I myself had DMed a campaign that started with 12 players, with the intent of playing though all the published materials. I know it sounds large but we had one interesting rule in this campaign. If your character died he was out of the campaign and you would then join the secondary Dark Sun campaign that my friend was started running along side this one. My campaign followed the official story as best as it could with meddling PC's involved and his campaign was our 1st go at us weaving our own Dark Sun tales (and gave each of us the chance to be Dark Sun PC's)
Anyway my campaign ended with just 5 Pc's left, 4 humans and a half-giant out of a group that had almost every single race and class represented. The players had managed to succeed and fail many times including but not limited to the following:
-failed to stop the order and the Psionatrix before all the thri-kreen went permantly insane (oddly though saving the table lands from the Thor-kreen empire)
-defeated the Githyanki
-saved Tyr numerous times
-accedently got Fulcruum possessed by Kalidnay who returned to his old city as a 24th level dragon and rebuilt it
- saved Korgunard (sp?) from the order, and was informed by Korgunard of the folly of the Hero's of Tyr's plans to slay the dragon and end the levy,
-watched the Sorcerer kings destroy Rajaat once and for all when the PC's stole the dark lens from Tithian after Rajaats release only to have it taken from them by Borys of Tyr whose earlier death was just that of a clone he sent to test might of the Heroes of Tyr
-Helped the Sorcerer Kings kill Rajaat once and for all by running interference while the sorcerer kings cast a mighty spell through the Dark Lens destroying both it and Rajaat
-watched the sorcerer kings kill all the heroes of tyr next aside from Sadira who was given the chance to be the sorcerer queen of Tyr to rule as she saw fit which. She accepted out of fear and because the dragon no longer needed a levy
- Were introduced to Orinos by Korgunard after their return and where promptly debriefed about what had been happening in the tyr region and to his old master, and then proceeded to scout out New Guistenel(sp?) for him.
I had planned to add the remains of rajaat to whatever material components where needed for Dregoth to become a god, but never made it that far. I had also planned on saying that a side effect of either Rajaats death, or Dregoths attempt to become a god was going to free Daskinor from his madness. I wasn’t sure how at the time because I was going to have to wait until I got a chance to read DA.
So tell me what tales you wove under the dark sun at this time :D
The City By The Silt Sea set told us that the Outer Planes were accessible from Athas, and that was the springboard for my last big campaign.
One player was a LE half-elf Sensei from Will and the Way, another was a Half-Giant Water Cleric, and another was a halfling barbarian.
Details are a bit fuzzy, but they had to go retrieve an artifact from Guistenal where a group of 1st generation Dray were planning a rebellion against Dregoth and his 2nd gen Dray. The PCs helped them, and a huge revolution was underway.
Dregoth summoned reinforcements from Baator to help out, and the sensei ended up being sucked into the Planar Gate to the Nine Hells, where he was dropped into the middle of the Blood War. The other PCs managed to escape Guistenal with their lives (barely), and we continued on with a Planescape Blood War campaign with the half-giant and halfling player making new Planescape characters.
The campaign was left hanging with the half-elf still embroiled in the Blood War. I was going to return him to Athas 50-100 years later and introduce my own changes. Alas, Dark Sun was cancelled, and new Rifts books came out, and we focused on that instead.
I always wanted to finish that Dark Sun/Blood War game...
I barely remember our games or the PCs involved. I thnk the PCs were basically raiders who preyed on trade routes between Tyr and Urik.
The highlights of it included the return of Taraskir and Irikos (unrelated), Dregoth capturing the remaining SKs and stripping them of their living vortices, the PCs rescuing said sorcerer monarchs, Nibenay advancing to the next stage of dragonhood, the forces of the Dread King capturing Semouke, the sacking of the Raam by the dray and later “liberated” by Irikos, Andropinis escaping the Black, my players taking on the roles of the remaining SKs and ending the menace of Dregoth.
There was much more but those were the major events.
now, my players have all returned...and though their old characters are pretty much retired...they've been wanting to return again to the lands beneath the crimson sun...
it's primarily how i found this online community, and why i began to draw up the maps....
Could you imagine a cadre of half giant or mul gladiators with mithril arms and armor, metal tipped arrows. That would be very unbalancing.
My biggest fear was an army of Half-giants and Muls getting there hands on katanas which were by far the nastiest 2nd edition weapon.......
That being said these are incredibly interesting to read, anybody else got any more they wish to share?
they fought several wars that tipped the balance of elements on athas, explored the multiverse a bit and settled in far-reaches of Athas beyond the Tablelands...
