What do you think?
Rate this book
Earthdawn
Earthdawn
Book by Greg Gorden
335 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 1994
1 person is currently reading
28 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
June 15, 2017
Earthdawn is a deeply frustrating game to me, in that so many parts of it are so good but the whole ends up being less than the sum of its parts. The core idea of Earthdawn is "what if we built a world where all the stuff in AD&D's mechanic that makes no sense made sense?" There's a lot of stuff in D&D that, if you remove abstractions, are silly: ever escalating durability from hit points, tightly defined classes with minimal ability to crosstrain, adventurers being so much more powerful than normal people or even the city watch, mega-dungeons, an ecology full of magical predators, and so on. Earthdawn goes 'OK, take all of that as given, real, understood aspects of the world, and then build game mechanics that explicitly do those things and a world history that justifies it. And it's all pretty darn neat - and then so many things are added that it becomes too much.
To explain
1) the core die mechanic is brilliant, but since that's a Greg Gordon design that's not a surprise. But then too many fiddly bits are added, and too many ways for the characters to customize with points rather than by agreement, and too many options. Character creation isn't hideous, but experience point management and character growth are past the cost benefit threshold by a goodly bit. This complexity is one of my core complaints about the game - fewer points, more trust and tighter options would speed up a lot.
2) The game setting is
a) an ecological puzzle setting - the players go into the wild and encounter strange things, but the world is tightly constructed enough that most monsters and plants follow a basic logic that can be sussed out, understood and exploited. History likewise plays a huge role, and players can look for clues in libraries, with sages and via magic to advance that knowledge base. The whole thing is grounded post-apocalyptic with magic taking the place of science. It's cool.
b) a psychological horror setting - monsters strip away the characters sanity, mark them, and twist them to fight their friends even as the heroes try to uncover the monsters' weaknesses and thwart the machinations of their cults. It's HP Lovecraft done in high fantasy, where all the magical and physical power the characters possess can be as naught against the forces they face, leaving them just their knowledge and courage. It's a bit cumbersome, but it can be great.
c) it's a mega-dungeon crawl - vast wealth and artifacts of power reside in buried cities lost to the centuries, now filled with traps and twisted monsters. The characters go into the dungeon, kill things and take their stuff, and in so doing gain ever more personal power. It's more complicated than the concurrent 2nd edition AD&D core books, but not more complicated than those plus all the splatbooks, and has a lot more color.
d) it's a wartime political drama - the characters can step in at almost any point to small to large scale military engagements as the nation states in the core game setting struggle to build and maintain a more egalitarian state in the face of re-conquest from distant, slavery-fueled magical power. There are feints and counter feints, politics and backstabbing, spies and bloody battles. The settings politics and loosely aligned coalitions work well for this sort of thing, even if there isn't a ton of initial support for wargame level conflicts.
e) it's a voyage of archetypal power - as the characters become more powerful they become ever more entwined with that their processions embody, they locate artifacts that force them to not just research their history but recreate those events to tie the artifact to them to gain even more power. The characters actions can rename parts of their world, fundamentally imprinting it with their personality. This has Unknown Armies potential written all over it - how far will you go? what do you give up when you become so much of something else?
It's all of them, at once, with next to no guidance on how to separate out these distinct and sometimes worldly different themes. As with the character mechanics, so many options are presented as not just equally valid but integral that as a GM I struggle for which to do. Each player finds a different thing they like from the rules and wants to focus on that. Some character classes are perfectly suited for some themes but founder in others, but there's no indications of what those might be.
So much of these problems are artifacts of the early 90's rule book presentation. The rules have a great visual style, and do a solid job on immersion for the players into the complex and compelling world, but what it really needed were pages of "There are the 6 main types of earthdawn campaigns (the 5 above or the 'we have an airship and jump from theme to theme like the USS Enterprise), how they work, who would like them, how to run them and how to transition from one to the other." Without that, you're left with the paradox of telling the players that they can do anything means that they can't choose anything to do.
I want to love this game more. I've wanted to love it since I bought the rules at a con in 1994 along with a new set of dice just for playing it. I keep coming back to it every few years (once having boiled down all the rules and building a new setting for them), but it's hard to come up with setting that 3rd Edition D&D doesn't do just as well with a lot less work.
