Dark Sun 5E Campaign Guide
Dark Sun 5E Monster Manual
Well over a year ago, I began a project to convert Dark Sun to 5E rules with a
primary goal to maintain the unique features captured in AD&D. This meant applying 20+ years of DM experience, including years of AD&D Dark Sun, and innumerable input from other DMs, gamers, and by review of homebrew material scattered across the web. So a blanket thanks to all. As life is oft to do, my plans of running a DS campaign were derailed when I took a new job out of state and had to leave a great group behind. While I have begun DMing again, Dark Sun is for down the road, not our current path. So, I wanted to share my campaign guide and a Monster Manual that should get you started. It's been a labor of love.
Campaign Guide's Top 3 (things that make Athas unique and make it hard to convert):
- Unique Races. A major draw to Dark Sun was new races and turning old races into something fresh. This means I avoided reskinning known races (e.g. the goliath,a medium sized creature, for the half-giant, a large sized 12 foot tall magically created species). The same went for the thri-kreen, which were large sized with thoraxes and unique physiology on Athas before 4E shrank them to match the other medium humanoids and fit easier into the miniatures game. Same with elves, who require sleep, and halflings who have no reason to be "lucky."
- Defiling. This is the cornerstone of Dark Sun. It's the damn reason the world is dying!It's also the hardest mechanic I've seen in homebrews for people to satisfactorily capture.
- First, if it's the cornerstone, then this needs to be a special mechanic that truly explains the lure. Hence, I passed on "arcane recovery" and the like.
- Second, it can't be a subtype or class, a flaw of AD&D. It's a choice, perhaps contemplated or even made just once in a person's life. It's a constant dilemma for the arcane caster in the amoral gray of Athas for casters, who might be faced with draining the earth to save the life of innocents, justifying "just a little bit" when "it would serve the greater good." And down that moral slippery slope many despots and tyrants have gone. Making someone take a defiler class when they may have only defiled once makes no sense, and there's no reason a person who defiles regularly would cast spells or use spells in a way different than one who calls themselves a preserver. Defiler seems a derogative title, nothing more.
- My system is converted from Dragon Magazine, which did a big conversion for 3rd Edition. In short, they gave the 5E sorcerer's metamagic (which in 3rd edition were feats, not a part of the sorcerer class), as a reward for defiling. Want to recover spells, or quicken, or twin, and so on? Defile! It's really a perfect choice. BUT, this meant we'd have to scrap the sorcerer as a player option. And, I was okay with that. First, the Sorcerer subclasses really don't fit (dragon, wild magic, celestial, etc.). Second, Dark Sun had already nixed the Paladin. In a unique setting, there's going to be unique rules, and we still have Charisma-based casters (the bard and warlock).
- Psionics. I'm still not satisfied, but I went with I saw as the best option: a reskinned (for flavor) UA mystic, version 3. AD&D psionics were amazingly complex and burdensome, but man the novels made them work. It's part of the fabric of Athas. Every being accepts psionics as a fact of life. It's a given many beings will have, at the very least, a tiny bit of talent.
- Why? Mostly because it's been playtested, a lot. It was designed by professionals who had such an investment to redo this thing multiple times. It feels unique enough to be a separate class. There's plenty of homebrew out there, including the DM Guild. Maybe some of it is solid. But if I'm going for something that I think has been put through the most scrutiny, playtest, and design, it's the mystic design.
- What about the latest UA subtypes? This guide was made before that, and upon review, it feels a bit lazy. The true psion should be a unique class, not simply a reskinned caster or an afterthought to an existing class. Anyhow, no need for a war on that. If you can find a better system, I say give it a whirl.
Monster Manual
It's version .9 because I haven't scoured it for inevitable typos and if I calculated default HPs incorrectly or whiffed on an ability score modifier, and I probably got a few CR ratings wrong (used an invaluable online calculator). A handful are intentional (giving the erdlu no proficiency bonus on attacking because it's a herd animal). I used the AD&D Dark Sun listing of native monsters from other settings as guidance when adding official D&D monsters to the CR list. I intentionally left several monsters out that didn't seem likely to come up or ever be used, and I left out drakes altogether as I wasn't a fan of adding dragons to a world where "dragon" means something else. Rather than adopt the Player psion abilities, I had monsters use a recharge system for most abilities as that seemed easiest to implement. In nearly all cases, these monsters are exactly as originally designed, with the original Hit Dice and powers. There should be more than enough to last for years of play (I hope).