I made the mistake of bringing the PC to Sigil for a time. If I were to do over again, I wouldn't have done that.
The only other time they left Athas was to escort Semouke into the Elemental Plane of Earth in order to barter an alliance between an elemental lord and Nibenay.
My biggest fear was an army of Half-giants and Muls getting there hands on katanas which were by far the nastiest 2nd edition weapon.......
I always thought the nastiest weapon in 2e was the forearm sword thing from SJ. I can't remember the exact name, but I do remember it doing piercing damage and then slashing damage all in one hit because of the way it was designed.
Anyways...
I got the first Dark Sun boxed set months after it was released as a birthday present from a friend. At that time I was showing some interest in the campaign setting and my friend who gave me the gift had gotten it for himself and then decided he didn't like it all that much when it came to running it and thought I would have a better time with it. Once I read it I was hooked and started hoarding up everything I could find at the time for the setting despite protests from the current DM I had at the time that was complaining about the psionics system.
Eventually I ran my own game with a totally different group, though the friend that gave me the first box set as a gift was in the group as well at the time. In that campaign, in my ignorance, I killed off Hammanu and replaced him with a homebrew NPC. Once that campaign ended and I had time to research some things I realized how folly that was and decided to hit the reset button and start over on my Dark Sun world.
After that I really didn't run Dark Sun again until I moved from Texas back to Indiana. Had a few campaigns going that would last a few months then die. I have yet to actually run anything for longer than 6 months for whatever reasons. Of those campaigns the one I enjoyed the most was the two players playing Muls and I had worked into the story later that they were father and son and didn't really realize it. Later they were able to rescue their dad and grandfather respectively, which was a dwarf, and met their mother and grandmother respectively which was a human female druid I think that was working towards becoming a SotL. The dwarf ended up standing down eventually and the guy playing the older mul was able to take over as king of the dwarven town I had created that lies between Draj and the Bandit States. They ended up becoming allies with a band of good-aligned yuan-ti that had disbanded from the yuan-ti empire which I put on the other side of the Silt Sea at the time and had an established civilization near their dwarven town. I think I ended up having Nibenay actually being the leader of the yuan-ti empire or at least behind it's creation in some way too.
Haven't really ran a decent Dark Sun game after that, and I'm hoping to get a system setup soon and get a long-term game going before the year is out, but we'll see what happens.
At that time I had 8 players. We played for two years straight and then switched to another campaign from one of the players.
When the 2nd edition came out we started up again and we once again played for a few years until 1995.
My fav character was a Mul named Mike. He was very tough and the player did an excellent job of character balance so Mike had offense and defense.
Mike ended up assassinating a bar owner and taking over the business! Even though I threw numerous obstacles in his way, he always managed to defeat his foes.
We then started up another campaign just four years ago and started getting into some epic adventuring involving the dragon kings. The looks of fear on their faces when fighting Abalach Re were priceless! She killed two of them (they were around 15th level) and chased off the rest. For a party not used to loosing, they took it hard.
My favorite character during the last DS campaign was a 1/2 giant named Chuck. Chuck was very susceptible to psionic intrusion. His player would call him 'Chuck's Chat room'.
Chuck was finally turned to stone by a Beholder and we all felt a little sad.
We completed several of the canned modules (Forest Maker, Marauders of Nibenay, Blackspine Mountains, etc.) and I sprinkled in many of my own, mainly to set up the canned ones.
They also managed to release the ex deities of this world. I run an apocalyptic Greyhawk world where Vecna won and sealed the gods away. Well, they released them. The gods have dispersed about Athas and are mostly up to no good. :D
We lost too many players to run a DS campaign and I have been on hiatus for over a year.
I am looking forward to February as I have heard we shall be able to once again walk on the burning sands of Athas.
...My fav character was a Mul named Mike...
...My favorite character during the last DS campaign was a 1/2 giant named Chuck...
Mike and Chuck?
And I thought I had it bad with players naming their characters things like Osric Chiang-Kai-Shek, Kiryakov Kalashnikov, Faro-ut (far out, man!), Shroom and Melons Stoatpamhplet... :D
Mike and Chuck?
And I thought I had it bad with players naming their characters things like Osric Chiang-Kai-Shek, Kiryakov Kalashnikov, Faro-ut (far out, man!), Shroom and Melons Stoatpamhplet... :D
We've had classic like Svedchek, Bob, Boris, and The before. The had an intelligence of 3 and it was the only word he knew.
To read the Prism Pentad at this time and see how it changed the setting irrevocably was shocking. SKs were dragons?! In many ways the changes were amazing and saddening at the same time.
