Friday, March 4, 2011

Porting Earthdawn to Dungeons and Dragons 4e

I started gaming when I was in elementary school back in the 1980's, playing AD&D. Since then I've played, and enjoyed Rolemaster, Toon, Palladium's games, and many others, but the one game that really captured my attention was Earthdawn.

I loved the world of Earthdaw. I loved the way FASA took D&D, looked at what we all took on faith, and tried to make it all make sense.

They world FASA created was tremendous.

And then along comes D&D 4e, and the took what was wrong with most every other RPG I've played in, and they fixed it.

So with that in mind, I'm going to spend some time porting the mechanical elements of Earthdawn into Dungeons and Dragons 4e, and I want to try to deviate as little as I can from cannon 4e without losing what I loved about Earthdawn.

Now, I don't want to invent new mechanics, or new rules systems. For the most part I don't want to have to create new races or disciplines (though in some cases - Windlings, I'm looking at you - I think I'll have to), but rather would prefer to re-skin and tweak existing races and classes and then augment them with new feats and new powers.

Essentially my goal here is to make create something thematically familiar to Earthdawn players, at the same time as being mechanically familiar to 4e players.

I'll start with the Races. As I go I'll be providing race specific feats that I feel are integral to the placing the race in it's Earthdawn context. After races, in no particular order, I'll write up the disciplines - converting talents and talent knacks into new powers and new feats, present rules for magic items that can grow as the adepts grow, and possibly new paragon paths and epic destinies appropriate for the world of Earthdawn.