Earthdawn is a Fantasy role-playing game, or RPG produced originally by FASA?.

The game differed from the fantasy troupe of games such as Dungeons and Dragons but drew heavily upon games such as Runequest. The game was tightly bound to its setting, a region called the Barsaive.

In synopsis, the game world has suffered an invasion from otherworld dimensions that has scoured the land of life. The players take the role of survivors who having hidden from the slaughter in magical shelters are now emerging to explore the land and discover what has happened in their absence.

The game had an intricate history that helped set the tone and goals of the adventures that the explorers would undertake. The key points of which are the prediction of the disaster, the creation of an empire in attempt to ready the population for its coming and the subsequent differences between the actual events and the predictions.

It was an interesting idea to create characters who had been living in underground shelters for most of their lives before emerging to reclaim a world most only knew by stories told by their grandparents and pictures seen in books.

The two major power groups within Barsaive were the Dwarves of XXXX in the north-east and the magic using Theran Empire (???) in the south. The Empire had taught the people of the Barsaive how to survive the astral attack and the dwarves were some of their most astute students. However once the danger was past the dwarves decided to rebel and set up their own independent kingdom. When the Therans returned to the Barsaive they faced a rebellion against their distant rule.

The Therans are based in the magical floating city of Sky Point while the dwarven realm's capital is the underground city of ???.

Magic in Earthdawn

Earthdawn's magic system was simultaneously Earthdawn's most innovative and most derivative aspect. It was highly varied but its essential idea that everyone had access to magic particularly that used to perform their jobs and assist in daily tasks was borrowed almost wholesale from Runequest.

Similarly Runequest Sorcerers can be seen to have a strong influence on Earthdawn's Astral Magic users.

Despite this Earthdawn's ideas and particularly its integration of the setting's magical philosophy into the game's rule system were distinctive and enjoyable.

Ed notes: a nice article - I don't want to edit it because I don't understand the subject, but there is grammatical confusion. You use present tense and past tense interchangeably. If the game no longer exists, use past tense, else use present. The previous paragraph is a key example.

'Remember to delete my comments when you are done! No-one else wants to read them.

The tense confusion reflects my own confusion over the status of the game, I thought it had been cancelled and was therefore "dead" (past). It seems though that there is a 2nd Edition of the game produced by a new company (present). This is really a placeholder entry until someone familiar with the 2nd Edition expands the entry for the new edition and replaces my comments on the older game to a "Changes between 1st and 2nd Edition" section.

For the moment I have kept your comments and changed the tense to the past.

People familiar with the new edition should take this to be request for them to step in and change the entry.