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With Wizard of the Coast bringing back the Dark Sun (DS) campaign as its next setting pair after Forgotten Realms and Eberron, I admit I'm more than a bit curious about the two (three?) supps. You see, my gaming experience started (and ended) with AD&D 1st edition. Our groups used homebrews, Greyhawk, and the Wilderlands (i.e., Citystate of the Invincible Overlord) as our settings. And while I know about DS, and have a few supps, I've actually never played in it.
Thus my post for those lucky folks whose PCs lived, and died, on Athas. What were some of your favorite moments about that setting?
I'm in the same boat. I have a lot of 2ed materials as well as some of the 3e and Athas.org stuff that was released, but I never actually got to play it. Not owning any 4ed material, I'm actually quite intrigued for this release and may just do it for the content alone and make it adapt to Pathfinder (or pay attention to the threads to those much more skilled than I).
Well I never played Dark Sun - I just DM'd it.
To be frank, when it first came out in 2ndEd days, my gaming group sort of looked at it and went "errmm ungh?" and no one was real excited about it - but I went right ahead and took the plunge on the boxed set as I was VERY intrigued.
After 5 minutes reading, I went back to the Gamestore and did the "I'll have one of everything please" shopping expedition, went home, and didn't resurface for a few days.
I found the whole setting to be completely immersive, and I found the content to be well written, with great depth, a range of flavours, and more potential gaming/campaign hooks than a fishing tackle shop.
After getting past the initial learning curve with the group we kicked off a 'few games', which quickly turned into two in-depth campaigns.
One was your typical Mercs for Hire type deal, with lots of battles and carnage involving animated undead giant scarab beetle mounts - and the other campaign was built around one of the players building his own fledgling Merchant House.
So there was heaps of intrigue between the fighting city states, treason and plot amongst the merchants, cannibal halflings, angry half-dwarves, awesome half-giants and a whole range of other stuff to like.
I also liked the flavour and feel of the bone armours, obsidian weapons etc...
And anytime a warring faction or cannibal halflings weren't trying to kill the party, the inhospitable terrain was!
Frankly this stuff was rolled gold, and was (in our collective experience) THE BEST 'bought' campaign setting ever.
If you haven't already, go off and buy the novels as well to get in the mood - they are pretty easy reading and are great for getting the feel.
Tribe of One series by Simon Hawke, Chronicles of Athas, Prism Pentad etc.
If someone ran a Darksun campaign within 100km of me, I'd drive to it. No question.
:)
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Thus my post for those lucky folks whose PCs lived, and died, on Athas. What were some of your favorite moments about that setting?
The setting was god-less, with the Clerics either being Templars in service to the Dragon-Kings, or elemental-priests, serving Earth, Air, Fire or Water (or one of the Para-Elements of Ash, Ooze, Magma or Smoke, IIRC, but they were less common and less useful). As a result, Clerics replaced Turn Undead with a create element ability, which was pretty cool for Fire and Earth Clerics, and useful for Water Clerics (not so much for Air Clerics).
But the most fun I had was playing a Thri-Kreen ranger (Tklrti) who had a Halfling psionicist (Chktla, run by a different player) riding around on his back, zapping people as he cut them up.
I did not much care for the psionics system in 2nd edition, but The Will & The Way, a psionics supplement for psionics in Athas, included some awesome options, including the ability to refine and train specific powers to reduce their cost, increase their range, up their damage, etc. After that supplement came out, we had several players try out psionicists, although they never replaced wizards and clerics as the gold standard.
Our flirtation with the setting ended quickly enough, as we vastly preferred Al-Qadim for our desert adventures, and Spelljammer for our crazy psychic bug-people adventures.
For me, quite often, a setting lives or dies by how evocative it is, and the text in Dark Sun didn't exactly sing to me. Which left the representative artwork, which was split between Brom, whose art was as good as it got in those days, but got a bit repetitive, as he played to his strengths (very muscular, scantily clad, unnaturally pale people) and Baxa, about whose art my momma insists I say nothing at all.
High points included the Muls (a race with some White Wolf-style pathos going on, bred to be slaves), the Half-Giants (in a playerbase that had clamored for half-*ogres* since early in 1st edition, which Gygax admitted to writing up only begrudgingly, the half-giant was like crack) and the Thri-Kreen, the first 'core' non-humanoid race, as well as the integration of psionics, until then an afterthought at best, in other settings, right into the baseline of the game. Classes like the Gladiator where just flat out powerful, and the limitations on arcane and divine magic (due to defiling / the godlessness of the setting) made for some extra shine for the melee classes. It seemed like every few months, Dragon magazine would come out with an interesting article adding new elemental spells, or new exotic weapons, or new strange creatures to ride / domesticate, for the setting, keeping the excitement and alien-ness of the setting alive.
I never liked ye olde fantasy setting. Finally there was something I truly wanted to play: deserts, lizard mounts, kick ass druids, psionic cacti... :D
Favourite Dark Sun Memory? Probably my character tree, spearheaded (literally) by Yah, a mutant ex Raamite streetkid turned shapeshifter druid - and her gorak companion.
If someone ran a Darksun campaign within 100km of me, I'd drive to it. No question. :)
Man, I wish I lived within 100km of you - your enthusiasm is legend!
Dark Sun is a great book and the revamp of the setting is the first thing to make me look at 4E. I'm really curious as to what they're going to do with it. Dragon Kings supplement was *amazing* - I wonder if that is going to get an update of sorts?
I have quite a few memories of the setting, perhaps the best of which was when my players finally got to the ever-shrinking jungle after risking everything on the sands. They never got a night of peace, as the cannibal halflings attacked them throughout the night, with all manor of Ewokesque traps.
In a desperate attempt to drive them off, the party dug a trench and started a fire around their camp. This led to the halflings discovering fire and using it to burn down their little encampment! The other "masterstroke" of theirs, was the beehive catapult - the critical hit against the rogue who thought he was hidden remains the stuff of legend!
Peace,
tfad
Man, I wish I lived within 100km of you - your enthusiasm is legend!
Thanks.
My view as a player and as a GM is that it's 100% all in :)
Then again, I spent so much time as a GM that a lot has rubbed off in the 'things I liked seeing as a GM I now do as a player'... like building backgrounds with hooks, and knowing what storyline development I'd like to see my character doing.
I like 'gunpowder, treason, and plot' by the large measure in games too, and Darksun has all of that in spades...