I played a low-charisma (suits me) Dwarven Fighter/Water Cleric/Psioicist surnamed Nightmareslayer or Nightmarebollocks to those who knew him. This one man army was able to get out of most situations alive and as the levels gathered he started causing more and more trouble til he encountered the gate of doom and tried to destroy all thirteen obsidian golems (which under 2nd Ed rules was surprisingly easy for him to do). Mr Borys Sir didn't like that and the character had to flee to the planes where he contented himself with merely triggering interplanar wars.
Anyhow a decade later I've started running my own DS campaign. Over Christmas I enjoyed it immensely as I plonked the PCs right in the middle of Raam just as the punters were beginning to realise Abalach-Re was dead and unholy riots ensued. Funny they didn't pick up on any of the clues beforehand but then none of us have played it in a while.
I'm working now on the campaign's to-be central setting, a location in the mountains north of Raam, the Kreegill hills I think Hamanu once called them, they're on all the maps. I wondered how difficult it would be for an essentially anti-SK small society to exist in those mountains for several centuries. I've had a few ideas like a Cappadoccia-style society masked by psionics like the Last See, plus a couple of unholy 'alliances' with a Krag and a Magma Lord help keep the curious out. The camp exists as it rests on an elemental vortex (water) created by an epic level cleric. Does this trigger any ideas with anyone? Anyone written about this region or something similar? What you think about epic levels clerics creating gates between Athas and their patron elemental plane? I have ideas on how to limit this but others are welcome. Happy new year by the way.
Some of my players are very pragmatic.
I forgot to mention I was also running a Spelljammer campaign before DS. I really liked SJ but someof my players were not as enthused. They went through ships too often. Fighting Liches in the Phlo with fire spells was something they may have considered over the top. :D
Just when they got used to the scenario I discovered DS and the rest is history.
I never liked most of the official adventures apart from City by the Silt Sea and the one with the Psionatrix (sp?), couldn't bring myself to like the flip book style. I expanded CbtSS and we took almost half a year of playing to run through that by 1998ish. Never seen a group of players more panicked than at the end of that adventure... :D
I was gutted that they stopped DS, but then it drove me nuts with the amount of inconsistency that was coming up within new supplements. I sort of stuck to the original box set, the Dragon Kings hardback, Traders, Tyr, Windriders, the Ivory Triangle and our own blend of psionics for a long time.
We spent lots of time wandering the Tablelands, I banned them from reading the Pentad and slowly uncovered the history of the SKs and halflings. Watching their jaws drop when realisation struck when they found out that the SKs and Champions were one and the same, that sort of thing.
Some highlights that I remember the PCs having lots of fun...
-lots of psionic combat (keeping it close to the Pentad descriptions)
-sailing on the silt sea (using a ship floating orb)
-saving Alturak
-finding the ruins of Ur Draxa
-destroying the Gate in Guistenal
-encountering forest halfings and life-shaped items
-their first mad max style introduction to DS, while defending a caravan
-being lost in the Gray
Well, some of those were more fun for me than them!
We also had Captain Poopy Pants, Booger and Steve.
My NPCs, of course, stuck with the campaign but the players chose their own names. Sometimes, if I named an NPC something they didn't want to pronounce, they would rename him. This occasionally resulted in said NPC attacking the party.
Once, this resulted in a TPK!
'Bob' is a classic Darksun name!
We also had Captain Poopy Pants, Booger and Steve.
My NPCs, of course, stuck with the campaign but the players chose their own names. Sometimes, if I named an NPC something they didn't want to pronounce, they would rename him. This occasionally resulted in said NPC attacking the party.
Once, this resulted in a TPK!
When running the old Ravenloft adventure Feast of Goblyns my players thought that the sinister Daclaud Heinfroth had a silly name. So they renamed him Darkcloud Beerfroth instead.
Still, I have to say that Captain Poopy Pants is a pretty hard one to beat... :D
Also, a the ghost of seer named Londar became Lawn Dart. I named an elf in my DS game (the 1st real villan) Dukk and made his tribe the Darkwing tribe. Since niether ducks nor the cartoon exist in athas its ridiculous to us, yet believable in the context of the setting.
I was used to gaming in more conventional worlds like Dragonlance and FR, and that's what kept me from Dark Sun for a year. Then I went out and bought the box (I bought every boxed set I could lay my hands on to mine for other ideas), read the Prism Pentad, and then went and soaked up the Psionics Handbook, because now I really wanted to play Dark Sun.
It remains my campaign setting of choice to this day.