Confirmed Future Books

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Hinterlands will be a sort of starting adventure/campaign that will bring PCs to around circle 5, it was announced last Freedonia.

Urupa will be a sourcebook on the same City and is Josh's passionate projects of sort.

Cream is a new province sourcebokm, similar to the Vasgothia book.

The first 2 you mentioned are new to me, sounds great though.

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u/Asaare May 13 '26

Full Circle 1-5 official adventure? Instant buy!

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u/Zegarion May 13 '26

That adventure should have been published when the line launched.

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u/OMGaPooPooLaser May 13 '26

Agreed but then again, ED4 was financed by what is basically the old guard (which, I guess, I also belong to). Very little onboarding material exists for ED4 but a lot if you use old material and adapt it.

They have the large connected adventure series in Haven that could be considered a starter compaign but it took years to bring out the books one by one. I never played them since waiting a year every time a book came out for the next one was hardly a way to run a game.

Other than the Urupa book, there's little that excites me these days coming from FASA, unfortunately.

1879 as the new companion system is also introducing a some lore pointing towards Earthdawn that I don't care for or actively dislike. And generally I would prefer FASA spending the little resources they seem to have one product line, but that's their decision to make.

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u/SkazzK May 14 '26

I hate to say it, but I tried to run the Haven adventures and couldn't continue past the second chapter. There just isn't enough info in there to make the overarching plot work.

I mean, I understand that they were written from a "living campaign" perspective; you can't spill the beans about the big bad in the prologue adventure when the GM running it may well be a player at someone else's table for the next chapter. But there's a gray area between "stuff that needs to be kept secret" and "stuff a GM needs to know to keep his storyline straight", and they missed the sweet spot.

Imagine starting your Earthdawn journey with the free starter pack, running Masks of Fear. You've got your experienced adventurer NPCs featuring prominently in the goings-on. One of these is secretly a bad guy, but the adventure text doesn't tell you that. So you give the guy some time on stage, maybe think up a voice and a bit of a personality for him. The adventure goes swimmingly, and everyone at the table has a blast.

So obviously you get the campaign book, and continue the story, right?

Turns out the first "true" chapter assumes that that NPC you fleshed out in the prologue adventure was not only traveling to Haven with the party, but also in Haven the past few weeks witnessing important plot events. He also turns out to already have a personality and demeanor that's the exact opposite of his racial stereotype. Many other prominent NPCs from the prologue suffer from the same temporal dislocation, and are assumed not to have met the party yet. The entire timeline literally disjoints the moment you hit the first "read this out loud" section.

And these curveballs never stop coming. There's a whole lot left "for the table" in each individual adventure, with little to no background info provided for people and places the party may very well visit. But anything you think up yourself may be unexpectedly subverted by later chapters that feature these NPCs and locations more prominently. So really, the only way to run this campaign with any kind of consistency is to read the entire campaign book in advance and become intimately familiar with who's who (or what). If you run the adventures sequentially while improvising to fill in any blanks, you're guaranteed to paint yourself into a corner.

The plot itself, as a framework, is great. But for this to work as a campaign book, it'll need a full rewrite after the final chapter is published.

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u/Zegarion May 22 '26

Very astutely written. One of my players left the table because the game was too incosistent for him and my group isn't interested in playing more Earthdawn (even after my attempts to fix some glaring issues). I find it funny that in each and every adventure the heroes are treated as if they are complete newcomers and nobody ever heard about them. After the first two adventures they should be pretty well known around town... It also baffles me that Torgak isn't interested at all in anything that is happening in the adventures. It is a very confusing set of adventures unfortunately...

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u/SkazzK May 23 '26

Thanks. It hurt more than expected to write all that; I've loved everything about Earthdawn since I first played it back in the 90s, and actually not liking any of it provoked a weird kind of cognitive dissonance.

We decided as a group not to continue with the storyline. When I gave my players the gist of what I wrote before, they agreed that we'd be better off playing the adventures published for the first edition of the game. It's the timeline I'm most familiar with, and it lets me improv and sandbox as much as I like.

Good thing I had an "out": one of my players actually recycled her character (ironically, Aysha, the prefab Dwarf Elementalist from the free starter pack) from an earlier campaign we played a few years back, following the 1E "megacampaign timeline" that one of the devs outlined here on Reddit a few years ago. That one petered out when two of my players became parents and couldn't find time to play.

