Earthdawn 4e Announced

[fuindordm]

3. Magic Items... Earthdawn had a totally different paradigm when it came to magic items. There wasn't a "trade up", or even "grab a bunch" mentality. Magic items in Earthdawn were more mythical in feel... every major magic item was a pretty big deal. Only through learning it's history and performing deeds that resonated with it's purpose was a character able to unlock more and more powers within the item. I don't see D&D 4e (at least as it is now doing this very well... it's almost a 360 of the... player picks/carries quite a few/auto-knows what it does, mentality)

IIRC later supplements introduced more "basic" magic items in addition to the legendary ones, but they still required the user to bind threads to them to function.

In 4e terms, this requirement serves a function similar to the magic threshold.

An 8th circle (level) character might have 6-10 ranks in Thread Weaving, which means they could benefit from the same number of enhancement bonuses on their magical equipment. For example, they might have 3 threads woven to their legendary sword (unlocking +3 damage and fire resistance), 3 to their magical but non-legendary armor (unlocking +3 defense) and 2 to their healing flask (allowing 2 in-combat uses of their recovery tests per day). If they discover something new about their legendary sword, they can benefit from the knowledge right away by releasing a thread and reassigning it to the sword.

Earthdawn is awesome. They didn't just make the rules serve the fluff (the original Stormbringer game did this, and ended up with horrendously imbalanced subsystems) or try to rewrite their fluff around the rules (like 4th edition). They really put immense effort into developing the two sides of the game together, and ended up with a balanced yet very flavorful system.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

What?! This hasn't been released yet?! It's been like 12 hours since I heard the announcement....

I'll check back in another 20 minutes. Come on, Red Brick! Get going!!

-O

While you were away, it was released and sold out.

No, really. Lulu has orders for the next 2 years, and had already to buy a square mile of South-African jungle to even ensure the paper production...

 

[Obryn]

While you were away, it was released and sold out.

No, really. Lulu has orders for the next 2 years, and had already to buy a square mile of South-African jungle to even ensure the paper production...

DAMN!


In all seriousness, I think the Earthdawn setting will be a huge benefit for folks who like a lot of the stuff 4e brings to the table, but who worry about versimilitude and daily/encounter Martial abilities.

I mean, every PC in Earthdawn is an Adept. They all use magic - from warriors to sky raiders to nethermancers. If all the martial abilities suddenly become magic... well, concerns about verisimilitude fly out the window. "Why can I only use this ability once every 5 minutes?" "It's magic. It follows its own rules."

I'm stoked about the setting because it's held a place in my heart ever since it "fixed" D&D in the early 90's. I still have all my supplements - they fill a book shelf - and, best of all, those supplements are like 95% fluff. Fluff is system-neutral, so I already have a ton of usable material.

I look forward to this.

-O

 

[Wolfspider]

This is really awesome news.

Earthdawn is my favorite RPG setting of all time, but not my favorite system (although it certainly wasn't a bad system).

I think this product might actually entice me to play 4e.

 

[Staffan]

This is not true. About half of the Disciplines in the core rulebook had Racial Restrictions.

Fair enough. It's been a while since I looked at the books.

2. Talents and skills...some things in Earthdawn had both a talent and skill equivalent (like thievery), so an adept Thief might have the thievery talent, while anyone else could pick up the skill. Also there were no arbitrary restrictions on skills because of what type of adept you were.

Second edition (the LRG version, not Redbrick) made non-magical skills more available (you started with a few ranks for free and could buy them for XP without spending months in training), and more limited. For example, many of the disciplines have access to a talent named Melee Weapons, which is used to hit someone with a melee weapon. Someone who doesn't have access to that talent could instead get the skill Melee Weapons (Axes) or MW (Swords) or some other more specific version. Similarly, the Thief talent Pick Locks actually conjured a magic lockpick, while someone using the skill would have to supply his own tools (I think this particular example was around in 1e as well).

DragonLords of Melnibone fiasco? Inquiring demands want to know more. (In hope of avoiding to go off-topic too much)

One of the first d20 products released was Dragonlords of Melniboné, a Chaosium product translating the Elric setting to d20. I haven't seen it myself, but by all accounts it sucked pretty bad.

 

[Andor]

Most excellent! As I may have mentioned 4e feels more like Earthdawn to me than it does like D&D. Weaving threads to your spell matricies is actually quite a bit like picking your at-will powers. They may have a very interesting take on spell casters in ED4e.

The pernicious nature of horror marks and taint is a poor match to the 4e 'Shake it off' save system, but there is no particular reason they must feel the need to use it so inappropriately, so hopefully that'll be okay.

Crafting skills were an important part of ED, but they were not something that was actually rolled in play, so much as used as a reference. 4e (or any system) can handle that by simpley making note of what creative endevour your character is good at, and it can still serve as a shibboleth when you're trying to get through the gates of Thera.

Troll Skyraiders FTW!

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Most excellent! As I may have mentioned 4e feels more like Earthdawn to me than it does like D&D. Weaving threads to your spell matricies is actually quite a bit like picking your at-will powers. They may have a very interesting take on spell casters in ED4e.

The pernicious nature of horror marks and taint is a poor match to the 4e 'Shake it off' save system, but there is no particular reason they must feel the need to use it so inappropriately, so hopefully that'll be okay.

DISEASE track.

Crafting skills were an important part of ED, but they were not something that was actually rolled in play, so much as used as a reference. 4e (or any system) can handle that by simpley making note of what creative endevour your character is good at, and it can still serve as a shibboleth when you're trying to get through the gates of Thera.

Troll Skyraiders FTW!

I see the potential for them creating a small "background" subsystem for this. Even if it will still not ever matter in play to have a resolution mechanic for this.

 

[Imperialus]

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.

D20 would not have meshed well with either ED or Shadowrun. Shadowrun just has a different design philosophy than D&D. It's very difficult for example to do a more 'traditional' dungeon crawl in Shadowrun as the PC's are all pretty much eggshells wielding hammers. There was a reason that the Renraku Archeology Shutdown was the Shadowrun equivalent of Tomb of Horrors. There are a few exceptions to the fragile PC rule like some troll builds and the odd physad but by and large Shadowrun PC's can very rarely survive more than one or two firefights before they need to bugout and lick their wounds.

Most of this IMO comes down to Shadowrun's wound mechanic which is vastly different than the concept of Hit Points. Heck until 4th edition no character could take more than 10 boxes of damage and a heavy pistol would on average do about half that. Even in 4th ed a character will only ever have 10-16 or so boxes in his physical damage track and a heavy pistol does a base damage of 6P. I don't see how that can be translated into HP.

There's also the skill based magic system (though the Black Company system could probably emulate that), the classless PC design, and the lack of levels (apart from initiation) that all conspire against a functional D20 Shadowrun.

Anyhow. I probably should have forked this, I would be interested in seeing how you figure such a conversion might be implemented so if you want to continue the conversation lets take it out of the ED thread.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

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?

Not at all. I'm saying that even if the Forgotten Realms, say, is meant to be Earth in 20000BC, that's utterly immaterial to the Forgotten Realms. It's only material to a game set later than that. Do you get it?

In SR after ED's release they dropped a lot of vague hints about the connection, and how maybe the Horrors were coming, but they never followed up on it, I suspect because ED wasn't insanely popular.

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.

With some abilities, sure, ones that warp the world around the Horror and the like. However, anything that is going to be directly interacted with, like mind-affecting powers, illusions, reality warping, and so on should at the very least have guidelines. Also, any power that is going to have ANY combat functionality AT ALL should be fully stated up and not DM fiat silly business.

 

[Voadam]

This is interesting, as FASA was very strongly anti-3e/OGL/D20. A pity

I was very dissapointed in this, I enjoyed both SR and ED and would have loved for both to have a d20 version. As it was I just nicked magic theory ideas from them for my D&D games.

As I think I will be sticking with OGL at least for now I look on it as too bad that ED will be under the GSL and I won't see an OGL version.