Quote from: Aos;445546I've played a lot of ED (1e), and A lot of (TSR) D&D and I have to disagree- to a point, anyway. Everything that ED "fixes" in D&D can be dealt with in a paragraph or two of house rules  (or by just ignoring some shit) without marrying the mechanics to any sort of setting in the way ED is married to Barsaive.  

I guess if you like having a setting hardwired into the rules, maybe ED does 'fix' D&D, but, for me, more than anything else, that was the deal breaker.

Beyond that, after not touching D&D for well over a decade I relearned the system in minutes; I tried to do the same with ED and decided it was not worth the trouble. Thread magic: wtf?  Opening the core book with fiction. For the love of God, stop! Also, first edition ED had the worst monster book I have ever fucking seen.

Wonder whether anybody would have paid any attention to Earthdawn to begin with, if the first edition was not originally published by FASA.

If I didn't know any better, I would have thought Earthdawn was a mediocre "brand extension" of Shadowrun.

Quote from: noisms;300442Dragon Warriors.

This. And by that I mean: underrated by the designer (Dave Morris) himself. Also the comment (therein) by Simon Bray:

QuoteI love Dragon Warriors, it was my second game behind RQ and opened my eyes to worlds beyond Glorantha. I bought all the new books, I contributed to the wiki and the fan sites, but I constantly felt that the rules were too shallow for the setting, although I have had hell of a lot of fun with them. When I demoed DW to young players at ConQuest in Derby this year it was a fun game, but the mechanics were poorly received and this saddened me. I even ran the game for Loz Whittaker the author MRQ2 and Mark Galeotti one of the Heroquest developers we had a blast, but all of us perpetually wanted to tweak the rules.

'Gosh! We ran Swords & Wizardry last night, and we had a ton of fun, but the mechanics are soo shallow! We constantly had to add stuff.'

Arcanum ( 2ed. "Beastiary" has some awesome art!)
High Fantasy (very bad art)
Sword Bearer (very cool and simple game with a nifty magick system)
Morpheus (Multi Genre)

And my favorite pony..."The Highest Level of all Fantasy Wargaming"

That "Maelstrom" game sounds cool...will be ordering that soon...

Runequest (but I hate Glorantha)
Ars Magica

Quote from: ggroy;445554Wonder whether anybody would have paid any attention to Earthdawn to begin with, if the first edition was not originally published by FASA.

If I didn't know any better, I would have thought Earthdawn was a mediocre "brand extension" of Shadowrun.

Well, the art sold me. It has some lovely color plates, and when I looked at them, I wanted to run the game. At the time (c.1993) I was not even aware of the existence of Shadowrun. We were casting around for an FRPG and  it did seem to me that Earthdawn fixed D&D. It has problems of its own, however, that became evident to us over time (we played a weekly campaign for about 2 years).

Quote from: Aos;445562Well, the art sold me. It has some lovely color plates, and when I looked at them, I wanted to run the game. At the time (c.1993) I was not even aware of the existence of Shadowrun. We were casting around for an FRPG and  it did seem to me that Earthdawn fixed D&D. It has problems of its own, however, that became evident to us over time (we played a weekly campaign for about 2 years).

I thought the artwork was cool too, many years ago.

I never played Earthdawn back in the day.  (I didn't play any rpg games at all during the 1990's).  I've only played a few evening pickup games of 1E Earthdawn a few years ago.

I only ever got some Earthdawn books from friends selling me their old rpg book collections for a pittance (or giving it me).  At best, I thought they were largely mediocre reading material with some deviations from generic D&D tropes.  I certainly would have never bought any new Earthdawn books on my own.

Quote from: ggroy;445568I thought the artwork was cool too, many years ago.

I never played Earthdawn back in the day.  (I didn't play any rpg games at all during the 1990's).  I've only played a few evening pickup games of 1E Earthdawn a few years ago.

I only ever got some Earthdawn books from friends selling me their old rpg book collections for a pittance (or giving it me).  At best, I thought they were largely mediocre reading material with some deviations from generic D&D tropes.  I certainly would have never bought any new Earthdawn books on my own.

Yeah, the supplemental setting writings were very lackluster. As I said above, the monster book was awful. It was written in 90's style first person from the perspective of a dragon or something. I think I bought four of five splats for it and found the setting overall dull as dishwater. It put my players and me off published settings, really.

Quote from: Aos;445562Well, the art sold me. It has some lovely color plates, and when I looked at them, I wanted to run the game.

Same here. The art (including some of the box art and colour cartography) really communicated the setting very well. Plus, unlike AD&D 2E, it was readily available in German. Even the novels got translated! And Kubasik's first novel really brought the world alive for us. We hated the system with a passion though, but coming from a similar experience (The Dark Eye) softened the impact.

Rereading the novel last winter, I was astonished how much I still enjoyed it, as I expected the revisit to be just as painful as the Dark Sun novels. The RPG has not aged remotely as well, afaic. The 'cleaned up' 3rd edition (Mongoose) left me lukewarm.

Quote from: Windjammer;445582Same here. The art (including some of the box art and colour cartography) really communicated the setting very well. Plus, unlike AD&D 2E, it was readily available in German. Even the novels got translated! And Kubasik's first novel really brought the world alive for us. We hated the system with a passion though, but coming from a similar experience (The Dark Eye) softened the impact.

