the release announcement was a little vague I think. If the events of the Prism Pentad are one possible outcome, does that mean that none of them happened? That Kalik is alive and well? It seems like from a design perspective it would be hard to resist not having one free city (of course with the attendent threat of sorcerer-king brought annihilation).
So, will none of it have happened, some of it? Any speculation?
I think we can pretty much plan on a total reset back to the original box set. However, the designers are themselves players and DMs. As such they are part of a noble tradition that is not afraid to "lift" and expand on interesting ideas they run across. We may see tidbits from novels, adventures, source books, etc. I can't wait! Bring on the previews!!!
Personally, I hope that Kalak IS still alive. Part of what I liked about Dark Sun was originally, there was NO bastion of hope, freedom or democracy. Being heroic was not only dangerous... it was friggin insane.
The interview does say they want to return to the First Boxed Set, which was set before the events of the Prism Pentad 1 novel and the death of Kalak and the freeing of Tyr.
The setting being by default in this timeline should allow plenty of flexibility to keep the status quo (the desire of many a fan) or change the world, with the Prism Pentad being but one possible outcome.
Personally, I hope that Kalak IS still alive. Part of what I liked about Dark Sun was originally, there was NO bastion of hope, freedom or democracy. Being heroic was not only dangerous... it was friggin insane.
BINGO! 
aye I hated how the novels etc went, it was bloody stupid, from "all nasty hard and gritty" to "oh peace and luv and flowrrs and DEMOCRACY!"
OMG...how dumb :p Hey I luv huggy fluffy bunny stuff in RL, hehe, but not in (most of) my D&D games. Being noble in Athas was hard, that's what made it worthwhile.
plenty of settings for high heroic fantasy, but Athas was mostly survival, revenge, freedom form tyranny etc.
Very glad the officla timeline is going to be ignored, going right back to 1st boxed set, woot! The officla timeline etc blew chunks. But those who love it, can still have it. Win win for everyone
BINGO!
OMG...how dumb :p Hey I luv huggy fluffy bunny stuff in RL, hehe, but not in (most of) my D&D games. Being noble in Athas was hard, that's what made it worthwhile.
*sigh* Let's be fair about this; Tyr wasn't exactly represented as suddenly becoming a functional democracy. Or constitional Monarchy, as the city still had a king.
You ended up with a
- an ineffectual, squabbling senate
- Templars still holding a stranglehold over all of the city services
- A shutdown of the city's primary source of trade with the rest of the Tablelands (the Iron mine)
- An immediate war with the neighbors, defended by a chaotic and undiciplined army of conscripts, ex-gladiators and templars, which wins one major battle, then smashes itself to bits in a misguided counterattack
- A king who immediately sets about trying to gain all of the dark powers of his slain predecessor
- A missed tithe to the dragon
- And a need to figure out just how it's going to start *paying* that tithe
It's hardly all puppy-dogs and sugar. Freeing Tyr gave players something to fight for, other than just fighting survive the next assult by Lord Doomspike.
Killing Kalak and leaving Tyr a free, and dysfunctional, city was a good thing for the setting. Gives it a reason to be happening "now" ... a totally static world isn't a good thing from a gaming perspective.
As for the other cities ... well, none of them resulted in democracy, ponies and teddy bears either. You ended up with
- rampant anarchy -- and eventual takeover by an invading force
- a psionically manipulated puppet king
- and a city carved up by three warring factions
All of which were left totally defensless when something "big" came along -- as Raam found the hard way.
The idea of which, I suppose, was to try and do something to actually differentiate the cities in a way that's more obvious to the newcomer. None of these were happy outcomes, or particularly stable places to live. Stirring things up in a city at war with itself, or participating in the intruge of unmasking the pretender-on-the-throne -- these are threads and plots that weren't available before. More room to move and tell different kinds of stories. That's not a bad thing.
I usually play in the first year or two after Kalak's death, myself, but I can appreciate the outcome of the changes made in DS2, if not necessarily the methods. No-one likes a deus-ex-machina, and it sucks for players to be put through massive changes that they had nothing to do with -- ask a FR player. If you start after those events, however, it's just the way things shook out.
And I really hope that I don't have to argue my purist credentials with this group. :p
Always being reasonable and level headed . . . that's flip. ;)
And I really hope that I don't have to argue my purist credentials with this group. :p
Hmm, now that you mention it . . . ;D
Thank you flip, that's why i like the revised box so much but if they restart to the original timeline, i will be able to twist the death of Sorcerer-Kings with some difference.
On my part, i think Kalak WILL die soon in the timeline, one way or the other.
He want to finish his transformation. So in 1 year from the original box:
Option 1: He is stop by some Tyr heroes.
Option 2: He complete his transformation, killing near every citizen and killed by the Dragon.
Option 3: Kalak end like Dregoth, many Sorcerer-Kings kill him just before he reach full dragonhood.
After that, ''Free Tyr'' is in trouble.
I think eventually, if you don't want a static settings, things HAVE to change. But, if Kalak dies, I'd prefer it were the characters in my game that did the killing.
