Probably me dredging up ancient ideas and hence the question. Given the information in Harlequin and Harlequin returns, as well as the statement of Earthdawn being the 'mythological past' of the Shadowrun world, I was wondering whether anyone had attempted this successfully or otherwise?

I played around with the concept in GURPS at one point, the multiple-period being easier to do in that system without significant work but also resulting in losing much of the 'flavour' of the Shadowrun system in the process...

Anyway, another mind-numbingly simple question which you have more than likely heard over and over again. But, still, if you could reply...

Kage

The difficulty, of course, is Time Travel. Magic and Time don't mix well, and it's a Hell of a lot easier to have ED characters translated into SR through Hibernation or something rather than the reverse...which, though not impossible, would require bending a few rules.

Have them get caught in a snowstorm. Things go bad and they end up freezing to death....

Thousands of years later, they wake up in a medical laboratory where scientists and doctors thawed you out after somebody discovered you stuck in a cave buried under 6000 feet of ice. Since you were frozen, the chunk of land you froze in separated and "floated" to where Antarctica is now, or maybe Greenland, ect ect.

An interresting thought...
The characters start out with amnesia. Later in the campaign they find out some very interresting things about their 'ancient' past. Players that don't even know about EarthDawn would definitely not see this one coming.

Or you could use Parlainth.

IIRC, there's been a topic on this same issue just a short while ago, might get some ideas from there too.

In Parlainth, one of the options the GM is given is that there was a Gateway to Astral Space that might still be functional.

In my ED game, I made this not only a gateway to other dimensions, but times as well. The makers (the Therans), only came to barely discover what their own creation was capable of, when Parlianth fell.

A person could use this Gateway to not only send ED characters to the future, but SR characters back to the past. Either from a Gateway opened in the past to the future, or by finding the gateway in 2060 and mucking with it.

I plan to someday do a crossover between ED and SR. Using the player characters from both games. I know some of my players are looking forward to it. I am too. But the time is not yet ripe.

Currently, on of the player characters in my SR game has a Weapon Focus that is also the residing place of the ghost of a Theran who died in Parlianth. He is basically her ghost master, and besides acting as an instructor (she is an initiatied adept now), he has told her all about the 4th World.

It was a bit of an open-ended GM device. You could also allow players to be adrift in one of the Parlainth astral ships which were lost, only to find yourself in teh Sixth World and only able to understand the elves talking Sperethiel.

I ran an extended campaign for four years based on the ED/SR interconnection that I ended in 1997 just as the "Heart of Dragon" series of novel came out. I developed this storyline in isolation to Jak Koke, and I had no idea of the "official" FASA plot to whack the Big D.

The basic premise of my storyline was created from a ED book called the "Legends of Earthdawn" (currently available at www.stiggybaby.com the last time I checked) and the story on page 55 called the "Heart of Heroes." The short of it was there was a magic item, called the "Heart of Heroes" which had the ability to seal the barrier between our world and the metaplane of the Horrors. The Heart could only be activated by 9 chosen heroes, one each "name giver races" (dragons, humans, elves, dwarves, orcs, trolls, windlings, t'skrang, and obsidiman) bearing a key attuned to their own race. The last three created problems in 2056 because (obviously) the mana curve was not high enough for these to "express" naturally. Windlings had expressed in Tir Na Nog based on a reference in Paranormal animals of Europe (the sprite on pages 94-95 looked a lot like a windling to me, so I went with it.) The t'skrang had to be "grown"...my runners had a steal a sample of his DNA from a sperm bank (and that was a hoot). The runners also had to find a liferock and reinfuse it with mana to produce the obsidiman.

Similar to the novel series, Aztechnology, controlled by a servant of the Horrors, was attempting to create an artificial mana spike so that the Horrors could cross before metahumanity was ready. Most of the campaign was spent tracking down the other heroes (one of the runners in my party, an earth elemental aspected magician, was the human champion), the keys, and finally the heart of itself (which was in the possession of Aztechnology inconveniently enough). The last battle was appropriately climatic and most of the party died. The very last part of the battle, the villain, a great feathered serpent, was almost successful in bringing the Great Horror Verjigorm through a rift, when the party (with some help) was successful in destroying the feathered serpent. The Heroes had to sacrifice themselves in order to power the Heart, and successfully closed the rift. All in all, I liked my way of doing it better (but I am a little biased).

As a side note, I'm in the process of running a sequel based on the Book of Horrow & the pillars of Thera. Should be pretty exciting.