Dark Sun General

People only talk about what they hate

Actually long flowing robes and scarves are pretty much what is traditionally worn on deserts. It's not like on tropical heat where you want to wear relatively little so more heat will radiate off you, you want to keep your sweat IN and close to your skin because otherwise it'd evaporate too fast to be any good. That's where stereotypical middle eastern clothes come from.

He's being sarcastic.

Anyways, I've got a 2e Dark Sun game going, playing a Half Giant fighter.

I'm 7th level now, and NG(ignoring the stupid Half Giant alignment junk).

What should I do with my army once I get it? How should I make the world a better place?

>tfw the people behind Baldur's Gate and Planescape: Torment will never make a phenomenal Dark Sun game running off the Infinity Engine with an incredible plot that theives off of moral grey

I'm gonna kill myself.

I am thinking of running it a convention. So people have an alternative to Adventurer's League

Sad thing is, there already was a really good Dark Sun game they can ape from. Just flesh things out, add some actual characters, and moral ambiguity in the dilemmas, and you're basically there.

Which one?

I would kill for a rpg with meaningful interactions and non-binary moral choices.
I went through Alpha Protocol despite the bugs, but it has been six years already.

CONAN dudeee

Not him, but it was this weird ass dos game. Good for its time, which means I found it literally unpalatable.

my dogteru

No wonder, floppy disks are mostly plastic and metal.

So I'm running a D&D game now where a party of PC's from a Dark Sun game I ran last year are the villains. The current game is in a fairly generic fantasy setting.

How do I make it distinctive that the villains are 'foreign'? So far they have only met one of the 6 villains, and I just paraphrased Legate Lanius quotes for his dialog.

Range.
Things that harm anyone on physical contact.

Don't even try. You'll just get killed.

BROM in the house, BITChES!!1!

Dress funny, weird accents, bizzare mannerisms/cultural practices. Daek sun guys would probably be uncomfortable in cool weather and have strange contempt for arcane magic. There's also the commonality of psionics and the elemental worship

What would be cool moral dilemmas for a dark sun video game ?

Just become a mob boss ruling a city/region.
Idealism will get you killed, and this way you still improve the life conditions of people under your rule by offering stability, security, and commercial opportunities.

Aren't Dark Sun commoners supposed to be vastly superior to the adventurers of the other settings due to thousands of years of natural selection in the harshest place in the planes ?

Fetish gear, foreign apparence, no knowledge of the social conventions of this world, making for ankward moments when gestures are misinterpreted/not responded to ; like how the massai spit ou your face to show their love, since water is very precious (and water coming from your own body doubly so), but it has led to a few misunderstandings.

Clothes imply culture, user. Once you got clothes, some wise guy is going to come up with stuff like irrigation, writing and architecture, and before you know it's not Dark Sun anymore.

Man, being a russian I would dig the snow desert aesthetic way more than the whole sand desert thing...

2nd Edition Kreen player reporting in. Long abdomens are best abdomens.

The design for Dark Sun was done retroactively. Brom would send in art, and they'd create stuff in the setting based on it.

That's the only type of Thri-kreen. The 3rd edition+ ones look so stupid its best to forget they exist.

>Why is everyone wearing fetish gear?

Fans of Oh! Great?

Everyone on Athas is tougher than nails and don't need protection from the elements. That is pretty much the whole IC explanation.

Not only that Dark Sun is meant to be apocalyptic with 'civilization' is just a handful of city-states ruled by tyrant kings and powered by the back-breaking labor of slaves.

Ideas on how to adjust the 4e version to a cold desert Dark Sun?

You seem confused. Dark Sun has culture and civilisation. The reason it's such a post-apocalyptic shithole is that most land has been made magically infertile and nothing will grow there, and the seas and oceans have been magically replaced with sand and dust.

>Good for its time
The same is true for Baldur's Gate user.

The game in question is Dark Sun: Shattered Lands. Not bad at all with a bunch of good ideas and plenty of unusual D&D monsters.
It got a sequel too, Wake of the Ravager, but it was so buggy I'd stay away from it. Unless you are an hardcore fan.

I've been passively trying to make this work for years.

There's an open source Infinity Engine called GemRB, but it doesn't have a user friendly toolkit and you'd have to create all the graphics and animations because there's no isometric dark sun library.

As for story and dialogue scripting, it wouldn't be hard at all to polish and build on the two TSR Dark Sun games.

Let's do a Kickstarter

Wake of the Ravager just got released on GOG. It's less buggy, just save frequently.

Dark Sun is very interesting to me but I never played an edition when it was an officially supported setting. What's a good source for getting Dark Sun's feel? What are some sample campaign hooks for it that you have had fun with?

It's just confusing because in the real world, desert settings mean you put clothes on. Jungles are where you go half naked due to humidity. At the very least Athasians should wear shoes since there's jagged rocks and scorching sand everywhere.

>Let's do a Kickstarter

Maybe Athasians have much tougher skin.

Isn't that a bit hand-wavey?

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D vitamin is the source of psyonics powers.

I think it's ok to just go with aesthetics regarding the general tone and level of realism in D&D games.

