A few days ago FASA published their plans about the future of Earthdawn. The announcement of Earthdawn: Fourth Edition coming in 2014 was made:

For the past twenty years, Earthdawn has built a loyal fan base as an original and engrossing fantasy gaming experience. As the game enters its third decade, we are taking the opportunity to update the game, revisiting the core systems to find a balance between the game’s legacy and more recent developments in game design.

Yiha, what else can I say, that’s some great news for the upcoming year! If you didn’t read the news yet: FASA Games News

One of the first comments I read about the announcement, that was send to me by Sethariel, was the G+ post of Carsten Damm. Dammi commented on the publication and the plans of FASA, but more interestingly, he shared an overview of the plans the old team had, when he was still “involved”.

Involved, that’s a good word to mention something here about Earthdawn in general. Earthdawn had, in my opinion, always had or still has, a great fan community and is often mentioned as one of the best settings of high fantasy RPG’s that are out there.

The countless fan creations for Earthdawn show that FASA makes the right move to involve the fan base by announcing a Kickstarter campaign to fund the development and the artwork production of Earthdawn Fourth Edition core books:

In preparation for the release of the Player’s Guide and Gamemaster’s Guide—currently slated for Summer 2014 release—plans are under way for a Kickstarter campaign in early 2014 to fund the printing and new artwork for the core books.

DID YOU READ IT? NEW ARTWORK!!

But still, I am cautious when it comes to Kickstarter, it always depends on the good advertising of the project and on what you can get. But nevertheless, the announcement of the plans about publishing Earthdawn Fourth Edition shows again that things are moving forward in the right direction.

A follow up article to answer some questions about what can be expected, the time jump and about the Kickstarter project, was released by Josh Harrison at the FASA blog. Oh by the way the discussion on the FASA Earthdawn forum about the news can be found here and here.

All that said and read, I am positive that 2014 will liven Earthdawn up again after the “stagnation” due to the recent change from RedBrick to FASA.

After some time the “online community's 'Great Library' of 3rd Edition fan-made Disciplines, Talents, Spells, and more!” is back!

Non Earthdawn content!

When it comes to reading fantasy novels, I have to admit that this years August was a very special month for me. Because the final book of the Wheel of Time series written by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson was released in German. The publisher piper fantasy was able to make out of 14 original English books, 37 German books!!! Nevertheless I finished reading the biggest fantasy series in August……and I am really thinking about to start it anew…

As I recently had a look on what exists “out there” concerning the Wheel of Time series, I discovered a fan made movie called Flight from Shadow. Maybe you’re interested in the biggest fantasy series written by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson, if not you definitely should be. Anyway, maybe you enjoy the following fan movie.

The Wheel of Time fan movie "Flight From Shadow" chronicles the events in the "Four Kings in Shadow" chapter from The Eye of the World, the first book of Robert Jordan's bestselling series.

UPDATE 8th September 2013

As I recently updated the downloads section, I realized that the Earthdawn Blog provided only once an Earthdawn character sheet. Now the “old” editable Third Edition Earthdawn character sheet gets accompany by the sheet that UglyGoblin sent me. And as I prefer editable sheets I “simply” made it editable.
The PDF’s are based on the original 3rd edition character sheet and comes in two versions. One has the D12 dice table and the other has the D20 based dice table on it. All the fields and boxes can be edited.

Extras:
At the bottom of first page are 6 fields to count whatever you need. The sheet also has five slots for elixirs, 10 slots for blood magic and it contains three big fields for discipline abilities descriptions of the character. Have a look at the two character sheets.

By the way: Don’t miss the Earthdawn Character Background sheet

The Earthdawn campaign “Heroes Unchained” is written by Asaraludu and his group on Obsidian Portal and was named September ‘13 Campaign of the month (CotM).

Obsidian Portal?

Well, the Obsidian Portal offers a lot of features for Players and Gamemasters to keep track of the story and character progression, document events (journal) and to provide information of RPG campaigns. Functions like an easy wiki building, the compatibility with any game system, adventure tracking and all of that for free, makes it a great choice for RPG groups.

That’s the place where Asaraludu and his group document their Earthdawn campaign “Heroes Unchained” now quite for a while and as far as I can see the award for CotM is well deserved.

