Thought this while dusting my Earthdawn books.
Have any of you done a campaign that spanned from the Eathdawn times till the Shadowrun?
What did you do and how did it all ended?

On a sidenote, no flaming please, can a Namegiver become a Immortal if he/she hasn`t been born one?

Maybe. I once projected a possible method. There are other alternative though.

Perhaps the characters are put into a magical sleep. Perhaps a new type of shelter from the Horrors.

Reincarnation.

Magical hibernation a la T'skrang, dragons.

An astral vessel adrift in the metaplanes, a la Parlainth.

Or, my unproven formula for immortality.

Maybe i`ll cook something up after all...

Maybe it's time to post my History Of The World again

Ok, ok, bowing to popular demand (), here it is:

The Great Lie
by Paolo Marcucci and Digger
September 8th, 1998
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Warning: This speculation can SERIOUSLY affect the way by which you see the Shadowrun universe. Many believe that the FASA universes are unrelated, and only some thing in Earthdawn can make sense in the sixth world of Shadowrun. Don't be fooled by that: Earthdawn IS Shadowrun IS Battletech. No question about this.
Anyway, let's see this theory....

World #0 - Extra-planar struggle

At the beginning of time in our universe, two fourth dimensional beings are locked in a power struggle across existance planes. These beings are beyond our comprehension, so let's give them two names, simple enough for us to barely understand their motivations and actions: the Enforcer and the Criminal.

Ultimately, the Enforcer manages to get hold of the Criminal, and a council of judges comdamn it to an eternal prison, called the Earth. There it will be reduced to a three dimensional being and thus unable to leave the sphere of influence of the planet. The council also order to the Enforcer to bring the Criminal to its punishment and leave immediately.

As soon as the Criminal reaches the Earth, it attacks the Enforcer on the physical plane and make it loss its four dimensionality, effectively locking him to the planet too.

The fight goes on. For ages.

World #1 - Battlefield: Earth

Tired from the fight, both the Enforcer and the Criminal retreat. The Criminal manages to hide itself underwater, making it unvisible to the Enforcer abilities by the growing life forms that are starting to fill the oceans.

Thousands of years passed, as the Criminal recognizes that this life surrounding it could eventually develop into something able to build the means to getting it back to its plane of existance. The Enforcer recognizes it too, but also understands that this will take millions of years to be effective. Bored to death by this desolate planet, it decides to create some copies of itself.

Calling them Dragons.

World #2 - Of Dragons and Monsters

The Earth is ruled by Dragons that can use the incredible powers given them by the Enforcer. Divisions start to appear like crack on a wall among them, and several factions starts to dominate separate regions of the planet. Small fights are brought up but quickly settled down by the Enforcer. This world is too unstable, so the Enforcer starts to look into something that can act as glue among the Dragons and finally find it: a new species, called humans.

Meanwhile, from the deep of the ocean, the Criminal is trying to call help from the metaplanes. Terrible energies, able to scorch the Earth and, hopefully, the Enforcer along the road.

World #3 - The Big Sleep

This Earth planet has some strange cycles, every few thousand of years, the inherent energy of the planet is able to support the powers of the beings on its surface, then, slowly and predictably, these energies fade out and the supernatural abilities vanish. Now, the Criminal, the Enforcer and all its copies are forced to slow down their activities and have some rest. The energy level is simply not high enough to support them.

The humans, on the other hand, are not bounded by this rise and fall of vital energy, and continue in their evolution.

World #4 - Elves ahoy!

As soon as the energy level was high enough again, all the dormant beings woke up. They find a Earth where the humankind has spread wherever. Different races had evolved from the rude, monkey-like beings of the previous age, but no one would be able to help the Enforcer in its plans. So it goes creating a new one, called elves. This should be the race, the elect ones. To further the quick evolution of elves, the Enforcer itself assumed the identity of one of them, a red-hair young elf, but it couldn't keep always that look and had to revert to its orginal form from time to time.

The evil energies called by the Criminal finally arrived to the Earth. They was quickly dubbed Horrors as horror was their weapon. Those beings feeded on the terror and the fear they inspired, and the elves found that, to survive, they had to provoke themselves terrible pain and fear, making the Horrors divert their attention elsewhere. A ruthless, painful ritual was adopted, and those elves with strong enough had their skin devastated by thorns.

World #5 - Mankind and other amenities

Eventually energy levels went down again, taking with them Horrors and the other powerful beings. Humans remained alone on the surface of the planet. The Criminal went dormant again under the safe cover of the Atlantic ocean, right in front of the New England coast, and the Enforcer managed to survive the 5th world by keeping the elven form and assuming several identities of rich and influential men.

