Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8406080" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon issue 35: May/Jun 1992part 3/5The Year of Priests Defiance: Straight from one familiar name to some more. Rick Swan & Allen Varney team up for the first Dark Sun adventure in here. Like the two Spelljammer adventures, it's written in such a way as to clearly explain the differences between Athas and most campaign worlds to people who haven't bought the books, in an obvious attempt to make it accessible and hopefully persuade people on the fence to buy them. However unlike them, it isn't written as a crossover, as Athas avoids that due to easy travel to other worlds ruining the air of hardscrabble struggle for resources. But even if getting to other prime material worlds is difficult, and going direct to the outer planes impossible, they sure do have a lot of inner plane connections. In fact, without the effort of the elemental clerics & druids bringing a few precious drams of fresh material in a day, Athas would be in even worse shape from the destruction defilers wreak on the land. Which leads us in a roundabout way to the plot. The PC's are wandering through the desert when they encounter a suspiciously verdant bit of grassland with no obvious water source. Poking around, they find a ruin with a bound water elemental in, keeping the place alive. Unfortunately, there's also a senile comic relief sage poking around, and once you've had a few interactions with him and are starting to get fed up, a defiler & his minions will show up and try to take the whole joint over, ruining more of that painstakingly grown grass with every spell. If the sage is still alive, he'll free the elemental during this fight, which will go for the defiler first, giving you a chance to escape, before heading back to it's own plane, but leaving enough water behind to keep the place verdant for another year or two. With both multiple comic relief bits, trying to set you up with a cute animal sidekick, and the way it puts the captain planet eco-preaching at the centre of the story, this feels very much like a saturday morning cartoon portrayal of Athas. It's still darker than the average Dragonlance story, but much cheesier than the tone in the core boxed set. So it's not exactly badly written, as these are two skilled gaming veterans, but tonally miscalibrated. TSR's attempts to make a dark and gritty postapocalyptic fantasy setting are being hampered by the code of conduct and writers who are used to writing in a more comedic milieu. The result leaves me frustrated and unsatisfied. I don't think I'd be using this one even discounting it's setting specificity.</blockquote>

Verification