Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 jimsmaher May 15, 2010 21:00:44	"Will there be any explicit exclusion of creatures listed in any of the 4E Monstrous Manuals from being in 4E Dark Sun?" "Short answer: No. We have a short sidebar that suggests omitting gnomes, ogres, horses, and a couple of others, but ultimately we don't want DMs fretting about what they *can't* put in Dark Sun. We wanted the list of "things you don't find here" to be very short, and pretty flexible for DMs who aren't too hung up on continuity." WotC_RichBaker ~ via WotC messages
#2 eric_anondson May 15, 2010 22:48:53	Reasonable. Leaves things open for the obsessive Dark Sun fanatic to go scour the various monster books and rate, using a scale, the monsters on DS appropriateness. Seems like a cool project.
#3 jimsmaher May 16, 2010 14:27:47	If kept to the climate distinctions, it seems binary.  Either the monster is classically DS or not.  Unless you want to get caught up in specifically reasigning rarity to each creature.
#4 603 May 16, 2010 16:25:26	Believe me, some people will go nuts because there isn't a specific rarity list for everything. You can't make everybody happy, and some folks just have to have a canon listing for everything.
#5 jahatch28 May 19, 2010 21:21:02	I just uncovered an article from Dragon Magazine from before Dark Sun came out in 1992 (1994?) that had a list of monsters to use from the monster compendiumss of that time frame: volumes 1 & 2 aarakocra, aerial servant, ankhegs, ants, ant lions, basilisks, bat, beetle, behir, bulette, cats, cave fisher,  centipede, dragonne, elementals, ettercaps, ettins, genies, giant-kin cyclops, golem, hornets, kenku, lizards, pseudodragons,  carniverous plants, rats, remorhaz, rocs, sandlings, scorpions, skeletons, snakes (all except giant sea snakes), spiders, wyverns, yuan-ti, zombies from forgotten realms MC3 bhaergala, meazels, rhaumbusun, striders, thessalmonsters, thri-kreen from dragonlance MC4 fire minion, horax, skrit, slig, tylor, wyndlass, hatori, insect swarms from MC5 greyhawk Beetle, bonesnapper, dragonfly, dragonnnel, horgar, plants (carnivorous again) from MC6 Kara-taur goblins spiders, jishin mushi sadly, no creatures from spelljammer or ravenloft are listed.. fiends from the outer planes (MC9) can travel to athas but do so rarely.. lol.. I guess that even as a purist regarding the original Dark Sun, there was a lot of room outside the ringing mountains for other races (like gnomes) to exist in small colonies, even if they were suppossed to have been made extinct by the champions... and certainly, with 4e having "skins" on their monsters that are changeable, you can always use a gnome arcanist .. just change it to a short, rhyming, sunburned mutant with psychic powers and shocking green hair... also, I don't know what their intentions are for dragonborn and tieflings, but it would seem that some backstory is necessary if you figure dragons are, ehem, slighlyt different in the original DS.. hopefully they don't change that too much!!! lol.. Josh