Earthdawn

[Dean]

I became interested in actually running an Earthdawn game for some reason and I had some questions for people who know it better than I do. I have three questions based on reading the Earthdawn system.

1) The first thing that occurs to me is the Step system of using all kinds of different dice is insane and I don't want to use it and I'm wondering if using an alternate method would upset things too much. My first instinct is to say that you just use 3d6 all the time and you get +1 or -1 to the roll for every Step you have above or below 10. So if you would normally have a Swords score at Step 18 you would roll 3d6 and add 8. This keeps the average the same but makes the resolution system not require 14 different dice per player. It's also close enough to D&D's system of bonuses and negatives from scores above or below 10 that my players would grok it immediately.

2) Everything I read tells me mages taking multiple rounds to weave threads into spells sucks a big one and literally everyone hates it. Would it upset things too much to say that casting isn't a separate action allowing you to cast Thread 1 spells every round. I figure I'll give Thread 0 spells a large initiative boost making them the spells of choice in opening combat rounds so they still play some part in the game but other than that would be functionally identical to thread 1 spells.

3) I plan on removing "Armor-defeating hits" because the game seems to hyper reward dexterity and I want to make being heavily armored a playable archetype.

Are any of those unworkable or insane? Are there any other rule holes or fucked up subsystems I should look out for? Any advice for someone running an Earthdawn game for the first time?

[Foxwarrior]

The step system looks insane but the explosions make it more mathematically smooth on average and more silly in practice. I don't think you'll get a proper earthdawn experience without the odd dice.

When I played it the biggest flaw seemed to be that starting characters are wimpy and can't do anything cool, I dunno if you'll enjoy starting with characters that weak.

[Iduno]

The weird dice are part of the being able to pull off crazy stuff. As long as you keep rolling maximum on a die, you keep rolling bonus dice. Also, there are a few you'll be rolling a lot of times (step 8 is where your chances to critically fail drop the most, so you'll see a lot of step 8 early, for example), so you won't need to look them up every time unless you suffer severe head trauma.

3) I plan on removing "Armor-defeating hits" because the game seems to hyper reward dexterity and I want to make being heavily armored a playable archetype.

That was a major change in 4th edition, along with redefining a critical success from half of a standard deviation (or whatever it was, exactly) to 5 more than the target number. Each 5 more than the target number gives an effect: bonus damage for physical attacks, usually more duration for spells (which are more buffs/debuffs than just damage), and specific meanings for other skills.

Also, agreed with Foxwarrior: the game needs a way to create non-starting characters.

[Dean]

I can easily make the d6's explode if that's important for some reason to the experience. I doubt having a bunch of dice that might potentially explode sometimes is really important to the basic math of the game.

I think it's a good idea to start the game at 4th Circle. That's when the classes seem to get their basic schtick together. Either that or have an introductory session at level one when they're apprentices or something and then jump to 4th circle a few years later when they're competent adult adventurers.

I planned on using 3rd edition but I'm open to change. Are there any books or expansions that I should definitely check out? I've heard the magic sourcebook is particularly good.

[DrPraetor]

Earthdawn dice are a math failure - use D6+X with explosions instead.
1D6 + 1 + (1D6 on a 6 the first die) gets 12+ 1/18th of the time
1D8 + (1D8 on an 8 the first die) gets 12+ 5/64ths of the time
It'll be a long time before you notice the difference.

Out of morbid curiosity - in an Earthdawn campaign, what do the characters do? I've seen a fair bit of Earthdawn lore - it's the holocene climate optimum but there's magic, okay. Stupid immortal elf crap. But, in strong contrast to Shadowrun (where you go on Shadowruns), Earthdawn seems to lack a central thesis for actual play.

Are you on a quest for fire? Are you foiling the plots of the ancientnewly-minted evils?

Like, the PCs are underpowered, but compared to... what objective?

If you have a straight answer for that, then by all means swap to more sensible dice and play Earthdawn. Can you drop the settings, quests and antagonists from Fallout II into Eastern Europe and see if anyone notices?

[phlapjackage]

Out of morbid curiosity - in an Earthdawn campaign, what do the characters do?

Are you asking what characters will be doing in THIS particular campaign, or what characters in Earthdawn do in general? The former makes sense to ask, the latter seems like a really strange question to ask in a RPG forum.

