Fucking Dark Sun How Does it Work?

[darkmaster]

I was invited to join a Dark Sun game run with 3.tome rules. I do not have any background with Dark Sun. I know it's basically Conan meets that one episode of Doctor Who where they go to the end of time. But that's more or less it. So, what do I need to know, what stuff will cause the setting to collapse in on itself, I read that you can't do planar travel somehow?

[name_here]

It's basically a blasted desert wasteland where everyone has psionics and there's something screwy with magic where it can suck out the life from the surroundings.

[darkmaster]

That helps me very little.

[Nebuchadnezzar]

The Wikipedia entry is actually pretty decent. Here's the main blurb from it:

Once a blue planet teeming with life, Athas has since been stripped of its fertility by the use of corrupting magic known as Defiling Magic, and the decay of its sun. It is a sun-burnt land forsaken by the gods, water, and hope. The natural resources have been depleted and a lack of metal has resulted in the use of wood, obsidian and bone for weapons, tools and other common equipment - metal objects are rare and expensive. In such a harsh and unforgiving land, even the most mundane of creatures has developed psionic abilities in response to the constant struggle for survival.

Many thousands of years ago, through a combination of psionic power and defiler magic, a number of individuals set themselves up as sorcerer-kings, each ruling one of the city-states strewn across the sandy wastes of Athas. The societies that resulted are strongly hierarchical, heavily reliant on slaves, and partial to blood sports.[5] Outside these cities lie vast expanses of deserts, mountains and desolate wilderness areas inhabited by monsters and tribes of humanoid races struggling for survival.

The main question is at what level will your game be? At low levels one is expected to mess with Survival checks and the like. If it's near 20+ then one should do a caster/psion/Cerebmancer/epic class, where the end class is either Dragon/magic diaphanous butterfly/Elemental/Spirit of the Land, respective to caster class of fucks with plant life wizard/doesn't fuck with plant life wizard/cleric/druid. Planar travel is about as out as it would be in Ravenloft.

[darkmaster]

It's level 10. But like how does there being no resource even work in a game where fucking wall of iron and shit exists?

[Echoes]

That helps me very little.

Off the top of my head:

• Metal is very rare (don't expect to start with it).
  
  Arcane magic is intensely distrusted because it can be used to literally suck the life out of your surroundings (and there is an absolutely broken feat that allows you to no-save nauseate everyone within the area of effect for 1 round).
  
  Psionics is ubiquitous and no one will be weirded-out by people using psychic powers.
  
  Halflings are xenophobic jungle cannibals, elves are desert nomads and raiders. Dwarves and humans can breed; the offspring are called Muls.
  
  Most of civilization is confined to city-states ruled by dragon-kings who operate as living deities for their templars.

The full 3.5 rules conversion (which also contains a great deal of the fluff) can be found here.

[Jeff W]

[quote="darkmaster"]It's level 10. But like how does there being no resource even work in a game where fucking wall of iron and shit exists?[/quote]

If it's anything like 2e dark sun, all spells that generate water, iron, etc are banned.

[Wiseman]

Huh, i assumed that clerics would generate water for small towns.

[Jeff W]

[quote="Wiseman"]Huh, i assumed that clerics would generate water for small towns.[/quote]

Yeah, you're right, it appears that the only limit is that they create 1/2 gallon of water per level.

[quote]In Dark Sun, create water produces only one half
gallon of water per level of the caster. In all other
ways, the spell is exactly as described in the Player?s
Handbook.[/quote]

[Username17]

There's a Dragon Kings ossr that you can take a look at.

-Username17

[Dean]

Just read through the 3.0 rules. Defiling and preserving have been seriously watered down. It's basically not even a piece of the setting anymore other than in the fluff. The Nauseating aura feat is the only thing in the entire sourcebook that would make me care whether I was defiling or not.

[Prak]

You could probably do worse than just making a raptor riding halfling barbarian who makes references to how much one can rely on blood for hydration and talking to any thri kreen characters what race tastes the best (I mean, the thri kreen will always say elf, but beyond that)

edit: I still really want to play a thri kreen sometime. Sadly, their LA and HD make them pretty gimped.

[K]

The setting is "the DnD version of the Roman Empire does Mad Max." Basically, lots of city-states as the only civilizations with big armies and blasted wasteland filled with bullshit barbarian tribes everywhere else.

