D&D 5E What do you want in a Dark Sun book (sans psionics)?

[Remathilis]

So I'm going to come in as someone who is not a Dark Sun fan. (I know you're all shocked). With the cavaet I'm open to much of DS's inspirations (S&S, Conan, Barsoom, Weird Tales, etc).

I want Dark Sun to be D&D first and foremost. Not "compatible with D&D" or "uses the same resolution mechanics as D&D" but a legitimate part of the game that expands and modifies the rules, not re-writes it. There isn't going to be enough room, even in a 300+ page book, to re-write the core book. Thus, a lot of items from the current game will have to be reused with minor tweaks.

So here is my "I'd consider buying" list.

• Subraces or racial variants to the main DS races (human, elf, dwarf, etc) that incorporate some element of the DS modifications and psionics built in, akin to how Dragonmark's were done.
• New races (mul, thri-kreen, half-giant) built match the current races, so that they could be used in any game without issue.
• A few reprints (aaracroka, genasi) races
• A guide to making all the PHB classes work in Dark Sun, including some new subclasses (elemental cleric, templar warlock, psionic reprints). Throw a cavaet that some classes aren't traditionally found in Athas, ask your DM.
• Refluffing or item modifications to make equipment fit the low-metal world (such as obsidian or stone) as well as some new weapons and armor that fit.
• Monsters. Lots.
• Magic Items, spells/psionics as appropriate
• Defling rules
• Lore stuff

I've bought Sword Coast, Ravnica, Eberron, Wildemount and (soon to be) Theros, and while I may never run all of them, I can use parts of it in any game I do run with limited concern. I want Dark Sun to be similar in that I could use muls or psionic humans or templars in a different setting without concern, and if I want to make my Athas different and, say, add paladins or artificers, it would not be over/underpowered.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Psionics being common would probably be 5th on that list. Meaningful, something I would expect from an official release, but certainly something that could be changed in a home game with relatively little impact on the core of the setting.

I'd have them in a totally different order, I have to say:

1) Magic over-use as environmental metaphor.

2) Psionics as a massive thing permeating the entire setting, which everyone can do, completely changing the paradigm of D&D from "dumb peasants can't do anything" (which is true in the vast majority of D&D settings) to "everyone is at least a little magical" (imagine a setting where everyone had a cantrip, at least - many people more). Feel like you're really underselling it as a paradigm shift. It also turns up the "fantasy level" like two notches (from, say, the 7/10 of the FR to 9/10, where Planescape is also 9.5/10 but Greyhawk is maybe 5/10, and Taladas similar - more is not necessarily better, but it is significant).

3) Sorcerer-Kings and their minions and so on.

4) All the races/classes are different.

5) Desert-world, fight against the elements - I say this because in my experience playing and running DS this doesn't actually pan out to be as major a difference/deal from other settings as it might be, especially as levels increase.

Ironically to make 5 a bigger factor they'd need rules that made being debilitated by thirst/exposure/heat etc. less bad, not more, so players were more likely to take a risk and get in a dangerous situation, rather than ruthlessly preparing and so on.

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

Dark Sun would be the ideal place for more in-depth and interesting Exploration and Survival rules.
Some of these would require change or removal of specific spells and abilities however.

 

[TheSword]

I will be controversial and say we have had campaign setting books before in earlier editions. Instead I’d like to see a great campaign of the quality of Tomb of Annihilation or Curse of Strahd. Essentially I’d them to show not tell what makes Athas different.

There hasn’t been a really good campaign for Athas with maybe the exception of Black Spine. The rest of the adventures as a campaign are decidedly ropey.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I will be controversial and say we have had campaign setting books before in earlier editions. Instead I’d like to see a great campaign of the quality of Tomb of Annihilation or Curse of Strahd. Essentially I’d them to show not tell what makes Athas different.

There hasn’t been a really good campaign for Athas with maybe the exception of Black Spine. The rest of the adventures as a campaign are decidedly ropey.

I feel like the first suggestion is an unreasonable one because of the second statement here. It is true that DS has never had a really great campaign for it. But they're not going to be able to pull one out of their um... rear end.