To explain
1) the core die mechanic is brilliant, but since that's a Greg Gordon design that's not a surprise. But then too many fiddly bits are added, and too many ways for the characters to customize with points rather than by agreement, and too many options. Character creation isn't hideous, but experience point management and character growth are past the cost benefit threshold by a goodly bit. This complexity is one of my core complaints about the game - fewer points, more trust and tighter options would speed up a lot.
2) The game setting is
a) an ecological puzzle setting - the players go into the wild and encounter strange things, but the world is tightly constructed enough that most monsters and plants follow a basic logic that can be sussed out, understood and exploited. History likewise plays a huge role, and players can look for clues in libraries, with sages and via magic to advance that knowledge base. The whole thing is grounded post-apocalyptic with magic taking the place of science. It's cool.
b) a psychological horror setting - monsters strip away the characters sanity, mark them, and twist them to fight their friends even as the heroes try to uncover the monsters' weaknesses and thwart the machinations of their cults. It's HP Lovecraft done in high fantasy, where all the magical and physical power the characters possess can be as naught against the forces they face, leaving them just their knowledge and courage. It's a bit cumbersome, but it can be great.
c) it's a mega-dungeon crawl - vast wealth and artifacts of power reside in buried cities lost to the centuries, now filled with traps and twisted monsters. The characters go into the dungeon, kill things and take their stuff, and in so doing gain ever more personal power. It's more complicated than the concurrent 2nd edition AD&D core books, but not more complicated than those plus all the splatbooks, and has a lot more color.
d) it's a wartime political drama - the characters can step in at almost any point to small to large scale military engagements as the nation states in the core game setting struggle to build and maintain a more egalitarian state in the face of re-conquest from distant, slavery-fueled magical power. There are feints and counter feints, politics and backstabbing, spies and bloody battles. The settings politics and loosely aligned coalitions work well for this sort of thing, even if there isn't a ton of initial support for wargame level conflicts.
e) it's a voyage of archetypal power - as the characters become more powerful they become ever more entwined with that their processions embody, they locate artifacts that force them to not just research their history but recreate those events to tie the artifact to them to gain even more power. The characters actions can rename parts of their world, fundamentally imprinting it with their personality. This has Unknown Armies potential written all over it - how far will you go? what do you give up when you become so much of something else?
It's all of them, at once, with next to no guidance on how to separate out these distinct and sometimes worldly different themes. As with the character mechanics, so many options are presented as not just equally valid but integral that as a GM I struggle for which to do. Each player finds a different thing they like from the rules and wants to focus on that. Some character classes are perfectly suited for some themes but founder in others, but there's no indications of what those might be.
So much of these problems are artifacts of the early 90's rule book presentation. The rules have a great visual style, and do a solid job on immersion for the players into the complex and compelling world, but what it really needed were pages of "There are the 6 main types of earthdawn campaigns (the 5 above or the 'we have an airship and jump from theme to theme like the USS Enterprise), how they work, who would like them, how to run them and how to transition from one to the other." Without that, you're left with the paradox of telling the players that they can do anything means that they can't choose anything to do.
I want to love this game more. I've wanted to love it since I bought the rules at a con in 1994 along with a new set of dice just for playing it. I keep coming back to it every few years (once having boiled down all the rules and building a new setting for them), but it's hard to come up with setting that 3rd Edition D&D doesn't do just as well with a lot less work.
March 21, 2017
Yes, this book does not quite deserve a full score, but the universe has given me so much over the years that i think it is justified.
Magic destroyed the world, well not quite. But the users of magic opened a portal, and something stepped out. Hungering for magic and those who wielded it. God-like horrors layd waste to most of the world and ate the Gods themselves, maybe.
But large swathes of the worlds population hid away in vaults, sort of Fallout'ish that. Hidden away for generations until they emerge anew to reclaim the world once lost. Not everyone took to the safety of bunkers, and those who did not were greatly impacted by even the most passing notice of the magic eating horrors.
Now you play a character that steps forth to find magic, to reclaim the world and explore it anew. To help those in need or take the joys denied from you all those years you were hiding.
