I’m thinking about writing a hack to play Earthdawn using Dungeon World. Obviously most of the work comes in writing up the play-discipline-books. However, Earthdawn is different enough that there’s some groundwork that has to be laid first.
In the link, I’ve sketched out races, karma, advancement, recovery, and wounds. I’d love feedback on how workable they are.
Also, I feel like ED’s thread mechanics and DW’s bonds have a lot in common (at a deep fundamental level), and if you have ideas on how to bring the two together, that would be great.
https://sagefault.wordpress.com/2016/01/02/world-of-legends-basic-rules/
I’m almost certain there is already a hack for this. Have you looked around?
There is… Fourth World??
http://divnull.com/blog/2015/seed-fourth-world/
Beat me to it, Pete!
Jonathan Beverley Just cuz someone’s already done a hack, doesn’t mean you can’t do your own!
Looking at what you’ve got there, it seems like your instincts are to “port” a fair amount of the mechanical aspects of Earthdawn (karma, racial ability mods, die steps, circle “trees”).
That’s not necessarily wrong, but maybe think more about the fictional elements of Earthdawn and how to best represent them using DW-like mechanics?
+all, the style of divnull’s hack and the style of the one I’d make are markedly different. And I like making this sort of thing. I’d planned on not doing much in the way of research until the basic form of my hack had taken shape.
Jeremy Strandberg most of the fictional elements of Earthdawn are setting. The rest is karma, threads and patterns, thread magic, blood magic, and circles. (unless I missed something).
All of these things were designed (by FASA) to mesh the fiction of the setting into the mechanics of the game. I can’t think of a non-mechanical way to implement karma, for example. The Fourth World hack replaced karma with its “preparation” mechanic, but that loses the fiction, and doesn’t feel very satisfying to me from a pure-mechanics point of view.
I know best-two-of-three-d6 isn’t an established mechanic, but I feel it fits well enough, and it gets me what I want from a mechanic: The player has to clearly, unambiguously, and tactilely, declare that they’re using karma, and they get a big swing in results.
Ability mods follow naturally, but not necessarily. Assuming I follow the ED tradition of racial karma variation then there needs to be a balance, but on reflection, I’m not sure I should. The alternative would be to give everyone the same attribute profile, and the same karma pool, and stick with DW-style racial moves.
Fourth World is generally i shitload of work put into a rulebook the authors will never get proper credit for. It is a marvel to behold and a really good piece of RPG to play. Not sure if you can beat Fourth World with whatever you cook up unless you spend a whole lot of time on it.