With a different setting, that would definitely be the right way to go - Dragonlance, for example, if it ever came back as an full-on setting, would be ideally suited to an "epic adventure" approach. Even Planescape could work that way because it did have some amazing adventures, and Sigil doesn't need THAT much description (just for god's holy sake retcon or forward-move the Factions back into existence, Sigil shouldn't be ruined forever just because the timing of the TSR-WotC transition meant Monte Cook couldn't publish his third adventure in his trilogy, which he claims was going to do that, after he kicked them out in the second adventure).

But Dark Sun isn't like that. It's a far more differentiated setting from the "generic fantasy" of the PHB than Ravenloft or Dragonlance are (Ravenloft is awesome but simply adds a gothic horror layer on top of normal D&D). The differences are what makes Dark Sun, Dark Sun. You can just drop a bunch of rando adventurers in there and say "Have at it!", whereas Ravenloft, that is LITERALLY what you are meant to do*. You need to establish the setting, and establish what's different about it.

And that's what makes it cool - because it wouldn't just be "another setting book". It would be an event. WotC could market around. I do think they should try to write an epic adventure for it, but I think it needs a setting book more than, say, Eberron, even (and Eberron definitely needs one).

All that said, you could work it the way you suggest if they had an incredible book, and it would make sense to allow the 3rd-level start, generous stats and so on for that specific adventure, because the adventure design could be fully calibrated to those assumptions.

* = It still works, btw. I'm 42. I've known about Ravenloft and the mists for like thirty years. And a DM still managed to "get me" with it. Sure I said out loud "OH BLEEP RAVENLOFT!" when the mists closed in half-way through an adventure, but he got me - my PC was all totally ready to rock for an extended FR campaign and that's not where he ended up!

 

[humble minion]

I will be controversial and say we have had campaign setting books before in earlier editions. Instead I’d like to see a great campaign of the quality of Tomb of Annihilation or Curse of Strahd. Essentially I’d them to show not tell what makes Athas different.

There hasn’t been a really good campaign for Athas with maybe the exception of Black Spine. The rest of the adventures as a campaign are decidedly ropey.

Hmm.

I'm kinda on the fence on this one. I don't think you could have the ONLY Dark Sun product as an adventure, there's just too much variation from 'standard' D&D and the explanation of all that (psionics, cleric domains, templars, defiling, loads of monsters) would eat up much more page count than I'd prefer to see in an standard-sized hardback adventure book, for example. On the other hand, you are 100% correct in saying that Athas has been pretty poorly served for adventures over the years.

I think the 'adventure-as-setting-guide' works best for a setting that's heavily defined by a single adventure. I suspect we won't see much more of ravenloft than CoS, for example. Strahd and Tatyana are really at the core of what Ravenloft is (even for people like me who fell hopelessly in love with the 3e White Wolf version and are still sad we won't get the rest of the Gazetteers and see what happened to S). And a 'War of the Lance' adventure/setting would be a very obvious one-book way to 5e-ify Dragonlance - a setting that is very, very heavily defined by a single story. But Dark Sun? The story it's most defined by is ... the Prism Pentad.

Frankly, I'm 100% in favour of re-running the Prism Pentad with the PCs as the heroes this time rather than hangers-on watching the NPCs do all the cool stuff. If nothing else is gives the PCs an in-character reason to actually uncover all the backstory of Rajaat, the Champions, the Sorcerer-Kings, etc etc etc which all Dark Sun fans including me nerd out about continually but which is rarely actually necessary for PCs to know in-character in a campaign, because in the published adventures they always seem to end up fighting Gith invasions or random psionic secret societies or whatever rather than grappling with the setting's deep lore. But it's a very hard thing to do in practise. It's a very big, very sandboxy story, and the PCs have a LOT of say in how things pan out (what happens if they give in and give the Dragon his tribute of slaves and the whole plot never happens? What happens if they see the danger of Rajaat early and team up with the sorceror-kings so Rajaat never escapes the Hollow and the entire climax of the adventure gets averted? What happens if they decide to troop out and take on the Dragon immediately on receiving his ultimatum - is the adventure going to describe the entirety of Ur Draxa to account for this possibility?) And also, if the PCs are going to have legitimate options in dealing with late-adventure enemies, then they're going to need to be very high-level (no matter what happened in the novels, Abalech-Re ain't going to be one-shot in melee by a wizard and a mul child on the tabletop!). High-level adventures are hard to write because of the sheer amount of options available to PCs - there's a reason most published adventures don't go much higher in level than the low teens.