The magic system is quite different from most system i have played. The dice system however, is a hot mess, but i am told that in newer editions it has vastly improved. As TSR has republished the game through kickstarter. Yay! :)
This is a game id love to get back into, didnt get to play it much myself, but what little i did i treasure, but the lore and setting? That is something i suspect will always be churning in the back of my head, it left that much of an impression on me.
Magic destroyed the world, well not quite. But the users of magic opened a portal, and something stepped out. Hungering for magic and those who wielded it. God-like horrors layd waste to most of the world and ate the Gods themselves, maybe.
But large swathes of the worlds population hid away in vaults, sort of Fallout'ish that. Hidden away for generations until they emerge anew to reclaim the world once lost. Not everyone took to the safety of bunkers, and those who did not were greatly impacted by even the most passing notice of the magic eating horrors.
Now you play a character that steps forth to find magic, to reclaim the world and explore it anew. To help those in need or take the joys denied from you all those years you were hiding.
The magic system is quite different from most system i have played. The dice system however, is a hot mess, but i am told that in newer editions it has vastly improved. As TSR has republished the game through kickstarter. Yay! :)
This is a game id love to get back into, didnt get to play it much myself, but what little i did i treasure, but the lore and setting? That is something i suspect will always be churning in the back of my head, it left that much of an impression on me.
September 8, 2021
Earthdawn is an early-90s attempt to made the basic D&D adventuring style make sense, and it success at that.
It's setting is well-written, and presented as the front and center of the book, up to curious editing decision to keep some of the setting to the end of the book. It's a post-magic-apocalypse, which does a lot to explain why there are ruins to explore, why there are monsters to kill, and why are the PCs unique, and so on. It makes sense to why finding magical items is better than creating them. They really made sense for everything, and did it in a captivating world. It also focuses on a specific region, which gives a concrete setting a gamemaster can use instead of a world with no details that's hard to use.
The system on the other hand, oh dear goddess in the heavens. It's a clear rip-off D&D, changed just enough so they could be sued, and with minor changes to adapt the setting. For example, there are 6 basic attributes (including strength, dexterity, and charisma) that are in the range of 3-18. It's generally a mess of unnecessary detailed sun-mechanics, as was D&D at the time. As many systems of the time, it does very little to support the game-style, if at all. How far we have come. Throw it away and never look back.
The gamemastrering advice is a product of its time, which means that it ranges from adequate to questionable. Tip: closing a session early because the players finished the adventure is not a good move. Also, buying in-game influence with XP instead of improving the character, and not a great design choice.
All-in-all, it's still a great thought experiment today. Maybe a newer edition has a system that won't make you want to tear your hair out, or you could just use Savage Worlds in this setting.
It's setting is well-written, and presented as the front and center of the book, up to curious editing decision to keep some of the setting to the end of the book. It's a post-magic-apocalypse, which does a lot to explain why there are ruins to explore, why there are monsters to kill, and why are the PCs unique, and so on. It makes sense to why finding magical items is better than creating them. They really made sense for everything, and did it in a captivating world. It also focuses on a specific region, which gives a concrete setting a gamemaster can use instead of a world with no details that's hard to use.
The system on the other hand, oh dear goddess in the heavens. It's a clear rip-off D&D, changed just enough so they could be sued, and with minor changes to adapt the setting. For example, there are 6 basic attributes (including strength, dexterity, and charisma) that are in the range of 3-18. It's generally a mess of unnecessary detailed sun-mechanics, as was D&D at the time. As many systems of the time, it does very little to support the game-style, if at all. How far we have come. Throw it away and never look back.
The gamemastrering advice is a product of its time, which means that it ranges from adequate to questionable. Tip: closing a session early because the players finished the adventure is not a good move. Also, buying in-game influence with XP instead of improving the character, and not a great design choice.
All-in-all, it's still a great thought experiment today. Maybe a newer edition has a system that won't make you want to tear your hair out, or you could just use Savage Worlds in this setting.
November 29, 2019
I had bought this book way back when it came out, then sold it off a few years later because I never got around to playing.
Still, having retained fond memories of it, I bought Earthdawn again a while back and have now re-read it.
What can I say? It no longer holds up to the memories I had of it.