A very interesting interview with Asaraludu was published on the blog of Obsidian Portal “Words In The Dark”, where he provides some very interesting tips, talks about the history of the campaign and recommends some further services for virtual tabletop gaming and online sessions. Like the service Roll20.net, which was completely unknown to me since I read his interview. If you are you already using Roll20, you might be interested in the old school styled maps provided by Matt Jackson.

Finally I can only say: congratulations for the award and thanks for the great Earthdawn campaign (although I just read up on a few chapters….)

Read the news? The most recent Earthdawn news can be read at Loremerchant.com and on Google+:

Josh Harrison has been offered and has accepted the Line Developer position for Earthdawn. I wasn’t able to find an official announcement @ FASA, but I think Josh doesn’t spread the news without reason.

I am honestly excited to read, that one guy of the “Crew” takes the position of Earthdawn Line Developer. His long relation to Earthdawn makes him a great choice and brings a fresh breeze to the Earthdawn Revised Edition (as far as I can judge...). I wish him all the best in his new position and am looking forward to further Earthdawn news, when things are ready for announcement. But for now: Earthdawn lives and maybe great things are looming @ FASA.

Update

The “who’s who” article at FASA officially confirms the news.

These days Earthdawn celebrates its 20th birthday. Earthdawn was introduced at GenCon 19th August 1993 and since then we saw various Earthdawn editions, many sourcebooks and several publishers which took command of the Earthdawn product line……..

Nevertheless it is one of the few great high fantasy RPG’s out there, with a great setting, complex stories and great adventures. 20 years, where fans all over the world got connected cause they play, played, want to play or simply heard of Earthdawn where “the heroes of today are the legends of tomorrow” – King Varulus III of Throal.

Birthday present?

Well, I got there two final quizzes for you, which were created with the help of Sethariel (thx).

Final quizzes, right! I had quite a bunch of Earthdawn Quizzes on the blog now which can be found at the quiz section.

It’s been a while since the last Earthdawn quiz was published and to give this series a good ending, these last two shall take you on a small journey of 20 years of Earthdawn. Enjoy.

 

 

About a week ago Sethariel posted a nice information on the Google+ Earthdawn community about a PDF of Carsten Damm aka Dammi. The post title says it all, the PDF is an Outline for the Chronicles of War project of the former Earthdawn publisher RedBrick LLC. So what about the 18 pages outline PDF?

This document was a first draft outline for the Chronicles of War project, the proposed final book in the Earthdawn Third Edition line. The core ideas were brainstormed in a larger team, and many of the details of that brainstorming would have made it into the final book if it had made it into the development queue

It would have been the first epic campaign published by RedBrick. In my opinion the original Chronicles of War campaign wasn’t/isn’'t that good at all, but an epic campaign in general was always the thing Earthdawn needed. But today …… yes today …… things are “different”.

Did some of you recently have a look at the Facebook page of Tableau Infractus? No, I just did today, since a long time…..

You might discover there a nice link to the site of Jett Cat where she provides a nice collection of Earthdawn cards.

I recently wrote about some interesting crowd funding RPG projects, wherein a Kickstarter project for professional MP3 background loops for RPGs was mentioned. The project for these MP3 files was funded successfully.

As a gamemaster it is always hard to find good background music or atmospheric sounds that fit your game. Sometimes a gamemaster has to create his own sound, sometimes you can use some existing sound.

Background music and music for use in RPGs in general was already several times a topic on the Earthdawn Blog. The two most interesting projects so far were the Free Nature Sounds and the Roleplaying music by Erdenstern.

The latest RPG music project, I was made aware of (thx to  Kyn), is the Realmsound Project by Orange County Gaming Group. Of course it is a Kickstarter project and there are still some days left to get it funded. Here’s a small example of what we can expect from this project:

The recently announced Earthdawn Appreciation Day was yesterday and I am a little bit late but nevertheless, here’s my late contribution.

Based on this article at Inkwell ideas I made up an Earthdawn study & research topics table.  The table should give Gamemasters a short overview of book titles, the players could see when they have a short look at a bookshelf.

- Creatures

• Habitats of the Griffon near the Tylon mountains
• Ecology of Cave Crabs
• Behavior of the common wolf
• Reproduction behavior of Espagras
• Treatise on salt water fish's near Urupa

- Cities

• Common clothes of Travar
• Boarding rules of Urupa haven
• Violence rates in Throal / Bethabal
• Heraldry of Throal families

- Landscapes

• Old trading routes
• The Hills around Kratas 
• A Windsailors thoughts on the Throal mountains
• Storm season of the Tylon mountains

- Trading / Financial / Faith

• A merchants treatise on trading routes (for campsites, state of some routes in southern Barsaive etc.)
• Trading houses of Throal
• Analysis of financial benefits in Travar
• The superiority  of Chorollis

The first annual Earthdawn Appreciation Day was recently announced by the EPIC RPG Blog for June 14th.

