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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7077866" data-attributes="member: 42582">On including iconic elements (Vecna, the Rod, etc): these work because they're tropes. (Not as generic as altars in cathedrals, but well-established in D&D gaming.)So when the PCs first found the Sword of Kas, for instance, the player of the invoker/wizard had already been talking a bit about his character's strange relationship to Vecna as well Ioun. When I mentioned that the sword seemed hostile to him (I can't remember if it did damage when he touched it, or something like that) he worked out straight away it was the Sword of Kas. So this was a way of me affirming his conception of his PC, as well as helping to foreground the various layers of conflict (different commitments, hence different ultimate goals) among the PCs - eg the paladin wielded the Sword for a while, then the PCs gave it back to Kas, and then the paladin took it back from Kas about 15 levels later when the PCs killed him.The Rod came into the game because the invoker/wizard (back when he was a 2nd level human wizard, before being reborn as a deva invoker/wizard) had died. I asked the player if he wanted to keep the PC or change characters - he wanted to keep the PC, and expressed this in terms of the PC's story not being over. So we talked about it a bit more, and he thought that the Raven Queen and Erathis might have a mission they needed to send him back to complete - finding a Nerathi artefact in the ruins near where the PC had died.Originally this Sceptre of Law had some fairly undefined functions that the player would call upon - pointing the way to other Nerathi roads and ruins, for instance. But then I got the idea that it could be the Rod of Seven Parts, and the player bought into this as a development of his conception of his PC and his PC's quest.For a while he used a Tome as his main implement, and had the Rod as a backup. But then, after he was reborn as an invoker, his Tome was largely stripped of magical power (in mechanical terms, I think this was running down the value of magic items so as to meet the notional cost of rituals to which he was no longer entitled for free as a class feature) and he fully embraced the Rod as his main source of magical power. Which it has been since. (He has access to the Crystal of the Ebon Flame, which from memory is a +6 implement, but because at first he had Misak trapped in it, and more recently Ygorl, he doesn't use that one on a day-to day basis.)What will be interesting to see is whether - if/when he gets the 7th part from Miska - the rest of the party let him rejoin it to complete the Rod. Because this is prophesied to herald the coming of the Dusk War.So I would see the Rod as a collaboration between me and the player: a mix of player-originated quest, a wish-list approach to items (which is how I approach "rewards" in 4e), and GM framing to help connect these things to the bigger picture of that PC and the rest of the PCs in the context of the default cosmology.Miska the Wolf-Spider is another example: the PCs build and play PCs who, in various ways and for various reasons, are hostile to the primordials (or, at least, the more destructive ones); I introduce Miska as one personification of the thing they are hostile to.What is important to me is that the backstory, the flavour, etc is shared at the table. Not to say that there can never be surprises (either as framing or consequence), but the players know the cosmological backstories (in the fiction, the invoker/wizard remembers them, as he was there in the early period of his 1000 lifetimes) and draw upon them to help express their PCs and frame the significance of their choices.It's not "secret GM backstory" of the form I dislike.I hope that is a bit of an answer to your question.(Also, you didn't ask but: one tricky thing about running a Dark Sun game will be working out to use the setting. It's not as trope-errific as default 4e, but my players aren't going to be interested in reading pages and pages of backstory, and that's not the most exciting way to make it part of the game in any event. To date I've been relying on painting with a pretty bright palette: templars, psychic hounds, secret societies, etc - maybe I'll just stick to these fairly clear sword & sorcery/sword & planet tropes, and just ignore the more intricate elements of the setting that don't necessarily seem to add a great deal.)</blockquote>

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