While I still like the idea(s) of the setting as well as the (then) connection to Shadowrun I now feel the game system unnecessarily complicated and clunky, with minute details of book-keeping necessary to run - and even to play - the game.
On the other hand I feel the setting and the world are insufficiently fleshed out. I get that later books further detailed the world of Barsaive, but there is way too little in the core book.
Still, having retained fond memories of it, I bought Earthdawn again a while back and have now re-read it.
What can I say? It no longer holds up to the memories I had of it.
While I still like the idea(s) of the setting as well as the (then) connection to Shadowrun I now feel the game system unnecessarily complicated and clunky, with minute details of book-keeping necessary to run - and even to play - the game.
On the other hand I feel the setting and the world are insufficiently fleshed out. I get that later books further detailed the world of Barsaive, but there is way too little in the core book.
December 25, 2014
Another failed attempt to challenge the Dungeons & Dragons mastery
5 July 2013
Apparently this game is set in the same world as Shadowrun, though probably thousands of years before the present day in a time before a great cataclysm reshaped the world. Personally I really don't know because it has been a very, very long time since I actually played this game, and even then I only played it a couple of times (I think I played a Tskrang Sorcerer, as I am prone to do, because Humans and Elves are really boring).
I came across this game because a friend of mine bought it and then gave me the book and asked me if I would run the game. I looked at it and politely declined because, to me, it was simply another game system set in a world like Dungeons and Dragons, and in a way I was more than happy to simply keep on using the Dungeons and Dragons system. Mind you, because I was pretty much writing all of my modules as if I were going to publish them, actually creating an adventure was quite a lot of work for me. I think I may have changed that attitude a bit, but I guess that part of me that is a writer really likes to properly craft my adventures beyond a few scribbled notes. Anyway, I have ended up publishing them somewhere on the internet (not that anybody really sees them).
So as for this game it seems like it has pretty much gone the way that ever other game that has attempted to challenge the throne of fantasy roleplaying that Dungeons and Dragons hold, and that is the dust bin of history. The only reason I that actually remembered that this game existed was because my friend mentioned the Tskrang sorcerer that I played on Facebook. However the problem with this was that the game master that we had was pretty ordinary (actually I think the word banal is a much better description of him). The problems that I have found with such games is that I have never really had a good game master (okay there was one, and I did play a pretty cool fanatical Jewish sorcerer) or even a good story, which meant that I ended up having to create the story and thus was not able to actually play the game. Anyway, it has been ages since we have actually played a game (well, not ages because I think I can put it down as a 'little over a year') so I guess it is a moot point.
5 July 2013
Apparently this game is set in the same world as Shadowrun, though probably thousands of years before the present day in a time before a great cataclysm reshaped the world. Personally I really don't know because it has been a very, very long time since I actually played this game, and even then I only played it a couple of times (I think I played a Tskrang Sorcerer, as I am prone to do, because Humans and Elves are really boring).
I came across this game because a friend of mine bought it and then gave me the book and asked me if I would run the game. I looked at it and politely declined because, to me, it was simply another game system set in a world like Dungeons and Dragons, and in a way I was more than happy to simply keep on using the Dungeons and Dragons system. Mind you, because I was pretty much writing all of my modules as if I were going to publish them, actually creating an adventure was quite a lot of work for me. I think I may have changed that attitude a bit, but I guess that part of me that is a writer really likes to properly craft my adventures beyond a few scribbled notes. Anyway, I have ended up publishing them somewhere on the internet (not that anybody really sees them).
So as for this game it seems like it has pretty much gone the way that ever other game that has attempted to challenge the throne of fantasy roleplaying that Dungeons and Dragons hold, and that is the dust bin of history. The only reason I that actually remembered that this game existed was because my friend mentioned the Tskrang sorcerer that I played on Facebook. However the problem with this was that the game master that we had was pretty ordinary (actually I think the word banal is a much better description of him). The problems that I have found with such games is that I have never really had a good game master (okay there was one, and I did play a pretty cool fanatical Jewish sorcerer) or even a good story, which meant that I ended up having to create the story and thus was not able to actually play the game. Anyway, it has been ages since we have actually played a game (well, not ages because I think I can put it down as a 'little over a year') so I guess it is a moot point.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews