Earthdawn 4e Announced

[Mercurius]

Wow, great news. I'm there.

EDIT: To add a quick note to the setting overview, I believe Earthdawn was meant as the prehistory of the Shadowrun world, Barsaive corresponding with a region in Eastern Europe and around the Black Sea.

(Or maybe it is the other way around and Earthdawn was post-history?)

 

[Ruin Explorer]

If you just say everyone has powers and its POL it sounds similar and fitting. But the mechanics of the powers gave earthdawn a totally different feel to me.

I played ED a lot back in the early '90s and I strongly disagree. ED had flavourful elements that 4E may struggle to replicate, but they most certainly were not the powers, which were, by and large, fairly flavour-light. 4E's powers will replicate those just fine.

There are elements 4E might have some difficulty with.

First off, everyone in Barsaive who isn't horror-touched has some kind of crafting skill that they use to demonstrate that they're not horror-touched (iirc). 4E has no mechanics for this. Easy enough to either add them, or just assume it as part of background, though.

Secondly, in ED, you don't run around grabbing magic items so much. You weave magic items into your er, magic-ness. So they grow in power with you. 4E has no provisions for this, but it would be easy enough to add.

Thirdly, the horrors are real bastards many of whom have long-term and complex powers. 4E struggles with this, but the disease mechanics could probably be used to handle them.

Otherwise, the confluence between 4E and ED is very significant. The mechanics are obviously different, but not nearly as conflicting as you suggest, it's just a different way of looking at things. The world is a perfect PoL scenario, and the way of life is rather 4E-esque, with the whole "magic is everywhere" thing being more true in ED than any actual D&D setting (even Eberron). Sunrods, just for one example, fit better into ED where magical tools are common, than they do into most D&D campaigns. Rituals are a big part of ED, and finally D&D has them too. I think the fit is extremely good, but studying my post history, I'm sure you'd see that I've compared 4E to ED before a number of times.

EDIT: To add a quick note to the setting overview, I believe Earthdawn was meant as the prehistory of the Shadowrun world, Barsaive corresponding with a region in Eastern Europe and around the Black Sea.

It was meant to have the potential to be interpreted that way, but frankly that was mostly a thing for SR and kind of meaningless to ED. Except for the possibility that the SR world was about to be hit by the horrors, which kind fo sadly, never happened (I remember much speculation about that back on Shadowland.org in the mid-90s).

 

[Lizard]

This is interesting, as FASA was very strongly anti-3e/OGL/D20. A pity, since SR would have converted very easily.

Earthdawn is one of the few major gaming systems to slide under my radar over the years; I'm looking forward to seeing a 4e version of it.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

A pity, since SR would have converted very easily.

In reverso-world maybe, but that's a whole other thread I guess.

 

[Mercurius]

It was meant to have the potential to be interpreted that way, but frankly that was mostly a thing for SR and kind of meaningless to ED. Except for the possibility that the SR world was about to be hit by the horrors, which kind fo sadly, never happened (I remember much speculation about that back on Shadowland.org in the mid-90s).

So you're saying that you thought it likely that Earthdawn was post- not pre-history? That the "time before the horrors" was actually Shadowrun?

 

[cignus_pfaccari]

So you're saying that you thought it likely that Earthdawn was post- not pre-history? That the "time before the horrors" was actually Shadowrun?

That's rather unlikely. An interesting theory, but they were pretty insistent that Earthdawn was the prehistory of Shadowrun.

Mostly, there were hints in some adventures and sourcebooks about how the Ghost Dance had accelerated the magic level to where the Horrors might show up early, with harbingers like wraiths and insect spirits showing up much earlier than they would have otherwise.

On the other hand, Early Horrors Are Lame (tm).

Brad

 

[SteelCoyote]

Wow, great news. I'm there.

EDIT: To add a quick note to the setting overview, I believe Earthdawn was meant as the prehistory of the Shadowrun world, Barsaive corresponding with a region in Eastern Europe and around the Black Sea.

(Or maybe it is the other way around and Earthdawn was post-history?)

Heh, I ran a "Shadow-Dawn" campaign once. I started players in SR (2.0e) and then had SR's signature character Harlequin show up. He (eventually) brought the party to a revived portal in Aztlan in order to transport them back to ED to "fix" some things that were going wrong in the SR timeline.