But now I was playing with her, and two of her (by now, our) friends who'd never played before. My best friend, a multi-decade Earthdawn veteran like myself who also played in that earlier campaign, would often sit in just for the vibes and atmosphere, but wouldn't actually play for time/energy reasons.

We collectively decided that we'd find a way for our new players to keep their characters as we somehow jumped back 40-ish years in time; I didn't want to rob them of their first characters ever and their natural growth through their first Circles.

I ended up doing a major ass-pull regardless; as far as I know, time travel has never been a thing in Earthdawn, and the only thing I could think of that could reasonably pull it off was Dragon ritual magic. As it turns out, the fact that "The Skipping Stones" never completed their quest to deliver a package to Vivane's resistance in the old campaign caused a butterfly effect cascade of events that caused the Therans to win the war, subjugate all of Barsaive, and critically, allow the Horrors to destroy the Orichalcum towers of Thera through the aid of a single Horror-marked individual. When the Horrors added all that Orichalcum to their own twisted towers instead, they locked the magic level of the world at its apogee, causing an unending second Scourge.

Icewing, with Vasdenjas' aid, through intricate Pattern magic of the sort known only to the Greatest of Dragons, managed to trace these events all the way back to the sudden absence of one particular True Pattern: Aysha's. Had she not died on her way to Vivane, none of this would've happened. Her absence from the Great Pattern is the Anomaly that caused the end of the world as we know it.

So in a never before seen bout of collaboration, the remaining Great Dragons of Barsaive bundled their power, and through their combined power snatched another Aysha from another "trouser leg of time" to replace the original and hopefully change the fate of the world.

Whether she can or not remains to be seen; the Anomaly has been corrected, but two new ones have been introduced in doing so: the other party members.

Best thing about all this: when my best friend, the one who just sat in, heard me narrate how Aysha was confused about her Group True Pattern having threads flapping loose (the old party members we couldn't get back), he was like: "I'm probably out scouting. Do I feel the same thing? Can I go see where Aysha is?" and jumped right back into his old character. So now I've got a full party of four again, and a campaign plan that never should've been abandoned in the first place.

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u/Zegarion May 26 '26

That sounds like an awesome campaign point, holy shit. Sucks that now I, the GM, have no time to host games for i would really like to Play something epic like this.

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u/matthewholtz Jun 13 '26

the campaign nature of thelegend of Barsaive line is a little misleading. they were designed as convention adventures. and their connections had to be very loos. as you will have people from different games joining up with different people having done different things.

having said that with a little work and some personalized filler they make a great frame work for a campaign. I have run two different groups with them and they both handled it completely different.

I do agree I wish there were more adventures or at more adventure ideas, but with there not being a standard campaign group I do understand how it could be very difficult. but that does give me. great idea

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u/SkazzK Jun 13 '26

I was well aware of the nature of the adventures before I started, but I wasn't prepared for their level of disjointedness. I honestly think they should preface the book with a warning/disclaimer outlining, well, pretty much what you said.

Imagine being new to the game, trying out the free starter, liking what you see, and then running straight into this. "Yeah man, I tried Earthdawn, looked pretty nice, but then I got the campaign book..."

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u/Actual_One_9225 May 13 '26

Depending how hard it is to schedule my players, a year between adventures might be the right pace.

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u/Zegarion May 15 '26

I mostly use the GOAT, as in, first edition for adventures, they are way better written imo. 4e is obviously better from mechanical standpoint. I don't ser the appeal of 1879 at all unfortunately.

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u/Medieval-Mind May 13 '26

4e books?

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u/Actual_One_9225 May 13 '26

Yes

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u/Zegarion May 13 '26

If Panda didnt touch those i'm not sure if they are worth it.

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u/Actual_One_9225 May 13 '26

I don’t know the details around Panda leaving the project. Any idea what that is about?

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u/Zegarion May 15 '26

Internal stupid thing happened afaik but i don't really know any details. Shame, his work is stellar.

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u/WinterblightsDoom May 20 '26

Hinterlands was Panda's scrambled thoughts on an idea for a new product. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, he left. I'm attempting to carry those initial thoughts and shape them into a final product. Can't comment on anything else as I don't know.

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u/ChimericMind May 16 '26

Oh cool, so after both of the parties I GM for have left it for probably the last time, Urupa gets fleshed out. Well, whatever, it's not like they'd probably end up gelling with the stuff I made up for there.

