposed to be swinging around a firesword or whatever. In fact, while there is an example weapon kind of like a flaming sword (a lightning mace), and I can tell that it would take 10,700 XP to level such a device all the way to rank 8, there isn't a direct answer available for what a flaming sword might cost or how it might be similar or different to a lightning mace. It really is just “here's a couple of magic weapons that do wildly different things, design your own.”

AncientH:

Again, I'm rather at the point of thinking that the first edition of the game was still striving to figure out what the fuck it was - like Shadowrun 1st edition, or most first-edition RPGs you could name - and this was part of that. They had the system, and the way to show you what it could do was to give bunches of example items. Now, some of these are shit, and a lot of them don't look much like the stuff in later products, but I'm generally in favor of examples so I'm pretty happy.

Also, remember these? Yeah. Back before the internet, Dungeons & Dragons released entire boxes and sets of cards chronicling the characters, monsters, locations, and magic items in their games. This wasn't even anything like Magic: the Gathering, these were like baseball cards. They even released entire boxes of cards with the details of spells printed on them, so you could quickly flip through your mini-card catalogue during the game. It was brilliant, and doomed. Anyway, Earthdawn did this in the beginning too - this very book has a couple sheets of uncut cards for the magic items in this chapter, with the backs blank so you can fill it out as you the player character figure out what it can do.

It was a different era.

FrankT:

Back in the day, D&D didn't have wealth by level guidelines, it had giant lottery charts that had an implied magic item power by level – higher level characters would get more lottery picks and would thus in general have more things that were amazing. This actually offended a lot of people, who wanted magic items to be individually “special.” Obviously, a +1 lucerne hammer was never going to be “special” if the game revolved around finding statistically significant numbers of them that the chances of it being a +2 lucerne hammer instead was supposed to eventually ensure that you got a better version.

The fact that this +1 lucerne hammer wasn't worth telling stories about was offensive to many gamers in the 1970s.

So a lot of people reacted to their distaste of D&D's mounds of magic gear and came up with systems that greatly restricted the number of magic items that were given out. This did succeed at the task of making each magic item sought after, but it also royally screwed Fighters every which way. After all, if you didn't get enough magical lucerne hammers that you were statistically likely to get one that was “big enough” for a high level character... you were very likely to get to high level with a lucerne hammer that wasn't big enough. And then you faced a golem or some fucking thing that required a +3 weapon to hurt, you didn't have one, and you cried little Fighter tears.

Non-casters spend a lot of time crying in most low-magic fantasy games.

Earthdawn is an attempt to thread the needle: to make magic items rare enough that they are individually special, without making the characters who are dependent upon them suck ass by denying them access to high level magic items. The result they came up with was to make it so that pretty much any magic item could, over the course of a campaign, level up to the point of being very powerful. Of course... a bit of guidance as to what high level magic items were supposed to do exactly would have been nice.

AncientH:

Later books actually expanded this a lot, introducing some more-or-less "generic" thread items that could replicate, say, a magic sword going from +1 to +5 rather easily as well as some more flavorful (and powerful/interesting) unique items tied to specific characters and places. The ones in this book are...more idiosyncratic, in their powers and effects, and more generic in that the backstories for the individual pieces tend to be somewhat lacking. The Counterspell Staff, for example, is designed to make you a bad-ass at dispelling spells and whatnot. It does that, but it doesn't really tell you who made it or why.

There's actually a lot of good ideas in these example items, but it's one of those things where making a good magic item is both an art and a science: what's an appropriate starting thread cost? How many ranks should it have? When do I require a key knowledge, and what should it be? This blood magic ritual seems cool, but how does that work if I'm making the item as I go along? Things like that.

Really, what the system says you can do - what the players should probably want - is to sort of build their own magic items and then grow into them as they level up. But if you're looking for a hard system to crunch the numbers on, it's not quite there. A lot of it is left up to Mister Kaer fiat.

