Pyramid Review
Earthdawn: Second Edition
Published by Living Room Games
352 page softcover; $30.00
FASA published the original Earthdawn game in 1993, and it developed a dedicated core of players who admired its well thought out world and intelligent mechanics. When FASA ended the line, a group of these players purchased the rights to publish new materials for the game: an uncommon act of devotion meant to save their favorite game setting from extinction. After producing two other well-received supplements for the game, Living Room Games has finally released a Second Edition of the main rules.
At first glance the book is an impressive piece of work for such a small game company; the interior art is good, the layout is clean, if simple, and the text is easy to read. It isn't until one looks closer that minor complaints arise. Living Room Games makes extensive use of the original artwork, while adding new art throughout the book. While each individual piece is good, the new artwork's cleaner comic book style never meshes with the darker, more evocative, original art. The color plates from the first edition are not included, a perfectly understandable business decision, but I do miss them. The main artistic improvement is the new cover -- it isn't inspired, but at least it looks like the cover to a fantasy game (with the obligatory cheesecake female in a Princess Leia on Tattooine outfit), something the first edition cover never managed. Like the art, . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: August 24, 2001
Copyright © 2001 by Steve Jackson Games. All rights reserved. Pyramid subscribers are permitted to read this article online, or download it and print out a single hardcopy for personal use. Copying this text to any other online system or BBS, or making more than one hardcopy, is strictly prohibited. So please don't. And if you encounter copies of this article elsewhere on the web, please report it to webmaster@sjgames.com.