At the end of the 5th world, with the approaching of the return of an energy level high enough, the Criminal restarted its activities, geared to stop the Enforcer ability to return to its original place. During the 20th century, the Criminal sent its minions on the landmass to kill and paralyze with terror those who were close to find the truth and to give the Enforcer its victory. Terrible creatures raised from the deep, feeding on the sanity itself of the humans.

World #6 - Per aspra ad astra

Meanwhile, the Enforcer developed some serious split personality problems, shifting continuously from its original form to the human/elvish one. Shortly after the start of the Criminal activities, the two forms begun to exist together, a double but unique being, aware of its status. On the early 21st century, the Earth population finally saw the Enforcer's original form, and they called it a dragon, a silver and blue dragon.

The Criminal didn't suffered from these problems, focused as it was in plaguing mankind trying to stop the technological advancements that could make the Enforcer's travel back home possible. The Black Plague, HIV, world wide wars, nuclear weapons, the matrix crash of 2029, the VITAS outbreak came all from the same source.

But mankind, aided by the Enforcer, managed to develop itself. A new breed of humans, the Otakus, were born, humans able to meld their minds with the intelligent machines, and capable to stepping up the advancements needed by the Enforcer. Men and machines became more and more the same, Artificial Intelligences took part in political world summits.

The Criminal finally found a way to return to its original place and, aided by weak, but still terrible, Horror-like beings, started to build a "bridge" in order to encompass the space between the Earth and its native plane. The Enforcer, disguided with its elven features, contacted somehumans and sent them to stop this building process, sometimes with success but sometimes failing miserably. It knew that only the technology could help mankind against a return of the Horrors.

More than a thousand years later.

Mankind has conquered the stars. Great, powerful battle machines were built, but the Criminal managed to destroy the knowledge and the secrets needed to build them. Humans were stuck with those few remaining giant robots called Mechs. Culture and society were kept alive only by small outposts of brave humans.

But a new hope came.

Piloted by semi-supernatural beings arrived from the Outer Sphere, descendants of the Otakus, new Mechs are joining mankind and the Enforcer itself in the battle against the ultimate evil...

It's TRUE! BELIEVE!

I don't think a campaign that spans the entire timeframe is desirable, but
some interaction between the 2 ages can be one hell of an adventure.
Here is what happened in one game I played in a couple of years ago:



Our team crashed on an island in the Bermuda triangle after an encounter
with some Azzie flyboys in a near hurricane. After finding shelter, we settled in for the night to wait out the storm. The next day, we awoke sans equipment and
wearing strange clothing made from natural materials such as wool and leather.

Our mage went astral to do some recon and immediately returned to her body screaming. Setting out along the shoreline we found the wreckage of a sailing ship and were able to equip ourselves. We could find no traces of our plane.

Days passed, and we found that we were not in fact on a small island, but in some
strange new land. Our mage was hardest hit as magic was very different, but she
soon learned to improvise. Our rigger found that he had an uncanny empathy with animals. And our decker (me) developed a real talent for obtaining information as well as "material goods".

Eventually we were able to return to "our world" after a few sessions and we had been given a valuable clue in our struggle against Aztechnology. And no, I'm still not certain what really happened to us, but it was a damn fine story arc in one of the best campaigns I have experienced.

My campaign actually did cover both games. How I did it? Well, the campaign was divided in two: a shadowrun campaign and an Earthdawn campaign, apparently with no ties at all.
The events in the Earthdawn campaign revolved about discovering and destroying a tremendously-powerful jewel, and obtaining vengeance.
The Shadowrun campaign, on the other side, seem to have no link between runs. Ocassionaly, the same Johnson would get them to recover a lost jewel from old times: once a collar, then a helmet,... inside each of this jewels lied dormant one of the pieces that was destroyed in the other campaign.
The link between both campaigns was a diary that my Earthdawn character (I was the master, so the character was always present, so the diary could tell all the events and not be bothered by a classical "hey, Joe wasn't there that day, how could he write it down?" The diary told all the events, and when my players found it, they'd tied together some runs that had been taking place.
The other nexus was Arasgael, a demon, that had obviously lived from the 4th world to the 6th one and wanted to see the jewel together once more, thus influencing over the SR characters to do as he pleased.
Obviously, the centre of both campaigns was the SR one, but probably it was due to the fact that we didn't get to play more than two or three games of ED, since I just couldn't get my players to get into the propper mood and everything. Pity.

