I have a couple of quick questions:

1. Have there been any mention of (What were they called...) I think , The Passions in the fiction or books in general? I have been playing the game since first edit but honestly, I have skipped a lot of the fiction since it sometimes seems like the authors don't read the source material that they are writing in. Though I have read the SR4A fiction and it has been pretty sweet.

2. Does anyone actually go with the assumption that Earthdawn is Shadowruns past? (Also has anyone played the game?)

3. Has anyone taken the massive undertaking that is changing the rules of earthdawn to be more like Shadowrun? I love the material but I am hating the rules.

4. Any sort of site out there that has any info on hints/clues/out right proclamations the correlate to Earthdawn?

Thanks in advance

Peace!

First of all, you must visit the Ancient Files.

edit: double post

I have often wondered about this myself. Are the Passions present in SR? If so, *what* are they?

I imagine that some of the past & present writers could answer that to a satisfactory degree if they could be convinced to offer up the goods.

So.... any of you past & present freelancers / writers / creators want to say anything substantive? Obviously it won't be canon but hey, I'll take unofficial from authentic sources.

I believe they've been mentioned a couple of times. If I recall correctly, the intro fiction in one of the Harlequin adventures included what may have either been a Passion or Harley's drunken hallucination.

It could be that the Passions were extremely powerful spirits, made increasingly powerful by the worship (and possibly donated karma) they received. It may be that since no one worships them anymore, their power has declined. Or maybe they are related to Mentor spirits, which the Sixth World still hasn't quite defined.

There have been some hints that one or more of the Passions are still around.

As to what they are...depends on what sources you believe. Fragments of a greater being, more than mere free spirits, less than totems.

Not played the game for many years, but one of my players is a big fan. He (the player) decided that one of his (the character's) contacts believed he (the contact) was descended from an ancient tribe of warrior trolls who 'flew boats'. Apparently this is reflected in the name of the contact's pub: The Flying Drakkar.

A friend of mine ran a campaign that started as Earthdawn. After a particularly nasty battle with a bug-themed Horror, they were turned to stone by ritual magic while their patron looked for a less drastic way to save them from the Horror's machinations.

Something went wrong, and they were not woken up until the mana-surge associated with Haley's Comet. The characters were rebuilt as adepts, mages or shamens based on what they had been under Earthdawn rules, and the game continued as a fish-out-of-water bug-hunt game. The GM knowing what he was planning made sure some of the characters were elves, and therefore Sperethiel gave them the ability to speak to some denizens of the Sixth World.

The only home-rule as such they used was that the Earthdawn Archer was allowed to buy distance strike, and use it through arrows he fashioned himself if they were fired from his weapon-focus bow.

Where were the Tom Dowd stories you have archived originally published ?

The Voices From the Past story is the one from Harlequin's Back that I was trying to recall earlier.

Voices from the Past was in Harlequin's Back and a convention flier, Dunkelzahn the Mass Media Dragon is from a print issue of Dragon Magazine, and all of them were posted on the web at some point.

It's mentioned in the Tir Tairngire book, briefly, about a group of nutters worshipping Passion, then Harlequin wetting himself and promising to send flowers to his funereal. I think the official line is "NO CONTINUITY" but it was originally meant to be that way, but two seperate companies took up the book lines.

While we are at it...is there some sort of primer on how ED magic works? I know there are passions and names and patterns and circles and whatnot, but what does all that stuff do?

It's an elaborate system, this page does a decent job of covering some of the basics.

I did a bit on converting some thigns over some years back. I don't have the info on it any longer (not nearly as organized as AH), but essentially, most of it worked alogn the lines of SR Adept powers. It works really well with the now formal addition of the rule allowing you to take adept powers in the place of a metamagic when you initiate. The initiation grades take the place of the circles, and the powers take the place of the Talents.

Melee Weapons = Improved Blades (usually)
Durability = Mystic Armor
Astral Sight = Astral Sight
Lizard Leap = Great Leap
Animal Bond - the metamagic in Street Magic
- And so on. It works pretty well, as most Talents, at least the lower level ones, have some sort of correlation in SR. The casting disciplines become Magician's Way Adpets, splitting magic points between casting ability and adept powers. All it needs is a little time to organize.

I don't run that Earthdawn was Shadowrun's past, and the main reason why is that there is no hard evidence to support it, and (more importantly) no hard rules to support it. It ends up sounding like a conspiracy theory that ED and SR are related. Now, to you guys' credit, your conspiracy theory has a lot of stuff worked out for it and looks good on paper, but at the end of the day you are still drawing imaginary lines that connect two different games.

I will not get my ED hate on this thread.......

