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Message no. 1
From: Todd Montgomery <tmont@****.WVU.EDU>
Subject: Earthdawn Review
Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1993 11:26:07 -0400
This appeared on the newsgroup rec.games.frp.misc. I am posting it
here becasue some may be interested. It seems that FASA took some
magic concepts from SR and used them here.

Newsgroups: rec.games.frp.misc
Subject: REVIEW: Earthdawn
Message-ID: <clay.745006419@****>
From: clay@****.vortech.com (Clay Luther)
Date: 10 Aug 93 18:13:39 GMT
Sender: root@*******.com (Operator)
Organization: Vortech Data, Inc.
Keywords: Earthdawn
Summary: A review of the new Earthdawn FRPG
Lines: 209


Earthdawn
Fasa Corporation
$30
335 pages, hardcover


AD&D has remained the most popular fantasy role-playing game for many years,
despite the rise and fall of many fantasy alternatives. Many of these
alternatives went out of their way to present an entirely different
approach to fantasy gaming than AD&D while some choose a more conservative
path and deliberately choose to imitate AD&D at some level.

Earthdawn is FASA's latest game release, a purebred fantasy role-playing
game and world, destined to tilt with the AD&D windmill. What it lacks in
bravery and ingenuity, it makes up for in class and quality.

If I were to describe AD&D to a new player as briefly as I could, I might
say "You create a character by generating six statistics: Dexterity, Strength,
Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. You then pick a race (like
Human, Elf, or Dwarf) and your class (like Warrior, Rogue, or Wizard). You
usually start at first level. After purchasing a few non-weapon proficiencies
granted by your class and equipping your character, you adventure. The point
of adventuring is to collect experience points which will help you increase
your level and gain more power."

If I were to describe Earthdawn to a new player as briefly as I could, I might
say "You create a character by generating six attributes: Dexterity, Strength,
Toughness, Perception, Willpower, and Charisma. You then pick a race (like
Human, Elf, or Dwarf) and your discipline (like Warrior, Thief, or Wizard).
You usually start at first circle. After purchasing a few talents and skills
granted by your discipline and equipping your character, you adventure. The
point of adventuring is to collect legend points which will help you increase
your circle and gain more power."

I hope the point is not missed. To write the above paragraph I merely copied
the body of the preceding paragraph and substituted new words. In essense,
this is what the authors of Earthdawn have done with AD&D.

FASA has choosen to compete with AD&D by offering a system that is very
familiar to AD&D players. Rather than generating something trully original,
FASA has merely regurgitated almost two-decade old concepts upon us.

Still, Earthdawn is not a bad game. Far from it. Earthdawn is a fine, high
quality fantasy game. Although FASA decided not to go out on a limb and give
us something new, they have fine tuned the archaic and creaking class/level
system into something a little more modern.


BASIC MECHANICS

At the core of Earthdawn is single unifying test system to resolve game
situations. It is a simple three step process: determine the difficulty
number, roll your dice, and beat the difficulty number to succeed.
Unfortunately, Earthdawn obfuscates this simple process by introducing a
different chart at two steps, and sometimes all three.

The first step, determining the difficulty number is by far the simplest.
Usually, the DN is easy enough to figure out (it's the defense value of
the target character or the casting difficulty of a spell). Sometimes the
GM will ahve to refer to a chart which will help him determine the DN of a
task. By cross-indexing the base requirement "level" of the person with a
difficulty level, the GM finds a range of difficulty numbers to pick from.
For example, I might decide that jumping a chasm is impossible for "ordinary"
(ie, most non-player characters) to do, but a "Class 1" person (that is,
reading through a few paragraphs of text below the chart, a person in Circles
1-4) could, and it would be a "Hard" task for this "Class 1" person.
Voila!
The chart spits out a DN with a range of 8-12.

The second step, determining how many dice to roll (and in Earthdawn, what
kind) is completely chart-bound. Characters skills and talents are rated in
"steps." A step basically indicates what number the character can expect to
roll on average. For example, if my Ride Horses step is 5, then I can expect
to roll a 5 on average. Now the chart comes in. Looking up "Step 5" I find
that I'll roll a D8. (Some steps require rolling multiple kinds of dice
for instance, Step 9 is a D10 + D6.) Obviously, your bags of dice used to
play AD&D will come in handy when playing Earthdawn. This isn't a large
problem (the character sheets provide a short version of the Step/Dice table on
the front), but merely evidence of the chart-heavy nature of the system.

The third step, determining the success level also requires a lookup on a
chart, unless you just needed to know if the roll was a simple success. There
are several levels of success "Poor" (which translates in common gamer
vernacular to "fumble" or "botch"), "Average",
"Good", "Excellent", and
"Extraordinary." The better the character's roll, the better his success.
For example, if the character has a DN of 7 on a test, a roll of 7 is
an average success and a roll of 15 is an excellent success. Unfortunately,
the chart is large and the progression appears somewhat arbitrary, so the
GM is forced to consult it.


CHARACTER CREATION

As mentioned before, Earthdawn character creation parallels AD&D character
creation. Generate your stats (which range from 3-18) either by rolling
4D6 (remove the lowest die) or by spending 66 attribute points. Select your
race (which may modify your attributes and will give you a "racial talent" such
as "Heat Sight" for Dwarfs). Your race may also bar you from certain
disciplines (for example, Trolls cannot follow the Thief discipline). Now,
select your discipline and purchase your Circle 1 talents. Finally, purchase
a few skills and equipment. Flesh out the character with a name and history
and you are ready to go.