So how can you participate and what is this about? Tilton explains it:

On June 14th we will be celebrating one of the best Role-Playing Games to ever be produced (In my opinion). How can you participate? By creating some new and fun content for Earthdawn and posting it to your blog, G+ or by emailing your submission to me at epicrpgblog@gmail.com on June 14th.

You can win some prizes that are sponsored by FASA and, to (maybe) inspire you, a list of some topics for your blog post/submission for June 14th is provided too:

Create new original content for Earthdawn (Including Savage Worlds and Pathfinder editions). This can include, but is not limited to:

• Thread Items
• Adventures
• Artwork
• Card Games
• Charts & Tables
• Cities
• Equipment
• Horrors
• Maps
• Monsters
• Mundane Flora and Fauna
• Namegivers
• New Disciplines
• New Sections of the Map (South Africa, Antarctica, Atlantis, Lemuria, Mu, Australia, North/South America, Greenland...The Moon, Mars?)
• New Settings (Using Earthdawn Rules in a new setting)
• New Talents
• NPCs
• System Conversions (Earthdawn Setting in different ruleset)

So what about you? Got some unfinished ideas or additional content for Earthdawn? Simply tell Tilton you’re in over here.

• Storytelling problems? Here are 22 storytelling rules that were tweeted by by Emma Coats, Pixar’s Story Artist.
• An Excel-RPG: Arena.Xlsm !!!!!! 
• Real life wood elementals at New York Botanical Garden
• Goblinproofing One's Chicken Coop has been named as the winner of Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year (Preview @ Google Books) via
• Walkthrough map of the "most dreaded Dungeons & Dragons adventure of all time" - Tomb of Horrors
• Medieval weapons ice tray
• Brian Jamisons Gamemastering - free PDF for Gamemasters - paperback available @ Amazon via
• "My Afternoon with the Ace of Swords" -Visiting the sword-smith, -restorer, -collector Francis Boyd

Since the rise crowd funding platforms, many interesting projects came up on various platforms like Kickstarter, Indiegogo.com or Startnext (German), to name just a few. By pledging to these projects you’ll receive a version of the final product, depending on the amount you spend and on reaching the pledging goal (As most of you’ll already know).

It quickly became clear that this type of financing is almost ideal for Roleplayers to realize their wishes, products and ideas, but of course not only to them.

Small RPG tools are mostly easy to fund, that’s why a lot of interesting creative projects were already funded, for example the DungeonMorph Dice by Inkwell Ideas. But still new, interesting projects are introduced and question for help to fund them.

That’s why I came across some interesting projects during the last few weeks, which are related to Roleplaying (I preferably have a look at these of course). Well, most projects are initiated by or particularly directed to Roleplayers and as I didn’t want to report about every single project one after one, I thought it could be helpful to provide a short overview of some recent ideas and projects. So here we go.

 

Professional MP3 Background Loops for Role-Playing Games

Sick of bad background sound, your GM is using? Well then:

Add professional background sound to your table top role-playing game.

 

ePIC Generator – A hero portrait generator

As I recently reported, the ePIC Generator was initiated to be funded at indiegogo.com by Sade. The goal is to create a portrait generator, where you can easily equip your character with various items, clothes and stuff. Seriously, have a look:

 

Radio Rollenspiel (German)

This is a German project, initiated by Marcus Richter at the German platform Startnext. If the interactive radio drama gets funded (it actually already is), it will be broadcast and published under cc-license, according to their plans.

Practice your German:

Ein Radiorollenspiel ist ein interaktives Hörspiel, bei dem die Hörer die Hauptrollen spielen und Einfluß auf die Geschichte nehmen können. Wir wollen ein solches Radiorollenspiel planen, schreiben, produzieren und im Programm des Radiosenders detektor.fm aufführen.

Ok, ok there you go:

The Radiorollenspiel is an interactive radio drama, in which the listeners play the main roles and are able to influence the story. We want to plan, write, produce and perform such a radio drama via the radio station detektor.fm.

