Dark Sun - The Burnt World of Athas (5e Conversion)

[Dark Sun Gnome]

Half Giant

As a half giant, you have the following traits –

Ability Score Increase – You gain a total increase of 4 between your Strength and your Constitution scores. You divide that increase between these two abilities as you see fit, though you must increase each ability score by at least 1.
Size – Half Giants stand between 10 and 12 feet tall and weigh between 1200 and 1600 pounds. You are a large creature, and you can carry, push, drag or lift double what a medium sized creature of your strength can physically manipulate.
Age – Half Giants reach adulthood at age 25 and can reach 220 years of age.
Speed – Your base speed is 35 feet.
Huge Appetite - As a result of your stature, you require twice the amount of food and water than a human, and clothing and equipment need twice the material to construct to fit a half-giant. Clothing and Equipment also weigh twice as much.
Made Warrior – Half-Giants were said to be created to be a warrior race. You have a reach of 10 feet. You can wield 2-handed weapons and weapons with the "heavy" keyword with one hand, but you take disadvantage when using weapons with the "light" keyword. You treat weapons with the "versatile" keyword as "light" weapons for your size (Used normally for "light" weapons.). When using a 2-handed weapon, you can add your proficiency bonus to the damage roll. You also have proficiency with thrown weapons
Language – You can speak Common.

 

[Dark Sun Gnome]

Done all the playable races, though they might need some adjustments, and the dray need a mutation table, as player characters will probably be first generation dray, as opposed to the second generation.

I based the Thri - Kreen as described in Thri-Kreen of Athas and brought back the original appearance of them as Mantis Warriors, along with the John Dollar artwork (that picture of the baby and the adult is adorable).

I'll probably type up stats for the Ghost Elves of the Last Sea, and the Dwarves of that area too, as well as Pristine Tower warped, Blacktouched and Graytouched variations of the races.

Now onto the classes...

 

[Connorsrpg]

Re: Half-Giant

If going with size large, why not just use the weapon size rules consistent throughout the MM? ie: Double the damage dice for actual weapons made for Large creatures. I know it is a lot, but you can play with damage a little more in 5E, and I am sure there are some easy 'penalty-styled' traits you could add. (I know many people don't like restraining racial features, but they often say as much about a race than the benefits.) Having to eat a lot is obvious and hardly a big enough penalty, but something like disadvantage on Desterity saves might be?

I would just go with +2 STR and +2 CON too. If you can add a +3 remember starting stats are restricted to 20; does this still apply? (Anyway, as in the PM, you can check out our Race Page for ideas).

 

[Dark Sun Gnome]

The food and the water is a big penalty in a Dark Sun campaign considering just how brutal the world is, and for most adventuring days, there will be a quite a lot of saving throws concerning the heat. I looked though the lore of the setting, and there is nothing about weapons made for Half-Giants, and as a PC race, I assumed they used the same weapons as medium sized creatures in the previous editions.

As for the level cap, in the original setting, the cap was 20 instead of the normal 18 in other worlds to reflect just how deadly Athas was. One of the other conversions for the half-giant stated that you could raise the stength to 22 instead of the normal 20. I might make it a feat when I get round to that later.

On the subject of half - giants, I wasn't a fan of the goliath being recast as the half - giant in the 4e conversion, considering that the lore of the goliath doesn't really fit for the half giant (or rather, the other way around), and how giants on Athas were far larger than the traditional ones on other worlds.

I'll add something about the goliaths being a reclusive race that lives on the peaks of the white mountains and other isolated ranges, which fits in with both the setting and the lore found in Elemental Evil. Genasi too, and maybe add Sun, Rain, Magma and Silt variations for the paraelemental planes.

Edit - Here are the stats for the Last Sea Ghost Elf subrace -

In addition to the traits for the race found in the PHB, you have the following

Ability Score Increase - Your Intelligence Increases by 1
Talent - you know a talent. Wisdom is your ability for it.
Mask of the Wild - You can attempt to hide even when you are only lightly obsured by foliage, heavy rain, falling snow, mist and other natural phenomena
Elf Weapon Training - You are proficient with the longsword, shortsword, shortbow and longbow.

 

[Dark Sun Gnome]

Spell Alterations and other things.

here is a list of Spell Alterations for Dark Sun (WIP).

Will have all the races and subraces finished by the Weekend.

 

[GreenTengu]

I still feel like I haven't seen you approach the mechanics for thirst, hunger and the lack of resources at the root of the setting. It really seems to me that it is way more important than worrying about what stats Half-Ogres or Pterrans get.

