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Earthdawn, Second Edition
A powerful magical society had developed, but then the Horrors came. Fortunately, the people had warning, so they built underground shelters to hide until the magical levels receded and the Horrors were forced back to their home dimension. Now—and earlier than expected—the magic levels have fallen but leveled off, and most but not all of the Horrors are gone. The political landscape reforms itself as the world re-emerges. It’s a new dawn! Time to become a hero and form your own legend!
Biggest problem with this: It’s a D&D clone that doesn’t seem set apart enough. (Really, it seems like a campaign setting they couldn’t get an official license for.) It was originally made by FASA, the folks who created Shadowrun, and apparently is a prequel to that: Shadowrun takes place in the Sixth Age, when magic returns to the world. Earthdawn is the Fourth Age, before the magic (eventually) goes away and ushers in the modern era of science. The thing is, the reason Shadowrun did well was because near-future magitek-punk was a cool new idea at the time, and the setting really worked.
Here, you can see them trying to change around standard fantasy tropes: Dwarves rule some areas, a group of elves got turned into walking torture-porn, the “dungeons” are shelters that the Horrors got into, and everyone has some kind of magical powers. But really, it’s not enough to set it apart from every other fantasy game out there.
And then there’s the problem of the system: Everything is divided up into “steps”, which are combinations of dice you roll for that skill level to try to beat a target number the GM sets. You cannot remember steps without a chart, they’re often annoying to calculate, and the distribution of returns of each of the steps is…really problematic, at best.
So, I’m not wild about the setting, and I’m not wild about the system. And there really isn’t much in the way of fluff or adventure hooks beyond that in here. So I’m underwhelmed wit the book overall. Oh, well.
Biggest problem with this: It’s a D&D clone that doesn’t seem set apart enough. (Really, it seems like a campaign setting they couldn’t get an official license for.) It was originally made by FASA, the folks who created Shadowrun, and apparently is a prequel to that: Shadowrun takes place in the Sixth Age, when magic returns to the world. Earthdawn is the Fourth Age, before the magic (eventually) goes away and ushers in the modern era of science. The thing is, the reason Shadowrun did well was because near-future magitek-punk was a cool new idea at the time, and the setting really worked.
Here, you can see them trying to change around standard fantasy tropes: Dwarves rule some areas, a group of elves got turned into walking torture-porn, the “dungeons” are shelters that the Horrors got into, and everyone has some kind of magical powers. But really, it’s not enough to set it apart from every other fantasy game out there.
And then there’s the problem of the system: Everything is divided up into “steps”, which are combinations of dice you roll for that skill level to try to beat a target number the GM sets. You cannot remember steps without a chart, they’re often annoying to calculate, and the distribution of returns of each of the steps is…really problematic, at best.
So, I’m not wild about the setting, and I’m not wild about the system. And there really isn’t much in the way of fluff or adventure hooks beyond that in here. So I’m underwhelmed wit the book overall. Oh, well.