[RPG] Earthdawn Options

[Dread Polack]

Yeah, this is something I thought about myself. Some other things to consider:

SR is a balanced game because cybered characters can fight with adept characters who can fight with magician characters. Note that characters with none of the above generally have a harder time competing with the above. That is, a character with a machinegun is on even ground with a character with a fireball, because he has a machinegun. Take away the machine guns and cyberware, as you do in a fantasy world, and suddenly, magicians are killing soldiers with swords by the dozen, because they just can't compete.

That means you can't simply take the rules straight from SR and use them to run ED.

Well, not exactly. :S

If you wanted to, you'd either have to weaken magic, or strengthen non-magic characters.

You could make all non-spellcasters Adepts of various flavors. Each of the non-spellcasting classes of ED would be Adept "Paths" with various Talents (powers) open to them, many of which you'd likely have to convert from ED. The Hermetic tradition would also have 4 paths- Elementalists, Illusionists, Nethermancers, and Wizards. Take away their ability to project, and give them some bonus dice for their spells of choice.

I think the other option is to drastically cut magician's power, and raise the Karma cost to improve them.

Anyway, some immediate ideas, it's actually been a while since I flipped through ED.

-Dread Polack

[Shockwave_IIc]

[krishcane]

We played a campaign in the Earthdawn setting with SR rules -- no attempt made to convert Circles and Talents and such, just used the SR rules as they are. To balance the magic vs. tech issue, I (as the GM) just enforced a worldwide Rating 5 background count. In "bad places" (ie. Horror-tainted) that count went up to 6 or 7, thus inflicting astral damage to exposed beings and increasing drain dramatically.

Even in the rating 5 count areas, though (the general level of most of the campaign world), magicians were at +5 TN to cast and +2 TN drain, which put a reasonable limit on magic. You could still sling spells, but you had to put some effort into it. The most powerful characters were naturally SR-style adepts, because they could amp their melee skills and speed. But even then, friend-in-combat penalties can slow down even the best hand-to-hand adept, and mass melee combats are par for the course in fantasy worlds.

It worked out to be a lot of fun. :)

--K

[JongWK]

New Earthdawn novels are finally available.

And it seems that Caroline Spector's novels will finally be released in english (Scars is scheduled for Summer 2004). :D

[Jpwoo]

The big difference in philosophy between SR and ED makes trying to play one with the others ruleset kind of silly.

SR is a game where you are relatively low powered, operating with the anonymity of an individual against forces much much bigger than you. The only reason a Shadowrunner would live a long time would be because she isn't worth killing. The power gap between a starting character and a 300 karma point end game character is large but not as large as we would like to think. A straight newbie has a good chance of killing an endgame SR PC if he is smart enough. The rules are made like this.

ED is a game of bigger than life heros who start out as weak nobodys with great potential. The endgame for ED are juggernaut heros who can go toe to toe with dunklezahn and have it be a fair fight. And the ruleset scales between those extremes.

So if you want larger than life in a shadowrun world, run Rift. (that was painful to say, dirtying SR with Rifts like that)

and if you Want a nicely crafted low power fantasy system play Runebearer best thing about RB is that it is all free.