[Axebird]

Out of morbid curiosity - in an Earthdawn campaign, what do the characters do? I've seen a fair bit of Earthdawn lore - it's the holocene climate optimum but there's magic, okay. Stupid immortal elf crap. But, in strong contrast to Shadowrun (where you go on Shadowruns), Earthdawn seems to lack a central thesis for actual play.

Are you on a quest for fire? Are you foiling the plots of the ancientnewly-minted evils?

Like, the PCs are underpowered, but compared to... what objective?

The horror apocalypse ended recently, and people survived it by hiding in magically sealed underground vaults. Some of those vaults failed. Raid monster-filled dungeons, rediscover lost history and magic, and repel the remaining horrors.

There's other stuff you can do, but that's the basic suggested campaign arc. I'm pretty sure it's even on the back of the book.

[Blade]

The problems I remember from when I played (I think it was 2nd edition) with starting characters:

- Starting characters have a very limited skillset, and aren't even that good with these skills
- Skills are too costly to be able to get some smaller "extra" skills for fun and/or character development.
- Spells are complicated to cast, and many are pretty useless.
- Combat is slow and uninteresting. You have little choices of actions (mostly "I attack") and you need to roll twice: once to hit and once for damage. We've had many fights where we spent turns after turns failing either roll (with the enemies doing the same) except for the Windling who had this skill that allowed him to roll his (very high) agility for both rolls, leading to devastating attacks. Windlings felt a bit overpowered to me.

[Username17]

We did an OSSR of the original Earthdawn Here.

The short of it is that Earthdawn's genesis is as a setting that was made to explain all the weirdnesses of Dungeons & Dragons as it was played in about 1979. Earthdawn has elaborate in-world explanations for why the player characters go on the adventures described in Dungeons & Dragons adventures written during the Carter administration. All of the epicycles and design decisions are to explain why it is that we have weird dungeons full of traps, monsters, and treasures within walking distance of towns where you can buy provisions and also why it is that no one thinks it's weird that sword and sorcery heroes with extremely different styles of abilities would band together to assault these dungeons and become massively more powerful for having done so.

Fucking everything from character classes to level gain to experience points to magic item slots hasin world explanations. But at the end of the day, the story you are actually telling is Against The Giants or something. It's the most backward-looking RPG to be made in the 90s. And that includes RIFTS.

-Username17

[Stahlseele]

Earthdawn.
Think Fallout but in Fantasy instead of 50's SciFi.

[souran]

Wow, first we had a thread on Exalted and now one of Earthdawn. One on Howard's Hybroria and we would have all the "secret histories of the world" this spring.

This is directed more at Frank but to anybody who shares his opinion of "alternate pasts" or "deep history" settings; what is it about this as the setting or conceit of a fantasy story/rpg that makes this so bad?

How is it any worse than say placing the setting on mars or even in another solar system?

Now, I find the idea of secret histories conspiracies in the real world both fascinating and disgusting. Things like the new chronology by Femenko is not proactive but seriously screwed up.

However, for a fantasy backdrop it doesn't seem any worse than any other basis.

[DrPraetor]

The Young Kingdoms (Elric) are also a secret history of our world.

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

Frank is... obviously correct? Secret history of the real world should be low fantasy, which means it has to plausibly produce a low fantasy setting with like France and shit in it. Is this controversial?

If you think Frank doesn't like secret history, well: After Sundown has a secret history which - while a bit vague - explicitly hits these notes.

[souran]

Except, I don't see it as obviously correct.

In reality there is no space within the accepted chronology, both of the human and prehuman era, hell not even in geologic time to fit a rise and fall of human civilization to early renaissance levels.

However, if you are going to suspend your disbelief for magic in the first place what the hell does existing history have to do with it at all? If a secret era of indeterminate length exists, but left no artifacts in the historical record, then it could be literally anything and the fact that the modern world exists has no bearing.

By its very nature the "secret" history era would contradict the known chronology but also be opaque as to its doings and dealings. There are actually no rules the secret era is bound and the corresponding version of the modern era is fundamentally distant in time enough that the specifics of the lost era can't be ascertained.

[Omegonthesane]

You lost me at "if a secret era.... left no artifacts in the historical record". THAT is an instant and total erasure of WSoD. Vampires only get to be secret in WoD because they've been continuously active and continuously covering up - and even then they regularly have to co-opt or kill people who find them.

Suspending our belief to have magic happen requires accepting slightly different premises about reality. Suspending our belief to have a secret past society leave no archeological record requires completely rethinking how humans act. Similar to how Mage: the Ascension secretly requires a profound restructuring of the entire human species to support its premise that most humans don't believe in any magical phenomenon whatsoever.

[souran]

You lost me at "if a secret era.... left no artifacts in the historical record". THAT is an instant and total erasure of WSoD. Vampires only get to be secret in WoD because they've been continuously active and continuously covering up - and even then they regularly have to co-opt or kill people who find them.

Suspending our belief to have magic happen requires accepting slightly different premises about reality. Suspending our belief to have a secret past society leave no archeological record requires completely rethinking how humans act. Similar to how Mage: the Ascension secretly requires a profound restructuring of the entire human species to support its premise that most humans don't believe in any magical phenomenon whatsoever.

Except that the "left no trace" is an essential and explicit part of these settings.

The vampire secret history does not include any forgotten eras unless you include exalted and you are not supposed to be able to find the "engines of creation." Exalted is the mythic past from which some shared conception of human culture emerged. Same with Hyboria and Earthdawn. The left no trace is as central as magic.

Also, the secret history of WOD is different. Vampire, Werewolf, and Mage have a secret history that overlays the existing chronology. Exalted, and Earthdawn and the like claim that there is a historical epoc that exists prior to the known history of the world.

While the "leave no trace" deal is an impossibility in the real world, it is no more something that kills suspension of disbelief than something like FTL. In fact, an argument that you would buy the influence of magic on the past but not that the past included an unknowable era is about like saying "I don't mind the force in star wars but hyperspace is an impossible version of FTL and that makes it something I can't buy into."

[Omegonthesane]

You lost me at "if a secret era.... left no artifacts in the historical record". THAT is an instant and total erasure of WSoD. Vampires only get to be secret in WoD because they've been continuously active and continuously covering up - and even then they regularly have to co-opt or kill people who find them.

Suspending our belief to have magic happen requires accepting slightly different premises about reality. Suspending our belief to have a secret past society leave no archeological record requires completely rethinking how humans act. Similar to how Mage: the Ascension secretly requires a profound restructuring of the entire human species to support its premise that most humans don't believe in any magical phenomenon whatsoever.

Except that the "left no trace" is an essential and explicit part of these settings.

No, it isn't. In fact it's the opposite - some lingering reminders are still active to the present day that cause the forgotten era to suddenly become relevant. Harlequin from Shadowrun was meant to be active in the Earthdawn years.

The vampire secret history does not include any forgotten eras

Literally the whole thing with the City of Enoch is a forgotten era to the point that even many Elders can reasonably doubt it ever happened.

unless you include exalted and you are not supposed to be able to find the "engines of creation." Exalted is the mythic past from which some shared conception of human culture emerged. Same with Hyboria and Earthdawn. The left no trace is as central as magic.

This is also just you being wrong about Hyboria, since the "lost age" aspect of that is just to let Robert E Howard play fast and loose with the time period of adventures that were initially meant to evoke more realistic and recognisable historical time frames. It isn't central to the premise of Conan.

Also, the secret history of WOD is different. Vampire, Werewolf, and Mage have a secret history that overlays the existing chronology. Exalted, and Earthdawn and the like claim that there is a historical epoc that exists prior to the known history of the world.

Earthdawn has it contaminate the present day directly, I refer you again to Harlequin from Shadowrun and the other Immortal Elves who are meant explicitly to remember the Earthdawn years in Shadowrun and must therefore have been continuously active in that period.

Exalted doesn't present itself as a secret past in 2e that I know of, and back when it was a secret past of oWoD it was explicitly meant to have left traces if you knew where and how to look. Like, the Werewolf tribe that became the first Black Spiral Dancers had Wyld tattoos like the Lunars. Or Malfeas and the Neverborn. Or the Pattern Spiders.

While the "leave no trace" deal is an impossibility in the real world, it is no more something that kills suspension of disbelief than something like FTL. In fact, an argument that you would buy the influence of magic on the past but not that the past included an unknowable era is about like saying "I don't mind the force in star wars but hyperspace is an impossible version of FTL and that makes it something I can't buy into."

You don't understand. "Leave no trace" doesn't just require me to alter my assumptions about physics, but also - and crucially - my assumptions about humanity. And the premise "a lost past era that left no trace" does not spell out what change in the human species caused this to be possible.

