Barsaive is populated by creatures and monsters little different than any other Dungeon World.

Barsaive is populated by creatures and monsters little different than any other Dungeon World.

Barsaive is populated by creatures and monsters little different than any other Dungeon World. Any creature in the Earthdawn books can be easily converted using DW’s monster maker, and many of the existing DW monsters are suitable as-is.

One exception is horrors.

https://sagefault.wordpress.com/2016/01/28/world-of-legends-horrors/

9 thoughts on “Barsaive is populated by creatures and monsters little different than any other Dungeon World.”

  1. One of the primary issues with the 1st edition of ED was that most Horrors were absolutely, positively, impossible to reasonably fight using the talents and items in the core rule book.

    This carried over into 2nd and 3rd edition, and is only partly offset by the expanded circles and items delivered by later supplements of 1st edition (which are rolled into 2nd and 3rd as “baseline”).

    Primarily this was caused by how severely the dice mechanics swing when taking step and difficulty numbers in consideration. As your defence stats barely scaled with Circle, even moderate “generic” horrors like a bloat form would (and for the most part, still will) pretty much always hit a player, with an extremely high chance of an armor-defeating hit.

    Horrors were terrifying, for both the right (flavor) and wrong (wonky mechanics) reasons.

    Here’s a graph I made of the success chance vs. difficulty number for steps 1 through 40: 

    http://i.imgur.com/MdIlXR8.jpg

    Anyways, that was a tangent; my friends and myself have been discussing doing “Earthdawn World” as well. Everyone absolutely ADORES the Earthdawn setting, but man we’re getting too old for terrible mechanics, so DW naturally came up.

  2. I agree with you about the impossibility of fighting them by fair mechanics, but it has nothing to do with steps. The wormskull above (according to 4th ed rules) can mark anyone it can see, can skinshift anyone it’s marked within 10 miles, always knows where it’s marked victims are, and can enter or leave astral space as a standard action.

    Fight that.

  3. Jonathan Beverley truly. But that also has to do with the fact that nobody considered that perhaps a limit on powers/day would be a good plan AND it’s steps are so high it will always succeed

  4. It’s not that bad. By eighth circle adepts will have woven threads to their defenses, and found thread items that boost defenses. Also, they’ll have talents like steel thought and avoid blow that let them roll to defend.

    My sixth circle party beat a wormskull in a open fight, the only arbitrary limits the GM placed on it was that it would never take the same action more than once in a round, and it would only skinshift people it had grappled. (Otherwise it would have done nothing but 3xskinshift every round). It dealt a bunch of damage, a couple wounds, and skinshifted one character, but we totally won.

    But those arbitrary limits are critical. Far too many horror powers (damage shift, cursed luck, mark, etc) have basically no limits, and some of those aren’t even standard actions. DW naturally corrects this, due to the way its timing rules work, otherwise I would have written some rules above to deal with it.

  7. I think that bit about splat books is key. We didn’t play it right out of the gate, and we played slow, so the splatbooks hit about the time we needed them.

    I’m always up for chatting about ED, it’s also one of my favourite games, which is why I’m still mucking around with it 20 years later…

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