"You have Named the sword Kel's Battleblade, and in your threadsight the pattern takes hold. You weave a thread to it, attaching it to your own pattern, and you can see and feel the energy from your pattern into the blade's and back again, strengthening both. However, you mainly use the thing to kill rabbits, and now the blood of rabbits has steeped into the metal, giving it a deep thirst for the blood of all rabbit-kind. Your first thread rank gives you +2 damage against rabbits."

"...yeah but Bob, what if I don't want that?"

"Then Kel should have taken the fucking dragonslayer quest instead of trying to grind LP by slaughtering bunnies wholesale, Todd."

Earthdawn does have dangerous carnivorous rabbits, so this scenario is not improbable.

FrankT:

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[/img]

These are 3x5 cards covered with descriptions of Earthdawn magic items. Back in the 1970s, that was the standard way magic items were used. A character would be basically a stack of 3x5 cards, where each magic item would get its own card and if you transferred your character between campaigns (or convention games), your new DM would look at your stack and tell you which items you could use and which you could not. Earthdawn is definitely locked in that mindset. To the point where the basic book literally comes with cards to cut out that have pictures of magic items on one side and space to fill in the known sequential powers on the other.

There was a time when TSR thought this was a good idea too.

AncientH:

Individual magic items vary from underwhelming to "neat, but boy that seems expensive." This is usually because you've got mostly straight bonus that increase every thread rank, with the occasional special ability. That's not always the case - Spike Bombs start out as blood-magic fueled regenerating explosives and just do more damage as you go up in rank - but it's typical. Generally, the cooler unique abilities are reserved for the Unique Treasures in the back of the book.

One thing I would like to highlight is that these items have two ratings: "Maximum Threads" and "Spell Defense." SD is the same as for people, meaning it's what you need to roll against to weave a thread to the item - so, higher the SD, more difficult to weave. Maximum threads is what it says on the tin, but what it means is that more than one character can have a thread woven to a magic item - you can't just pick up the evil overlord's magic axe when they drop it and gain access to it's power, you have to weave a thread to it first (and, of course, if you're strong enough you can unweave his thread to it. Ha-ha, dickwad!) But in a game where there's few magic items and more than one PC that wants to benefit from them, it also means that different characters can each weave threads to a single item, and both can benefit from wielding it.

It's the pre-WoW equivalent of a couple saying they're going to level up together, and then he comes back one day and find she's got an Epic Mount. Also, the in-table "My turn!" fights could be epic.

FrankT:

One of the places I think these magical items really fall down is in how you unlock the next rank. Each one requires you to do something. Sometimes it's as simple as “research the name of the dude who used this in battle last,” which is pretty much code for “spend some downtime and maybe some money to unlock the next level.” But sometimes it's a lot more involved, requiring you to go specific places or fight specific monsters or something. This is basically bad, because it requires the other player characters to agree to go have specific adventures before you get your next helmet upgrade. Sometimes players in fantasy games really do have nothing better to do than run Molten Core to upgrade the equipment of one party member and then go somewhere else to upgrade the equipment of another character – but sometimes there are actually plot relevant things to fucking do, and equipment upgrade sidequests necessarily take the backseat to those things.

In short, a lot of the sample Earthdawn items give you a tangible reward for fucking around with nothing on your plate as adventurers. And that is frankly bullshit.

The hands represent perverse incentives to do trivial sidequests rather than plot relevant adventures.

AncientH:

On what Frank said: there's a lot of talents that are specifically about figuring out what Key Knowledge or Deed a PC needs to know/perform to weave the next thread rank; it's part of the reason why Troubadours and Weaponsmiths are a thing - besides trying to justify Bardic Knowledge, I guess.

"Legend has it that Arthur drew the sword from the stone. Perhaps you must put it back."

Other than that, there's straight-up Call of Cthulhu-style researching, where you read up on the legends of the guy who Named the thread item and what he did with it and all that.