You haven't even mentioned the benefit all the secret histories provide when writing. If you are creating a secret history, either you want to tell stories in the past which deviate in specific and relevant ways from actual IRL history, or you want to tell stories in the present or the future which are informed by ahistorical events. Otherwise, you're setting a lot of WSoD on fire for nothing.

[Username17]

You haven't even mentioned the benefit all the secret histories provide when writing.

That's the key point of course. A setting element is justified by what it brings to the table. What does Exalted or Earthdawn get for taking place in Earth's past? I would argue that they get less than nothing.

It puts an enormous strain on willing suspension of disbelief, and it means that everything your characters do will ultimately fail and be completely forgotten by history. And that's pretty much it. Low fantasy normally brings all kinds of advantages like the ability to use well-known places and people and events as story elements without having to read hundreds of pages of setting-specific backstory. But with Earthdawn and Exalted, no such advantage exists. The map is unrecognizable and nothing you look up on Wikipedia is actually there.

Exalted and Earthdawn are tied to low fantasy modern/future games as a marketing point. The only reason was to attempt to sell the games to people already familiar with other games that did utilize their low fantasy settings to good effect. The decision to make these high fantasy games into prequels of low fantasy settings is classic example of a company making a marketing decision that negatively impacted a creative work. People in suits made ridiculous decisions based on sales demographics rather than even try to improve the product they were nominally working on. It's exactly the Poochy the Dog scene from The Simpsons.

-Username17

[EightWave]

Suspending our belief to have a secret past society leave no archeological record requires completely rethinking how humans act.

Except there are plenty of past societies that left no archeological record. The archeological record is incredibly sparse. Humans have, conservatively, been around for 100,000 years and the majority of our knowledge for that time amounts to bones and guesses. "The Vandals were a horde of demons" is just as supported by historical record as "The Vandals were a proto-germanic tribe from Northern Europe", the only thing that makes the latter a more reasonable explanation is that demons don't exist.

The part of Earthdawn that doesn't make sense is they're claiming a scourge of demons came and caused mass extinctions across the earth at about the same time Homer was writing the Iliad.

[Omegonthesane]

Suspending our belief to have a secret past society leave no archeological record requires completely rethinking how humans act.

Except there are plenty of past societies that left no archeological record. The archeological record is incredibly sparse. Humans have, conservatively, been around for 100,000 years and the majority of our knowledge for that time amounts to bones and guesses. "The Vandals were a horde of demons" is just as supported by historical record as "The Vandals were a proto-germanic tribe from Northern Europe", the only thing that makes the latter a more reasonable explanation is that demons don't exist.

Even then, the existence of the Vandals was recorded by other cultures that did leave an archeological record. For an entire era to have no cultures that left any such record in an area doesn't just require that not one culture have writing but that not one culture have effective construction techniques or even the use of long-lasting materials.

The part of Earthdawn that doesn't make sense is they're claiming a scourge of demons came and caused mass extinctions across the earth at about the same time Homer was writing the Iliad.

Which wouldn't even be enough to explain the lack of bones and artifacts.

EDIT: turns out a stray "close italics" command "[ / i ] " without spaces resizes text for some reason

[EightWave]

Even then, the existence of the Vandals was recorded by other cultures that did leave an archeological record. For an entire era to have no cultures that left any such record in an area doesn't just require that not one culture have writing but that not one culture have effective construction techniques or even the use of long-lasting materials.

My point was that the Vandals of the era just left some bones, pottery, and jewelry. You don't have to explain where the demons went, you just have to explain why nobody wrote down "And the Vandals are literal demons from another dimension", which is trivially easy because people people of the era didn't write down things that were common knowledge. So the Vandals could have been demons while the actual proto-germanic tribes were just chilling. Our only evidence that those tribes are the Vandals is some Roman writings saying "we have to repair our city because some dudes from the north sacked it" and the proto-germanic tribes are the only people to the north at that time.

So you could easily have a secret history with demons and wizards, where Achilles and Hercules were real dudes with high-level abilities and nobody wrote down "And the high king of Babylon was a ninth circle Aethermancer" because writings at the time were just about grain shipments and army deployments. Dwarves evacuated Pompeii and didn't tell the humans or elves. Rome went from having zero naval power to sending their entire army across the Mediterranean to crush Carthage "because demons" (were the demons in Carthage or Rome? Writer's choice). The First Council of Nicaea included a conspiracy to destroy any evidence of past wizardry. Court astrologers making sure the next Emperor is born under a good sign because that shit actually mattered when magic was in the world. A competent writer with a high school textbook could bang something reasonable out in a week.