I'd love to see it done, but I think it's a wishlist thing. It'd need to be damn near 500 pages just for the level 1 to 20 adventure alone, and the setting details and 5e rules conversions and monsters and psionic powers would only add to that. It'd be as epic as hell, and like I said, it'd be a case of SHUT UP AND JUST TAKE MY MONEY for me, but not everyone has my budget or dedication/insanity, and WotC will be wanting to sell this thing widely, and not be too daunting a prospect for the non-obsessives to pick up...

 

[TwoSix]

2) Psionics as a massive thing permeating the entire setting, which everyone can do, completely changing the paradigm of D&D from "dumb peasants can't do anything" (which is true in the vast majority of D&D settings) to "everyone is at least a little magical" (imagine a setting where everyone had a cantrip, at least - many people more). Feel like you're really underselling it as a paradigm shift. It also turns up the "fantasy level" like two notches (from, say, the 7/10 of the FR to 9/10, where Planescape is also 9.5/10 but Greyhawk is maybe 5/10, and Taladas similar - more is not necessarily better, but it is significant).

Fair. Most of my games (certainly the ones I DM, and most of the ones I've played in) have been more broad magic/high magic, so Dark Sun didn't really stand out in my mind in that regard. The "shopkeeper who can read your thoughts" doesn't stand out as much, compared to say Planescape, where the shopkeeper is a literal angel.

5) Desert-world, fight against the elements - I say this because in my experience playing and running DS this doesn't actually pan out to be as major a difference/deal from other settings as it might be, especially as levels increase.

Yea, whereas my experience was more in low-level Dark Sun, and not having healing spells (no clerics) and dying of thirst (which happened to one PC) shaped our game quite a bit.

I think as with most game material, our personal experience shapes our reading of the material just as much as what the actual material says.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I think as with most game material, our personal experience shapes our reading of the material just as much as what the actual material says.

Definitely - I think if you came to Dark Sun after other high-magic settings it would be easy to think "Everyone has psionics, so what?", but coming from the other direction, as I was, with stuff like the FR, Dragonlance, Taladas and so on, where magic-having NPCs are treated as relatively rare/special, the idea that everyone can do something magical was a huge deal. And I think the authorial intent (death of the author blah blah but still) was that it was a major and shocking thing, that changed how the world was. I feel like both DS and PS wanted to be a huge contrast to most D&D settings. And they were treated as such. Both came out late enough that I saw them discussed a lot on the internet, and they were both seen as wild and daring.

Whereas now people tend not to blink, even though most fantasy settings still aren't actually like that.

 

[TwoSix]

And I think the authorial intent (death of the author blah blah but still) was that it was a major and shocking thing, that changed how the world was. I feel like both DS and PS wanted to be a huge contrast to most D&D settings. And they were treated as such. Both came out late enough that I saw them discussed a lot on the internet, and they were both seen as wild and daring.

I think that's definitely part of DS that I'd like to retain. Someone mentioned above that they wanted DS material that was part and parcel of general D&D such that it would be freely portable; personally, I'd like the exact opposite. I'd like DS 5e to be different enough that its rule changes register as a profound break with 5e conventions, much like DS 2e's 5d4 stat generation method did.

If that requires some retconning and some canonical breaks with 2e/4e DS, I'm OK with that.

 

[TheSword]

I disagree. Yes curse of Strahd was light on rules, but ToA had almost 60 new monsters/NPCs and lots of additional rules.

To my mind a dark sun setting guide is just a rehash of what we’ve seen already. I can homebrew a beast head giant or tembo. What we need is to bring the setting alive for a new generation.

I think realistically we aren’t going to get an alternate version of d&d for Athas, this isn’t d20. Expecting that is just asking for disappointment. What we might get is an Eberron style source book with a mediocre mini adventure and lots and lots and lots of rules. I just don’t think that adds what the setting needs.

When you boil it down the only thing you really need is defiling/preserving rules and Psionics. Everything else is just flavor, and is better expanded on in context with a couple of pages on how to give an Athasian flavor to spell books, potions, excluding spells etc.