The unique items are a little better than the "generic" thread items, or at least their powers are more interesting than just straight bonuses to damage/armor/etc. There aren't a lot of stand-outs here, except maybe Purifier - a rusty sword that at rank 6 lets you use blood magic to one-shot a Horror. No, seriously:

For a cost of 4 points of permanent damage, the wielder can use blood magic to use Purifier to slay a Horror with one blow. When the wielder invokes this power, he takes the 4 points of Damage and then blade becomes searing hot. The Damage against Horrors and Horror constructs when using this effect is the character's Strength step + 35 steps. A successful attack against a Horror automatically inflicts 10 Wounds to the Horror.

So...yeah. +35 steps. That's...I don't want to say inconceivable, but in a game where rolling a couple dice at Circle 1 is the norm, that's like a bring-your-own-bucket to the table. The basic step table maxes out at step 40 and even that's 2d20 + d10 + d8 + 2d6...six dice. And that's if your Strength is only step five. Sure, permanent damage sucks, but how often do you get to one-shot a Wormskull?

FrankT:

The Mask of Oltion is the most trollish item that ever trolled. I can't even describe how bullshit this is, I'm just going to have to quote it in full:

Earthdawn wrote:Oltion was a wizard known for his intricate devices and peculiar sense of humor. He created dozens of items, most of them utilitarian, most not meant for use in combat. The character must always think of the mask as the “Mask of Oltion,” but never refer to it as the “Mask of Oltion.” In game terms, the player must always use the exact phrase when telling the gamemaster that his characteris using the Mask of Oltion. If he fails to say “Mask of Oltion,” the item will not work. On the other hand, if the player character ever refers to the mask in conversation or explanation as the Mask of Oltion, the mask freezes its magic for a period of 1D4 hours. The wearer must know that the mask is Named the Mask of Oltion.

Considering how few magic items are in this book, including joke items to troll players with is totally not OK. There are only 18 magic items (two sheets of 9 cut-out cards), this is not OK.

AncientH:

Some of these magic items are thematic, some are just for lolz. It's not the best introduction to thread magic items, to be honest. If I were doing a new edition, I'd pick items from later books where the guys had gotten their acts together and could describe spell matrix items (what it says on the tin: like a Spell Matrix talent, but tied to a physical object. Before magicians had Spell Matrix talents, they had elaborately embroidered robes that contained their Spell Matrixes. It was Epic Needlepoint Era.)

Like so.

You can see what they were trying to do here. You can see it so hard. You can also see why they failed to really hit the high notes: fear of failure. They didn't want to lock players and gamemasters into a lock-step system of balancing advantages and disadvantages, they wanted them to work together to come up with their own thing that was right for their game, to build their own legends. I'm sympathetic, but as I said, later books did it a bit better.

Next up: Creatures

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Jun 21, 2014 10:45 am

hogarth wrote:
3rd edition D&D appears to have been written with exactly this headache in mind, what with the existence of “Exclusive” and “Trained Only” skills that are labeled as such both on the master chart and in the headings for the writeups themselves. The people who said 3rd edition D&D was inspired by Earthdawn are not wrong. The hand of someone who was annoyed at the Earthdawn book layout is obvious throughout 3rd edition D&D's player's handbook.
Of course, sensible games like Champions had been doing the same for years. For instance, my 1989 copy of 4E Champions has a suggested list of Everyman skills, as they call them.

I'm sorry, I really should have called you on your outrageous bullshit when you said it. The fact that the big blue book of Champions had a list of Everyman skills at the beginning of the skills chapter is in no way equivalent to putting a tag on skill descriptions indicating whether you need to buy them in order to make attempts in game. It is in fact equivalent to having the big list of skills that can be defaulted on at the beginning of the chapter. You know, exactly the thing I was complaining about because it required unnecessary page flipping.