I was flipping through the 1e core book this morning, and I still like the just about all of the color art quite a bit; the black and white stuff ranges from being very cool to pure shit, though.

Quote from: Aos;445572Yeah, the supplemental setting writings were very lackluster. As I said above, the monster book was awful. It was written in 90's style first person from the perspective of a dragon or something. I think I bought four of five splats for it and found the setting overall dull as dishwater. It put my players and me off published settings, really.

Until recently, I never had the opportunity to be disappointed by published settings.

Back in the day, I had the original 1E AD&D Forgotten Realms "grey box" and the first several FR supplement books.  Shortly before 2E AD&D was released, I stopped playing rpg games altogether and took a long 15+ year hiatus.  Over those 15+ years, I occasionally got some rpg books from friends selling me their rpg book collections for a pittance (or just giving it to me).  Some of those books were 2E AD&D Forgotten Realms titles and older stuff like 1E AD&D Greyhawk, which were half decent reads.  (They didn't have many duds).

When I got back into rpg games shortly after 3.5E D&D was released, I picked up a few supplement books like the 3E Forgotten Realms campaign setting book, 3.5E Eberron campaign setting book, and later Castlemourn.  These setting books turned out to be good reads.  (I didn't pick up many of the subsequent WotC 3.5E FR and Eberron splatbooks, until more recently).


The first opportunity I ever had with being eventually disappointed by a setting, was Pathfinder's Golarion.

Initially I liked the Pathfinder adventure path books, and the supplement setting books they were publishing back in 2008 and early-mid 2009.  Back then, they were purportedly writing the Pathfinder Chronicles splatbooks for 3.5E rules (nominally) or being relatively system neutral for the setting type supplement books.  They were relatively easy to use with my 4E D&D game at the time.  (Some books were kinda useless for 4E, such as the "Revisited" monster books and player character race books).

After the release of the Pathfinder core books in mid-late 2009, more and more of the supplement books were becoming crunch heavy and/or were titles which were largely useless to me (ie. Pathfinder Society, NPC Guide, Faction Guide, Adventurer's Armory, etc ...).  Though in the end, this isn't too surprising once they have their own core rulebooks published.

It seems to me when being on a setting splatbook treadmill, cranking out so much (perceived) useless stuff for a setting seems to eventually spoil it for me.


In hindsight if I had continued to buy Forgotten Realms books regularly for several years into 2E AD&D, I probably would have eventually become disappointed with the FR treadmill too.

Quote from: ggroy;445588It seems to me when being on a setting splatbook treadmill, cranking out so much (perceived) useless stuff for a setting seems to eventually spoil it for me.


In hindsight if I had continued to buy Forgotten Realms books regularly for several years into 2E AD&D, I probably would have eventually become disappointed with the FR treadmill too.

I think this is a pretty good argument in favor of the 4e "two books and out" strategy with settings such as DS. I think if things go too far and into too much detail,  there is nothing for you to explore with your own imagination as a game master.

Quote from: Aos;445591I think this is a pretty good argument in favor of the 4e "two books and out" strategy with settings such as DS. I think if things go too far and into too much detail,  there is nothing for you to explore with your own imagination as a game master.

Definitely.

When I eventually picked up many other 3E/3.5E Forgotten Realms and Eberron splatbooks (from the bargain bins in 2008-2009), it turned out most of them were rather superfluous or useless.  Many of them weren't even that interesting as pleasure reading.

In hindsight, I'm glad I didn't buy these books at full price when they were first released.

Quote from: Windjammer;445555This. And by that I mean: underrated by the designer (Dave Morris) himself.

Re-reading that post and comments (especially the Simon Bray comment) I must be the only person in the world who felt that the world of Legend and the Dragon Warriors rules were a perfect match...

On Dragon Warriors: Morris' view of what the world *should* have and how it was presented were slightly at odds - 'real' Legend apparently shouldn't have orcs and stuff.
I'm another weirdo though - I like the DW system more than the setting, I think, so I'm another 'minority of one'.  I really liked armour bypass rolls, spell expiry rolls (something D&D got eventually but in a form I find unpalatable in 4e 'saving throws'), psychic fatigue rolls and a few other things.

(And another friend in my group is planning on using DW to run a one-off adventure based on the old 'Blood Valley' books in a month or so, though I don't think that he particularly doesn't Legend).

My vote for underappreciated fantasy RPG is Board Enterprises' LegendQuest, again for system rules more than anything. I picked this one up on .pdf from DriveThru after reading the review in Dragon #195.

There's a pile of Earthdawn core books, ED companion, and adventures at my local Half Price Books. All 2e. Prices are around $10-$20, at least for the big books. If anyone's interested, I could post a list of what's available. Personally, it piqued my interest but, although I liked the artwork and some of the races, I wasn't so keen on the setting or the mechanics. (They seemed like someone had taken D&D 3.x and then changed how all the die rolls work.)

On-topic, lately I've been taken by a game called Shades of Fantasy. It's very much in the mold of '80's D&D-clones; in other words, a cousin of Palladium 1e and Bard Games' Atlantis/Arcanum, although it uses percentile dice for many things. I can describe it at more length if anyone's interested; in the meantime, here's the RPGGeek listing: link.