Please post (or PM me) about any cool stuff you've seen on any website or blog out there, that fits the bill.
The world of the Dark Sun setting is unique in several ways. Many familiar trappings of the Dungeons & Dragons game are missing or turned on their heads. Athas is not a place of shining knights and robed wizards, of deep forests and divine pantheons. To venture over the sands of Athas is to enter a world of savagery and splendor that draws on different traditions of fantasy and storytelling. Simple survival beneath the deep red sun is often its own adventure.
Newcomers to Athas have much to learn about the world, its people, and its monsters, but the following eight characteristics encapsulate the most important features of the Dark Sun campaign setting.
1. The World Is a Desert
Athas is a hot, arid planet covered with endless seas of dunes, lifeless salt flats, stony wastes, rocky badlands, thorny scrublands, and worse. From the first moments of dawn, the crimson sun beats down from an olive-tinged sky. Temperatures routinely exceed 100 degrees F. by midmorning and can reach 130 degrees or more by late afternoon. The wind is like the blast of a furnace, offering no relief from the oppressive heat. Dust and sand borne on the breeze coat everything with yellow-orange silt.
In this forbidding world, cities and villages exist only in a few oases or verdant plains. Some places don’t see rain for years at a time, and even in fertile regions, rain is little more than a humid mist that falls during a few weeks each year before giving way to long months of heat and drought. The world beyond these islands of civilization is a wasteland roamed by nomads, raiders, and hungry monsters.
Athas was not always a desert, and the parched landscape is dotted with the crumbling ruins of a planet that once was rich with rivers and seas. Ancient bridges over dry watercourses and empty stone quays that face seas of sand tell the tale of a world that is no more.
2. The World Is Savage
Life on Athas is brutal and short. Bloodthirsty raiders, greedy slavers, and hordes of inhuman savages overrun the deserts and wastelands. The cities are little better; each chokes in the grip of an ageless tyrant. The institution of slavery is widespread on Athas, and many unfortunates spend their lives in chains, toiling for brutal taskmasters. Every year hundreds of slaves, perhaps thousands, are sent to their deaths in bloody arena spectacles. Charity, compassion, kindness—these qualities exist, but they are rare and precious. Only a fool hopes for such riches.
3. Metal Is Scarce
Most arms and armor are made of bone, stone, wood, and other such materials. Mail or plate armor exists only in the treasuries of the sorcerer-kings. Steel blades are almost priceless, weapons that many heroes never see during their lifetimes.
4. Arcane Magic Defiles the World
The reckless use of arcane magic during ancient wars reduced Athas to a wasteland. To cast an arcane spell, one must gather power from the living world nearby. Plants wither to black ash, crippling pain wracks animals and people, and the soil is sterilized; nothing can grow in that spot again. It is possible to cast spells with care, preserving the world and avoiding any more damage to it, but defiling offers more power than preserving. As a result, sorcerers, wizards, and other wielders of arcane magic are reviled and persecuted across Athas regardless of whether they preserve or defile. Only the most powerful spellcasters can wield arcane might without fear of reprisal.
5. Sorcerer-Kings Rule the City-States
Terrible defilers of immense power rule all but one of the city-states. These mighty spellcasters have held their thrones for centuries; no one alive remembers a time before the sorcerer-kings. Some claim to be gods, and some claim to serve gods. Some are brutal oppressors, where others are more subtle in their tyranny.
The sorcerer-kings govern through priesthoods or bureaucracies of greedy, ambitious templars, lesser defilers who can call upon the kings’ powers. Only in the city-state of Tyr does a glimmer of freedom beckon, and powerful forces already conspire to extinguish it.
6. The Gods Are Silent
Long ago, when the planet was green, the brutal might of the primordials overcame the gods. Today, Athas is a world without deities. There are no clerics, no paladins, and no prophets or religious orders. Old shrines and crumbling temples lie amid the ancient ruins, testimony to a time when the gods spoke to the people of Athas. Nothing is heard now but the sighing of the desert wind.
In the absence of divine influence, other powers have come to prominence in the world. Psionic power is well known and widely practiced on Athas; even unintelligent desert monsters can have deadly psionic abilities. Shamans and druids call upon the primal powers of the world, which are often sculpted by the influence of elemental power.
