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….)