Kamelion's page

Additionally, the way XP awards work un der the 3.5 rules means that a character who lags behind the rest of the group in levels will eventually catch up. So, as long as you don't blow huge amounts of XP in a short time, you'll be able to keep pace with the other characters in the long run.

Say Kamelion, an interesting thing came up at our "character creation" meeting for the new Dark Sun game I'm in. Athas.org is recognized as being the Official Dark Sun for 3.x versions of D&D as well as content creation and such. Who if I may ask, would I hit up at WoTC for more along the lines of the Intellectual Property rights? See, my friends and I absolutely LOVE Dark Sun and the whole setting. Just the sheer idea of it, is fantastic. Well we think there are more people out there that feel the way we do. Since the people I play with are somewhat corporate savy, etc. We're actually interested in somehow getting printed a new "boxed" set (big hardcover really) piece of material. If we have to purchase the "rights" to the setting... we decided, so be it.

You know, I'm not exactly sure who the precise person at WotC would be for that. I am imagining that it would be the D&D Brand Manager, but that's a bit of a guess. Direct interaction with WotC takes place a step higher up the food-chain than the lowly design and product development postition that I currently occupy ;-)

It's a cool idea, and you wouldn't be the first to consider this. Some time ago, in fact, one of the original creators of the setting is supposed to have approached WotC with a cash offer to buy the rights, but was turned down. I also recall hearing a rumour that AEG tried something similar - no idea how true that is, though. And, as I understand it, WotC would be looking to ask a pretty stiff figure for that kind of thing. Still, nothing ventured, nothing gained, eh?. If you guys do take a shot at something like that, then best of luck!

DesertGamer110 wrote:

Is there anything i can do in return for either of you?

You can stay safe and come home soon.

What he said :).

Thank you for the support. Do you know where i can find those or do can i buy them offline. My facilities around here are rather limited. I was also curious if anyone knew what is the best thing to use with a chessex battle mat but i dont know if minitures will work? Anyone have experience with this?

I use Chessex battlemats, with wet-erase markers, miniatures and/or counters. A set of kid's washable/water-soluble colour pens also works great. Was that what you meant? I'm not quite clear on what info you're after here, regarding the mat :).

You might also want to take a look at Paizo's own Shackled City adventure path hardcover, if you can get a copy offline. It runs from 1st to 20th. Most stuff from Necromancer games is also good - "Crucible of Freya" is a great starter adventure that has lots of potential to become a longer-term area (plenty of good hooks and adventure development). "Rappan Athuk" is also good, but I wouldn't take a party of lower than about 6th level in there - it's a real meat-grinder (but a damn fine adventure besides). Rappan Athuk is due a revised hardcover release around GenCon time this year, iirc.

Hey Kamelion-

Firstly, you're welcome. I've been a huge fan of DS3E for a long time and I've tried to get involved to no avail. ;)

How would you feel about someone with a little extra cash commissioning some DS artwork for you guys? Who would one take that up with?

Questions of that nature should go to our governing body, the Overcouncil - they'll take it from there. Personally, I couldn't comment, other than to say it's a really cool idea :). Their email is:

You ahtas.org guys are kick ass. I can offer up another artist, he might want money (don't they all?), but that's something you could talking to him about.

His name is Reilly Brown. http://www.oddgodpress.com/reillybrown/

He did some commission work for me and he's always looking for other stuff. He's top notch, and has done work for Marvel Comics.

Anyway... my "group" is celebrating. A DM in the group has just announced he's kicking off a massive Dark Sun campaign. I was lucky enough to be named as one of the players he wanted to run. So thanks a TON for ALL the hardwork you guys have done at Athas.org. Oh the character contemplations are the good stress I love.

Thanks, Saint Malice, and cheers for the tip - I'll pass it onto our art guy.

I'm pretty jealous of your imminent DS game. My current group has 4 DMs and we alternate every couple of months - we just finished 8 sessions of Eberron and are about to start the same amount of Dragonlance. It'll be ages before I get back to running games on Athas again!

Has the ruvkova appeared in any of those issues of dungeon? I am looking for a stat block but I honor my DMs request to not view any Dark Sun references. I want ruvkova for an adventure.

No, the ruvoka wasn't statted in either of the Dungeon issues (and we haven't covered it at athas.org either, as the ruvoka will probably fall under our epic rules-set, the monster section of which is only in its conceptual phases).

I think I have the Dragon issues, but if I don't, what were they? And I must have missed the Dungeon issues, what were those?

The first DS article appeared in Dragon #315 (the first "Campaign Classics" article) and presented a version of the defiler, along with an adaptation of the t'liz. The second was in Dragon #319 and featured the Dark Sun "Player's Handbook". The accompanying "DM's Guide" was in Dungeon #110, along with a bunch of monsters, with more monsters appearing in Dungeon #111. The most recent article appears in Dragon #339, and is an adaptation of the dragon advanced being class. (This latter article was actually produced by us at athas.org, although it was written to be both easy to use and adaptable to any campaign setting, so lacks some of the more detailed elements of the original advanced being classes).

