First Impressions
Since it's a CD it has my vote for durability as nothing much short of total neglect and intentional abuse will hurt it. Beats the heck out of the 5-page pulp minibooks given away a few years back. Of course, those books also didn't have the fairly restrictive computer requirements of this CD. I personally had to jump through hoops to get it to work and not due to any real fault of my own (more details below).

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Content

For those of you not in the know, Earthdawn is the fantasy RPG released by FASA a few years ago. It has elements of heroic dark high-fantasy thanks to the lingering presence of the brutal Horrors: extradimensional beings that feed on the suffering and misery of mortals. Earthdawn is a world with a rich, complex history that traces back several millenia and a wide variety of races ranging from the traditional elves, dwarves, orcs, trolls and pixie-like Windlings to the reptilian T'skrang and rocky Obsidimen.

ED's system is class-based with each character having a list of potential skills and abilities available to them. Having multiple classes is possible, but can be difficult. Success tests are based on the character's attribute and skill ranks to determine the number and type of dice used. All dice are totaled and compared to the target number. Beat the target number and it works, less and it fails. Needless to say, the better your skills and attributes the better your dice and the more likely you are to succeed. To keep in line with the heroic elements any die that rolls its max value is rerolled.
The CD includes the full text and artwork of the Earthdawn main book, along with a fairly useful character creator/manager. The files are standard HTML with only a little JAVA and can be read by most any web browser. Graphics are included and I expect to see them used throughout the 'net on ED sites. (I will note that I didn't find a single "Thou shalt not use our graphics" disclaimer anywhere on the CD)

There's also a character creation/management program written for DOS. It's a fairly functional program, but can be a bit confusing. To people newer to computers it will look quite odd as it seems to have been written using the old ASCII menu generator used with a lot of BBS utilities of the late 80's/early 90's.

It does keep track of who can use what skills, appropriate spells and items and it even does the calculations for the point-based character creation, speeding up the process immensely. It may be ugly, but it got the job done.

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Evaluation
The good part is that this is the full version of the main rules. All the tables, charts, indexes, and references are included. There was no rearrangement of the information and it is laid out just as the book. The information can be printed at will and is a godsend to GM's needing handouts listing weapons and armor or the dice progression charts.
There may have been some slight page alteration for effect, but I've not looked at a hardcopy of EarthDawn in some time. If there are any changes, they look good. The graphics are of sufficient quality that they look very nice, but no so bloated that they make your machine drag.

The search tool and the fairly lean page design makes it a nice quick reference for forgetful individuals. I can't remember the number of times my players ask me where to find the saving throw/resistance roll/spell list in numerous other books.

The character generator's ability to run on any machine is a boon, as is its capacity for having multiple characters open at once. While not true multitasking, it does a good job of letting you work on more than one character at a time. This could be handy for GM's needing an NPC gallery. The files are fairly small so a whole host of individuals can be carried around on a floppy or two.

There are downsides: You get what you pay for. This is a free CD (It comes in specially marked copies of Shadis or Inquest) and it shows. The text still makes reference to page numbers, something I've been completely unable to find in the index, search tool, or borders.

Then there's the technical aspects: the CD uses long-filenames. This doesn't bother Macintosh or Linux users, but unless you've got a newer version of Windows95 or NT you won't be able to use the disk. I'm afraid it's entirely incompatible with DOS, which really irritates me as I have an older PC in my the room I tend to game in.

Overall I have to give it a B. The material is nice and the interface is fairly good, but it just didn't quite hit the mark. There were too many irritating technical problems combined with the kludgy DOS character creator to give it a polished feel. I would have been much more irritated with this had I actually paid for it.

Style: 4 (Classy and well done)
Substance: 4 (Meaty)