Terrors of Athas, v3.5E, released

[Gab]

A preview version (no images) of the 3.5E version of Terrors of Athas, is available at http://athas.org.

Terrors of Athas contains:

* Over 200 monsters
* Seven templates
* 26 monsters playable as races
* New Summon Monster and Summon Nature's Ally spell lists for Dark Sun
* An extensive list of monsters from other sources that will fit into a Dark Sun campaign
* New druid animal companions

The document is a 2.1MB download.

 

[Gez]

Interesting, I'll take a look.

 

[Ryltar]

Nice! I'll go and check it out.

 

[Voadam]

Are these converted DS monsters, new ones, or both?

 

[Gab]

Are these converted DS monsters, new ones, or both?

They're all the DS monsters we could find in books, Polyhedron, Dragon, modules, adventures, etc. Some are given stats for the first time (eg, raakle), while most are conversions.

 

[Gab]

*bump*

 

[Voadam]

I downloaded it from the website.

First glance it looks good, has a list of creatures broken down by type and later by CR.

The decisions about what to release as OGC in the entries are more than a bit odd. Instead of relaseing all the combat section and special abilities while reserving IP, only certain individual words are released from those sections, for instance "Will DC" but not the actual number or even any part of a whole entry for Pounce.

The industry standard is for the italic description and everything in the combat section minus any specific IP reservations to be included as OGC since everything except the flavor description and the combat exposition are game rule mechanics.

Its a big collection so thanks for doing this work, and the monster entries are more than just the stats, so they are usable without owning the original source or needing to cross reference it to actually use them.

 

[Welverin]

Ooo, nifty.

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

The decisions about what to release as OGC in the entries are more than a bit odd. Instead of relaseing all the combat section and special abilities while reserving IP, only certain individual words are released from those sections, for instance "Will DC" but not the actual number or even any part of a whole entry for Pounce.

I believe there are two issues at play here.

First, everything Athas.org publishes is joint ownership of WotC and the Athas.org authors. Nothing can be made OGC without both parties agreeing to it. Odds are that Athas.org is playing it safe, knowing that they will never get someone at WotC to look at their stuff to agree to OGC designations, so they just highlight portions that are easily confirmed to be right from the SRD.

Second, the attention to detail to not step on WotC's toes may have clumsily left things like the "Will DC" words in OGC, but not the actual numeric value. Purely an editing slip, and as this is a preview, might be touched up in final versions.

It is very, very interesting to see a WotC fansite offer OGC associated in products that work with WotC PI.

On an OGL note, Gab, I don't think section 15 designations is correct in Terrors 3.5. Missing is the copyright notice from the SRD. This must be in Section 15. See Section 6 in the OGL, is says that an author MUST update the exact text of the copyright notice of any OGC you are copying, modifying, or distributing. If you are using the SRD the OGL requires the Terror's copyright notice take word for word the copyright notice that the SRD gives.

Hey Gab, thanks for keeping on the Athas team for all these years!


Regards,
Eric Anondson

 

[Style]

Anything with two giant killer squid monsters gets my vote!

Mesonychoteuthis is alive and well and living near Saragar!