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As the introduction gently states, the huge book is conceptually broken up into four parts, each of a number of more bite-sized chapters. The first is an description of the default campain setting, Barasive, elaborating on the material previously provided in the Players Compendium and in particular the land and people, places of legend, and astral space. The second part is more concerned with "the art of Gamemastering", including adventure encounters, healing, blood magic, and airships and riverboats. The third part is the supplementary material of magical treasure and gamemaster characters. The final section is various creatures, starting from the relatively mundane, to the more exotic such as spirits, dragons and finally the terrible horrors which continue to infect the world of Earthdawn. All this is included with various Appendicies, tables and charts and a creature-design shortlist.
Much of the first section is of the "elaboration" variety; there really is not much here that a well-versed player-character should not be aware of, which is a little disappointing as I was hoping for more cultic secrets of the various races, kingdoms and of Barasive history. This is not to suggest the material is bad; far from it, it is very interesting background material, very well-written and very comprehensive elaboration, with good balance between history, the name-giver races, the cities, the kingdoms and trade and the various geographical locations. It's just that something with the words "Gamemaster's Compendium" does usually a difference in substance to a "Player's Compendium". This does not however, detract greatly from the section as the level of detail and variety is truly incredible. Of particular fantastic note is "Death's Sea", an ocean of molten rock and a rich source of "Truefire", a pure form of that fantasy element. Another is the Blood Wood, a region of twisted and tortured elves who sought that mechanism to protect themselves from the overworldy and chaotic horrors.
The section on gamemastering provides the sort of sensible information that every good roleplaying game must include with a handful of Earthdawn-setting specific ideas, especially with regard to the tone of the setting. These comments are fair, but not particularly special. They do not, for example, make particularly strong use of the idea of narrative trajectory or character development. On the other hand, the game-specific material such as sample difficulty numbers, perception tests, NPC attitudes, and roleplaying social interactions and the assigning of "legend points" are particularly well developed. The chapter on 'Adventures and Campaigns' places particular emphasis on the horror theme, with several suggestions for campaign settings. Again however, a stronger chapter follows in "Adventuring", which provides elaborations on various actions and experiences typical to the adventurer and the game mechanics to resolve them. Included here are the rules for climbing, falling, fire, traps, curses, loot, overland, sea/river, air, and underground travel, travel hazards, encountering wild animals, exploring kaers, fatigue, injury, poison and disease. As you can see it's quite comprehensive yet again and the various diseases and poisons are given sufficiently exotic names.
The same can be said for the chapter on Healing, which emphasises the importance of early treatment (true that), and various natural medicines with the fantasy herbs ("adept's blood", "Garlen's hand") as well as the mundane (aloe, garlic). Further, the section on Resurrection does have a touch of the mythic to it. In contrast to healing, the chapter on "Blood Magic" discusses the ability of inducing magic by sacrificing one's own blood and thus recalling the torments of the people during The Scourge of the Horrors. The short chapter discusses thematic considerations, setting history, death magic and the creation of blood magic charms. The latter come with permanent damage and are grouped with some very generic examples of Alteration (to the user's body), Booster (bonus to skill, talent or damage), Enhancement (additional senses or pool of damage points), and poison.
The final chapter on the "art of gamemastering" deals with Airships and RIverboats. Although the former are few in number they are very significant to the Earthdawn world. Magical and expensive, often made of stone, they range from single rower airboats, to the mighty behemoths some 250 yards on each side. The rather more prosaic riverboats receive significantly less attention. Ships of both varieties have six Attributes; Speed, Maneuverability, Firepower, Hull, Damage and Crew. An example of the typical creakiness to the Earthdawn rules is the use of a flat step bonus or penalty of 1 to a ship's Speed attribute rather than a variable or multiplier. Several pages are spent on ship hazards, combat with various combat maneuvers (e.g., "Board", "Fire", "Ground Assault"), weapons, repair and maintenance. The chapter concludes with six pages of example ship statistics.
