Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tzarevitch" data-source="post: 714149" data-attributes="member: 1792">Bah. I finished my DS campaign about a year ago. In my campaign, all of the Sorcerer-Kings took the standard precautions that any other mage/psion would take to hedge against his own death. Almost every last one of the "dead" kings was alive and well and conducting plans for world domination in secret. In my campaign, the status of the "dead" sorcerer-kings was as follows;Tektuktitlay had protected against his death by implanting his personality via a psionic power (mind seed I think it was) into his "son" Atzetuk, (See the revised DS set.) and was busily ruling his kingdom in the guise of a teenager that the populace not just feared, but actually liked. (Think of an immortal and near all-powerful Prince William of England.) It was only at the end of the campaign that I think the PCs began to suspect what Atzetuk really was.Abalach-Re simply activated a clone of herself. She was operating behind the scenes in Raam through her legion of shapechanger enforcers (mainly Rakshasas and doppleganger assassins) rooting out those disloyal to her in preparation for her return to power. Andropinis' loyal templars were using obsidian mirrors to contact him in The Black. They mounted a rescue operation using obsidian golems and hired shadow mages to open a portal and form a bridge into the black and pull him out. The PCs actually (to my surprise) stumbled on this operation while they were on another mission. They were too slow finishing the other operation however and didn't make it back in time to stop Andropinis' rescue. Andropinis then went on a purge the likes of which had never been seen in Balic and publicly flayed alive fully 5,000 disloyal citizens of Balic and members of Houses Wavir, Rees and Tomblador for acts of treason. On a mission in the ruins of Yaramuke, the PCs discovered that reports of Sorcerer-Queen Seilba's death were greatly exaggerated. She was in fact slowly rebuilding Yaramuke using her undead citizens under the protection of a HUGE and very powerful illusion. The PCs also succeeded in in advertetly restoring King Kalid-Ma when one of them stumbled on one of the fabled Orbs of Kalid-Ma. The orbs then dragged them into Ravenloft where they confronted and killed Kalid-Ma's former high templar and disloged Kalidnay from the Realm of Mists. Unlike the other Sorcerer-Kings, Kalid-Ma went on a campaign of peaceful rebuilding and gracefully allowed the PCs the opportunity to grovel before him. As a reward, he then gave them exactly one day in his good graces. The PCs wisely used this day to put as much distance between themselves and Kalidnay as possible. The PCs traveled to Giustenal (in the City by the Silt Sea set) and found King Dregoth was also not so dead as they had been led to believe. They traveled north and found the one ray of hope they had yet seen in Athas in the form of King Oronis of Kurn. Then they approached the city of Eldaarich on another trade mission and found out that the horrors they had seen in the other city-states were pale shadows of the horrors that the insane King Daskinor inflicted on his people on a daily basis. By the end, as far as the PCs knew, the only sorcerer-king they were fairly sure was dead was Kalak. And even then, they were fairly sure only because they couldn't find any evidence that he was still alive. I loved that campaign. I only ended it because 3e had just arrived and I couldn't properly convert an ongoing campaign to 3e and still keep its original feel. My favorite part of the campaign was when the PCs went north, beyond the borders of any of their maps in search of a fabled city of bliss where water was plentiful and no one went hungry, that they found out how bad life could be. By the shores of the Last Sea they found an metropolis seemingly right out of the legends of the past, only where free will was a mere illusion and happiness was enforced by regular mind-wiping regimens. To top it all off, almost every drop of the water they found was undrinkable (salt water). It was then that one of my PCs stated the thing that all Dark Sun DMs want to hear from their players, "You know, this planet really sucks."Tzarevitch</blockquote>

Verification