Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AdmundfortGeographer" data-source="post: 4505427" data-attributes="member: 4682">I believe new races can be handled extremely easy in Dark Sun. The covered geography of the setting was remarkably tiny. New races could be handwaved away as immigrants from distant societies. There is precent to this already, with the Revised boxed set the Pterran were added. The pterran were from distant villages just outside the Tablelands. The aaracokra were added as well and were from a mountain range to the north of the Tablelands.Plus, we have the issue of the Pristine Tower creating New Races all the time. With this sitting there, there is no reason any race couldn't be given a brief cameo by the DM.That said . . .Dragonborn could be slid in as dray.Tieflings could be the Draxan diaspora.Eladrin: Well, I got to read co-creator Tim Brown's draft of the unpublished Dead Lands sourcebook. One thing had long stuck out in my mind, he had dropped a line in passing about rumored elven cities floating high above the silt sea to the north of Saragar. Have elves be Dark Sun elves, but we could have eladrin be from these never before detailed cities.I must say, gnomes? Dark Sun had these all exterminated. To bring gnomes back after a genocide wiped them out would be to squat all over the background tragedy of the genocidal wars that ravaged the planet.As easily as the Pristine Tower justifies anything a brief cameo, the Cleansing Wars are justification for not allowing any darn race 4e burps out into a 4e Athas. Unless you want to toss out a nation of undead versions of such a race down in the Dead Lands.Cosmology.I'm uncomfortable with Shadowfell being used as analogous to The Black. It's not even close. Shadowfell would work far better, IMO, with a few tweaks, as The Gray.The only place I could see Feywild showing up would be at the center of certain druids' lush groves. Apocryphal or not, Lynn Abbey's books had a druid-protected grove where many scenes were described with characters walking deeper into the grove and suddenly noticing the sky had changed color and the wind was not as warm. Otherwise, I believe the Feywild should given as minimal a position as could be in Dark Sun.Classes.Care must be taken with arcane-powered classes and whether or not they draw* life-energy (defile), or* tap into The Gray (necromancers), or* the Black (shadowcasters), or* the elemental planes (all divine casters), or* the strange Cerulean Storm that seems to blend the essence of Athas' nearest thing to a god, Rajaat, the insane rage of Tithian, and electrical energy and primordial water (not elemental water, but water from the time oceans covered the planet)Wizards could be kept as drawing life energy.Warlocks could be given the choice of a pact with Adropinis (The Black), a pact with Tithian (Cerulean), and a pact with some undissolved soul (The Gray)Swordmages . . . meh . . . make them draw life energy and be as hunted/hated as wizards. Swordmages could be the Veiled Alliance's own trained bodyguards. Maybe after centuries of being hunted by Druids, Templars, and Sorcerer Kings, the Veiled Alliance believed that the best way to keep their secrets was to train their own guards to use life-drawing magic in a machiavellian way to buy their guards silence from snitching them out. Once a defiler, always a defiler.If you wanted to keep Paladins true to the ideals they are meant to embody, having Paladins come from New Kurn could suffice as a way to allow them with as little change as necessary. That, IMO, limits their geographic distribution too much to be useful to most players. Otherwise, with a little more reinvention, Paladins could be re-imagined as holy protectors of certain elemental shrines.</blockquote>

Verification