Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="tyrlaan" data-source="post: 5205374" data-attributes="member: 20998">Warning, this will be long because Earthdawn was my drug of choice for many a year (and always threatens to come back <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> ). I’ll try to piggyback on other responses to not repeat too much.If I wanted to sum up why Earthdawn is awesome in a single word, it would be flavor. That should come through below.And orcs! Oh, and if you have a mental image of what these races might be like based on previous experiences, you might be surprised. The lizardmen (called t’skrang) are river dwelling traders and pirates with a strong swashbuckler feel to their culture. The rockmen (called obsidimen) are literally made of rock and “emerge” from a magical liferock instead of being born in a conventional sense, and they’re so bulky that their written language is basically landscaping (or they hire a scribe). The trolls are not the green monstrous kind from DnD, but rather resemble huge cousins of orcs with large horns. Oh, and they’re known for sailing the skies in their airships and using magic to literally leap off the side to descend on a small village to raid it. The Therans are just one of many well developed threats to toss at the PCs. But I think the most important are the Horrors, abominations from another realm of existence (astral space) that are about as Lovecraftian as you can get. They vary widely in power level, with the more powerful ones finding sustenance by causing strife, misery, fear, etc. Many of them can corrupt the minds of their victims in all sorts of insidious ways. Horrors get top billing for me because the backdrop for Earthdawn exists solely because of the damage they dealt to the world…In Earthdawn (and Shadowrun), the level of magic on Earth ebbs and flows, like a sine curve. When the level of magic gets high enough, the walls between Earth and astral space get thin, and the monsters that live in astral space (the Horrors) can come to Earth. Earthdawn is set just after the end of what’s called the Scourge, a 1000 (I think it was this long) year period in which Horrors ravaged the world. During that time, the peoples of the world hid in underground cities called kaers in hopes to survive the Scourge. Not all succeeded. So basically, you have a world with a magic level that’s low enough that most of the Horrors have went back to astral space (but certainly not all); plenty of excuses for dungeon crawls thanks to the kaers, and all sorts of other goodness.And the cool thing is these spellcasting rules had flavor explanations behind them. Since spellcasting draws power from astral space, casters had to use matrices to protect themselves from the corruption in astral space from the recent activity of the Horrors, not to mention to try to hide their activity so a Horror wouldn’t decide to pay a visit. Furthermore, only so much of a spell could be stored in a matrix, so the caster had to weave additional magic threads into more complex spells in order to cast them. Magic in Earthdawn runs off the basic principle that (a) everything had a “pattern” or mystical representation of itself and (b) to access magic you could weave threads to such patterns. So to use a magic item, you had to weave threads to it (there’s that rules baked with flavor again!). And if you wanted to weave threads to something, you needed to know about that something in order to do it. And the stronger the thread, the greater the power. So for a weapon, you might need to learn it’s name, then the name of the person who forged it, then where they forged it, then what beast the creator killed with the weapon, and so on.Actually, a lot of Earthdawn tracks to 4th Edition DnD. Talents feel like powers. All attacks roll against a defense score. And so on. I really wouldn’t be surprised if the 4e designers looked at Earthdawn for inspiration.  What’s cool about having legend points vs. XP is how it really makes xp feel like it has a tangible in game effect. There’s literally a table that shows how well known/famous a character is based on his/her legend point total. One of the shticks of Earthdawn is that the characters are “building their legend.” Defeating opponents earns you legend points, naturally, as does turning in certain trophies (of course your legend improves if you show off the fangs of a hydra you killed to the nearby town). Oh, and you can write a journal and hand it into the Library to earn a handful of legend points <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Bah, I could go on and on, but I think I'll shut up for now <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> Happy to talk about any of it more.</blockquote>

Verification