I thought about a game that started in Earthdawn and then the PC's would be put into a deep sleep on the metaplanes when magic declined and reawaken in the 6th world. This would be an awesome Idea, but the more I thought about, the more against it I became. Why? They'd be incredibly powerful. They'd have to fight dragons and IE's for a challenge.

What?

Noone wants to do the campaign where the shadowrunners have to stop a group of heavily cybered and magicked elite Aztechnology troopers from their mad plan to use an alien time portal to travel back in time to kill Dunklezahn (known then as Mountainshadow) with a thermo-nuclear bomb so he can't stop Aztechnology from forming a astral bridge that will allow the horrors to invade our world in 2057?

It's got everything!

Alien time portals!
Horrors!
Earthdawn!
Shadowrun!
Thermo-nuclear weapons!
Dunklezahn! (Mountainshadow!)

What no takers? Fine. Johnson Forgetable wants you to go to so and so corporate facility and steal such and such datafile. Sigh.........

@ booklord:
I'm in! My char's name is Reece.

Heh, sounds like a blast, Booklord. There needs to be some human sacrifice involved with the time portal, though. Can't have the Azzie's breaking from stereotype

booklord, if you start that run in this forum, I'll join. Just give me the character design limits, and I'll have something ready.

What about this. PAST LIVEs.

Think about it., with past lives you could run an ED game,then a SR game.

Or the opposite... Run an extended SR campaign, and as peoples characters die (as they invariably do...) steal thei character sheets and convert them as closely as possible to ED - then once all of the players have fave 'dead' characters or the campaign ends, ressurect those charactrs in Earthdawn, where they lived out their previous lives - maybe you can even explain some eges and flaws or abilities 'in game' here...

Well, I'd run the ED game first, then run the SR game.

When timetravell is discovered you could do a SR > ED. But if you want to go ED > SR there is that huge time gap. You might have to do an army of darkness alternative ending. For those that have not seen it Ash gets a potion, dim wited as always he can't recall anything and takes to much of it and sleeps to the apocalypse (more or less). So ED chars take sleepy sleepy potion in some safe place (known to be around in the SR days, a dragons hoard perhaps) and wakes up in 20xx to a whole new world where all their skills are crap or in some cases probably super neat.

The other possibility would be your all immortal elven party playing their way to the future ... that will be one freakin' long campaign.

I was actually thinking of a sleepy-sleepy potion, or a magical sleep of someother kind. The potion or magical sleep would wake them up when the mana level was high enough.
I would keep my players in the dark, but it'd tough explaining to them why they couldn't play a T'Skrang, Obsidiman, or Windling.

The dragons did that with T'skrang. Gave'em some magical widget that let them hibernate through the Scourge within their kaers. Not sure how they were triggered to wake up, though.

I`m pretty sure that i will do a ED -> SR campaign, year after year spanning several thousand years, well maybe not every year but most of it.
But it is gonna take a frigging long time and if done properly, it might be quite rewarding.

ps: Didn`t the Dwarf King of Throal, can`t remember the name, have access to a "immortality" potion of somekind?

The Kings of Throal, received three longevity potions from Icewing before teh Scourge. This allowed Varulus to reign throughout the Scourge, but severely impacted his fertility.

Well, seem`s i have to re-read whole bunch of ED books.

Not too many, Dragons .pdf and I think the Throal sourcebook.

Well, yeah those and the others `cause i read them a long time ago.
Where i can get the Dragons pdf, seem to have lost it somewhere?

Well not exactly the time to ask this, the players ain`t gonna get to SR time in a long time, but here goes.
How would you convert the ED character to SR system?

Divide the attributes by three, convert skill ranks to an equal number of skill points in the closest approximate skill, convert adept talents to adept abilities and closest approximate skills, keeping in mind the limitations of each. Treat the character's circle as their Initaite Grade, any talent that falls outside the SR amgician's perview, such as Spell matricies, should be considered a metamagic, work out the rules for spell matricies as per Filtering, save permanent.

Use Spell Design rules in MitS to convert ED spells to SR.

Magical items should be converted to Unique Foci that convey approximate bonuses the same as their ED counterparts; weapons can be converted easily, when converting armor, consider the impact armor rating to be the same as the Physical armor rating, the Ballistic armor rating equal to half that, and each has a Quickened Astral Armor spell equal to the Mystic Armor rating.

Thanks Ancient.