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Message: <blockquote data-quote="humble minion" data-source="post: 8328843" data-attributes="member: 5948">I'd mine Abbey's books ruthlessly when it comes to the everyday flavour of life in Athas, and also when it comes to the sort of relationships that the sorcerer-kings have had over the millennia.  They certainly didn't adhere to DS gameline canon very well (understandable, given the ... suboptimal ... management from TSR) but I still stand by them being some of the highest-quality books ever written for D&D, in any setting, the most evocative and flavourful, and with some of the best characterisation.  I certainly wouldn't make the ending of RaFoaDK canon for a new 5e iteration of the setting, but on the other hand, RaFoaDK has a post-Prism Pentad starting point, so i wouldn't be using that in 5e DS either.I'd 100% be stealing her vision of how the templarate works.  I'd be stealing a lot of her flavour of life in Urik (much deeper, more evocative, and useful for a game than the crayon-simplistic version we got in the Prism Pentad and the 2e adventures).  And I'd certainly be taking a big leaf out of her book and 'humanising' the SKs a bit.  Too often in the original game line they were painted as doing evil because they were evil, persecuting preservers because they were defilers, etc etc.  That's IMHO out of place in DS, and seemed to be a hangover from other D&D settings where the 'gods' actually exemplified abstract concepts like 'murder' etc.  The SKs are flawed once-mortal individuals who do evil things, for reasons they either justify to themselves as necessary, or out of selfishness or habit or callousness or whatever.  They don't actually promote the abstract philosophy of evil, or rally to evil's banner, they just have no qualms about doing evil things when it suits them.</blockquote>

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