Needless to say I heavily downplay the concept in my games.

Thanks, that is what I was looking for. So a pattern basically is like a spirit's true name?


@Neraph: Too bad the authors obviously believe in this theory. The statement that "in the cycle of magic, Earthdawn is the Fourth World and Shadowrun is the Sixth World" from the FAQ leaves little room for interpretation

Yeah, well. Author bias.

You don't have to like the Earthdawn–Shadowrun connection—and it's easy to ignore or replace—but it's officially sanctioned as much as it can be without legally making the two games one piece of intellectual property.

In addition to all of the references in various Shadowrun game books that indirectly refer to Earthdawn; there was a trilogy of published novels that started in Earthdawn and ended in Shadowrun.

Thanks, just looked over the version published in Harlequin's Back, and it is clearly a later draft than the one posted on the web. How common is rewriting web fiction before including it in books?

Speaking from personal experience, pretty common...though in this case the version published on the web probably comes from the earlier pamphlet or whatnot.

As well as a number of characters, and a few items, that have carried directly over from one setting to another. But it is very easy to ignore the other setting if you don't care for it. Was a time, early on, that it seemed like every other adventure had some reference, even when it was a run about rock bands( Total Eclipse to name one). But they've purposely moved away from that with the latest adventure. Even though I personally like the connections, I think that there's been enough seeded in previous editions to let it go for a while and help build Shadowrun to let it stand on it's own.

I haven't seen any mention of the Passions from Earthdawn in SR - if that is what you are asking. Of course, I haven't read any fiction from either in a long time...

I do, and I have played both games, and run an SR4 game now that is incorporating elements of ED (most notably, Horrors.)

I find myself liking the ED rules a little better than the SR4 rules - or earlier versions, for that matter. It is just a matter of porting in all the technology and stuff.

Don't know of any, but would love to....

pretty sure ancient history's files has a list of ED/SR links.

and by 'pretty sure' i mean 'here's a link'.

I gotta update that verdamnt thing. After exams.

Well.

Earthdawn was conceived of and created as the Fourth World to Shadowrun's Sixth World, but the conscious decision was that we would make all of the connections pretty vague and would not, in product, unequivocally link the two so that gamemasters could chose to ignore or exploit the connection as they wished. We also wanted to be sure that we were not hamstringing either the SR or ED writers by forcing direct continuity between the two lines, and so therefore kept things rather vague. Some authors chose to make more direct connections - I being one of them - in the "Voices From the Past" short story. So, yes, that is meant to be Vestrial in that story, but it could either be the Mad Passion, or just Harlequin's hallucination of him. Regardless of which, the connection is deliberate. The entirety of Harlequin's Back is a tap-dancy link to Earthdawn.

The most notable exceptions to that (that occur to me right now) were Caroline Spector's three novels Scars (Earthdawn), Little Treasures (Earthdawn), and Worlds Without End (Shadowrun). I have to admit that I was phasing out of FASA and into FASA Interactive as those novels were being worked on and I had little to do with them and do not remember why it was decided to create a definitive bridge. It was most likely marketing driven, to try and pull more SR players into ED. Only WWE was published in the US due to the cancellation of the ED book line by the publisher.

Tom Dowd

A limited edition trade-paperback edition of Scars was published in the US in 2005.

Yup and you can get a new copy for $2,499.99 or a used copy for $927.17 through Amazon.com...

(I should have been clearer and said that only WWE was published at that time.)

Tom Dowd

Which begs the question I've had about other items from time-to-time:

1. What are some amazon and eBay sellers thinking ?
2. Has someone actually sold one for even a tenth of that ?
3. Was one price a typo, and subsequent just follow blindly, without applying any common sense ?

I saw an Iron Kingdoms RPG Character Guide for over $3,000 once. I laughed so hard everyone in my office stopped to look at me. And if anyone's THAT desperate for a book. . . well, it must be nice to have money.

You can indeed resolve a lot of issues by throwing large amounts of money at them... if you care to do so that is... and if you have the large amounts of money in the first place...

Me, I have to schedule my purchases a bit and the ludicrous prices out there are very entertaining indeed...

Keep the Faith

Speak of the Devil...

Apparently RedBrick Limited has been publishing new Earthdawn novels, and they added Scars on 25 April 2010.

• RedBrick Limited info page
• Lulu press order page

According to an e-mail response I got from Ms. Spector, Little Treasures should be available later this year.


The other Earthdawn novels from RedBrick via Lulu are:

• Anarya's Secret by Tim Jones (2007)
• Dark Shadows of Yesterday by Hank Woon (2008)
• Immortal Twilight by Hank Woon (2009)