Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 RoboTony Feb 11, 2014 9:14:34	This forum has been pretty quiet, so I thought I'd mention a few Dark Sun related things I've seen / have going on:   This new podcast, Total Party Kill, http://www.theincomparable.com/tpk/ has people from the Incomparable Podcast playing through the Dark Sun adventure Marauders of the Dune Sea.    I'm still running a regular in person Dark Sun campaign, our next meeting will be our 30th sesssion, my players are about to hit level 9. We are currently in the midst of a Dark Sun version of Madness at Gardmore Abbey, though the adventure took a strange twist when a PC wearing a fragment of the crown of dust died, and became the main antagonist houding them as they explore the abbey picking up various pieces of the deck. I've generally been pretty impressed with the quality of this adventure though I did chop out some major chunks rather than trying to convert them to Dark Sun appropriate settings.    Here is a map I made of my characters path across Athas: https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1rHMId4_oOAqnZwdDOybw77qD-YEj6F5SVxzMRQZiAP0/edit?usp=sharing
#2 Tech-Priest Feb 16, 2014 8:49:37	Interesting; I would like to know what sorta changes you made to the Madness at Gardmore Abbey stuff, as that's one of my favorite adventure modules and would be pretty badass to add into my campaign...
#3 RoboTony Feb 16, 2014 19:36:47	I made all the orcs into Tareks. The PCs were given the first card of the deck by the SK of Gulg a whileback, they believe that assembling the pices will help them unbond the crown of dust from one of the PCs currently stuck with it. I cut out and reskinned avariety of the encounters (cut all the stuff about minotaurs and oni for example.)   The sotry took a strange turn when the PC carrying the crown of dust died in an encounter, so now he's the main antagonist chanelling Ul Athra and harrassing them as they wander around the Abbey searching fo the cards and trying to piece togetehr what has happened.   So I ended up doing a decent amount of reskinning and responding to things the PCs have done, but the heart of the module is still there.
#4 Tech-Priest Feb 17, 2014 7:21:17	Well if you have any other notes on what was reskinned, let me know- definitely may hijack a bit of ideas for mine, lol! Thanks!   Btw, listening to the podcasts, great stuff.
#5 RoboTony Feb 24, 2014 12:06:16	So the big/easy one was reskinning the orcs as Tareks (there a recommendation in the Dark Sun Setting book on one power to swap out.) I made some of the ogres giants. At one point my PCs got captured by the Tareks and managed to talk their way out of death by challenging and defeating their most powerful warrior in single combat, so the Tareks are a bit thematically different from the orcs in terms of being fierce warriors protective of their territory but not blood thirty warriors.    In terms of other things I change / reskinned:   The eladrin Berrian is a member of the Veiled Alliance and the PCs VA "contact" for that area. There is a small encampment of eladrin keeping watch over a secret grove on the abbey grounds. (The rest of the abbey grounds is typical rocky desert, I chose to throw out rather than reskin many of the forest-y encounters featuring owlbears, displacer beasts etc.)   I reskinned Sir Oakley as an ex-templar and human member of the Veiled Alliance who works with the eladrin though isn't exactly part of their tribe. Oakley has been studying the history of the abbey and is obsessed with the ancient god Bahamut. I kept the core element of the deck being scattered throughout the abbey and the idea that the use of the deck was the doomsday weapon that decimated this place (my PCs haven't pieced that together yet), though the timeline is dramatically pushed back to having happened in the green age and being experienced now by the PCs in the Dark Sun setting.   I expanded on the idea of the watch tower being stuck in time to having many parts of the abbey stuck in time, the PCs have encountered murals, and in some case had visions of knights and paladins etc. There is even the idea that some of Bahamut's power is stuck in the temple even with Bahamut being long dead in the Dark Sun setting. I threw out a the minotaur/oni/gnoll encounters but kept the undead catacombs and the confrontation with a dragon and it's kobold worshippers (reskinned as a drake with silt runner worshippers.)    One of the neat unplanned things was a character wearing the crown of dust was killed somewhat early on in the adventure, and he became the villain - basically an embodiment of Ul-Athra's power walking around in a elemental sand form, destroying things, collecting cards from the deck, turning tareks into zombie-esque "sand tareks".  For a while the villain even impersonates Bahamut, turning Oakley into his minion and adopting a cult of drake worshipping silt runners.  This changed the overall goal of the whole adventure from "finding these cards might help us get the crown off his head" to, "we need these cards to have any chance at defeating our former friend and saving the world." With this fun twist I threw out the whole section of bounty hunter/mercenaries hunting the characters, though I might reuse that in a later adventure because it seemed like a fun idea.   At one point there was a party wipe and the player switched to playing a group of Eladrin and Terraks, they were eventually able to rescue their former character with the exception of one that the player wanted killed off.
#6 Tech-Priest Feb 27, 2014 11:16:01	Sounds fun! Our game's kicking off saturday; we did a Session Zero a week or so ago and now we've got time to sit and actually get things rolling.