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What happened to Merrox? I thought he was Master of the Hall of Records, and Thom Edrull was just the lowly Archivist/Scribe? Has Thom been white-anting Merrox so he could steal the top job? (e.g. making claims Merrox doesn't know the Throalic equivalent of the dewey decimal system)

So I've just read the 'What Has Come Before' chapter.

Some thoughts.

A few things in there I wasn't expecting, need to mull them over some more.

One thing that does seem to be missing is the whole Jaron and the creation of the Sphinx thing in relation to the declaration of Empire. Later in the text it does mention a dragon sitting atop Jaron's Sphinx, but for anyone new to the game's history that will appear meaningless.

The title of the chapter 'The Return To The Surface' in my personal view should be changed. It should be more dramatic. It should simply be called 'Earthdawn', that's what it describes and what the game is called.

*puts hair up in crazy Doc Brown style*

What year is it!?

1517 TH.

That was one thing that struck me while reading that chapter - a lack of dates for major events. Our current campaign is 1507 (right between Prelude and BaW). It would be handy knowing exactly when future events happen (a timeline would be great- that way I wouldn't have to comb through the chapter every time to check dates).

Ron was doing a rewrite on those (he just turned it in this week), so they aren't in the draft that got sent out.

Depending on page count, they may be added in, or pushed off to the Companion.

With regard to the Creature stats layout... there's a lot that is likely to happen with those. I got about 2/3 of the way through the creatures before realizing that I wanted to change some stuff in that regard, but wanted to finish the first pass on the numbers themselves, and then go back and revise the layout. I also want to change the way Enhanced Senses works slightly -- rather than a straight Step value, I want to re-do it as a bonus so that it is easier to figure out what kind of benefit an adept using Borrow Sense gets.

Also on the "to do list" with regard to creatures is figuring out which creature powers are common (and easy) enough that they can be presented at the start of the list (Enhanced Senses is one of those), and the best way to present creature powers that mimic talents/skills (I'm not crazy about the mass of "see Player's Guide p. XX" all over the place in there). I also want to do a comparison of the mounts/beasts of burden and potentially change some base Step numbers around, because I honestly think they're all over the map. A bit more consistency in terms of how powers are written... there's less use of the success mechanic in there than I would like... but I also want to try and reduce the amount of stuff a GM would need to keep track of from round-to-round in combat.