The Inside Scoop on Gaming

What can I say, I really like this game. I love the mechanics. I love the basic premise of the setting. I hate how FASA has discontinued it's production, but I guess that's the law of supply and demand in action for you. At least it provides a good example of how a really great game can get killed in a very small and competitive market that just wasn't looking for this type of thing at the time (I mean, Whitewolf was eating the competition alive when ED was release; with good products too I might add).

For those not familiar with the game setting (which is key to the whole game), it's essentially a somewhat Tolkienesque world in which ancient evils, called horrors, have come back and destroyed or corrupted most of the earth. The peoples of the lands holed themselves up in mighty underground fortresses called "kaers" (one of those ways they fit "dungeons" into the game) where they waited out the ravages of the horrors. At the time in which the game is generally set, the horrors are gradually receding back to where they came from and the peoples are reclaiming their abandoned world.

I love the basic premise of the setting. It provides a decent, if somewhat believability stretching, reason for the heroes to exist and for things such as monsters and dungeons. It's not a perfect gameworld and I've tweaked it to death for my own campaign, but it's decent enough to provide a really good feel for what Earthdawn is intended to be: AD&D meets Call of Cthulhu.

The mechanics might take some getting used to. They can be overly complex to the inexperienced who might only know of something like AD&D, but in general I found that things were very well explained (I've been gaming for 15 years. I've probably lost touch with what "well explained" means by now, but things seemed okay.)

The basic mechanic is the currently ubiquitous, and very easy to grasp, target number system. The GM assigns a difficulty number to an action, and through the rolling of a combination of dice and modifiers, you have to meet or beat the target number in order to succeed. Things get tricky with Earthdawn when you constantly have to refer to the "Step" table which tells you exactly what dice you have to roll when making an action test. This might be the one key problem with this system. Until you have the Step chart memorized, the game can be exceedingly slow, but once you've got the hang of it, it flows extremely fast and gives a very satisfying feeling of accomplishment to action tests.

Characters are created in a straightforward manner. You roll, or allocate points, to your basic statistics (of which there are 6). These form the basis for your skill rolls. Then you choose your race and your discipline (somewhat like AD&D classes but much less restrictive). Choosing talents and skills comes next. It's fairly standard stuff, but the prime concept is that the heroes are somewhat better than their peers and this is reflected through their possession of "talents" which allow for some astounding feats of derring-do to be performed. By the way, this is by no means a game for people who HATE power gaming. It encourages munchkin characters but makes the experience FUN, not tedious and mindless (think of it as being a dash of Champions added to AD&D).

The most confusing thing about this system has to be how it handles magic. It took me at least 4 reads to get things right; the concepts were quite strange to me at first. Basically, you have a book of spells, but you can only have a certain number of spells ready at any time for instant use. If you want to use a spell you don't have readied, you have to purge one of your readied spells, then go through a few dice rolls in order to ready the spell you want to cast. Add to this the concepts of "Blood-magic" and a unique way of handling magical items (they grow in power as you learn more about them), and you get a very complex magic system that can get bogged down in book-keeping, not spell casting. (But who said being a mage should be easy ;-)

The art and presentation of this book is not as flashy or as generous as in some other publications, but I found it to be of good quality and it stuck with the theme of the setting. The layout was simple and easy to read, as was the english (for the most part, though any glaring errors elude me at the moment). The introductory story was a pretty good read also, IMHO.

One last thing. I want to know what the hell FASA was thinking when they decided to include the "Treasure cards" (pre-printed pictures of certain magical items on cardstock, much like collector cards). This has to rank as one of the hokiest includes in any product I've seen. I mean, were they thinking to attract the CCG crowd with those things? They serve no real purpose in game terms except as cheesey handouts for your players. But whatever, I digress...

Earthdawn is AD&D done right. It's fast paced, yet consistent. Super heroic power mongering, but role-playing friendly. For me, it's the fact that it takes so many good elements of other systems and combines them into a really FUN product which makes it stand out in my mind as one of the best RPGs to have graced the shelved in the 90s. Too bad it's dead.

Style: 3 (Average)
Substance: 5 (Excellent!)

