Earthdawn

I’ve spent a lot of time sitting around a table rolling dice and pretending to be someone I’m not.  Like most role playing groups I started with Dungeons and Dragons.  It didn’t take long after that though and I was buying rule books from any game I could get my hands on.  I can still vividly remember the first time I saw the Shadowrun book sitting on a store shelf.  It was at a store called Comic’s Etc which is long gone.  The movie theater it was next to is now a hair salon and cosmetology school.  The Fun Machine arcade it was across from, I don’t even know what is in that space now, I just know it isn’t Street Fighter cabinets. 

Shadowrun is one of my gaming group’s favorite games.  It’s something we always come back to after trying something different.  So when the publishers of Shadowrun created a fantasy game called Earthdawn we were already interested.  Slowly in the game’s fiction we were teased that Earthdawn and Shadowrun were set in the same world.  We were hooked.  Suddenly we had dropped our machine guns for crystal swords.  We went from Street Samurai to Sword Masters, our Deckers became Beast Masters, and our Mages became…well they stayed Mages actually. 

The first edition of Earthdawn was released in 1993.  It went out of print in 1999.  After that there have been fan re-launches giving us the second edition, the classic edition, and the third edition.  Now a new Fasa is on Kickstarter raising funds for a new edition.  The Kickstarter is for a new Player’s Guide and a new Gamemaster’s Guide.  Right now the reward choices involve PDF copies, softcover, and hardcover books.  If you want to get really ambitions you can pay to have the game developer run you through an online game.

This kickstarter started on the 13^th and has already raised the 10,000 they were looking for.  That doesn’t mean you don’t want to go check it out yourself though, especially if you’re a fan of the role playing game.  Additional funds are just going to help the other books they have planned get published, so it’ll help things a new Companion or a book on the Questors.  They haven’t added these stretchgoals to the Kickstarter yet, but I don’t think they were expecting to clear their goal so quickly.  There are still 29 days to go in this, so it is probably worth keeping an eye on.  Check it out for yourself by clicking HERE