All characters begin a Circle (read level) 1 and the rules currently support
characters up to Circle 8 (although, FASA tells us, this is certainly not the
limit of power). Like AD&D classes, Earthdawn disciplines define your
character. Your character can learn talents, magical abilities that only his
discipline can teach. Thus, the warrior discipline teaches you combat
talents and the wizard discipline teaches you spellcasting talents. Unlike
AD&D, the class/discipline system in Earthdawn is not quite as strict. For
example, while your Wizard discipline character does not learn any warrior
talents, he may learn warrior talents as skills (this is harder than just
learning talents magically in your discipline). This single, but important
point, makes this class/level system more palatable.

Generally, your character will have only one discipline, though any character
may learn a second discpline while adventuring. Humans have the unique
racial ability of Versatility, which allows them to learn any talent from any
discipline as a talent (instead of as a skill). This is a strong incentive to
play humans in Earthdawn, and a better incentive than AD&D's no class/level
restrictions. In Earthdawn, unlike AD&D, humans will become the most
versatile characters.

Pulling back a little, Earthdawn assumes that all disciplines (warrior,
wizard, archer, etc) are inherently magical, that the followers of these
disciplines shape magic in certain ways to perform the magical talents of
their disciplines. Anyone can learn to wield a sword, for instance, but only
a magically-aware character (an Adept) can use magic to wield a sword. This
is similar to the Ord-Storm Knight differentiation in Torg.


TALENTS AND SKILLS

There are many, many talents and skills. In most cases, any character can
learn any skill (or any talent that is learnable as a skill -- some talents
cannot be learned as skills). The skills and talents are interesting,
detailed, and many look like they'll be quite fun to play. This is probably
the strongest area of Earthdawn and its greatest strength over AD&D.


MAGIC

The magic system is thoughtful and complete, although superficially similar to
AD&D. Spells are arranged by discipline and circle (class and level). A
magician may cast any spell he knows or he may cast a spell from a grimoire
(any physically encoded form of a spell - a book, a couple of dice, a scroll).
Magicians do not forget spells once cast, and a well-prepared magician can
usually cast (his prepared) spells without repurcussion. The trouble arises
when trying to cast spells your character is unprepared to cast or does not
himself know.

While complete and interesting, the magic system provides no mechanics for
improvisational spell casting. Perhaps FASA will recitify this in the future.
However, seeing how difficult and dangerous it is for a magican to cast spells
"on the fly" or unprepared, I think Earthdawn's magic system is currently
geared against improvisational magic.

A highlight of the magic system is how Earthdawn handles magic items. When
a character finds a magic item, he must study it to learn its magical pattern.
This can take quite a long time and even involve adventuring. Once he has
understood some of the items history, purpose, and power, he can attempt to
"activate" the magic in the item (called thread weaving in Earthdawn). The
very act of this "weaving" binds the item to the character, linking the two
together. The game outcome of this is 1) you cannot really share your
magic items and 2) you don't ever want to lose your magic items for any reason
(an enemy could use the item as a pattern of you to attack you magically).
These additions make finding and using magic a very personal affair and
greatly enhances the flavor of the system.


COMBAT

Combat is very simple. Roll to hit and do damage. Damage is based on your
character's strength and the type of weapon he wields. Armor reduces damage,
although sufficiently high to hit rolls can completely by-pass most armor,
doing full damage. Earthdawn combat appears reasonably deadly, and resurrection
is apparently extremely uncommon. All in all, I give the combat system high
marks for its speed and simplicity; nothing appears horribly broken here.


THE WORLD

I was very surprised that the rulebook did not include a color plate of
Barsaive, the region in which FASA intends to place their Earthdawn sourcebooks.
The rules mention a fair amount of history and include a small chapter on
Barsaive. While Earthdawn can certainly, and easily, be run in any homebrew
world, FASA obviously wants you to play in the Earthdawn world. I was in the
end surprised at the lack of material in these sections considering FASA's
expertise at worldbuilding, and the lack of even a artistic map is unforgivable.


CONCLUSION

Earthdawn is a rather blatant attempt to cajole and seduce players from AD&D
with a game system that is comfortably similar if not conceptually identical.
People who long ago abandoned the AD&D will probably not like Earthdawn very
much at all. However, there is nothing bad about or wrong with Earthdawn,
except for a certain laziness or cynicism on the part of the authors and FASA,
and it is certainly complete and I suspect very fun to play. I can't
wholeheartedly recommend it though since I think FASA took the easy road and
avoided the chance of introducing something really new and revolutionary.
With that reservation aside, Earthdawn is a fine fantasy game and will
certainly give AD&D a good tilt.

--
Clay Luther clay@****.vortech.com
Software Engineer Kodak Health Imaging Systems
(214) 994-1377 Fax (214) 994-1310
for(1..10){print"$_ little ",$_%3?/0/&&"indian
boys\n":"indians\n"}

-- Quiktek
-- Todd Montgomery
tmont@****.wvu.edu
tmont@***.wvu.edu
un032507@*******.wvnet.edu

Further Reading

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