7. Fierce Monsters Roam the World
The desert planet has its own deadly ecology. Athas has no cattle, swine, or horses; instead, people tend flocks of erdlus, ride on kanks or crodlus, and draw wagons with inixes and mekillots. Wild creatures such as lions, bears, and wolves are nonexistent. In their place are terrors such as the id fiend, the baazrag, and the tembo. Perhaps the harsh environment of Athas breeds creatures tough and vicious enough to survive it, or maybe the touch of ancient sorcery poisoned the wellsprings of life and inflicted monster after monster on the dying world. Either way, the deserts are perilous, and only a fool or a lunatic travels them alone.
8. Familiar Races Aren’t What You Expect
Typical fantasy stereotypes don’t apply to Athasian heroes. In many Dungeons & Dragons settings, elves are wise, benevolent forest dwellers who guard their homelands from intrusions of evil. On Athas, elves are a nomadic race of herders, raiders, peddlers, and thieves. Halflings aren’t amiable riverfolk; they’re xenophobic headhunters and cannibals who hunt and kill trespassers in their mountain forests. Goliaths—or half-giants, as they are commonly known—are brutal mercenaries who serve as elite guards and enforcers for the sorcerer-kings and their templars in many city-states.
Thanks.
Anybody can create their own Primer and add it, too.
If Flip can raise from the dead the Dark Sun wiki that too will get ripped.
Can I make a Warlord with the templar theme or that theme is tied specifically to Warlocks ?
Hi everyone I got a question
Can I make a Warlord with the templar theme or that theme is tied specifically to Warlocks ?
I believe the templar theme can be taken by most classes and not just Warlock.
Hi everyone I got a question
Can I make a Warlord with the templar theme or that theme is tied specifically to Warlocks ?
I believe the templar theme can be taken by most classes and not just Warlock.
Replace "most" with "all", and it would be more accurate. Themes are available to all classes.
I still want my elemental priests as a class, but that's another topic...
No racial weapon feat for Thri-kreen? Am I missing something, or is a Thri-kreen without martial weapon proficiencies forced to take separate feats for the Gythka and Chatkcha? That would be disappointing.
I had the same question myself. You'd expect a feat like the one for dwarves, eladrin and githzerai. Previous edition kreen even were able to treat them as martial weapons instead of exotic.
Can a Dark Sun Character be used in the LFR setting ? If not then why not if Eberron can be?
Thank you for answering this
I'm sorry if this question has been answered somwhere I have done many searches and looked through a lot of Q&A's, but I can't find the answer to this.
Can a Dark Sun Character be used in the LFR setting ? If not then why not if Eberron can be?
Thank you for answering this
Depends on which part of a dark sun character you want to bring over. Thri-kreen? Themes?
Themes are not dependent on the senario but a few are very dependent on the world of Athas.
Roleplaying wise as far as bringing an athasian to LFR through either a ritual or teleport or even through the planes is hard. There is a buffer known as the Gray that separates Athas from all other planes. The only thing that can penetrate the Gray is a God and its too much work for them to try. There are beings of unimaginable power there and even if you get pass them if you falter for a second you will get lost in the Gray forever. Becoming a wandering soul that will eventually evaporate.
There is no reason why someone can't teleport to Athas or out of it if the DM deems it possible. Its just Athas is separated from everything. The way I interpret it in my campaign, the Gods are afraid of the power that Athasians have, especially the Dragon of Tyr and the Sorcerer Kings.
Thanks again
Mul are just half-dwarves, after all ... so it ain't like they're an exotic race, and could be found anywhere both humans and dwarves co-mingle. So just get one of each together, add a little Barry White and ... insta-mul.
Does it have to be a case of a character being removed/exported from Dark Sun to LFR?
Mul are just half-dwarves, after all ... so it ain't like they're an exotic race, and could be found anywhere both humans and dwarves co-mingle. So just get one of each together, add a little Barry White and ... insta-mul.
Yeah, just as long as the character isn't from Athas.
DM's rule is law though. DM trumps rules.
I'm sorry if this question has been answered somwhere I have done many searches and looked through a lot of Q&A's, but I can't find the answer to this.
Can a Dark Sun Character be used in the LFR setting ? If not then why not if Eberron can be?
