Today’s game is FASA’s 1993 fantasy epic Earthdawn. The world is emerging from a period of super high magical potentiality during which Horrors from Beyond The Void invaded, driving the sentient races to hide away in underground retreats for centuries. The stars are gone just wrong enough now to make it safe to come out so, in an inversion of the trope, you’ve emerged from your dungeon to crawl across the surface of the land of Barsaive, making contact with holdouts in other dungeons – or the lingering Horrors that took them over!

From the get-go the game was headcanoned as a predecessor to FASA’s other smash hit, Shadowrun, due to its cyclical magic eras concept & the fact that most Shadowrun races were present in Earthdawn as well. That may have been made officially true at some point.

Step one in creating an Earthdawn character is to select your Discipline. This is what most other games with a similar advancement system would call your class, but Earthdawn has its own terminology for literally everything, as you’ll see. We haven’t had a rogue-alike yet, so let’s go with Troubadour, the bard of the Earthdawn world.

There are no requirements for Disciplines, but certain Attributes are more important than others (Dexterity, Perception & Charisma in the case of the Troubadour) & certain races are excluded from certain Disciplines altogether. I’m looking for an entertaining concept rather than optimization, so I decided this is going to be a troll Troubadour. (“Let me sing you the song of my people” is in this case followed by twenty minutes of nearly subsonic growling punctuated with clashes of metal on stone.)

Attributes can be point-bought or rolled, though the rules recommend point buy to keep all the PCs in a party roughly equivalent. I go with points. The advantage to racial bonuses for some attributes is that you can dump a paltry number of points into that stat & still end up with an OK-ish value. There are six stats, which we give these values plus or minus the troll modifiers:

Dexterity 15
Strength 9 + 4 = 14
Toughness 13 + 2 = 15
Perception 14 – 1 = 13
Willpower 13 + 1 = 14
Charisma 14

Dexterity is important for Troubadours, yes, but mostly I like the idea of a shockingly nimble troll parkouring all over Barsaive.

Each numerical value for an attribute corresponds to a step, which in turn yields the number & type of dice to be rolled when using that attribute in a test. The step is equal to the rounded-up average or sum of the averages of the roll or rolls. Our Troubadour ends up resoundingly medium in all things:

Attribute	Value	Step	Dice
Dexterity	15	6	1d10
Strength	14	6	1d10
Toughness	15	6	1d10
Perception	13	6	1d10
Willpower	14	6	1d10
Charisma	14	6	1d10

The attribute scale goes from 1 to 30, so that’s literally smack in the middle of the range.

Next come many, many derived values, here called Characteristics. They’re all found by cross-referencing the values of various attributes to columns on the Attribute Table

Physical Defense Rating: 8
Spell Defense Rating: 7
Social Defense Rating: 8

Move: 70/35
Lift/Carry: 105/210

Death Rating: 38
Wound Threshold: 10
Unconsciousness Rating: 29
Recovery Tests/Day: 3
Recovery Dice: 1d10
Mystic Armor: 2

Social Defense Rating is like AC for your mind; it’s the number another character has to hit to effectively mislead or manipulate you. Death Rating may sound metal but it’s just the number of points of damage you can take before you die. Ditto Unconsciousness. Wound Threshold is the number of points of damage that must be inflicted with a single attack to cause a capital-w Wound, which has more grievous effects than ordinary injury.

The world of Earthdawn is a highly magical one, as mentioned; so much so that all Adepts, whether or not they’re literal spell-casters, can draw upon the magical energy known as Karma to enhance their skills – or in game terms, buy a higher result on a test. All members of a race share certain common Karma stats.

Troll:
Karma Action Dice: d4
Legend Point Cost/Karma Point: 10
Starting Karma: 6
Maximum Karma: 20

We won’t get into the weeds of what those numbers mean here. Suffice it to say that like the stone-bodied Obsidimen, the other tanks of the setting, trolls get little Karma & it produces slight change when they do use it. Legend Points are Earthdawn’s XP. (I did mention the “idiosyncratic name for everything” bit, right?)

Each race has at least one special ability. Trolls have Heat Sight, which lets them see Predator-style to a distance equal to what sight in the visible light spectrum could spot. There may also be minimum Attribute values to be met or maximums to be observed, but our Troubadour’s are all good.

Each Discipline offers various Talents at each Circle (level). At chargen a PC has eight Rank Points to distribute among the Talents, maximum three points in a single talent. Our Troubadour ends up with:

Disguise 2
Emotion Song 2
First Impression 1
Karma Ritual 1
Melee Weapons 1
Mimic Voice 1

Characters who put no Rank Points in a Talent can’t attempt to use them untrained; they just don’t know them at all. That’s down to the nature of Talents. They aren’t mundane trained skills, but peri-magical abilities that call upon the Adept’s connection to the world’s energy. They range from the mundane Disguise to a Cú Chulainn style warp frenzy to full on guardian spirit summoning. Some cost Karma to use, & some cause Strain that inflicts physical damage.

The semi-arcane nature of Talents is why I have no qualms about choosing it for our Troubadour. That & I love the idea of faking a way into a location, then suddenly throwing off a cloak & crying “surprise troll, suckers!”

There are also fully ordinary skills. Each character puts one Rank Point in one of the Artisan Skills offered by their Discipline, then two more points in a single Knowledge Skill or one point in each of two.

Artisan Skill: Storytelling 1
Knowledge Skills: History of the Scourge 1, Legends & Heroes 1

All that’s left is to buy equipment. Every PC starts with 120 silver pieces. A couple of standard kits make choosing a bit easier.

Adventurer’s Kit, lute, traveler’s garb, water skin, 5 sheets parchment & writing tools, peasant garb w/ robe, other disguise materials

Trollsword (Damage Step 6)

Our PC may be a Troubadour but she’s also a troll, & I imagine that trolls consider the Trollsword the only fit weapon for their people regardless of their Discipline. She particularly wants to show some trollish pride when among the myriad other peoples of Barsaive.

Name: Odgudana
Discipline: Troubadour
Circle: First
Race: Troll

Attributes:
Dexterity (15): 6/1d10
Strength (14): 6/1d10
Toughness (15): 6/1d10
Perception (13): 6/1d10
Willpower (14): 6/1d10
Charisma (14): 6/1d10

Talents:
Disguise: 2
Emotion Song: 2
First Impression: 1
Karma Ritual: 1
Melee Weapons: 1
Mimic Voice: 1

Skills:
Artisan/Storytelling: 1
Knowledge/History of the Scourge: 1
Knowledge/Legends & Heroes: 1

Initiative: 1d10

Combat:

Physical Defense Rating: 8
Spell Defense Rating: 7
Social Defense Rating: 8
Armor: 0
Mystic Armor: 2

Move: 70/35
Lift/Carry: 105/210

Death Rating: 38
Wound Threshold: 10
Unconsciousness Rating: 29
Recovery Tests/Day: 3
Recovery Dice: 1d10

Equipment:
Adventurer’s Kit, lute, traveler’s garb, water skin, 5 sheets parchment & writing tools, peasant garb w/ robe, other disguise materials
Trollsword (Damage Step 6)