Earthdawn
Author: various Category: game Company/Publisher: FASA Line: Earthdawn Cost: $30.00 Page count: 335 ISBN: 1-55560-213-4 SKU: 6000 Capsule Review by Curtis Batt on 08/25/99. Genre tags: Fantasy Horror Post-apocalypse	What can I say, I really like this game. I love the mechanics. I love the basic premise of the setting. I hate how FASA has discontinued it's production, but I guess that's the law of supply and demand in action for you. At least it provides a good example of how a really great game can get killed in a very small and competitive market that just wasn't looking for this type of thing at the time (I mean, Whitewolf was eating the competition alive when ED was release; with good products too I might add). For those not familiar with the game setting (which is key to the whole game), it's essentially a somewhat Tolkienesque world in which ancient evils, called horrors, have come back and destroyed or corrupted most of the earth. The peoples of the lands holed themselves up in mighty underground fortresses called "kaers" (one of those ways they fit "dungeons" into the game) where they waited out the ravages of the horrors. At the time in which the game is generally set, the horrors are gradually receding back to where they came from and the peoples are reclaiming their abandoned world. I love the basic premise of the setting. It provides a decent, if somewhat believability stretching, reason for the heroes to exist and for things such as monsters and dungeons. It's not a perfect gameworld and I've tweaked it to death for my own campaign, but it's decent enough to provide a really good feel for what Earthdawn is intended to be: AD&D meets Call of Cthulhu. The mechanics might take some getting used to. They can be overly complex to the inexperienced who might only know of something like AD&D, but in general I found that things were very well explained (I've been gaming for 15 years. I've probably lost touch with what "well explained" means by now, but things seemed okay.) The basic mechanic is the currently ubiquitous, and very easy to grasp, target number system. The GM assigns a difficulty number to an action, and through the rolling of a combination of dice and modifiers, you have to meet or beat the target number in order to succeed. Things get tricky with Earthdawn when you constantly have to refer to the "Step" table which tells you exactly what dice you have to roll when making an action test. This might be the one key problem with this system. Until you have the Step chart memorized, the game can be exceedingly slow, but once you've got the hang of it, it flows extremely fast and gives a very satisfying feeling of accomplishment to action tests. Characters are created in a straightforward manner. You roll, or allocate points, to your basic statistics (of which there are 6). These form the basis for your skill rolls. Then you choose your race and your discipline (somewhat like AD&D classes but much less restrictive). Choosing talents and skills comes next. It's fairly standard stuff, but the prime concept is that the heroes are somewhat better than their peers and this is reflected through their possession of "talents" which allow for some astounding feats of derring-do to be performed. By the way, this is by no means a game for people who HATE power gaming. It encourages munchkin characters but makes the experience FUN, not tedious and mindless (think of it as being a dash of Champions added to AD&D). The most confusing thing about this system has to be how it handles magic. It took me at least 4 reads to get things right; the concepts were quite strange to me at first. Basically, you have a book of spells, but you can only have a certain number of spells ready at any time for instant use. If you want to use a spell you don't have readied, you have to purge one of your readied spells, then go through a few dice rolls in order to ready the spell you want to cast. Add to this the concepts of "Blood-magic" and a unique way of handling magical items (they grow in power as you learn more about them), and you get a very complex magic system that can get bogged down in book-keeping, not spell casting. (But who said being a mage should be easy ;-) The art and presentation of this book is not as flashy or as generous as in some other publications, but I found it to be of good quality and it stuck with the theme of the setting. The layout was simple and easy to read, as was the english (for the most part, though any glaring errors elude me at the moment). The introductory story was a pretty good read also, IMHO. One last thing. I want to know what the hell FASA was thinking when they decided to include the "Treasure cards" (pre-printed pictures of certain magical items on cardstock, much like collector cards). This has to rank as one of the hokiest includes in any product I've seen. I mean, were they thinking to attract the CCG crowd with those things? They serve no real purpose in game terms except as cheesey handouts for your players. But whatever, I digress... Earthdawn is AD&D done right. It's fast paced, yet consistent. Super heroic power mongering, but role-playing friendly. For me, it's the fact that it takes so many good elements of other systems and combines them into a really FUN product which makes it stand out in my mind as one of the best RPGs to have graced the shelved in the 90s. Too bad it's dead. Style: 3 (Average) Substance: 5 (Excellent!)