 

[Dark Sun Gnome]

There are no half-ogres on Athas, nor are there kobolds, orcs, wemics, gnomes or hobgoblins. Well, none alive

I have approached the mechanics - many of the races (dray, elf, mul, ssurran, half giant and thri-kreen, and probably the genasi and goliath) all have features concerning the conditions, and I have approached the mechanics - the thri-kreen for example. In many settings, food and water is not so much a big deal, but here, its a huge drawback or a huge advantage given the race you choose, and so therefore, it is important in relation to the other stats. The effects of heat and cold in the DM guide will be built upon, and I've found three different systems for dealing with the heat (original Dark Sun setting, DS3 beta, DS3 and the current 5e one). I'm deciding on which one to use or update.

Edit - I am using the temperature detailed in Sandstorm and the rules on exhaustion, plus the tables detailed in DS3 on survival regarding finding resources, with a few tweaks.

 

[GreenTengu]

By half-ogre, I meant half-giant. To my mind there is no significant difference-- I just view Ogres as being the only "giants" small enough to breed with humans. (Well, typically given the how the last few have developed the concept of Orcs, they might well be even smaller giants which makes all half-orcs effectively half-giantkin) I mean, I just think of Ogres as smaller Hill Giants and most things in the last 3 editions seem to more or less back that idea.

So Half-Ogre or Half-Giant, it seems like the same thing to me. Granted, maybe Dark Sun has an explanation for half-giants that lies outside the general breeding practice.

And... yes... it is irksome to me that a setting would insist on including elves, dwarves and halflings, but preclude the possibility of kobolds, goblinoids, orcs or gnomes in some form as I would kind of either tend towards excluding all traditional races or trying to include all of the main ones in some capacity. Granted-- I do understand that this setting was initially conceptualized when there was nothing interesting at all about kobolds, goblins, hobgoblins, orcs, etc. except that they were just bags of increasingly larger hit points that produced XP when hit with your sword enough to pop. And so given the time that Dark Sun was created, I can understand the idea of absolutely HAVING to absolutely beyond any question include the 4 races that were in the core rulebook for all of the game, but feeling free to toss away the monster manual....

But 30 years later?.... Man it feels like a massive lost opportunity not to take the more properly developed concepts of these people and see how they might shake out in this setting. With the more developed concept of Orcs being this really primal race of survivors who can adapt to just about any climate possibly, but utterly fail when it comes to higher intellectual pursuits and certainly including the adoption of technology... or the idea of the hobgoblins as a highly structured, highly rigorously trained people who aim for perfection in body, mind and soul but as a people utterly reject creative thinking, abandonment of tradition for new innovation or advancement in the peaceful social diplomatic arena in favor of a "survival of the fittest" domination model secure in the belief that they would win in the grand struggle.... And, of course, the conception of Kobolds as Dragonkin who just... utterly fail to achieve their potential and instead struggle as a collective mass full of superstition and an ambition for greatness that just can't be achieved...

Well, their Dark Sun adapted versions would probably be considerably more interesting than the Halflings there.

 

[Dark Sun Gnome]

Thanks for your posts Hobgoblin. I started work on a Gladiator class today. And there is a hell of a lot of meat for that class.

Half Giants in the setting are an artificially created race that were bred for an unknown purpose by one of the sorcerer kings, and were made using magic. They are a common race on Athas and have a mindset that is rather childlike. They are quite conceptually different from half ogres.

Kobolds were always master trapmakers and had some pretty interesting lore. And considering that dragons in this setting were meant to be the apotheosis of arcane and mastery of Psionics, kobolds didn't really fit in the setting. There is only one dragon on the planet alive, and it has laid waste to much of the world, with the sorcerer kings gaining in power and taking steps to become dragons themselves.

The other side of the coin are the Avangions - who at one point in the history of the setting, were completely theoretical - if you are a preserver, you may just be able to become one.

And they didn't throw the entire monster manual out. There were still a lot of races that were present on Athas, and they came up with a lot of really interesting ones that had some great features. Of course, since the setting was hugely based on psionics, this allowed even more scope with the races.

As for the races you've mentioned, none of that seems that radical. The halflings in the setting, for instance (shapers of biotechnology that once ruled a blue world, split into two groups - one fallen into savagery, the other keeping alive the shaping of life while trying to fend off invasions from the Thri Kreen - and they really expanded the concept of them with the Thri - Kreen of Athas guidebook), and they sound a lot more interesting than the traits you've described for the races you've named, which are traits that are not too dissimilar to the ones found in the normal versions of those races.

And they may have removed a quite a few of the monsters from the setting, but they put in a lot of very imaginative ones in the two Monstrous Compendiums that they released for the setting, and also in the guidebooks for the setting too. Considering the Dark Sun line was cut short, they may very well have been planning to expand the lore around these monsters.

So while it may have been a lost opportunity in terms of those monsters, they made up for it and then some with the monsters they made for the setting, which were pretty awesome.