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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 1956186" data-attributes="member: 2205">OK, so I knew (or thought I did) about Dark Sun.  Desert world, cannibal halflings, defiler magic, muls, thri-kreen, bone weapons, adventures that dealt with trying to find food or water, etc.  But I'd never read anything of it, and it turns out I didn't know nearly as much about it as I thought.  Just recently, I borrowed a number of Dungeon magazines from my friend to flip through and find maps and ideas to loot, and I took 110 (the Dark Sun DM's Guide) and I asked him if I could take his Dragon 319 (the Dark Sun players guide) while I was at is so I could see the Paizo take on modernizing Dark Sun.Turns out a lot of the stuff that I thought defined Dark Sun was just flavor while many of the most basic premises of the campaign eerily converge on what I've done myself!  True, I differ in many (most) details, but the whole idea of the dragon kings as mortals who have transcended mortality to become tyrranical god-kings is common in my game as well (although I most likely borrowed the idea from Black Company, with a bit of Nagash from the Warhammer setting thrown in for good measure).  The whole rival city-state idea is not terribly different from my own take on politics in my campaign.  Heck, the idea of a desert planet is like mine too, although mine is more directly influenced by Mars with cold weather, surface features that resemble Vallis Marinaris and the Tharsis Montes, etc. rather than being a kind of Arrakis/Tatooine hot, sandy place.  And the idea of all animal life being unfamiliar and alien is also a convergence with my own setting, although again; one I've picked up from Edgar Rice Burroughs.I also don't have the iron-poor ideal; in fact, my homebrew has all kinds of industrialization more along the lines of Iron Kingdoms, which is an obvious flavor difference from Athas.  Still, I was very impressed by the similarities, and finding all kinds of ideas where they had done things that I had not and vice versa.  After reading it, I also pulled out my old "campaign classics" issue of Dragon, and read the blurb there by Stan! on the development of the setting, and was surprised to find that originally it was going to eschew all kinds of Tolkienisms including the races.  That would have made it resemble my own more classic Swords & Sorcery feeling campaign even more.Anyway, I'm still pretty much only familiar with the setting from the Noonan (and Paizo editors) version of the setting, not the original.  I've picked up from a number of places that there was not really a great fan reaction to the new version of the setting, which made a number of compromises to accomodate the core rules more at the expense of what many obviously thought were integral changes to the rules in the setting.  Anyone who's a fan care to chime in and have a little discussion on the differences?There's also a lot of things that clearly weren't explored in any depth in the articles that I had questions about; like this chap who created the sorceror-kings; who is he?  What's the nature of the cataclysm that shook up the setting during it's initial run, which supposedly was set 300 years prior to this new take on it?</blockquote>

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