Just discovered Dark Sun -- have questions!

[Crothian]

Dark Sun was a really cool setting and appears to have been even better thought out then I thought. Ah, another campaign setting I'll never get to run......

 

[Evilhalfling]

First of all thanks to all the people who provided timelines
I played a long DS campaign using the original boxed set and a few of the suplments.
We had a great time, although it was one of the more deadly games I have ever run..
encouraged by the setting.
I will second a bad review for all prism pentad books after the first which was still only decent.
I really enjoyed lifeshaped items - basically symbiyotic or parasitic magic items. I have used them in other games, normally dividing the group into those who would try them and those who thought they were disgusting (IC at least).

If I played it again I would prolly use the revised timeline, and some of the rules from either atlas.org or the Dragon magazines. The original rules for preserving/defiling never worked very well. As they depended on defilers needing less xp to advance, and an iniative penalty when you used preserving magic.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Here I thought it was a wierd helmet.

Me too. I thought it was a helmet getting slimed.

 

[Desdichado]

How good the novels are will largely depend on whether or not the reader generally enjoys TSR novels. I thought the first Prism Pentad novel was decent, and it goes downhill from there. I haven't read any of the other novel series for the setting.

I don't much like them, unfortunately. Many of them are downright terrible. But in this case, the setting intrigues me enough that I might like them anyway, if for nothing else, then for the setting.

But it sounds like you're telling me that I can just skip the novels and read the revised setting document to get all the goods.

I think the reason was to provide some space between the "current" setting (as it was when it was last published) and the changes made for the 3.5 version - the introduction of new races, classes, etc.

Probably true, but he did want to also restore it to something that more resembled the original condition as well -- that's stated right there in the articles.

I prefer the original, and would have liked it if the setting's "true" past were never revealed. Like the cause of the Mourning in Eberron. I dislike nailing down all the mysteries presented in the first box set, not to mention the radical shake-ups that followed in the official timeline (the death of most of the sorcerer-kings, for example).

Well, the setting's out of print. Did you mean you wanted the mysteries to never be nailed down? 'Coz if there was no solution to the mysteries, that would defeat the purpose of having the mysteries. The whole purpose of them is to give GMs plot hooks for things the PCs might want to investigate.

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

About the novels.

I think the Prism Pentad is good up through the first 4 books. The last book was a stinker. But there was a good reason behind it's stinker-ness. Troy Denning (co-creator of DS) was assigned to writing novels for Dark Sun after his work writing the Wanderer's Journal in the Original Boxed Set was finished.

TSR put an iron wall between novels and game design. As Troy was writing the fifth book, he was intending it to finish in the home of the Dragon. At the same time, the games department had just assigned a designer to write an accessory for the location. The games accessory was published first, causing Troy to hack his manuscript up so as to make it fit what the games department had just published. And it shows.

About the Blue Age halflings.

I'm pretty sure that the Pristine Tower was already in existence before the "brown tide". I really like Malhavoc's Chaositech as a good model for lifeshaping technology of the halflings of the Blue Age.

About the Green Age halflings.

Rajaat had gathered a clique of some halflings with which he was coordinating the return to the Blue Age. When Rajaat's Champions rebelled, the Rajaat's halflings were sealed in the dimension called "The Black". In 3e terms, a coterminous/coexistent plane. One can travel through the black an equal distance to the "Prime" world. Rajaat was sealed inside a manufactured dimension inside the Black. Very much like the permanent 3e psionic power called genesis. Rajaat's halflings returned to the Pristine Tower and set up shop there. It is they who is used the Pristine Tower upon the sorceress hero to change her. They hoped to turn her to releasing their master Rajaat.

Rajaat's halflings also discovered a way to project themselves out of the Black into the Prime. The result on the Prime was something that was called by residents on the Prime, a Shadow Giant. A monstrously huge incorporeal manifestation. The Shadow Giants were feared by all as there was no known way to slay them. One of the heroes accidentally discovered how. Anyway, just something that added to the flavor of the setting in a minor way.


Regards,
Eric Anondson

 

[Psion]

Dark Sun was a really cool setting and appears to have been even better thought out then I thought. Ah, another campaign setting I'll never get to run......

The unfortunate thing about dark sun is as a baseline it's nice, but the metaplot tied up with the novel sort of sweeps aside a lot of interesting hurdles and mysteries with a quickness.

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

I also wanted to toot the horn of a fan project done in 2e days. It is absolutely awesome. done by some folks who are knowledgeable in biology and ecology, it is called the "Net Libram of Athasian Ecology". The authors are Teos Abadia and Gerald Arthur Lewis. I don't know where they are today, but I have seen Teos on certain Living Greyhawk mailing lists... so he is still around playing RPGs.

I couldn't find an actual link to a page, but here is a direct link to the .PDF FILE. It is 199 KB in size.

If you are interested in adding a level of "reality" to your Athasian environment, it is a must read. There are a bunch of fan-created 2e beasties as well. Much of them experiments in "rounding out" the hypothetical ecology of a planet like Athas. If anything it is worth it to get tips on making the Athasian desert more than expanses of sand where you fight big monsters.


Regards,
Eric Anondson

 

[nyrfherdr]

Excellent Thread! Thanks Joshua.

I would say that you can get most of what you need from the 2 box sets (pdf's) If you need more after than, then the Prism Pentad provides the most history.

The other source books provide generally excellent material.

On the meta-plot. I ran Dark Sun as a campaign for about 5 years and the meta plot only effected me as the DM slightly. The players were oblivious. I was surprised by the total world shakeup in the novels and the subsequent release of the revised box set, but I have to agree with previous posters that a great deal of the new material was too cool to pass up.

For me, I didn't like the Dregoth story line, but that was mostly because there were already plenty of plots and threads to follow and villains to face. I didn't need another one.

I find that I plunder ideas all the time. If you have the time, there is great stuff to be found in the original, the revised and on athas.org. I liked the Dragon/Dungeon updates but felt that they made too much effort to please everyone and ended up with a couple of odd results (like not eliminating certain classes/races). I thought the Elan would have made good replacements for the Pyreen, actually. But... There you go.

Now I'll have to dig out all of my sourcebooks again and have a nostalgia fest.
Game ON!
Nyrf

 

[Crothian]

The unfortunate thing about dark sun is as a baseline it's nice, but the metaplot tied up with the novel sort of sweeps aside a lot of interesting hurdles and mysteries with a quickness.

Meta plots though are rather easy to ignore or even work around. Also, even with the knowledge of what the world used to be and why it is the way it is really won't help the character much at all unless they happen to get very powerful.

 

[Dragonblade]

Of the thirteen novels for Dark Sun, most people seem to think that only the Prism Pentad ones were truly good (or that's what I've gathered, at least). For me, what killed my enjoyment of the other novels outside of the Prism Pentad was that (being series for the most part) they always broke some rules about the setting, making them non-canon.

I think that Simon Hawke's Tribe of One series was the best. True it broke the "rules" of the setting, but I feel it captured the savage Conan-esque feel of the setting better than Prism Pentad. And considering that Troy Denning's Prism Pentad series pretty much destroyed the entire setting itself, I'm willing to overlook that fact.

In fact, the whole setting post Prism Pentad kinda sucks in my not so humble opinion.

The whole revised box set sucks too. In fact, I was so disgusted with TSR's nerfing of my favorite setting that I pretty much stopped buying their products altogether. I didn't really buy new D&D books until WotC bought them out.