Thank you for answering this
Depends on which part of a dark sun character you want to bring over. Thri-kreen? Themes?
Themes are not dependent on the senario but a few are very dependent on the world of Athas.
Roleplaying wise as far as bringing an athasian to LFR through either a ritual or teleport or even through the planes is hard. There is a buffer known as the Gray that separates Athas from all other planes. The only thing that can penetrate the Gray is a God and its too much work for them to try. There are beings of unimaginable power there and even if you get pass them if you falter for a second you will get lost in the Gray forever. Becoming a wandering soul that will eventually evaporate.
There is no reason why someone can't teleport to Athas or out of it if the DM deems it possible. Its just Athas is separated from everything. The way I interpret it in my campaign, the Gods are afraid of the power that Athasians have, especially the Dragon of Tyr and the Sorcerer Kings.
Short answer===no
I'm sorry if this question has been answered somwhere I have done many searches and looked through a lot of Q&A's, but I can't find the answer to this.
Can a Dark Sun Character be used in the LFR setting ? If not then why not if Eberron can be?
Thank you for answering this
Depends on which part of a dark sun character you want to bring over. Thri-kreen? Themes?
Themes are not dependent on the senario but a few are very dependent on the world of Athas.
Roleplaying wise as far as bringing an athasian to LFR through either a ritual or teleport or even through the planes is hard. There is a buffer known as the Gray that separates Athas from all other planes. The only thing that can penetrate the Gray is a God and its too much work for them to try. There are beings of unimaginable power there and even if you get pass them if you falter for a second you will get lost in the Gray forever. Becoming a wandering soul that will eventually evaporate.
There is no reason why someone can't teleport to Athas or out of it if the DM deems it possible. Its just Athas is separated from everything. The way I interpret it in my campaign, the Gods are afraid of the power that Athasians have, especially the Dragon of Tyr and the Sorcerer Kings.
Short answer===no
Athas is seperated from all other PMP's by the Grey, known to those of other realms as the Shadowfell. Interpretting things as the gods themselves being afraid of the power players in Athas is a bit of a stretch to me. Lolth vs Dregoth would be an interesting fight, but I believe that Lolth would eventually prevail.
I seem to remember back in the '90's with AD&D there was a sourcebook/box set that featured ol' Dregoth in it and stated that despite the extra hazards of planar travel imposed by the Grey that he/it had visited other PMP's (not stated but presumeably Faerun or maybe Ravenloft) and returned to Athas after escaping a Big Meany but barely. Maybe we could see some more of this in future 4e supplements for Dark Sun? Speaking of which, are there any more published books being released in the foreseeable future? *Need moar*
Metal is rare so wearing chainmail armor would be like wearing a coat made from precious gems, woudln't it? When I equip armor for my character, can I equip some "chainmail" and then claim that it's made of bone, drilled and bound together with leather straps or do I have to downgrade the armor to hide or leather?
I'm preparing a character for my first game of Dark Sun. I really like the setting, but I was curious about how I should outfit my guy.
Metal is rare so wearing chainmail armor would be like wearing a coat made from precious gems, woudln't it? When I equip armor for my character, can I equip some "chainmail" and then claim that it's made of bone, drilled and bound together with leather straps or do I have to downgrade the armor to hide or leather?
Yes, use the rules for normal chainmail armour and then reflavour it to something more suitable to Athas. See pages 118 and 119 of the Dark Sun Campaign Setting for more details.
I'm preparing a character for my first game of Dark Sun. I really like the setting, but I was curious about how I should outfit my guy.
Metal is rare so wearing chainmail armor would be like wearing a coat made from precious gems, woudln't it? When I equip armor for my character, can I equip some "chainmail" and then claim that it's made of bone, drilled and bound together with leather straps or do I have to downgrade the armor to hide or leather?
Yes, use the rules for normal chainmail armour and then reflavour it to something more suitable to Athas. See pages 118 and 119 of the Dark Sun Campaign Setting for more details.
Thank you.
I haven't bought the Dark Sun campaign book yet (though I have looked for it at the local Borders that's going out of business to try to find it cheap). I'm going to get it once I have some disposable income.
Any idea where Alphastream's blog on Dark Sun can be found?