Vagrant Workshop, the German publisher of Earthdawn: The Age of Legend, recently released a free PDF preview of the upcoming book on their page. The 12 page PDF contains the 'Getting Started' chapter and of course the book's cover, which is a great displays of Kathy Schad and David M. Wright art skills.

For all of you who didn't read the news about the release of Earthdawn: The Age of Legend or the interview with Carsten Damm and therefore ask themselves, why another publisher is releasing an alternative ruleset for Earthdawn, I can only quote from the preview PDF, to explain the case:

The Age of Legend was designed for those who want a simple and story-oriented game system.

That's why Earthdawn: The Age of Legend is based on FU: The Freeform, Universal RPG game engine by Nathan Russel, to simplify the sometime complicate original Earthdawn Step System.

Earthdawn Soundtrack

Update 20th March 2016:

The Earthdawn Soundtrack Album is now available at:

• iTunes
• Amazon music
• Google play

The recent rumors that an official Earthdawn Soundtrack is in the making are actually no rumors!

The composer duo Konstantine Kazantzis and Jan Haak from X-Score created a professionally produced, official Earthdawn Soundtrack in cooperation with Ulisses Spiele (German Earthdawn publisher)! The duo can look back on a lot of experience in RPG-music as they already created the soundtrack for example for Contact, Space:1889 or Dark Age Wars.

I really have to say that my experiences with music in RPGs, from a Gamemaster perspective, were, how can I say it, 'disappointing'. The only roleplaying music I actually used during my games was from Erdenstern, but the music wasn't a fit for Earthdawn at all. On the other hand I sometimes used Free Nature Sounds to build a little bit of atmosphere. But there was no real fit for Earthdawn when it came to music so far.

In my opinion the official Earthdawn Soundtrack is about to change that.

The 17 tracks on the upcoming official Earthdawn Soundtrack have a total playing time of 72 minutes and they are actually a real fit for Earthdawn.

The songs cover a lot of moods and really transport specific atmospheres for Earthdawn. I realized that, as I heard thru the snippets that are available at Soundcloud. My absolute favorites so far are of course the songs 'Steel and Blood' and 'Onwards to Battle'.

Track list:

• 1. The Might of Thera - 04:01
• 2. Lament of Thorns - 04:14
• 3. Fire and Rage - 03:58
• 4. Ashes and Smoke - 04:23
• 5. Steel and Blood - 03:46
• 6.  Wisdom of the River People - 04:37
• 7. Jugglers and Thieves - 04:08
• 8. Haven - 05:20
• 9. Pulling a Valvidius - 04:12
• 10. Rooftop Chase - 03:25
• 11. Ale and Good Company - 02:19
• 12. Under the Mountain - 03:36
• 13. King of Stones - 03:36
• 14. In the Ruins - 03:32
• 15. Onwards to Battle - 03:41
• 16. The King Fares North - 05:13
• 17. Earthdawn Suite - 07:24

Official release date

The album will be released on 18th of March 2016 on iTunes, Amazon Music and Google Play as download and of course there will be a physical CD available containing beautiful artwork. I can only recommend to have a look at it when the Soundtrack will be released.

Links:

• X-Score on Facebook
• X-Score homepage
• Earthdawn Soundtrack snippets on Soundcloud

Just to remember you shortly again. The Earthdawn Kickstarter project by FASA, which was launched on January 14th 2014, reached these stretch goals:

• GM Screen
• Travar: City of Merchants
• ED 4E Companion
• Elven Nations
• Questors

After release of the Player's and the Gamemaster's Guide in 2015 it was in early January 2016 when information about next sourcebook Travar: The Merchant City was revealed.

It was Allen Farr who wrote an article on G+ to inform about the work, the story and background to develop the the book.

Travar: The Merchant City
Now that Travar is in the development pipeline at FASA Games I thought it was only fair to let you all know about it. Hopefully when it is closer to publication there will be a few previews that can be unleashed. Until then…
The Cover:
The Cover layout isn’t finalised yet, but there should be enough there to give you a good idea of what it will look like when it’s finished……..

Read the full article HERE

The following info should be taken with care:

Several rumours can be found on the net about the release date of the book, like this one here from the FASA Earthdawn forum:

If you didn't fund the Kickstarter project to get a copy of the book, you already could pre-order the book at frpgames.com. There they speak of an estimate February, 2016 release……

Carsten Damm, author of Earthdawn: The Age of Legend answered several questions in a recent interview with Obskures.de about the upcoming alternative ruleset version for Earthdawn.

Short excerpt:

How does your new Earthdawn: The Age of Legend system support these features?
The main focus in the design phase was to capture that specific “Earthdawn feeling” that made us play this game all those years—but without the crunch and all those excessive ruling baggage the original game has accumulated over the years. The game is light and easy to play……

Read the full interview @ Obskures.de

Last article for 2015!

The German version of this Earthdawn character sheet for Earthdawn 4th Edition was made by Elidis. The sheet is a good mix of stylish design and usability. It took me some time to create an English version but finally at the end of the year, I found some time to translate it.