Dark Sun is just so much fun. Can't wait. Can't. WAIT.
I had two players who were a bit iffy on the game... until I explained to them the general gist of it. For some reason, dune-running elves really caught one player's attention.
The rest of my group is looking forward to a low-treasure, gritty game with a survivalist theme. Because I have a few players in my group who hate magic items almost as much as I do.
I've been planning my 4e Dark Sun story arc since the day after DS 4E was announced. I seriously cannot wait for the game to come out. My girlfriend told me she was going to buy it for my birthday, and I Seriously told her not to, because I'd be buying it the day it comes out (about two days before, if memory serves) - and if I had to wait for my birthday for it, those two days in between would be TORTURE for me.
I actually told her I wouldn't be able to go on the internet, lest there be spoilers. Gah, I'm such a geek!
as for the thread crappers - fair enough. It's not for everyone. But then, I've never liked some of your settings, either. Dragonlance never caught my interest. FR bored me to tears and was way too NPC-heavy. Planescape had a good starting point, but it was just too weird and hard to understand from a player's perspective. Really, the only two settings that were worth looking at were Spelljammer and Birthright (unless you count Jakandor, which most people don't).
Dark Sun was a game shaped by the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was post-apocalyptic when the thoughts of an apocalypse were still on people's minds. There was the whole ecological collapse issue, back when the idea of global warming was still a new and frightening possibility. The designers were making this when there was still the possibility the USSR would go nova and start blasting nukes off - and the game shows that (ever notice how most post-apoc games & movies were released in the 70s and 80s? The genre has changed to a "zombie apocalypse" since then)
Also, to me, Dark sun was the ONLY setting where the magic sort of made sense. in a game like FR, there was absolutely no reason why a castle should exist - it was too easy to bypass with magic/monsters. Lanterns should be rare, since continual light was better. and so on, and so forth. Eberron has addressed the issue in one way, but Dark Sun took another - magic isn't rare, it's dangerous. People that use magic aren't going to do it for trivial things. And the use of magic feeds into why the setting itself is so blasted. Which, in my mind, is a helluva lot cooler than "Elminster would do it himself, he, um, just doesn't have time".