The thing about Earthdawn is that it's just very clearly not that and was never intended to be that, but then someone at FASA said "actually it is that" so they could tie it into Shadowrun as a marketing gimmick.

[Orca]

The Vandals didn't build stone fortresses with supplies to last years and space for people to live there for those years. The Therans and various other people of Barsaive did. Plus the Sea of Fire would leave marks physical and cultural for hundreds or thousands of miles around. Other little things like crashed air ships nowhere near any sea or navigable river would be fascinating to find.

I'm just getting started. Earthdawn as written couldn't fit into a secret history at all because it really wasn't intended to.

[DrPraetor]

The Vandals didn't build stone fortresses with supplies to last years and space for people to live there for those years. The Therans and various other people of Barsaive did. Plus the Sea of Fire would leave marks physical and cultural for hundreds or thousands of miles around. Other little things like crashed air ships nowhere near any sea or navigable river would be fascinating to find.

I'm just getting started. Earthdawn as written couldn't fit into a secret history at all because it really wasn't intended to.

Yeah, although I suppose if it's the 80s and you're a kid, you might not know this.

How "easily" you can fit how many demons doing what into your secret history depends on your specifics. It also depends on the savvy of your audience.

Thus, in order to get suspension of disbelief from a modern audience, you need at least a wikipedia-level knowledge of history and anthropology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/40th_century_BC

Thus, you can't have Stouts, Stirrups and Steel in the Neolithic because those would leave traces, mixed in with all of the pottery shards and crap we have from that period.

It's true that many historical societies left fewer traces, but to review, they:
[*] typically didn't have metal
[*] didn't build a series of underground bunkers cross-crossing Eastern Europe.

Changing topics somewhat. Earthdawn would be a much cooler setting if the history and technology level was more historical. For starters, this is the period when stonehenge went up and megaliths have cache. Second, you'd be bear-chested, painted with woad, and fighting with copper clubs. You pretty much dress like the characters from ElfQuest.

From there, you port as many of the Earthdawn conceits as you can:
https://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=56993

without breaking history.

[EightWave]

I'm just getting started. Earthdawn as written couldn't fit into a secret history at all because it really wasn't intended to.

I literally just said that, do you think you're arguing against me? Do you think I said something different?

[Username17]

I'm just getting started. Earthdawn as written couldn't fit into a secret history at all because it really wasn't intended to.

I literally just said that, do you think you're arguing against me? Do you think I said something different?

You seemed to be busily self refuting your own statements as hard and fast as you could.

The Vandals did leave historical and archeological evidence of their presence and of their passing. Obviously the archeological and historical record would be different if the Vandals were an army of demons. Because obviously. Major in-your-face shit like Earthdawn's Sea of Fire or Exalted's armies of bird people would not go unnoticed by historians and evidence for them would be available. Secret history of that kind is bluntly absurd. The entire "and left no trace" thing that souran was banging on about is insulting and stupid and obviously counterfactual.

But that doesn't mean that there isn't room for there to have been fantasy adventure stuff going on in ancient history. Ancient histories have mundane and magical events recorded side by side, and it is entirely a modern convention that historians believe that the mundane events mostly happened and the magical events are at best misunderstandings of natural phenomena. If you instead say that the historical record is broadly correct, then Zeus caused it to rain blood twice during the siege of Troy and Aga of Kish ruled for 625 years as god king.

There's plenty of space for supernatural fantasy adventures that are fully compatible with the historical record. The historical record has some crazy shit in it that modern historians quietly play down as exaggerations from the time period. The complaint against Earthdawn and Exalted is not that there couldn't be an ancient history fantasy setting, it's that both are basically standard D&D-fare that then insults our intelligence by marketing themselves as fantasy historical fiction when obviously that is not what they are.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

Earthdawn and Shadowrun both take a leaf from The Magic Goes Away by Larry Niven in postulating that as the mana level goes down, so does a lot of the physical evidence for the magical stuff that happened...and that as it comes back, so does the rest of it. This doesn't make a lot of sense, but it is why you don't find fossilized dragons before the Awakening but they do start showing up in the fossil record afterwards. It's an excuse used to maintain some degree of plausibility in an otherwise implausible setting.