Games I missed out on #1 - Earthdawn

I managed to pick up a copy of the first edition book as I'd been looking at the recent editions and just wanted to get back into it. I remember looking through it when it first came out back in the early 1990s as we were in the middle of a Shadowrun game and the GM at the time wanted to run a similar game but using Earthdawn. I didn't know at the time that Earthdawn was the world eighteen thousand years before Shadowrun, and that you find out the true history of the awakened races that inhabit the future.

I remember wanting to run a Shadowrun game that alluded to ancient artifacts, and then run an Earthdawn game that explained where the artifacts had come from. It never came to pass, and Earthdawn was put away.

I've been reading up on it recently and so acquired this second hand copy, and all the original memories came flooding back. I wasn't a fan of the system at all, and to be honest if I ran it now I'd probably use the Runequest system. But the Mesoamerican feel, the takes on the different races, the idea of the Horrors and the people emerging from the Kaerns, which in turn gave a decent reason why there were dungeons to explore, instead of them just 'being there'... it was all fantastic, rich stuff and I'd run a game in this world in a heartbeat.

I regret missing out on this game when it first appeared. My next campaign is going to be a science fiction Cthulhu game, but if my players asked me to run a fantasy game I'd use this setting in a flash.