Also, I just wanted to say thanks for the kind words of support in the above posts for our work at athas.org - they are greatly appreciated. Apart from the satisfaction and enjoyment that comes with helping to keep the DS setting alive, positive feedback from the fan community is the best reward that we could receive. Thankyou!

I also have to agree with the assessment about some of the artwork - there are places where the quality could be upped a notch or two. Unfortunately, zero budget for art (or anything, really) is part and parcel of being a fan site (no matter how "official" we are). Mind you, we recently appointed a dedicated art director who has been scouring the globe for talented artists - there are a couple of really promising candidates in the mix, so hopefully we will see the standard of the art improve over the course of the coming months.

Anyway, do keep an eye on our site for fresh updates (we are due a revised release of "Terrors of Athas", our monster manual, before very long) and stop by the Dark Sun forum on the WotC site and say hi!

I wanted to know how can i lvl an Athasian Dragon after lvl 10, i wanna make a really strong Dragon King, but how should i make him stronger after lvl 10, i mean when do i make him grow more, etc. Anyone?

The standard approach for epic-level prestige classes is that every class feature that is gained at regular intervals continues to accrue beyond level 10 in the prestige class. In the case of the Athasian Dragon class from the article, this really only means the spellcasting/manifester progression and the bonus feats. Beyond the two size increases at 4th level and 10th level, this class doesn't really allow for continued advancement in size (as was the case under the 2e version of the class). You could house-rule it that the dragon gets a size increase at 4th level and every 6 levels therafter, I suppose, thus allowing you to continue increasing the dragon's size, but this steps away from the class as presented and may bring a few balance issues further down the line, once the really hefty bonuses from size increases start to add up.

That said, you may instead want to check these out:
http://www.athas.org/releases/advancedbeings/dragon-r3.pdf
http://www.athas.org/releases/templates/champion_of_rajaat-r2.pdf
The former is athas.org's own version of the dragon, which differs somewhat from the one that we were asked to contribute to the magazine. Our own in-house version combines an epic-level prestige class with a series of 10 epic spells. The class advances the dragon's various arcane and psionic powers and abilities, while the epic spells provide the dragon with size increases, physical enhancements, a breath weapon and the like. It hews a little closer to the 2e model and incorporates many features that we couldn't use in the Paizo article (mainly due to size constraints, but also a need for the article to be portable from setting to setting).
The other pdf from is athas.org's take on the Champions of Rajaat. It's a template that details the abilities of the genocidal Champions, many of whom went on to become dragon kings.

Finally, you might also want to look at this thread:
http://boards1.wizards.com/showthread.php?t=552057
It's a discussion on what the levels of the various dragon kings might be under the 3e rules. It waffles on a bit, but there are some fine ideas in there that you might find useful when building a dragon king of your own :-)

...So, I've noticed the two epic feats presented in the article would prove to be very useful to epic characters NOT from Dark Sun, especially epic-level Cerebremancers.

So, I suggest those that want to use "Arcane Augmentation" and "Metamixture" as epic feats in a non-Dark Sun campaign setting to use the following:...
(snip)

Enjoy your new epic feats in your non-Athasian campaigns! :D

Cool idea. It's great to see this approach being taken. When we at athas.org were approached to write this article, it was a major concern for us that the rules elements be easily portable between settings. For something so seemingly inextricable from the DS setting as the Athasian Dragon, it was really important to us that it be simple to plug into another gameworld, and Razz' modifications are exactly the kind of thing that we were thinking of. Although only Jon and Flip got the byline for the article, there was a whole team of us working on it, so we're all really glad to see it in print and being well-received.

I quite like the "schools of philosophy" idea behind the article. What I did miss, however, was some understanding or explanation as to how the schools were put together from a balance perspective.

When comparing one school of philosophy to another, there are different numbers of spells at different spell levels. Mostly there are two spells per spell level, but sometimes there is only one and occasionally there are three. I had been wondering whether there was any system employed when deciding how many spells of a given level each school would have.

It's not a huge issue, but it would be good to see how the various schools are being balanced against each other, given that they have different numbers of bonus spells.

While I thought the idea for the Schools of Magic was great - the mechanic really shouldn't have been there at all.

What I mean is that this article was obviously written for people who can't shake out of 2nd ed where there was what 20+ schools with the schools of philosophy (standard ones), schools of effect, and schools of thaumaturgy.

In 3.5 there are 8 schools and Universal (everything else) and no spell belongs in more than one school. Even Ghostwalk (3.0 I know but still serves as an example) specifically stated that ghost spells were not a separate school and treated more themeatically similar to a descriptor.

There are much better ways to capture the flavor of specific dedicated study than to use the label of schools of magic and follow pattterns real similar to specialization.

Colligiate Wizard (from Complete Arcane) was a way of handling benefits of specific study and couls have served as a model for a better mechanic, so too could many of the options that equate to domains.

Sorry just had to vent because I really think this is going to open up a huge can of worms by confusing something that was designed specifically to accomplish something.

Descriptors and types are one fo the best ways to maintain differences and combinations of spells that are similar - adding in somethingn else to the equation just serves to make it more confusing.

Could you be thinking of the osteomancer? That prestige class appeared in Dragon #317.

(Edit: heh heh, snap!)