Forked Thread: Describing a setting in 12 bullet points

By request: Dark Sun

• The apocalypse occured millenia ago, destroying much of the world except for a patch of land about the size of Colorado.
• Hanging in the olive-tinged sky, the crimson sun burns like a fiery puddle of blood over a bleak and harsh desert. Water is scarce. Forests are all but a fading memory.
• Metals are very rare. Gold, silver, copper, and iron are commodities of only the richest of the rich.
• Many traditional fantasy races (orcs, gnolls, gnomes, goblins, kobolds, lycanthropes, and others) were exterminated in genocidal wars waged long ago.
• Arcane magic is a curse, feared and hated by nearly everyone for the unchecked destruction it causes. Arcane magic draws its power from the life force of vegetation. Defilers leave inert ash in the wake of their spell which devastate the land so that nothing may grow. Preservers siphon only the energy they need in an attempt to leave the vegetation relatively unharmed.
• Minor psionic ability manifests in vast swaths of the population and many of the animals and plants of the shattered wastes.
• Horses, cattle, oxen, and other beasts of burden do not exists. Strange reptiles and huge insects serve their functions.
• Carnivorous psionic plants are as likely to kill you in the wastes as the psionic animal predators and roving tribes of mauraders.
• The Sorcerer-Kings, beings of epic psionic and arcane power, rule over the few large bastions of civilization as tyrannical and despotic living gods. They squabble with each other constantly over the limited resources of the land.
• There are no gods. Divine power is wielded by clerics who devote themselves to the elements and by templars who gain spells from the sorcerer-kings so that they may perform their will. Druids stand vigilent and protect the green green places left in the world.
• Slavery permeates "civilized" culture, and gladiatorial bloodsport entertains the masses in grand spectacles of blood and violence.
• Athas is a world in its death throes. The enslaved and oppressed masses cry out for someone to free them and to ease their suffering.

Wow. I had no idea! It actually sounds really intriguing, a huge departure from generic fantasy and yet still D&D.

You did a really good job bullet-pointing that one, every one is something that a) distinguishes Dark Sun from all other settings and b) has a really expressive flavor. Your one post is superior to the whole Wikipedia entry for explaining how Dark Sun works and why you'd want to play it.

Noumenon,
well I'd have had a point about Dark Sun "adventuring" being as much about survival as anything else, as "heroics" and the like aren't very common
One of my player's characters was a dope peddler and the other a truly psychotically vicious gladiator: hey what do you think people do for a living in such harsh places, TV fashion consultants?

Spelljammer:

• D&D adventuers in space, aboard flying ships, vs Mind Flayers, Beholders and negoi who have fleets and battleships...!
• Magic "helms" are used to power the ships, some consume magic or psionics for power, negoi use "Lifejammers" that consume life energy for power, which is a fate that can happen to an adventurer!
• The Elven Imperial Navy used to keep wha tlittle peace and safety there was, but they are fading in power and glory
• Trading and carrying interesting passengers can be part of the fun
• Many bizarre and even humorous creatures, from giff to dohwar (think Ferengi crossed with penguins), and horrendous ones like the Witchlight Marauders (orcish living Doomsday weapons that can destory entire worlds)
• Travel between many of the worlds of D&D, sail to Faerun or Greyhawk between the stars! It's also beautiful, see the ship designs and my Spelljammer art plus RL space pics for why it can be a great setting for the imagination.
• Swashbuckling high adventure!! Plus tinker gnomes (if you like Steam/Magic-punk or just gnomes and good humour), dwarves sailing space in asteroids carved into works of art (Spelljammer dwarves move their mountains!), Elves have a snobbish Plane-spanning very lawful Navy..in other words, races and folks can be very different.
• Very cosmopolitan and very strange, less of the "Infernal" and "Blood War" conflict of the Planar settings, and more of the "major trading/conquering" political chicanery of the great races and powers. But some stalwarts are in Spelljammer too: the Gith are pirates who raid illithid convoys and anyone else they meet by shunting their ships between the Planes. Orcs have evolved into the "scro", intelligent orcs, and back with a vengeance!
• Giant Space Hamsters! It's a setting that can laugh at itself, but is also very serious (neogi buy slaves from mind flayers for instance and their fate is, ick, grizzly). Capn' Jack Sparrow would fit right in.
• GIVE 'EM BROADSIDES ME HEARTIES!! hey, ship to ship battles are fun!!!!
• Gives a rationale' for characters of any type/race to be played
• Amassing a fleet of ships, or a trading empire, or preventing slavery across the multiverse (see the "Pragmatic Order of THought") and other avenues of adventure are open to you which are a bit beyond the norm.

Hey Silverblade, I never really gave Spelljammer a chance when it came out. But, how did the ship to ship combat rules work out? That's one place where i've found D&D doesn't do very well, when you have some thirty or forty combatants to a side. Too many die rolls.

