D&D 4E How would you re-envision Darksun with 4e?

[Irda Ranger]

Templars as warlocks - the templars are warrior priests, though. Not blasty-types.

I think a Templar hanging back behind a line of Half-Giant slave-warriors and blasting his King's enemies with magic makes a lot more sense, thematically, than someone who enters the fray himself.

It might not be stupid though to make an entirely new class that is a Ranged-Arcane-Leader, rather than a Ranged-Arcane-Striker. Take the Warlock concept, tone down his damage a bit and swap in some Warlord buffs, and you'd probably be good to go.

 

[Evilhalfling]

I played 2 campaigns out of the old boxed set - killing lots of PCs w/o remorse in varied and interesting ways. They made life hard for me by making broken characters - thri-kreen with 19 st, a starting character with teleport & dimenesion door and....It was the most adveserial game since paranoia. Great fun at the time.

I have only glanced dismissivly at the world changes since. The Dragon Magazine mechanics (esp defiling) were just awful and I never bothered to move to 3e. I like frankthedm's mechanics, except that I would prefer the preserver magic to function according to the RAW. Perhaps defilers would always get the power boost - +1 caster level and/or +1 to roll(??) while preservers would play straight. Both classes suffer huge social problems depending on if they cast in or out of a city. I like Noolans suggested changes to iron weapons and armor pricing.

Unlike some others I am okay with Kalack dead, while ignoring the rest of the prism pentad.
(I think I played it that rikus & crew got killed when fighting against Urik, but fearing a power imbalance the other SK's stopped anyone from retaking Tyr)

for 4th? dragonborn seem a natural fit, and the flavor posted earlier would work great with the passage of time. Warlords = fighters & fighters = gladiators? excellent. Lots of great ideas in this thread.

I can easily see adapting a sect of clerics to the old druid role. Although the social postions were very different, distinguishing elemental based druids from elemental based clerics never made sense, even in the orginal rule set.

As for psionics, both DS and my homebrew world will have to wait till 2009 to convert over. Psionics is too deeply woven to leave out for a year.

 

[Silverblade The Ench]

I agree, except that I think Defilers should be the baseline. Defiling is the norm for Darksun mages (at least that's how the fluff made it sound), and Preserving requires you to be more careful and hold back, weakening yourself so as not to destroy the environment further. That being said, it's probably easier to make Preserving the baseline from a gameplay perspective.

No, preserving is the norm, defilers take it to extremes

besides the mechanic doesn't really make that much senses per se...it drains life, but not creatures life? Nah.

I think a better way to do it for 4th ed, is to give Feats. Defiling is a personal choice, you go down the path of defiling.
-Defiling feats give metamagic effects, "free", but at the cost of life energy to *anything* around you. Something like 1hp/per spell level in a 1' radius per caster level, will save negates.

Note how in the story/boxed set it says that defilers are more powerful than preservers,defiling is a "cheat" it pulls in more power, but at the cost of life. Defilers wiped out nearly all the preservers because defilers ARE more powerful than their benign brothers.

So defilers are just wizards who've taken a dark path to get more power. You don't need a seperate class, and you have to accept defilers are more powerful, that's the temptation...


Warlocks should absolutely not be on Athas! Much as I llike the class, magic is very rare on Athas, apart from elemental clerics. Warlocks, like monks, would break the paradigmns of the setting: unrestricted casting.

Folk who embrace the elemental focus, including destruction, are clerics, though they are often not "Priests" in the normal way...they live their way rather than preach, be it a stone mason, an insane pyromanica or whatever.

 

[The Ubbergeek]

Maybe Templars should be a sort of Shugenja/Wu Jen mix?

 

[Raduin711]

I think the periods before the Prism Pentad, and the freedom of Tyr are very cool time periods to run a campaign. But I just cannot imagine WOTC doing that kind of Retcon. Never has a gaming company said, "oh, all those books published after X never happened." You just have to accept that the Prism Pentad happened, and any new products are going to continue from there. And I would really like to see some new products.

But that doesn't mean that they can't sidebar different eras of play (like they do for Star Wars and Dragonlance) or that they can't try to corral current events closer to when Dark Sun was at it's best. Heck, they can even release supplements for different eras. But I don't think they can just "forget" the second boxed set, or the PP.

 

[The Ubbergeek]

Could they do a 'future, a time warp? What was the world heading to, as implied... more defiled Athar. with a less and less vivable world, or some greening was coming back?

 

[Kobold Avenger]

Could they do a 'future, a time warp? What was the world heading to, as implied... more defiled Athar. with a less and less vivable world, or some greening was coming back?

That's what they did with the Dragon (or was it Polyhedron?) Magazine article, they advanced the timeline by 80 or so years, and brought back all the city-states except for Tyr under the rule of sorcerer-kings. Though that article did controversial things like leave most of the classes as they were in the core books, and introduce Maenads and Elan to Athas.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Warlocks, like monks, would break the paradigmns of the setting: unrestricted casting.

On the House Rules forum a while ago Nifft posted a pretty nifty "Psylock" class -- a class that used the Warlock's mechanics, but whose powers were Psionic in nature (instead of eldritch blast, it was a mind blast, for instance).

How's that sound?

Or, perhaps....warlocks make pacts with the elements. The power they draw on is by destroying the opposite element. A water-pact warlock would extinguish fires whenever he used an ability. An earth-pact warlock would still the wind around them.

Or perhaps...warlocks made pacts with the Sorcerer Kings. The power they draw on is directly the SK's. They're little puppets.

I think Shugenja, stripped of their Asian flavor, would make pretty nice Athesian priests.

 

[Zaruthustran]

I think they could do whatever they want. If most customers think the later stuff is stupid, they could certainly "re-launch" the setting from the original box set.

Batman: Begins did it. They took all those other movies and tossed them right out the window. I see no reason why they couldn't do the same with DS.

Oh, and one more proposal for Templars: make it more of a social status thing, and less of a strictly class-based thing. As in, there'd by "Templar" build paths for Cleric, Warlord, *and* Warlock. Or, who knows, maybe 4E multiclassing will allow characters of other classes to dabble in Templar abilities.

Edit: Mourn's Batman lore is superior

 

[Spatula]

I agree, except that I think Defilers should be the baseline. Defiling is the norm for Darksun mages (at least that's how the fluff made it sound), and Preserving requires you to be more careful and hold back, weakening yourself so as not to destroy the environment further. That being said, it's probably easier to make Preserving the baseline from a gameplay perspective.

Right. All mages already suffer socially; making the "good" ones weaker than the other classes mechanically just means no one would ever play a mage.