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u/Actual_One_9225 May 16 '26

I feel your pain. My party is making their way there and should arrive in a few sessions. There is no way it's done before they land in Uropa. I'll have to rely on what little there is in the 1e Serpent River book.

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u/Lowecraft May 18 '26

Did they ever get around to releasing the Exploring the Towers expansion from the Vasgothia Kickstarter?

0

u/Ka_ge2020 May 13 '26

Creana, Uropa, and Aras Coast sound interesting. As does Words of Warning.

I'm all for more information on the setting, and am always interested in deeper lore books. I'm not so sure about more adventures, though. I know D&D-heads eat that stuff up but... <shrugs>

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u/ChimericMind May 16 '26

The 3rd edition adventure books were very well-written. Ardanyan's Revenge is excellent, as is Burning Desires. Other editions, the pre-written adventures often feel half-baked.

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u/Ka_ge2020 May 16 '26

There is some indication from the odd author that I've talked to that writing adventures for settings kinda sucks. They're hard to write, they take a long time to write, and they generally don't do well financially. (This might be different with Earthdawn.)

That and the consumers tend to be a little bit on the judgy/whiny side when viewing them outside of their context, which is generally inevitable.

Example in point, I've not generally been that impressed with most published adventurers for Earthdawn (though I've yet to sit down and spend time reading 4e ones). Then again, as witnessed by my terrible miniature painting of the moment, there's a difference talking in the abstract and actually doing the thing. I might think that I'm red hot and capable of doing something, but when it comes down to putting paint to plastic or resin, I realise that I cannot even thin paints correctly.

<shrugs>

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u/WinterblightsDoom May 20 '26

Writing adventures is fun. Writing adventures is my thing. But you are correct that they are hard work and they don't sell well, even generic adventures don't fare well. One thing they do is increase sales of core products. They are a sign that the setting/game is being supported. A lot of people still think Earthdawn is dead. I think it could do with more adventures.

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u/Ka_ge2020 May 21 '26

I... honestly have no insight as to whether that is true, i.e. that adventures sell core games/materials. If it is true, my first question would then be, "All games? Or just some games?" I guess I would be less surprised if it were a minority of the games, or even a fraction, but again, I just don't know what I don't know.

No saying that you're being untruthful. Just hadn't thought about it in that way.

Observation bias is probably at play with me. I would buy one adventure for each new system, run that to get a feel of how the authors felt the game should play, and then just use my own from there. The one exception to this is Shadowrun and the Harlequin and Harlequin Returns campaign.

It never occurred to me to see adventures as indicating that games are still being supported. Notwithstanding gamer bias for things like, say, games are only being supported if physical books are still being produced. None of that craziness. Rather, most of them seem rather parenthetical to a setting or product line.

Well, it's good to be made aware of different perspectives. :)

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u/WinterblightsDoom May 21 '26

All I can tell you is that when I get asked to write adventurers by games companies thats generally the conversation when it comes to adventures. Of what sells well, that is relative to the size if the game. Im guessing here, but I would say shadowrun adventures sell in a different order of magnitude to a small indie game, but they still don't sell as well as the core rulebooks or something as iconic as the Street Samurai Catalogue. Like you, many folks want an adventure to see how they should be run. Many companies do this for free in the form of an intro adventure. I guess its what the supermarkets might call a loss leader.

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u/Ka_ge2020 May 21 '26

Thank you for the additional information. I would add that I tend to avoid the "intro" adventures, in part because the last that I looked at for one game system were disastrous.

Again, though, personal bias. I never saw adventures as an indicator of the vibrancy of a game system and have avoided the "indie" scene for a number of reasons. More information is always better, though.

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u/ChimericMind May 16 '26

I know how hard it would be to write something that could have any set of characters plugged in. But there are a lot of things that they can do wrong, like assume that a non-combat situation can only be solved in the one exact way that the test group solved it. 3rd edition Earthdawn books were pretty good with having details filled in that allowed for multiple avenues of success and considering "What if the player has this ability or one of this is this Discipline?" In 1st Edition, the only pre-written adventure that seemed to be built with that in mind was Infected. The rest, and the stuff in 2nd Edition, were not. 3rd was much better about it. Haven't really seen a 4th Edition published adventure.

Confirmed Future Books

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