| date | source | topic | link |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2010-05-02 | Dumpshock Forum | SR/ED crossover | [1] |
Dumpshock Forum - May 2 2010, 03:13 AM - Link
Earthdawn was conceived of and created as the Fourth World to Shadowrun's Sixth World, but the conscious decision was that we would make all of the connections pretty vague and would not, in product, unequivocally link the two so that gamemasters could chose to ignore or exploit the connection as they wished. We also wanted to be sure that we were not hamstringing either the SR or ED writers by forcing direct continuity between the two lines, and so therefore kept things rather vague. Some authors chose to make more direct connections - I being one of them - in the "Voices From the Past" short story. So, yes, that is meant to be Vestrial in that story, but it could either be the Mad Passion, or just Harlequin's hallucination of him. Regardless of which, the connection is deliberate. The entirety of Harlequin's Back is a tap-dancy link to Earthdawn.
The most notable exceptions to that (that occur to me right now) were Caroline Spector's three novels Scars (Earthdawn), Little Treasures (Earthdawn), and Worlds Without End (Shadowrun). I have to admit that I was phasing out of FASA and into FASA Interactive as those novels were being worked on and I had little to do with them and do not remember why it was decided to create a definitive bridge. It was most likely marketing driven, to try and pull more SR players into ED. Only WWE was published in the US due to the cancellation of the ED book line by the publisher.