Since there are still quite a few people that are clueless on this fact, Earthdawn, a fantasy game published by FASA a few years ago, is once again being published. It has been for several years now. A company called Living Room Games has taken over the license and has produced a 2nd Edition of Earthdawn.

They also finished off the Epic Trilogy that FASA started with "Prelude to War", and their most recent product is "Way of War: Makers of Legends Vol. 1" which is the remake of some of the same info from "Adept's Way" though it's smaller and only covers 5 Disciplines (including 1 new one).

The mailing list is still active (Though it goes in spurts...why talk about stuff when there's nothing to talk about?
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The biggest qualms with LRG are their artwork (steadily improving) and their proofreading (steadily worsening).

Are there any good 'net resources for running Earthdawn using Shadowrun dice mechanics?

Wow. Earthdawn is class-based? Any ideas on how this magical system could exist in the same world that eventually becomes Shadowrun?

It's not a closed-class system like DnD. Much more user-friendly. A discipline is a class in much the same way a Magician's Way from SR is a path (mage, shaman, physad,e tc)

So what are Talents, in SR terms?

Remember that Earthdawn takes place relatively late in the fourth age, thousands of years after that era's awakening, and after the peak of mana that brought the scourge. Exactly when is open to debate, as mana in that setting seems to have leveled off, but IIRC, it takes place 5,000 years ago, and it will be another 1,000 years before the fourth age.

As such, magic is more powerful and formal, as it has been studied for generations. Every player in Earthdawn is an adept, which is not like an adept in shadowrun, but rather simply someone that uses magic. Some adepts use magic to cast spells (the Disciplines that do this are Elementalists, Illusionists, Nethermancers, and Wizards) and all of them use talents, which are simply abilites that use magic. Some talents use magic to supplement normal skills, like Melee Weapons and Stealth, and some, such as Air Walk or Spirit Dodge, cannot be used without the use of magic.

Casting spells in Earthdawn can be done "on the fly," but the corruption of the Scourge makes this risky, so spellcasters use Matrices, which are a little like spell-slots in D&D, but the mechanic is somewhat different.

The game system is completely different from Shadowrun, using all sorts of polyhedrons, and takes a little time to understand, but once you do, it is very easy, and allows for a good deal of complexity and detail.

A bit of advice (from when I used to run ED): don't worry about how many dice you roll, worry about your step (you'll know what that is when you play the game), and then reference a chart.

The dice thing isn't a big issue, it just works out to a steadily increasing minimum and maximum possible.

Example: Step 7 is 1d12, Step 8 is 2d6, Step 9 is 1d8+1d6. Your odds go from 1-12, 2-12, 2-14. Works fine, translates rough. But it's easy to compute higher numbers, when you need 'em, and follows a more logical progression than, say, DnD.

Skills add flavour though, don't forget that...

So let's say I was going to use an SR-based stat/skill system. Attributes and Skills translate over nicely; for Talents I'm guessing Strain = Drain, Circle = effective Force, and the adept's Discipline Circle is equivalent to an Initiate Grade?

Note that the player characters in Earthdawn are called Adepts. Coincidence, or something other than coincidence?

Oh, wait a second, someone's already mentioned that. In any case, I think they're quite a lot closer than Seville is letting on.

Kind of. An adept in Earthdawn is anyone who uses magic (i.e. every PC). So yes, swordmasters and warriors are adepts, but so are illusionists and wizards, so its not really the same in terms of game mechanics. However, if you wanted to equate them (and it would be somewhat forced) you could treat talents as powers, and circles as grades of initiation. But there really is no way to convert the two easily, as Shadowrun uses a dicepool, while Earthdawn uses a Step system.

Plus, it would be more accurate to say that there are physical adepts and physical magician adepts, as only the Nethermancer ever gains even a crippled astral projection ability.

As if somebody actually wanted to be projecting with so many Horrible Things TM lurking in ED's Astral Plane...

I think the talents represent power points. So, you'd get powerful very quickly, but it's Earthdawn, everything is powerful. I don't think the circles represent anything, it's just easy to keep track of everything.

I got my first Earth Dawn thing, I collect SR stuff. Okay I have no life. But at least ummm, well I have the Bersaive Campaign setting (Yes I know that it is from 1993), however I get these things for a better understanding of Shadowrun.

My understanding was that the adepts that cast magic in ED were the magical adepts. Not Phys-mage-adepts, but aspected magicians. They used to be called magical adepts, right?

The thing is, Shadowrun and Earthdawn share a common comapaign world, not a rules system. And by this, I mean that the two systems are utterly unrelated, despite the closeness of the campaign worlds. As someone who used to play Earthdawn as much as Shadowrun (god, gaming stole my best years) please understand that Earthdawn is not like Dark Ages Vampire or some other game were the game world has two eras of play. Earthdawn was a stand-alone game, with completely different mechanics, that happened to have connections (purposely kept somewhat cryptic) with the history of shadowrun.

Now I know this won't satisfy people who want an ED-SR conversion guide, but really, its not possible. There was no such things as physical adepts or or power points in Earthdawn, just as there are no such things as circles or talents in Shadowrun.

Now, if you really like the shadowrun ruleset, and want to play in Barsaive with them, I think that's a great idea, but realize that you would be using the rules to simulate in character concepts of Earthdawn, and not converting an Earthdawn character to reflect his Sixth Age counterpart.

I used the word simulate in reference to an RPG, so now I'm going to go to rpg.net and repent my evil ways

One more thing about Talents. You can NOT use a Talent to increase a mundane Skill, you can use the Melee Weapons Talent, or you can use the Melee Weapons Skill, but you can't combine them.

I'd suggest just making Talents skills, but giving them a much lower cost and remove the 'time to learn' aspect. Talents in Earthdawn are much cheaper and easier to increase than mundane Skills.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like Talents are similar to WW's magic things. The dice sound like they're similar to Alternity's crazy dice slider doohickey.

You could always toss the Earthdawn rules out the window and just modify SR rules and use the Earthdawn setting : )

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.

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

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

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).

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.