Earthdawn 1e / 2e

[Aus_Snow]

Could anyone here shed some light on the differences between Earthdawn's 1st and 2nd editions? Especially in terms of better / worse - with reasons, hopefully.

Story so far is that I was really into the 1st ed. years ago, but the books were misplaced and I haven't heard anything about the game since, let alone played/run anything with it. I know somewhere I can pick up 2nd ed. for a small sum, and the thought's occured to me that I might want to do that. Worth it? - or should I track down 1e (which I can also do pretty easily, if not quite as cheaply) ?

All advice welcome.

 

[sazisme]

From what I remember, there was very little difference from 1e to 2e. Very little at all.

If I remember correctly, the only reason they even called it 2e was because LRG was publishing it after having bought the rights when FASA went belly up. I mean, there is different artwork. And the example characters might have had different names. But as far as mechanical changes beyond minor (very minor) fluff changes ... if there were any I do not remember them. Oh wait, I think there was new fluff stories to catch the new reader up. 2e is assumed to have happened after all the FASA published stuff happened, so that a new player needs only to buy future stuff from LRG to be up to date.

 

[Aus_Snow]

there is different artwork.

Different good? Different bad?... Just 'different'?

 

[Turjan]

Different good? Different bad?... Just 'different'?

2e is renowned for its bad artwork . The system was somewhat cleaned up. Some of the changes were not taken well by players of the first edition (sounds familiar ). That's why a new version of Earthdawn (Earthdawn Classic), which is much closer to the original, has been released just now (look here). With much better artwork . The pdf is available here .

 

[Aus_Snow]

Classic... very cool!

And thanks for the info; also thanks to sazisme for yours - and, even though I by no means have the 'authority' or 'status' round here to do this, and am therefore probably woefully misguided in doing so...

Welcome to ENWorld!

 

[kigmatzomat]

2e's main changes reduced twinking. Specifically, getting multiple disciplines is much harder now. Our 1e game consisted of all multidiscipline characters after 6th circle. My character was a Weaponsmith7/Warrior6/Nethermancer6.

Second they differentiated skills from Talents. Skills are weaker in general but IIRC are a bit cheaper so it's easy to pick up a number of skills to address basic proficiencies. Talents are better but more expensive. The eliminated a few of the "Talents-as-Skills" (like Great Leap) that weren't very realistic.

Lastly they tried to balance the disciplines better, both from a Talent front and by spells. Primarily they were trying to prevent a Talent being 1st Circle for one discipline (Warrior) and 5th Circle for another (Archer). Generally a Talent will only appear within a 3-Circle band. I think it was successful without harming the system.

Some of the art in the core book was pretty good (check the stuff by DJ) but others were probably the work of someone's relative. I heard it took a while for the artists to get paid so the good ones found other jobs and weren't available for subsequent books.

 

[Staffan]

2e is renowned for its bad artwork . The system was somewhat cleaned up. Some of the changes were not taken well by players of the first edition (sounds familiar ). That's why a new version of Earthdawn (Earthdawn Classic), which is much closer to the original, has been released just now (look here). With much better artwork . The pdf is available here .

Though from what I understand, while they started making that version with the goal of having things be closer to ED1, they eventually turned out to make their own changes, creating ED3 instead. I haven't seen it yet though, so I couldn't say for sure.

 

[balam_br]

Somebody knows something about earthdawn d20?

 

[Warden]

Somebody knows something about earthdawn d20?

There's a few scant sites kicking around calling themselves Earthdawn d20, but nothing has been updated in a couple of years, from what I remember. Nothing worth checking out.

And don't expect to find any publisher acquiring the rights to it. Wizkids owns the rights to the old FASA stuff and specifically said in an interview I did with them for our Genesis magazine that they will not get into d20 or offer any of their brands into d20. Not gonna happen.

 

[twofalls]

Great Game

Earthdawn is a very good system, and the second edtion did improve the game from a balance veiwpoint. The art is worse, yes, but so what.

Talents that were broken in 1st 3e were fixed in second ed, a prime example is Riposte. In frist edtion the talent allows you to not only block an attack directed at you but then to immediatly counterattack your opponent. In second edtion they split it into two talents, Parry and Riposte which is far more balanced. Swordsmen in the first edtion were the most powerful of the fighting classes because of these extra attacks they were allowed. There are other tweaks along the same lines that overall improved the game. As was mentioned earlier the skill system is revisited and improved, some additional equipment added, etc.

I was unaware that a 3rd ed of Earthdawn was out. I ran a game for three years using the original 1dt ed materials, and we found the game to be a lot of fun. I ended up buyin all the original books and am still glad I did.