When I last published this hack of Dungeon World to
the Earthdawn
setting, I claimed that it was as complete as I intended to make it.
Apparently, that was a lie.
This version (1.3) remains much like the previous version, with the following changes:
- Bonds have been replaced with flags, an idea from Rob Donoghue. This necessitates changing some other things, such as the Aid and End of Session moves. Disciplines now have a “suggested flags” section rather than a bonds section. All references to Dungeon World-style bonds removed and moves that mentioned them changed. (This turns out to solve a problem: version 1.2 also used the word “bond” to refer to weaving a thread into someone or some place. It still means that in 1.3, but is no longer ambiguous.)
- A lot of people wondered what happened to the idea of karma from Earthdawn. It actually was there in version 1.2, it was just called what Dungeon World calls it: “preparation”. I gave in and switched to calling it karma in this version, even though the term as used in Earthdawn bears little resemblance to what the word actually means. Still, this change should help Earthdawn players who are looking for it. Also, it has always been the intent to make preparation/karma significantly more useful and present than it is in standard Dungeon World (where it is so useless that, I’d wager, most players aren’t even aware it exists), so this change should differentiate it even more.
- Most of the disciplines were tinkered with a bit. This is particularly true of the air sailor, as that playbook is significantly based on the aid move and, therefore, was previously based on bonds. In general, the number of “plus something to something” moves has been reduced, as have the (already small) number of moves that dictate what happens on a miss. All of the disciplines remain based around two stats, but a few now have a better balance of moves between those two stats than they did before.
- I took a crack at building character sheets. These are experimental, continuing my dabbling with legal sized paper. (The aspect ratio of legal paper falls between 16:9 and 16:10, the typical aspect ratios of nearly all modern laptops, so landscape legal pages fit very nicely in full screen.) It’s also the largest paper that most home printers in the US can easily support. For those in places where the only aspect ratio for paper you can easily buy is based on the square-root of two (the ISO 216 standard), shrinking these sheets onto A4 is probably your best bet, but probably not entirely satisfying. Each playbook is formatted to fit on a single side of once piece of paper (spell casters also have a separate spell sheet).
- Debilities now inflict -2 instead of -1. This makes them more…debilitating, and forces them to be taken a bit more seriously. They can often be glossed over, forgotten in standard Dungeon World.
- A number of rules have been changed or tweaked. Magicians can now get a fifth spell matrix, for example, and move triggered when someone aborts a spellcasting attempt has been added. Swordmasters can no longer become immune to stuff. Fireball is a bit different. Changed a warrior’s “carnage” to “impetus” and altered the way it worked and is explained a bit. Addressed monster tags better. And so on.
- Some added gear, magic items, mounts, monsters and so on.
This is probably the last revision I’ll do of this hack. Maybe not. Anyway, you can download the lot, including InDesign sources, here:
- fourth-world-1.3.pdf (6.0 MB)
- fourth-world-playbooks-1.3.pdf (12.1 MB)
- fourth-world-src.zip (32.3 MB)