It was an utter riot when everyone figured out this was no ordinary shadowrun, and began to sense just what was going on. ...though maybe you had to be there to appreciate it.

FWIW, we (my group and/or coworkers at the time) often argued about the ED/SR timeline:
I thought that FASA's official cycle of "Ages" implied that SR was two 'worlds' after ED (ED, then modern/current/magicless world, then the Re-Awakening that was SR).

It seemed that in SR magic wasn't what it was in ED, (perhaps b/c humanity as a whole had lost too much Essence?), but there also wasn't a Scourge or Horrors (though, in another of my SR/ED crossover campaigns, I was slowly bringing SR into another Horror-infested Scourge as all the magic in SR is, essentially, Raw Magic by ED standards).

However, I also felt it could be possible that ED does follow SR: SR's Raw Magic leads to the Scourge, and ED is the result. The Kaers are what's left of the massive SR Corporate Arcologies...I played one ED campaign that way, with the various ruins like Parlainth holding odds bits of SR references that only the SR gamers in my group got--and loved.

Man, now I miss my old ED group...

I played FASA's ED since it's first handouts hit the gaming store I worked at (back in 1991?).

Compared to D&D 2nd Ed, I definitely thought the core system was far more inventive and flowed better both in and out of combat. I liked the "tougher" characters (more HP than D&D--especially at first level) and I felt the back-story and the involvement in an unfolding exploration lent to some really great RPing opportunities within the group.

I liked the Step-Action Dice, Karma, Combat Options, 3 Defenses, Talent/Skill set up, character races, and overall "feel" to the game.

I actually preferred (and still do prefer) ED's combat system with the differentiation of DEX for Attack but STR for damage. And, I liked the variance in dice/Step per player (or per Combat Option-like going Aggressive and adding 3 Steps to Attack).

I liked their movement system (tied to race and Dex) and I liked having a Physical Defense that was for how difficult you were to hit but which was unrelated to what armor you were/weren't wearing at the time, and I liked that armor was there to reduce damage (as it should).

I preferred ED's unlimited casting magic system (spells per day bugged me ever since the boxed sets, and kept me from playing very many mages in D&D )

And I loved the "unlock the UNIQUE magic item" of ED over D&D's Monty Haul/GolfBag style of magic item collection.

Really, my only complaint--and it was the game killer--was that after a few campaigns, you began to feel very, very limited.

The Discipline system just didn't really allow you to make vastly different characters. After a while, every Swordmaster/Archer/Whatever in the group ended up more similar to any other character of that Discipline--whether it was one of your old characters or someone else's at the table. Every example of X-Discipline seemed to be just another clone rather than something unique.

Whereas, in D&D 2nd, we had so many Kit Books that we'd play Single-Class-Only campaigns (ie All Clerics or All Rogues, etc) and never have any doubling. In fact, if you looked at our All-Rogue party, you'd see the widest range of characters that just happened to share a very few baseline stats.

Earthdawn suffered from the inability to create a new/different/unique character experience the second time you wanted to play your favorite class as well as having difficulty differentiating Swordmasters if there were two in the party.

ED also suffered from an utter lack of D&D-style stacks of spells/items/etc., which also helped make each character seem overly similar to all others. That, and it just got kinda boring to be so seemingly limited when D&D had 8 books of spells and magic items, plus 83 Kit Books and 3 jillion monsters in 17 Monster Manuals.

I tried for years to alleviate the Discipline-Clone problem by just churning out as many new Disciplines as I could think of (I have 48 in my House Rules), but you still had the problem of "one-shot-only" Disciplines. Once someone played one, they'd pretty much played them all. The Talent selection was just too restrictive.

In my later campaigns, I simply did away with all but the core ethos of each Discipline, and let players simply pick Circle-appropriate Talents from any Discipline list (the ED PG had rules for what Talent could be obtained when) and that turned out to be something very much like picking Feats in D&D 3.0 and so, finally, you could have widely variant approaches to the same core Class/Discipline.

Still, ED was ahead of its time in many other ways. D&D 3-3.5 began to borrow/incorporate much of what I first saw in ED (even Eberron struck me as very ED-like), and MMOs and D&D 4e seems to have continued the borrowing.

