Besides that France got one of the most beautiful national anthems in the world, their English accent is also simply the best I’ve ever heard . But you are here on the Earthdawn Blog and it isn’t my intention to talk about the French and their anthem, no I want to inform and talk about Earthdawn in France.

The best is to start with the beginnings of Earthdawn in France. The first edition Earthdawn rulebook (Earthdawn – prémière edition – livre de base) was published in France 1996 in French!!! Only 3 years after the original FASA edition rulebook was published.

The French publisher of the first edition books is “Jeux Descartes”. Some time ago I made an interview with Damien Coltice wherein he stated some critics about “Jeux Descartes”. It looks like that their decisions about which books will be translated weren’t that well chosen. When you look at the table below, you’ll notice that two essential books weren’t translated; “Denizens of Earthdawn” and “The Adept’s Way” are missing. I can’t tell you why they didn’t translate those two books, maybe some of my French readers can leave comments to tell us about that issue. Nevertheless here’s a short overview of the releases of “Jeux Descartes” since 1996: 

In 2009 it was Black Book Éditions to start the conversion of the Red Brick’s classic edition. No not conversion, translation. Yes the French are the only ones that have the classic version translated in their language. All the Polish and German fans might get a little bit jealous. Here’s another short list of the so far accomplished “Classic” translations of Black Book Éditions:

But that’s not all they recently (September 2009) released the first novel in French. It is “Dark Shadows of Yesterday” (“Les Ombres noires du passé”) French players can buy for only 9,90 € !!! 

But the best or worst (more jealousy!!!) as you see in the table above Black Book Éditions released a “Limited Edition” of the 520 pages thick Players Compendium. Only 200 copies were sold and the hard leather cover with golden throal symbol only costs 74,90 €. Jealousy!!

I also found out that they are currently working on the translation of “Prelude to War” and announced the release for November 2009, so I guess the book is not far away.

I got no information if the Earthdawn Third Edition will be translated into French. I guess they have enough to do translating the Classic Edition and that there might be no publisher who wants to battle with Black Book Éditions at the moment.

 
But now enough of the published French Earthdawn books. I want to inform you a little bit about the places on the net, where French Earthdawn fans meet and support Earthdawn.

One of the oldest addresses on the net is the French Yahoo Mailing list for Earthdawn. It exists since 1998 and, as I was told, 28.0000 posts were made since then. And as I saw at my first visit the community is still active there.

As you might know French is a language that is spoken in various countries and that’s why the French community is supported from Canada, Belgium, Swiss and of course France. It looks like that there are 3.000 to 5.000 players in those countries but only around 20 to 300 of them are active in communities or forums. But there are several good pages that you should have a look at. Even if you’re not capable of speaking French maybe you should use these buttons of Google to quickly translate the pages into your preferred language.

 
Here are some French pages you should have a look at:

• SDEN-Earthdawn
• Full RPG Alchemist
• Petite Hanse du Rôle
• Barsaive.free.fr
• Les Parchemins de l'Archiviste  
• last but not least Black Book Editions

As on my previous posts of EWW I wouldn’t be able to provide those information without the help of several insiders. This time many thanks go to Scorpinou, Mahar and Fred Troll grognon.

Funny thing at the end. As I was told Mordom can be translated as “mort d’homme” which means “dead man”.