>the joke
>the iss
>the average flight height of a commercial airliner
>the eiffel tower
>a mature white oak tree
>the average scandinavian male
>your head

It definitely is. Dark Sun is crazy pulp postapocalypse, people running around in thongs is perfectly in tone for the setting

So a am planning on running a veiled alliance campaign set in Nibaney with a heavy emphasis on intrigue and espionage with the PC's fighting the cities Templars, any tips?

Put some shoes on though, seriously.

I wonder if there's a clothes check when you enter athas? Like "sorry sir/madam, you're gonna have to lose those pants to adventure here"

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I'm looking for more specific details to include. Phrases, etc. They aren't really sit-down-and-talk political villains, their last encounter opened up with the Half-Giant monk threatening to break all of their fingers before he killed them unless they surrendered

he caused a TPK.

This reminds me of a line a that the planescape book said about Athasian inhabitant in that they are amazingly adaptable and flexible that they can do things with leather and wood that the rest of the multiverse requires metal for.
With metal they are virtually unstoppable.

Puts a smirk on my face when my friends start talking about other settings.

>Baldur's Gate
No, that was crap even compared to the other games on the same engine.

No-one enters, no-one leaves. Athas is cut off from the rest of the multiverse, ravenloft style, although it doesn't go around kidnapping people from other places.

Isn't it able to be enter in 4e but its just stupid hard to get in/out

>Remember kids, if someone, somewhere might find it sexy, it's fetish bait, magical realm and we don't want it in our game about playing strong knights and barbarians going on adventures and getting all sweaty, thrusting weapons into... Oh dear.

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That is no longer a dog. Stop doing this to awesome animals, you're just making them useless.

I don't know what it's like in 4e sadly.
They're pets, they're supposed to be useless. They exist for no purpose other than to sit around and eat food.

Leather bikinis and banana hammocks for everyone. What, are you some kind of wimp?

To distinguish it from Al-Qadim.

Hmm, i's been a lnog time since I've read about the setting, so I don't remember any Athas colloquialism, but you can always use insults like milkskin, waterbag, clothes hamper, and so on.
Call any short human a mul, halflings flesh eaters, elves foot draggers, wizards defilers...

Look at the old Brom paintings, then look at these. Disgusting. Fuck "dynamic action." Fuck digital art.

It really is a shame nobody does traditional artworks anymore. Although I don't want to demonize digital art. It's simply less quality for a cheaper price and less time. Nevertheless I hate some trends. Why is it that every archer has to do the slide pose or be jumping and at melee range while shooting?

I'll be honest, I really can't see a difference.

It can look good if you've already got a thick style with traditional methods. Like Bilal or Gimenez.

While I'm at it, Caza's works have a pretty strong Dark Sun vibe. Nocturnes and Arkani in particular.

Dark Sun Dwarves are 6' tall on average, so that 'mul' insult doesn't work.

Bullshit mate. The tallest a dwarf can be is 4.8 ft

You know, I understand that having proper half-giants in 4e isn't really possible, but replacing them with goliaths is such a fucking cop-out.

No, mul, dwarf-human halfbreeds are 6ft. Sorta like how ligers are larger than lions and tigers
Dwarves are still short.

Yes, and in real life Conan the barbarian would wear armour. Fiction and pictorial depictions of fictional things are often not realistic. This shouldn't be confusing.

Any oldschool Dark Sun fans here?

Brom IS Dark Sun art, and some of the new stuff is "ok", but will never match the feeling.

Dumping inspirational weapons and armour: No metal edition

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Huh. didnt mean to hit spoiler

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I loved playing Dark Sun back in 2E.

Killing people to drink their blood. Jesus. The things you do to get to fourth level.

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That what you get for leaving the pockets of civilization

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it's all about dat abdomen

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I wasn't planning on jacking off to thri-kreen today, but here we are.

The difference has nothing to do with being digital. And plenty still do traditional works.

The thing is, those paintings by Brom are covers. You didn't get interior artwork like that. All the interior art of the original Dark Sun books are black and white drawings. That's what you should be comparing that artwork to.
Digital painting and better printing tech means we now get full colour paintings instead of black and white drawings. And if those digital paintings don't look as good as Brom covers, well of course they don't. Brom's art costs more. And it should. But let's be realistic here, doing interior illustrations for rpgs is not a profitable line of work. WOTC gets the art that it pays for. If modern D&D art isn't up to your high standards, it's got nothing to do with it being digital, it has everything to do with WOTC not being willing to pay enough to allow the artists to do better without starving to death.

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it is good and proper to jerk off to thri-kreens

I wish WotC would make official Fate hacks for their settings because all D&D's rukesets are bad.

There's a FAE splat called Aether Sea that is very, very obviously meant to be Spelljammer, and could be made identical (besides Vancian casting) with minimal effort Currently in the process of doing just that, actually. For Dark Sun, just Google it. It doesn't look like anyone's made an actual PDF for it, but there's a bunch of guides people have written.

Neither of those are official obviously, but on the other hand they're real.

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Spelljammer, Dark Sun and Ravenloft are the top 3 in my opinion.

I'm not too familiar with Savage Worlds but I was wondering whether that would be great for Dark Sun. Both the setting and system tries to have that pulpy action feel.

Your current PC is stuck on Athas.

What does he/she turn into?

It's face reminds me of Nigel Thorneberry