EX:
Talents :: Feats
Recovery Tests :: Healing Surges
Karma Dice :: Action Dice
Combat Options :: Combat Expertise/Casting Defensively (etc.)
3 Defenses :: FOR/REF/WIL
ED Heroes :: Points of Light

..etc...I know I've talked about more than the list above, but those are all that spring to mind at the moment.

Lol, and now (sadly) it seems like 4e is going down the same (wrong) path ED did by making seemingly more-restrictive classes than you could make in 3/3.5--at least that's been my experience playing and running 4e so far.

Base/Core book to Core book I think the 3/3.5 PH had greater ways to differentiate two characters of the same class than in 4e's PH or in FASA's ED.

I kinda skipped the re-hash of ED 2/3, I toyed with House Rules for a Homebrew "Dragon Dawn" ED/D&D 3/3.5 crossover/mixed rule game, but never finalized anything (ED core/combat system, D&D classes, Disciplines as either subtypes/specialists or Prestige Classes).

So, anyway, I'm excited to see that there is going to be a 4th edition, maybe I'll gravitate back to that since I'm (so far) less than thrilled with my D&D 4e experiences...

Heh...and, to be honest, I miss the sense of epic heroism when your Open-Ended dice kept coming up open and you really did look like a Hero!

 

[Jan van Leyden]

There are elements 4E might have some difficulty with.

First off, everyone in Barsaive who isn't horror-touched has some kind of crafting skill that they use to demonstrate that they're not horror-touched (iirc). 4E has no mechanics for this. Easy enough to either add them, or just assume it as part of background, though.

I'd probably go with a passive Perception check to notice that something is not quite right. I don't want to see Craft skill rolls to prove that someon's untouched.

Secondly, in ED, you don't run around grabbing magic items so much. You weave magic items into your er, magic-ness. So they grow in power with you. 4E has no provisions for this, but it would be easy enough to add.

Each class would have the Threadweaving class feature, which allows it to access Threadweaving rituals. You'd have to perfom a Threadweaving ritual to connect to a new facet of the item or a new item. The different powers of an item would be keyed to the success of the ritual's skill roll.

But wasn't there a limitation in ED about the number of threads a character could have active?

Thirdly, the horrors are real bastards many of whom have long-term and complex powers. 4E struggles with this, but the disease mechanics could probably be used to handle them.

Long live exception based game design!!! I would use the horror's powers for dramatic pruposes and not as a defined game mechanic. Something like the disease mechanic could work, but isn't it much cooler to simply decide when something bad will happen?

There is a difference in time scale between 4e mechanics and the horrors a la ED. 4e works with rounds, encounters and days, horrors in ED work with months or years.

Ah, I'm really looking forward to see this!

Huldvoll

Jan van Leyden

 

[Foundry of Decay]

I'm VERY intrigued. I remember seeing adverts in Dragon Magazine back when Earthdawn was first published and I remember immediately wishing I could find a copy of it.

We didn't have any full time Game-Stores in the immediate area that I knew about, so I had to try and scour the back shelves of comic/hobby stores. Sadly I never found a copy of it.

Now that Its being released for 4e though I might be picking it up (based on reviews).

 

[Baumi]

As Earthdawn was always very D&D like, where they explained typical stuff like Dungeons*, Monsters**, limited Spellselection*** and magical Heroes**** quite logical .. it is only fit that they finally make a version for D&D since 4E went in the direction they have gone.

* The Name-Giver Races (Humans, Dwarves, etc) had to hide themselves from the Horrors and build massive protected Dungeons (Caerns) for this. Many Caerns where overrun in the past centuries and can now be looted by brave Adventurers...

** Horrors are still out .. only the strongest ones had to go

*** The Astralplane was and still is poisoned with Horrors. Spellcasting is a magical Beacon which enables the Horrors to put a Curse on you. To prevent these there are Spellmatrixes where you can store some of your spells to cast them hidden from them and the more powerful you become the more Matrixes you can hold.

**** The Player Characters ALL use magic to be the best in what they do, from typical Spells to Feats of Strength or magical Guided Arrows (like the Powers from 4E)