Earthdawn® 2nd Edition Differences

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The most common question I expect Retailers and Distributors to get about Earthdawn® 2nd Edition is: What are the differences between second and first edition? This announcement will hopefully give you an answer to this question.

The biggest change is the addition of a robust skills system. In first edition Earthdawn, there was a skill system, but it was difficult for players to actually use for their characters. It's understandable why the game designers did this: they wanted to emphasize the Magical Talents that every character possessed. Unfortunately, though, this lead to alot of similarities between characters of the same archetype. If a player in Seattle wrote up a Warrior, it looked an awful lot like a Warrior written up by a player in Tokyo. So, we increased both the scope and accessability of the skills sytem. Now a player will be able to tailor the kind of Warrior she wants to play by use of the skills system. Want your Warrior to have a wilderness oriented background? No problem! It's now easy to pick up some outdoor skills to suppliment your Warrior's Magical fighting abilities. Indeed, one of the most notable conversions of a first edition character to second edition will be the addition of a number of skills.

We also took a long look at the magic system, and while we in general kept the rules mechanics the same, we did alot of rewriting - with a goal of making the rules and game world concepts of magic more easy to grasp for a novice player.

There were updates to almost every section of the book. Some, like the game world history section being brought up to date after nearly a decade of the metaplot moving forward, are obvious to even the casual reader. Others, like some of the changes made to the specific Magical Talents might take a side by side comparison between the two editions to be noticed. Our goal with these updates was not to alienate the current playerbase, but to make improvements on the playability of the game. We think that the Second Edition will be welcomed by current Earthdawn players, and will also be very well suited as an entry point for new players.


Mike Williams
Earthdawn Line Developer
Living Room Games

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