 

Toolcards : Fantasy GM Cards

Another interesting Kickstarter project to create easy-to-use cards that inspire the GameMaster to run adventures.

 

World of Classcraft

Last but definitely not least, a soon to come project on Kickstarter to create a free online version of the game World of Classcraft created by Shawn Young. World of Classcraft game? WHAT?

World of Classcraft is an educational augmented-reality multiplayer role-playing game. Played in the classroom, students play as one of three classes, gaining awesome powers, while risking a terrible death.
Students gain experience points for good actions and take damage for bad actions. As they gain experience points, students level up and gain powers that can be used in the classroom.

• Official World of Classcraft page
• Deutsches Interview mit Shawn Young @ spiegel-online.de

I recently got in touch with Piotr again who wrote the Earthdawn shard “Ship of Tears”. Piotr took a look at the Polish fanwork “Kronika Skradzionych Legend”, which was already mentioned in the Earthdawn World Wide series about Poland.

Oh wait what do I tell you, he didn’t take a look, he translated most of it into English! In his recent “Open-call” on the Earthdawn Compendium forum, Piotr describes what he accomplished so far, but also requests some help.

So if you are a native English speaker and want to help to create some new Earthdawn fan stuff in English, head over to the forum post of piotrus to learn more about his project.

Sade hasn’t been idle since her last project, which brought us the iRPG app. Based on the principle of the well known Hero Generator, Sade comes up with a less cartoonish hero-portrait-generator called the ePIC Generator. The idea is to simply select items to equip your character from the picture pool Sade has created. Items and equipment can be assigned to the following parts:

• head/skin
• hair
• top
• pants
• boots
• full sets
• misc category 1 (wings, etc)
• misc category 2 (belt bag, scrolls, etc)
• misc category 3 (tiara, horns, halo, etc)
• left hand
• right hand

Backgrounds, companions, like animals and creatures, as well as frames can be added too.

Sade told me that the generator will be available as a downloadable PC program and an Android and iOS version will be released too. The program will come in a free (limited) and a paid version. The first version will contain human male and human female base bodies. The second version will come with some more add-ons for humans and dwarf male and dwarf female base bodies (maybe those will already be included in the first release).

The following pictures give you an impression of how the interface (Sade: “UI will look completely different in the final version”) and what the result of your hero could look like:

At this point of the project, Sade has already created a lot of equipment pictures to choose from (like human female top wardrobe pictures), but the program itself is not available yet. I read sth. about the hope of a release at July.

However, if you want to know more about the ePIC Generator or give some feedback, head over to http://herogenerator.blogspot.com, where SaDe regularly posts example heroes and informs about the status of the project.

Sade is also running polls on the Facebook page of the ePIC Generator to find out what you want to see in the upcoming generator. So don’t hesitate to send her your suggestions about special items or anything else you want to see in the final program.

I will update this article as soon as the beta test or a RC phase starts.

Update April 14th 2013

Sade initiated a project on indiegogo.com where you can support and help to fund the ePIC Generator.

Steven Black has posted a short encounter shard at FASA. It is made for Novice level (Second to Fourth Circle). The shard was, as mentioned in the article, inspired by an article about Living Root Bridges. This is hopefully one of many shards to come.

Adventure Goal: Getting the group involved. One potential goal is that the group needs to cross either the Servos or Galanga River and hears rumors about a bridge in the area from local natives.

The full shard can be found at FASA’s Articles page.

FASA has recently announced “March M-m-m-m-mad-madness Earthdawn Sale!”

Here’s a short look at the announcement:

Regardless, we have a bunch of Earthdawn books sitting in our warehouse looking for a new home. So we're doing something that we don't do often. FASA Games are pleased to present our March M-m-m-m-mad-madness Earthdawn Sale!

As long as stocks last, or until the end of March -- whichever happens first! -- prices have been m-m-m-m-massively reduced across our Earthdawn Third, Revised, Pathfinder, and Savage Worlds Edition game lines.

Read the full announcement over here.

The sale can be found on the FASA Games Online Shop.

Some of you might remember the two german fanworks Barsaives Bestiarium and Verborgene Talente made by Nico Pendzialek. His most recent publication, well the title says it all, is an english Poor Attack Test Table. It is made for use with D4 and D6. Have a look.

UPDATE February 16th 2013

The Poor Attack Test table is now available in 3 editions:

Easy penalties	Moderate penalties	Hard penalties