D&D 4e Campaign Setting Mashups

by Kalvin Lyle

Musicians have been doing it for years, taking two different and seeming incompatible artists and mashing them together to create something new, and arguably, better.

During the period between 1998 and 2005 I worked on a total conversion of Earthdawn to a new rules system for personal use.  Last month I realised that I may have wasted nearly 3 years of my precious spare time.  The mashup solution has completely changed the way I think about running table top games.

My Loveaffair with Earthdawn

Earthdawn is an AMAZING world, unique in setting and deeply rich in detail and history.  The setting and the rules took everything I hated about pre-3ed Dungeons and Dragons and fixed it by completely flipping it upside down.  They took everything about DnD and made it work in the opposite way.  The best example of this is the character advancement.  As you might imagine the two games might at first seem completely un-mashable without a lot of work.  Yet they are and the method is so simple that it can be applied to any combination of RPGs.

While there is so much about Earthdawn that I love, there are many problems as well.  Problems that cannot be simply solved with house rules or light rules conversions.  I tried.

One of the greatest and ultimately fatal things about Earthdawn is it’s character advancement system.  Players can spend points on whatever powers or abilities they want.  When enough of their powers are high enough rank, they gain a level.  Players have complete control over how their character progresses.  Where this goes horribly awry is when you try to create balanced encounters for any character above first level.

The Earthdawn system lacks any real metric for determining the power level of the players.  There is no guarantee that two level three characters are equal.  Which would be okay, but this is only half the problem.

There is no metric for determining the power level of any of the creatures.  That’s not true.  You can use the experience value of a creature to get a rough idea of the creatures power level, but it isn’t that accurate.  To be more specific, there is no metric for determining the power level of a group of creatures.

These two problems result in a game where it’s nearly impossible to create balanced encounters for the players.

That Dirty Harlot… Fourth Edition

I toyed with Dungeons and Dragons before, I even ran a class for game design students at the Vancouver Film School, but my heart was always with Earthdawn.  Until fourth edition.  4e DnD took the balanced encounter system from the previous edition and improved it by adding Earthdawn style class powers.  4e makes my heart swoon.  It’s not perfect, but it treats me just a little bit better than Earthdawn did.  I’m such a slut.

RPG Matchmaking

In the days leading up to starting my first 4th edition D&D campaign in years I stumbled onto a simple yet brilliant idea.

The first step in my journey of discovery was in realising that all 4e DnD adventures are rubbish.  No seriously, they all suck.  I sincerely wish that Paizo Press had made the move to 4e, but I digress.

In the absence of a good adventure I considered writing my own.  I started with a simple spreadsheet-based encounter generator that creates balanced encounters for any party size that would take the party from level 1 to level 30.  That’s when it hit me:

Use the statistics for an encounter not the descriptions.

It works brilliantly.  I use a modified version of the Earthdawn world and a completely unaltered D&D 4e rules set.  Those rubbish 4e adventures become a gold mine of balanced encounters for me to choose from.  The 4th edition Monsters Manual suddenly becomes completely relevant to Earthdawn. No matter what the players do I have a linear list of challenges they will encounter.  What they do has no impact on what challenge they will face.  If they leave the well designed dungeon and avoid the 3 kobolds skirmishers and 5 kobold minions in the next room, they will face that exact same encounter in the forest instead.

However, where the encounter happens and what’s at stake changes completely based on their actions.  For example, their first encounter was On The Road: Kobold Brigands from Keep on the Shadowfell.  However, instead of journeying down a road, they stumbled out of a Kaer without their memories and fought cannibals near a river in a post-apocalyptic fantasy Earthdawn setting.  When they entered Sir Keegan’s Tomb, they instead met Keegan, an ancient drake spirit of a great dragon (one of the factions in my campaign who will become more important later in the story).

The campaign plot is a series of nodes in a flow chart and I take the encounters from adventures in the order they are presented and make them fit into the current situation for the players.  It’s perfectly balanced, thanks for 4e.  The world is rich and deep with history thanks to Earthdawn.  I can tell a story without fear of worrying what the players will want to do next.  Instead of focusing on the rules and game balance I only have to worry about the story and the pace of play, but those are completely different sets of problems.

Published March 5, 2010 at 12:09 pm

Tags: D&D Campaign Setting, D&D Monsters, D&D Setting, DnD Setting, Earthdawn 4e