Add Psionics and evil life-sucking arcane magic to taste.

The novels for the setting focus on slave revolts and the like, so basically watch any Roman-based drama of the last 30 years if you want similar story ideas. Just add a Dragon King in place of Caesar.

[Ancient History]

Wait, which set of 3e Dark Sun rules are you using? As I recall they had 2 or 3 versions in Dragon/Dungeon magazine, and they were almost incompatible on how they presented defiling.

[TheFlatline]

I remember in 2nd ed all characters start at 3rd level because it was assumed that if you lived long enough to start adventuring you were kind of tough to begin with.

[Previn]

The setting is "the DnD version of the Roman Empire does Mad Max." Basically, lots of city-states as the only civilizations with big armies and blasted wasteland filled with bullshit barbarian tribes everywhere else.

Add Psionics and evil life-sucking arcane magic to taste.

The novels for the setting focus on slave revolts and the like, so basically watch any Roman-based drama of the last 30 years if you want similar story ideas. Just add a Dragon King in place of Caesar.

This is a pretty good quick view of the flavor of the setting. I feel that I should add on that in 2e you were expected to start at 3rd level and have multiple characters with an interrelated background so that when one died you could easily pull in another and have a reason to have them join the currently running story.

There also wasn't an official 3.x Dark Sun so as Ancient History notes, you need to get that nailed down before we can really dive into what to expect because in some cases it is full on deadly, and in others it's barely even cosmetic flavor for a standard game.

Incidentally I just opened some boxes that had been sealed in an attic when my parents did a remodeling of their house and found that I apparently own Valley of Dust and Fire, and a second copy of my 2e PHB among other nifty things. Had some good times when the active party died of dehydration and every player brought in Thri-kreen. Derailed the game from an average fight the dragon kings into an awesome we are raiding bandits that are out to eat you.

Good times.

[TheFlatline]

My last DS campaign (like 20 years ago) comprised of 5 PCs playing cannibalistic Halflings on a rampage of eating humanoids and pillaging.

It was insane in a good way.

[Wiseman]

So which version would you recommend?

[Ancient History]

Well, like I said, there was some Dark Sun material in Dragon Magazine for 3.x.

[/edit]
So, issue #315 covers Defilers, issue #319 is the big "update" for playing Dark Sun in 3.5, and the Athasian Dragon prestige class is in #339.

[Previn]

Ah, athas.org is still up. You can get a pretty comprehensive (300+ pages) 'fan' conversion of the Dark Sun setting to 3.5 there.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I've always wondered: what exactly is there to do for mid-level Dark Sun characters?

From what I've seen of the setting and expansion material (I've seen two LPs of the 2E D&D game and own 4E Dark Sun crap) there's plenty of cool shit for low-level and high-level characters to do, but what do you do after you've accumulated enough power to not be threatened by the typical hazards of Athas but not enough to play SimCity?

[Ancient History]

Mainly, you try not to be killed as Dragon-Kings send hit squads after you. Or you're hired by Dragon-Kings to take out potential threats before they get more powerful.

[Occluded Sun]

In 2nd Ed. Athas is disconnected from the rest of the multiverse by a phenomenon known as the 'Grey'. People trying to enter the Ethereal from Athas, or enter Athas from the Ethereal, find themselves lost in the Grey instead. It's theoretically possible to escape from the Grey if you're lucky, but every day spent within it loses you a point of Constitution permanently.

[Dean]

Dark Sun seems very close to the Earthdawn world. It has a desert theme and the Sorceror Kings controlling each primary Kaern is a twist but it's a very similar setting as far as I can see.

[Ancient History]

...no. I mean, you can argue that they're both post-apocalyptic fantasy, but that's about as far as they have anything in common. Magic isn't demonized in Earthdawn, nor is Dark Sun beset by horrors. Both have a certain elemental focus, but in Dark Sun it's all clerics and druids while in Earthdawn it's just one spellcaster class. The cities of Dark Sun are thematically closer to the walls city-states of ancient Sumer than anything in Earthdawn, and they have no thematic similarity to kaers.

And that's without getting into the really crazy shit, like psionics in Dark Sun being the result of mind-bombs and shit.