I think eventually, if you don't want a static settings, things HAVE to change. But, if Kalak dies, I'd prefer it were the characters in my game that did the killing.
Exactly! it was utter arrogance and stupidity on TSR's part to force such a massive change of the setting so quickly after it's release. They even admitted it.
Killing off major NPCs etc should be left to the DM and the PCs!!
Removing half the sorceror kings from the game etc just ruined it for me, and for many other players too. Plus I don't like the offical timeline, I much preffer Athas to be a msytery or let the DM and players make up the backstory.
Running Athas like a Clark Ashton Smith or Robert E Howard setting, in that it's incredibly ancient, deeply mysterious and baroque, is a hell of a lot more fun
Exactly. The whole "coming along and changing everything that was cool about the setting" was a gigantic mistake and poorly considered direction: designers and setting writers can not treat their settings like they would their home campaigns, because they are not. And then to make all those huge changes via "the GM's own special characters" was a huge slap-in-the-face.
It always seemed like the designers were more interested in telling a story than providing a setting. The former is fine, if that's what you're setting out to: so write a book, then. If your intention instead is to provide a sandbox for others to create their own stories, then the need to keep your mitts out is massively important, and the need to provide hooks and meaningful color is paramount.
Unfortunately, the designers the last time around failed to do that.
Running Athas like a Clark Ashton Smith or Robert E Howard setting, in that it's incredibly ancient, deeply mysterious and baroque, is a hell of a lot more fun
YES!
And I note, in counterpoint to the idea that "static" settings are boring, Howard's stories are dynamic, interesting, and incredible, and all take place within an otherwise almost entirely static setting. The "statis" of a given setting has nothing to do with keeping things interesting or not--that is an false modern meme about fantasy fiction in general, with its now well-worn and blase world-shaking, power-structure altering plotlines--but if the group itself wants to shake things up in the world, that should be up to the group.
In fact, keeping the setting "dynamic" left so much of the world un-detailed or described as the writers tried to keep things in the city-states and their setting-plots moving forward, instead of expanding on and making interesting material for what was already there at the edges for further exploration and adventure.
It always seemed like the designers were more interested in telling a story than providing a setting. The former is fine, if that's what you're setting out to: so write a book, then. If your intention instead is to provide a sandbox for others to create their own stories, then the need to keep your mitts out is massively important, and the need to provide hooks and meaningful color is paramount.Unfortunately, the designers the last time around failed to do that.
To be clear though, the moment Troy completed his participation in the original boxed set design, he ceased being a designer. TSR moved Troy out to the novels department, and in those days the novels department had zero coordination with the RPG line . . . even though the novels were being written for the exact same setting the RPG designers were writing for!
When Troy began writing the Prism Pentad, Troy DID intend for the series to be nothing but an example of what PCs could aspire to accomplish. The RPG designers, through out TSR, not just the Dark Sun group, tended to look upon novels as setting-shaping stories. FR was most messed up by how RPG designers and developers treated novels. Troy wrote his story, and the RPG developers took his story as canon.
Where fan expectations for novels come in to this is a tricky thing. But I believe, at the time, fans of TSR settings expected novels to be representative of development of a setting, so RPG developers had incentive to take novels into account whether the novel author intended it or not.
The Eberron setting took the learned disaster of FR novels (and other settings' novels) treatment of the setting and decreed that every novel for the setting is but an example of what heroes could accomplish, and has no effect upon the setting itself. What Troy (no longer a designer but as a novel author) intended all along for his Prism Pentad.
I knew about the spectacular lack of communication between the novel and design departments, but I hadn't heard that Mr. Denning wanted the PP to be an example instead of canon. Thanks for mentioning that.
I lay not a little of the blame with White Wolf for that particular turn of events in the 90's, given they were churning out splat books and novels chock full of metaplot like it was going out of style: gamers began to expect the fiction WAS the game world, so designers started using their products to tell THEIR stories, and new designers thought that was how it had to be done, despite the abundant spectacular failures and bad feelings it created.
It may have started with TSR's edition change from 1st to 2nd using tied-in fiction to explain everything (the Realms in particular, with the "Time of Troubles"), but I'd need to look at the timeline of various game releases by company to really track down some of the critical mass points of the shift towards it.
Took years for the market to correct itself and realize: "If I want to tell a story, I should write a novel, not write a novel and disguise it as a game (supplement(s))". Which it finally did, including White Wolf.
(Though I still find it amusing that WW claimed to make "story-telling" games and yet pushed metaplot, thus doing exactly the opposite of creating a story-telling environment for players--well, unless you consider them telling you the story to be a "story-telling game".
I still have friends who quote all this empty history about Vampire, etc., know all these characters and plot events and such, like it was a novel they read...I roll my eyes. But I never hear about games they played. Sad commentary.)
I knew about the spectacular lack of communication between the novel and design departments, but I hadn't heard that Mr. Denning wanted the PP to be an example instead of canon. Thanks for mentioning that.
Well, he did so in a personal interview I was able to get from him after a seminar at Gencon. He spent a full hour with Paul Liss and me, answering every question we could come up with. I'll never forget the honor.
