I’m a big fan of Nathan Russell’s Freeform Universal RPG rules, especially as found in the draft 2nd edition and found expression in a range of games such as: Neon City Overdrive, Tomorrow City and others. Neat D6 dice pool with positive and negative dice cancelling, built on descriptive tags, with a Forged in the Dark result range on the highest uncancelled positive die. It’s a weathered eye, intuitive appreciation, that may see some actual play at Seven Hills very soon.
When I woke up to the realisation that Earthdawn – The Age of Legend was a light narrative take on this great fantasy game, and based on FU, and that there was a DrivethruRPG GM sale going on, well the confluence of portents summoned me to action and acquisition!
The physical book is on its way, in an intriguiing 8×8 size format. I went Hardback and standard colour as a compromise due to cost, but I think it will work out great.
The PDF comes in a couple of flavours. There is both a book reproduction and also a more traditional sized, no art, optimised version for screen reading. I have coursed through the optimised version and have liked what I have found.
The game has significantly tweaked FU, whilst keeping the lightness of touch. Decomposing the design, with its Karma points, Tiers of power and lists of Talents and spells, left me thinking that I would do as they actually suggest: run the game straight with Nathan’s FU, drawing on the copious lists of cool options as ‘ready for the character sheet’ text.
Pick your race and discipline (yes, of course I want to be a sky raider), unlock your Talent list, tag yourself up with cool phrases and throw yourself in, though not overboard, into the world of Earthdawn.
I kept a wary eye for the extra rules weight that I would have to excise, but it never really emerged. The game is very light on its feet, designed with short campaigns in mind. In actuality, if you are thoughtful about advancement, and reflect on how you might blend in the four ascending ‘Circles of Mastery’ to provide some additional mechanical effect to your hero’s journey, then you have plenty of expansion space for a longer form game, should you so wish.
As someone new to Earthdawn, I felt I got enough to light my way for a deeper exploration. You get a succinct and direct primer as to what Earthdawn is all about. The text is resplendent with categories and tags that themselves say something about the unique setting. A dedicated section on Airships and Riverboats will get you about the place in some style. I liked the guidance on setting up your start environment for play, with a fully fleshed out example.
To fully explore the wonders of Earthdawn, I think you could do with dipping into the sizable corpus of legacy tomes, all of which are listed at the back of the book. I appear to have ‘bundled’ a sizable collection of Earthdawn 4e books, which provide a recent iteration of the more traditional Earthdawn Step system. Perhaps a few of the old PDFs might sidle over to my cavernous cloud vaults for Foundry VTT enthronement?
Ah yes, and I see that there is a 4e Foundry system. Hmm. I do wonder though, if I should just keep with FU, use my own simple custom sheet on Foundry, and sail off into the stormy waters of adventure in The Age of Legend!
