Old Dark Sun adventures

[Jürgen Hubert]

The recent Dark Sun conversions in Dungeon/Dragon rekindled my interest in the setting. I've got most of the sourcebooks back from when they were still in print, but now I'm considering getting some of the old adventures as well now that they are available as PDFs.

Now, which ones are worthwhile purchases? Can anyone who has them give some short reviews/summaries?

I'm especially interested in the series that ties in with the liberation of Tyr ("Freedom", "Road to Urik", and - which ones came after that?), but I'm also considering the others...

 

[Heretic Apostate]

The OCR reading on some of the older adventures, when they were scanned, was awful. Either that, or the original editing was terrible...

 

[johnsemlak]

I can't offer much help as I never played DS, but I do have the Dragon Crown PDF, as I heard it was a classic and got it. It's a MASSIVE pdf, 350 pages. I haven't examined it closely, but skimming through it the text seems fine and it certainly is quite usable.

You might find a 350 page PDF file a bit hefty to use though.

I believe the series you asked about is : Freedom , Road to Urik , Arcane Shadows, and Asticlian Gambit

 

[Mach2.5]

Most of the adventures were rather hit or miss unfortunately.

Freedom and Road to Urik were both fantastic and rather low level.

Dragon's Crown and Black Spine were also terrific, and very high level.

Most of the rest were rather mediocre or even terrible (avoid Black Flames like the plague, same with Mauraders of Nibenay).

I've only seen the pdf versions of two of the 'flip book' adventures, and they were as good as you could expect from scanning in the flips.

 

[Staffan]

There were two main series of adventures set in Dark Sun:
Freedom, Road to Urik, Arcane Shadows, and Asticlian Gambit. Dragon's Crown fits this series better than the other (one major NPC from Arcane Shadows plays a major role).

Freedom is a great adventure for starting a campaign (and works pretty well as a follow-up to the adventure in the box set), leaving many loose threads on which to build spin-off adventures. The PCs can get involved with some factions in Tyr that can later help or hinder them in Road to Urik. Road to Urik does have some problems in that it involves some mass combat, and pushes the Battlesystem rules pretty heavily. These two are the most heavily related of the DS adventures.

Arcane Shadows, in turn, starts in Urik (it doesn't take over right where RtU ends - there's a novel in between) and leads the PCs back to Tyr (or at least somewhere close) while trying to evade Urikian forces. Asticlian Gambit doesn't have much to do with the other adventures in the series, and I find it pretty weak (it involves two sorcerer-kings and several "random dungeons").

Dragon's Crown, on the other hand, is my favorite adventure for any D&D version. It is big, and takes the party all over the tablelands - and beyond. They get to go silt-sailing, creep through Hamanu's palace, search an ancient fortress from before the Cleansing Wars, fight in gladiatorial arenas, travel to the Forest Ridge (and deal with man-eating halflings), face off with almost-mad thri-kreen, and stuff like that. While there are a few dungeons, it's a mega-adventure that's NOT just one big dungeon.

Of the other adventure series (Black Flames, Merchant-house of Am-ketch, Marauders of Nibenay - Black Spine and Forest Maker may or may not be sort-of part of this series like Dragon's Crown is part of the other), I've only read Black Flames. Frankly, Black Flames stinks on ice. It features a 22nd level dragon (defiler/psionicist) who presses the 3rd-level PCs into service to do some stuff, and as the finale said dragon faces off against one of the sorcerer-monarchs. It's just bad.

I have heard good things about Black Spine though, which features githyanki and githzerai.

As for the scanning quality, I think the quality is a lot higher on the Dark Sun PDFs than on many of the others. Dark Sun was part of the early ESD project, when they took care to OCR and do actual layout on the books to make them look like the originals. After a while they decided that this took too much effort, and made a half-hearted OCR, and put the text behind scanned images of the books. I think the DS box set PDFs weigh in at about 15 megs each, while the later Planescape box set PDFs (which has approximately the same number of pages and the same number of maps and stuff) are more like 60 megs.

 

[humble minion]

I second what everone else has said about Black Flames. It really is bloody awful.

I'm a bit ambivalent about Freedom and Road to Urik. They're pretty well put together, but if you're after an adventure that makes PCs the movers and shakers of the campaign, they're not a lot of use. The modules really just let the PCs tag along with the NPCs from the Prism Pentad, Rikus, Agis and the rest, who get to do all the good stuff (fighting Kalak, etc) while the PCs run contrived errands for them and are expected to be honoured to get the chance to meet such luminaries.

Dragon's Crown is good, if you accept there's a vastly powerful secret society of many, many level 20+ psionicists hanging around doing (until recently) not-very-much. If you've got psionicist or thri-kreen PCs it will be tough to run, however.

 

[VorpalBunny]

Dragon's Crown and Black Spine were also terrific, and very high level.

Seconded. Black Spine is one of my favorite adventures period. When I ran Freedom for my group, it got a lukewarm reception, but that could also be because they were new to Dark Sun when I ran it.

 

[Staffan]

I'm a bit ambivalent about Freedom and Road to Urik. They're pretty well put together, but if you're after an adventure that makes PCs the movers and shakers of the campaign, they're not a lot of use. The modules really just let the PCs tag along with the NPCs from the Prism Pentad, Rikus, Agis and the rest, who get to do all the good stuff (fighting Kalak, etc) while the PCs run contrived errands for them and are expected to be honoured to get the chance to meet such luminaries.

At least in Freedom, the crossover with the novel (and mighty NPCs) only happens at the very end, and the PCs don't really interact with them - they're just trying to get through a situation that the big guys have instigated. I thought it was a pretty good idea on how to do a novel tie-in, actually.

Without spoiling things, it's a bit like having the finale of an otherwise unrelated adventure take place on the outskirts of the battle of Pelennor Fields. Sure, the PCs aren't the ones who take out the Witch-King of Angmar, but that doesn't mean they don't have their own stuff to do.

 

[humble minion]

At least in Freedom, the crossover with the novel (and mighty NPCs) only happens at the very end, and the PCs don't really interact with them - they're just trying to get through a situation that the big guys have instigated. I thought it was a pretty good idea on how to do a novel tie-in, actually.

True enough. Most of the module is well put together, and if you don't want the Verdant Passage stuff to be going on in the background, it would be pretty simple to modify things so that a riot/storm/unrest/war/whatever created the conditions that allowed the PCs to make their escape attempt. The great majority of the module would still be usable. Same with Arcane Shadows, and even Road to Urik.

But I've always really hated how the Prism Pentad books had NPCs deal with all the big mysteries of the setting, and how the modules slavishly followed this plotline. Epic plots like that should be for the PCs, in my opinion. It by no means makes Dark Sun unusable for lower-level adventuring, but I've always had a big soft spot for the epic, world-changing stuff...

 

[Welverin]

Of the other adventure series (Black Flames, Merchant-house of Am-ketch, Marauders of Nibenay - Black Spine and Forest Maker may or may not be sort-of part of this series like Dragon's Crown is part of the other)

Black Spine was the capper to the first three, just as Dragon's Crown was to the first series. Forest Maker was a separate module all together.