Darksun: Anyone still playing?

I remember the outcry and craziness when Dungeon / Dragon was doing their Darksun conversion last year. Many people said they were going to retry it.

I haven't done much with it in the last six months but was thinking about my Under a Darksun Storyhour.

So I was wondering- is anyone still playing and if so- Pazio, Burning Sands, Own conversion into 3e or 2e?

I had the impression that most people were pretty disappointed with the conversions done in Dragon and Dungeon. The mechanics for defilers didn't convince, either. I'm not sure why it is so difficult to translate the Dark Sun mechanics to 3.x without losing the flair *shrug*.

And, no, I don't play it at the moment.

aye, I'm working on a campaign using the 3.x dark sun from athas.org
edit: i like the defiler in this version, lots of cool ways to play it out

I just read over part two of Dregoth Ascending from the athas.org people. I must say I'm quite impressed. This one seems much more involved, as it has the characters talking to four sorcerer-kings (Nibenay, Hamanu, Lalali-Puy, and even Andropinis), and on a search for three major artifacts that they can use to fight Dregoth himself!

Yeah- the more I had looked over Burning Sands the more I preferred their version. I saw they had Part II up but I have yet had an oppertunity to look at it. Sounds like I should.

While I've not run a full campaign on Athas, I've used the rare NPC from there in my 3e Planescape game (given that there's the 'New Tyr' district in the City of Doors). I've also used Athas (and Dregoth) as the setting for a brief plot arc in that campaign as well.

I've never bothered with any specific mechanics related to the setting, thus nothing to convert really. But the flavor of the world is neat, and I went back for the 2e sourcebooks to find it, plus the material the Athas.org folks created.

Turjan said:

I'm not sure why it is so difficult to translate the Dark Sun mechanics to 3.x without losing the flair *shrug*.

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I think part of it has to do with Dark Sun being a fairly unbalanced setting. The gladiators are plain better than fighters (from a PC point of view - in most campaigns you'll have more use of the armor optimization bonus and multiple weapon specializations than you will have use for creating battlefield fortifications and training people in weapon profs), defilers are more powerful than preservers (with what is fundamentally a roleplaying disadvantage), low-level bards could have access to Death/20 poison if they were only a little bit lucky, and some druids just had more spells than others. And let's not even get into the races - muls and halfgiants made powerhouse warrior-types, especially with the original box set where their Strength bonus just bypassed the exceptional strength scale (in 2e, there was an enormous difference between Str 17 and Str 19.

In 3e, balance is given much more emphasis, which makes it hard to convert some elements and still keep their flavor. In addition, people often want to expand on Dark Sun into rules areas that weren't available in 2e, such as making regional feats for various places, adding prestige classes, and things like that. This kind of thing is neat, but doesn't produce the same nostalgic feeling that a "plain" conversion does.

We had some enthusiasm for DS a while ago.... brought on by all the good conversions in Dungeon and Dragon (plus the revised psionics rules) there was a rough campaign arc with the player characters desperately trying to escape from the plane and go -some-where else.

Didn't really take off. Combination of lack of 3.5 material and some "genre" issues (I couldn't stand "elemental clerics" for example.)

As it stands right now the setting is unsupported and porting material over is difficult because of how different the world is from anything else. Basically its a world for a DM who is either very very strong in the setting/rules and or else is willing to put out hardcore effort.

Personally I was very pleased with the Dragon/Dungeon rules. It captured the flavor of the setting well enough while forcing a balance.

But DS has a very rigid world. Non-human racial roles are rigid, as are (social) class roles. Aside from the actual physical setting it reminds me of what I’ve read about feudal Japan or (what I presume) post-modern India would be like.

Most players don't like the idea that they will have to spend a lot of time "fighting the system" to have fun. DS is like that, any watering down would probably cause the world to cease to make sense.

I've ran Dark Sun for a brief bit back in the day, but nothing since. Seems to me that Dark Sun is a very good AD&D world. By that, I mean that it can be done for 3e, but many of the rules make good use of the 2e rules (i.e. class advancement for defilers and preservers).

Paizo's version was neat in some ways, but missed the mark in others. Paladin magic doesn't fit the setting. Half-giants lost their "axis alignment".

Athas.org has some good stuff too. I highly recommend looking over their site.

Basically, look towards Paizo for a PHB-centric Dark Sun, and look to Athas.org for a setting-centric Dark Sun.

If I was to run Dark Sun again, I would probably mix and match between the Paizo info and Athas.org. The mystic from Dragonlance seems to be a better fit for clerics in DS, IMO, especially if you limit them to an elemental domain.

Another option would be to look at Castles and Crusades. C&C makes use of varied advancement charts, so that may work out nicely for defilers and preservers. My understanding is that there is a fan project in the works to convert Dark Sun to C&C format.

I've been thinking of resurrecting Dark Sun using GURPS, Burning Wheel, or Sorcerer. And I'd go back to the first box set of DS. The later stuff ruined it, IMHO.