The interview itself was many years after his participation in Dark Sun, so maybe his memory was colored by time or wishful thinking . . . who know. I'll take his work though.
That said, the original design intention, which included Troy when he was a designer, was that the original designers never wanted the setting to stay frozen as was presented in the original boxed set. They WANTED and expected PCs to feel like they could change things, change things in big ways.
The design goal of progress in the setting gave us the tension between intending the setting to progress through PC efforts, and novels showing just how far heroes can changes things ended up. As we see how things worked out, the tension clearly favored the novel's outcomes over letting PCs accomplish the change.
*shrug*
Seems 4e be promising to be different, what with a new Dark Sun editor on WotC staff, plus settings only receiving support for a single year. There is hardly a way for a novel to leave an impact on a setting that will be in and out in under a year.
That said, the original design intention, which included Troy when he was a designer, was that the original designers never wanted the setting to stay frozen as was presented in the original boxed set. They WANTED and expected PCs to feel like they could change things, change things in big ways.
That's how it should be: left up to the play group as to what gets changed and how and how much (and even IF things change, at least on a big scale).
Aye, splatbooks etc should just add useful material, not force things, and novels add to the romance (old useage) of the setting
Dune Trader was excellent, I really like that splatbook.
I never really played in darksun but I loved the prism pentadad series. I'm looking forward to being able to play in darksun. If the character I run gets to free Tyr cool beans. I'll wait and see what the book looks like. My own prefrence would be to do a fast forward of the timeline rather than a reset, but then I also liked the changes to FR as well.
I've just compaired 4e Forgotten Realms to 4e Eberron, and the data density is lacking for Eberron, it's shockingly obvious. The font is big, the graphics layout trendy and space-wasting, many things explained in 3e Eberron are now glossed over or absent...I'm afraid for Dark Sun!
Troy Denning said something similar when he made a brief appearance on the listserver many years ago. He was sort of tentative to be there, fearing player wrath (though everyone was, in fact, very kind and happy to exchange e-mails with him).
I suspect this is just one of those things that happened. The developer lead changes hands, novels are written as an exercise in how PCs can be the ultimate heroes, and then the world ends up transmuting. It just kind of happened. There is both good in that (the stories were interesting, the examples for DMs/PCs were very useful for heroic campaigns, the setting information released often followed novels and thus you walked through the campaign in a progression) and bad (the later supplements had little to offer to players and DMs, the setting felt 'done', the story was changing what drew many to the setting).
I suspect we will still see the original concept with Kalak either dying (giving the PCs a base and introducing some hope into a bleak world) or at least challenged (allowing PCs some freedom in Tyr as rebels). I think that element of help is important.
You know what would have been a good fix for that Prism Pentad metaplot problem; make modules based on the books - just like they did with 2nd Ed. Dragonlance. Rikus and Co. were an example group of characters, now make your own characters and take out the Immortal Tyrant Kalak!
The actual Freedom module only added to the problem of meta-plotting the world, your characters get to sit around, being beat upon, ban by the plot from escape while the characters from the novel get all the glory and exp. In the Road to Urik, the PCs again take a backseat to the characters from the novel, after that - well nothing about the novels shows up in any of the RPG supliments again. I think you can see the direction I'm going here?
There is both good in that (the stories were interesting, the examples for DMs/PCs were very useful for heroic campaigns, the setting information released often followed novels and thus you walked through the campaign in a progression) and bad (the later supplements had little to offer to players and DMs, the setting felt 'done', the story was changing what drew many to the setting).
I thought there were good points to the PP, but I'm not a fan of it at all. Mostly, as I recall, I found the ending to be anti-climactic and wholly, horridly unrealistic. It changed the entire setting in something like a page of text, killing the Dragon and destroying immortal sorcerer-kings like they were all 1st level characters.
Imagine if the end of Star Wars were exactly like this: {Luke takes off in X-wing, Death Star appears} "Luke, shoot the Death Star!" "OK!" *pew-pew-lasers* {explosion} "Yay! The Empire is defeated!" and how you'd feel about it? That's what I was like with the ending of the PP.
It was complete let-down. No epic battle of sorcery, psionics, and cunning at all. Very pat and simplistic. Boring. I very strongly recall my intense disappointment. If it was a movie, I would have asked, "Did you blow your entire special effects budget already or what?"
But, for some reason, a lot of the TSR novels of that time did that. I recall one book where the first 3/4ths or so was great: deep characterization, interesting plot threads, unforseen twists-and-turns building towards...a hackneyed, banal dungeon-crawl that had so little to do with the first part of the book you could see the writer stretching to make it loook like it did, but not too hard because you could tell even they realized how pointless it was. That, or someone completely different had written that part and basically tossed out everything prior to do something weirdly trope-tastic, predicatably "shocking", and unsatisfying, because there was a distinct change in the tone of the writing, from fresh and excited, to plodding and forced.
Aaaaaaanyways...
As I recall, our DM actually ran the "Road to Urik" module the way you mention: as though our characters were the most important part of the events (with the Mary Sue metaplot NPCs were off wherever doing something pointless and unimportant). Ended up winning the battle, too, and reaped the glory of it for a little while.