FASA Games, Inc.

I feel like the uncool kid at the party for not knowing this, but what is Earthfell?

I don't recall seeing any mention of it prior to the open call posting and the line developer bios. Is there any information on the setting thus far? I feel like I missed an announcement somewhere along the line.

No takers? Is anyone else as curious as me about this game?

Perhaps there's an announcement forthcoming after the news of Blue Planet's demise? I know that they shared the same line developer at least.

I'm not trying to be pushy or force anyone's hand. I'd just like to have a vague idea of what kind of game it's going to be. Is it a miniatures game? A roleplaying game?

Earthfell is one of the three new settings representing the second, sixth and eighth worlds. Probably the sixth, several centuries after Shadowrun.

Whoa, seriously?

If so, I'm 500% more excited about this game.

Aren't there potential rights complications with tying in with Shadowrun? I was under the impression that the Shadowrun/Earthdawn shared world concept had gone out the window after the licenses were split off to different publishers.

As you said it. Shadowrun is no longer an official future of Earthdawn. If it ever was...

When both games were with FASA, Shadowrun was about as explicitly the future of Earthdawn as it was possible to be (if nothing else, Caroline Spector's novels made it explicit).

But the split doesn't invalidate the magic cycle concept, nor does the exploration of other time periods invalidate Shadowrun as a (possible) future for the Earthdawn setting. We just can't refer to it explicitly anymore.

Yeah, I recall spending WAY too much time trying to connect the dots between the settings. Most of the time, that meant trying to identify the Shadowrun equivalents of Earthdawn's great dragons (Mountainshadow = Dunklezahn [rip, Big D], Icewing = Ghostwalker, Lofwyr = Alamaise's rival brother, etc). One of the Shadowrun adventures involved a magic item that was clearly Horror tainted in some way and the insect spirits were obviously supposed to be the Invae. I seem to remember there being a comment in the Tir Tairngire sourcebook that described a portrait of Queen Alacia in some government official's mansion (or something similar). Even the very concept of adepts is shared between the settings because SR adepts are essentially weaker versions of ED adepts.

The big problem with tying the settings together was always the rules, though. SR's rules were so fundamentally different from ED's that it made it difficult to create equivalencies between them. As a funny aside, when I bought my first copy of ED back in 1995, I scoured my house to collect d6s because I assumed that ED would use the same rules as Shadowrun, which I had played previously. Fortunately, I had a set of D&D dice from an old "red box."

I think there used to be a post over on the old Shadowrun Dumpshock forums that compiled every ED-SR reference from the two game lines. Not sure if that's where I saw it or if it's still there. I like the idea that SR could be a "possible" future for ED.

"Ancient History" was the guy who compiled the ED/SR crossover stuff. Sadly, a lot of that stuff has been taken down or lost (though digging can pull some of it up from the internet wayback machine).

The portrait of Alachia in the old Tir book explicitly showed her with thorns.

Man, I forgot how much of a rabbit hole this was.

ANYWAY...

The idea of setting games in later magic cycles is a great one. I'm excited to see what could come out of it.