AncientHistory wrote:I think Frank misread the basic availability rules.

That's totally possible. They are incredibly incoherent. For the record, here they are:

Earthdawn wrote:The Difficulty Number for an item of Average availability is equal to the step number of the merchant’s Haggle Skill. A different Availability Rating can either raise or lower the Difficulty Number. Consult the table below to add the appropriate modifier to the Haggle step number to determine the Difficulty Number.

To determine whether a merchant has an item on hand, the gamemaster makes a Haggle Test using the Difficulty Number determined by the item’s availability. A successful test result means the merchant has the item on hand and will sell it to the character.

Everyday –2
Average +0
Unusual +2
Rare +5
Very Rare +9

Farliv is preparing for an adventure and wants to purchase a Booster Potion. He visits Trelara, a local merchant, and asks for the potion, which the gamemaster has decided is an Unusual item. Because the potion is Unusual, he adds a +2 modifier to Trelara’s Haggle Step Number of 6, yielding a Difficulty Number of 8 for the test. If the gamemaster rolls a result of 8 or higher, the merchant has the potion and will sell it to Farliv.

It's certainly possible that I'm reading it wrong. But it looks to me that the Merchant rolls their Haggle Skill against their own Haggle Skill. I don't even know why this happens.

-Username17

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Sat Jun 21, 2014 12:42 pm

No, I totally agree with you on that bit, I meant only that the text clearly states that the Difficulty Number is based on the merchant's Haggle Skill step, which you seemed confused on.

Orca · Post by **Orca** » Sat Jun 21, 2014 1:01 pm

If you're trying to find a rare item and the merchant has step 5 haggle, they need to roll an 8 on their d8 and then roll 2+, about 11%. If the merchant has step 11 haggle they need to roll 16+ on 2d10 (with 10's exploding), about 22%? I think this implies good merchants are more likely to have rare items. I wouldn't swear to it though.

Orca · Post by **Orca** » Sat Jun 21, 2014 1:11 pm

To be clear, I'm sure in my example, but there could be any number of cases where better merchants are not more likely to have whatever you're after in stock. Analysing all the possibilities is much more than I could do in my head.

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Sat Jun 21, 2014 2:01 pm

It's hard to visualize percentages with the step system because every step moves the upper end of the probability space a smidgen to the right, but also changes the distribution. So for example at Step 8 you're rolling 2d6 and at step 9 you're rolling 1d6 + 1d8 - so in both cases you have a minimum of 2, but step 9 has a higher maximum (not counting explosions here) - explosions aside, you're never going to roll a 13 or 14 on a 2d6. However, explosions are a thing, and you're more likely to explode on smaller dice than bigger dice. So on 2d6 your chance of exploding is 11/36, or about 30% chance of at least one die exploding. On 1d6 + 1d8, your chance of exploding is 13/48, or about 28%. And explosions fuck royally with your RNG.

An Average item has a Difficulty Number equal to the merchant's Haggle step, so for Step 8 that would be 8. Rolling an 8+ on a 2d6 is 15/36, or ~41.6%; and for Step 9 that would be 9, or 21/48, or 43.75%...but that's not taking into account explosions, so the actual percentage chance is a bit higher than that. You can see how the whole difficulty-number-tracks with-skill is counterintuitive and kind of kludgy, but theoretically workable (if a pain in the ass).

What this amounts to, of course, was trying to address skill challenges before that was a thing. Static target numbers and ever-escalating skill steps would just result in you succeeding more and more often with less and less chance of failure. Instead you've got a TN that shifts with the RNG, so that while you get better the progress is more incremental (and while I don't want to do the math, I'm pretty sure it's a limited function so that at step infinity an Average item is on hand 50% of the time). Even if you went to, say a Merchant Supreme with the maximum of 10 skill ranks and an eye-popping set of attributes that gave him a Step 17 (d20 + d10), his chances of having an average item at hand is just 47.5%.