How did SJ handle ship to ship combat.

Silverblade The Ench said:

Noumenon,
well I'd have had a point about Dark Sun "adventuring" being as much about survival as anything else, as "heroics" and the like aren't very common

Click to expand...

Too true. 12 bullet-points are too few to condense the awesomeness of Dark Sun. Heck, I didn't even have room to mention the Dragon of Tyr, the undead, the Sea of Silt, the Cerulean Storm, the muls and thri-kreen and half-giants, or the *vast* cultural differences between traditional D&D races and their Athasian counterparts (particularly the elves and halflings).

Well, working with limitations, even an arbitrary self-chosen one is often hard like that. And sometimes that's the interesting part. It's interesting to see what people do pick. Me, I'd have never mentioned plants, for example...

I want to try Dark Sun, too!

- Post-apocalyptic Fantasy: mutated adventurers in a fantasy world reminiscent of Mad Max.
- A Dying World: Athas was a verdant, living planet, but now is a barren, scorched husk.
- Life-sapping Magic: Arcane magic draws on the life force of all around, and is responsible for the destruction of Athas.
- Elements, not gods: divine casters turned their backs on the gods and now revere the elemental forces of the universe.
- City-states are bastions of civilization... almost: The largest settlements in Athas are city-states, where life can be as short and brutal as in the wilderness, and usually far more decadent.
- Old races are radically altered... or nonexistant: quest-driven bald dwarves, nomadic elven bandits, anthropophagic halflings, outcast half-elves. Gnomes, orcs, goblins, lycanthropes and others are no more.
- New races tied to the setting: half-dwarven muls, magic-created half-giants, mantis-like thri-kreen, degenerate gith...
- One Dragon To Rule Them All: mighty sorcerer-kings aspire to become dragons, but only one Dragon of Athas exists, and his appearance heralds the end of life for miles.
- Where there's a Will, There's a Way: in this harsh world, anyone can be blessed with the powers of the mind... and usually are.
- Life is short, and most will defend it at all costs: starvation, thirst, gladiatorial combat, slavery... there are so many ways to die, true altruism becomes suicidal.
- No water, no metal, no hope: waters is the most precious thing, metals are all but nonexistant, hope is a delusion.

I love Dark Sun. It is almost the uncola of D&D; no dungeons and only 1 dragon.

The only downside that it felt a little hopeless at times. I died fairly regularly. My DM didn't use the character tree method.

I understand there are two Dark Sun versions. I had the older one. Then they released a more positive or upbeat one with the greening of Dark Sun.

I only played a couple sessions of Dark Sun way back in the 2e days, and I loved even that little taste of its flavor I got. I had no idea it was that cool though cmrscorpio and Klaus.

I'm getting a bunch of cool ideas here for my newly-hatched homebrew game.

Speaking of, I'd do the homebrew in my sig'd storyhour, but the "teaser" in my sig pretty much sums it up.

My newest homebrew (leaving out some choice details since some of my players read these forums):

The Gates of Heaven (my players call it "the Hegemony game")
* The Godswar - The gods have been at war in the heavens for hundreds of years, their battles visible as flickers and flashes beyond the stars in the night-time skies
* Godstorms - The violence of the god's battles sometimes spills into the mortal realm - lightning tornados, firestorms, terrible god-spawned creatures, city-sundering quakes, discarded or lost godly weapons falling and splitting mountains in half...
* Godstorm energies tear apart the World Bound that seperates the planes, creating rifts and making the rituals to open new rifts all too easy
* Eldritch, malevolent beings hover around the outskirts of reality, waiting for the World Bound that holds them back to collapse
* The great empires that once covered the land have long fallen into ruin in the Godswar's onslaught, leaving isolated pockets of civilization and vast and dangerous, ruin-choked wilds behind
* The great religions have crumbled as or become corrupt, since their gods no longer speak with them
* "Pretender Gods" roam the lands, struggling, bickering, and battling with each other over the scattered scraps and fragments of the great empires
* The Hegemony of Man formed in the heart of the continent, their Speakers having discovered some secret, immensely powerful arcane power source called UNITY
* The Hegemony used UNITY to create magitech machines of war, airships, ever-running factories, permanent city-portals, UNITY weapons for the elite Dragoons, and - most importantly - Godshields to protect their cities from the vagaries of the Godstorms
* Non-humans from any town that joins or falls to the Hegemony are rounded up by the Hegemony and are never seen again.
* The largely "racial" Resistance fights losing battles across the ever-expanding Hegemony and struggle to warn those kingdoms on its boundaries of the price of joining or falling to it
* Oracles speak of signs of the opening of the Gates of Heaven - a legendary passage to the Shining City in the Astral Sea where "the gods grant your wildest wishes"

i feel like this is a good treatment for the settings they create for Magic: the gathering expansions. Then again i've always fantasized about a Ravnica campaign setting for 4e.