The first chapter in the "supplementary material" section is magical treasures, consisting of over forty pages. The item design rules, it must be mentioned, are a particularly nice touch to the system; magical treasures are individual, and further knowledge of an item provides access to additional benefits - very cool. At this point the book, or at least it seemed to me, to take a turn towards producing "filler" material with an unnecessarily inflated page-count, something I personally dislike. Indeed, a more elaborate version of "how to create magic items" instead of examples would have been more substantial. The next chapter is in this theme is "Gamemaster Characters" which initially provides guidelines for gamemaster characters, differentiated into "patrons", "opponents" and "supporters", along with a short gamemaster character creation section (for some unknown reason the time-honoured title of "non-player character" is not used in Earthdawn). This guidelines themselves are of good-average quality, but like the preceding chapter the provision of some forty-four pages of sample characters which could have been better served with more attention to the guidelines rather than examples. There is a lot of white-space here.
The final section is chapters of the various denizens of the Earthdawn world. The first chapter discusses the use of creatures in the campaign, creature design and customisation, powers and descriptions before moving into creature descriptions. Again this falls into the average-good level of design with the bonus of following a logical and detailed progression. In a regression to earlier game design, there is little in the Earthdawn creature descriptions that provide a sense of ecology or species-organisation and much that provides a sense of aggressive targets for combat - needless to say the quantity of herbivores is extremely slim. For some of the particularly exotic creatures an adventure hook is provided; for others they are reminiscent of some of the strange and frankly, quite silly, monsters that have graced roleplaying games in the past. The page count of the actual creatures comes in at a hefty 80 pages. This is followed by a chapter on Spirits, which begins with describing their motivations, strength, development of spirit allies, elementals, named spirits, summoning, and various spirit powers. Again, this is well-written, a logical and detailed progression. Following this there are several pages of sample spirits of various types and strengths.
The next chapter is on that great fantasy staple, Dragons. Here the description is somewhat more simple; dragons are either allies (approximately 1/3 of a page of text) or enemies (1 page). Significant detail is undertaken on dragon lifecycle and metamorphosis, draconic culture and etiquette, dance and gesture, language, dragon history, relations with the "Young Name-Giving Races", dragon magic, powers, dragon-kin (the result of "mating of a Name-givers and dragons in Name-giver form"), dragon-like creatures (including sample characters), dragons themselves from the "common dragons", with individual examples, the Leviathans (dragons of the water), cathay dragons (from the east of course) and notes on their culture, feathered dragons, and finally a good ten pages on the Great Dragons with several individual examples. Overall, this is a fairly impressive section of the work deserving of praise for both the scale and detail.
The final chapter is a bit of a high note from my perspective. One of the key motifs of the Earthdawn game is the mysterious and terrifying "Horrors" whose form is either the the most chaotic and repulsive physical manifestations or the most disconcerting mental invasions. Here at last one discovers perhaps not enough to fully explain the Horrors, but certainly enough about them to feed the inquiries of PCs who must know more of how to confront these archetypal Earthdawn enemies. Rather delightfully, Horrors have the capacity to infect places and items and a couple of example "cursed items" are sufficient to give a sense of such items. Horror powers are, of course, described with some detail, and as expected they have quite a few. However, once again, descriptive and design elements are cut short in favour of examples - some sixty pages of different horrors are provided, again with adventure hooks for the some of the toughest and more interesting.
Like the Players Compendium, I am extremely impressed with the production quality of Earthdawn, the excellent quality of the artwork and more than satisfied with the general design of the book, the writing style, and the exotic and evocative campaign world of Barasive. On the other hand, I was less impressed with the pages and pages of sample magic items, sample creatures, the lack of species ecology, the sixty pages of horrors etc. This said, it is still a very worthwhile production and the book does serve its purpose well. If a summary complaint were to be issued it would take the form of: "Less examples, more design" and "Too many pages! Two hundred very good pages is better than five hundred average-good pages". There is perhaps a sense that the author's were trying a little too hard to do everything for the game that they clearly love. Nevertheless, they have succeeded to a fair extent: I am still eagerly awaiting the opportunity to get my teeth seriously into this game; there is a real sense of imagination and adventure here and the potential for many months of excellent gaming - but with a fair bit of prior reading.
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