Run by strict world rules? nope. It is YOUR game world. If you want to then do so. If there is something you don't like then change it. It is your world afterall.
For story arcs I have done-
Run many of the pregenerated adventures. Did a lot of exploring of Celik and the area including making the ruins of Celik very UnderMtish. Since then an undead invasion has occured there and destroyed most of it (again).
Dealt with templars sevral times including making a dwarven templar into a banshee whom chased the group endlessly which was fun at first but got old after a while.
Had a forgotten Dragon-King rise. PCs were dragged into it when 1/2 the party were taken to be slaves.
Some Gladiatorial stuff.
I like running dune traders, templars and escaped slaves or tribesmen.
I'm looking to run a new DS campaign around May, will probably incoporate both athas.org and Dragon/Dungeon material, depending on how much I like the latter.
I will probably start soome years before Kalak's death and have something like Shattered Lands going on if someone plays a real Charismatic character with Leadership, otherwise I might start with Freedom or something.
I plan on having the PCs change the world though, Rikus, SAdira, et al will probably not even exist, and if they do, they will be mostly background and will probably come into play once the PCs take out Kalak, if they ever take out Kalak.
Now that I have Secret of the Deadlands and Dregoth Ascending I will be incoporating some of that into my campaign as well.
Originally posted by NytCrawlr
Now that I have Secret of the Deadlands and Dregoth Ascending I will be incoporating some of that into my campaign as well.
WHERE DID YOU GET THOSE!?!?! And more importantly, how do I get mine?
1- PCs where wanderer which all had a good reason to leave their original home. I asked them all to create something that would push them to leave their home in a hurry. They all gathered in the city of Balic, they were at the Common Place, eating and a crier sollicited peoples for some expedition and adventure, they were interested. All their Background are store on my web site. Although, everything is in french. There is maps of all their travel before the campaign start, and from where they are (it's the adnd darksun map).
There was a human preserver, dwarven fire cleric, human psion, human rogue / psion, elf ranger and halfling ranger.
2- PCs started as prisonners or slaves at Fort Inix, they were to be sold in a auctions (which happened). They were bought by a dwarven merchant in order to find and kill a rival, with the help of one of is man. All the PCs have a background of how they got captured and sold for this auction. So they all have a tooth again a different group and these different group are, of course, looking for them. Right now, they just managed to get out of the desert, they were lost, they got snatched by the Werrick stalker and made slave again, they escaped and survived in the desert until Nibenay. They used rock to defend themselves, that was very pathetic
There is a half-elf psion/preserver/earth cleric, half-elf psion/rogue, mul gladiator and a elf druid.
Another couple of campaign ideas I've had recently were a kreen invasion campaign, where the PC's were thrust into the war. The second idea was the idea presented in a Dragon/Dungeon spread a few issues back, involving a Gith invasion from the Astral Plane. This could easily be tied in with the Black Spine Dark Sun module (one of my favorites).
One of my favorites had 3 clones awakened after the original was killed, ALL believing they were the rightfull king of Tyr. I was playing a templar and was given spells by one of the clones, and the assignment of tracking down and helping to defeat the others.
Another of my favorite storylines involved a player who was unfamiliar with the Dark Sun world. He found a magic item that lead him on a search for another ETC until he had 7 items altogether which produced a magical instructor "The First Sorcerer" (think recording, like Tom Riddle in HP and Chamber of Secrets) He had all of the info stored about how to become a "higher magical being", like building a beautiful tower and surrounding it with LIFE and studying texts that had never known the touch of a defiler... The DM dropped plaenty of clues along the way that something wasn't right, but the player was so into "ascending" that he took Rajaat's word over the cautioning of his troup (We never came right out and spoiled it, what's the fun in that?) And then turned into a mad ravaging dragon.
Still haven't decided if Borys is real or not, though... ;)
All the players had a choice of Draxan or Slave and had their race and class choices limited accordingly. 4 chars are from one house, the templar is from another (rival) house, and the other 2 from 2 other houses. They have walked into a conspiracy that may lead them to a possible escape route from the valley.
Currently I have them with a slave gathering party trying to chase down some outlanders who ambushed them.
btw does anyone have any idea wtf the Draxan fleet is docked?
Also how did the heros from the PP get into and out of the valley, it never mentions it in the books!
Major pain in the arse if one is planning on destroying the only civilisation in the area and is vaguely concerned with the PC's surviving.
Originally posted by felixmeister
Also how did the heros from the PP get into and out of the valley, it never mentions it in the books!
Major pain in the arse if one is planning on destroying the only civilisation in the area and is vaguely concerned with the PC's surviving.
I believe the PP heroes entered Ur Draxa the same way Tithian did, using the obsidian portals in the silt sea. As I remember it the Dragon used to use these to transport people/goods into and out of the Valley of Dust and Fire. That's about as much as I can recall without driving home and opening my books.
I believe the PP heroes entered Ur Draxa the same way Tithian did, using the obsidian portals in the silt sea. As I remember it the Dragon used to use these to transport people/goods into and out of the Valley of Dust and Fire.
megamania
Yup. As I recall, they were guarded by dozens of Obsideon Golems which Rikus had a great timing pushing off the bridgeways and racing on. All I could think of was the XP he gained for so a task. Now in 3e that would be different
Are you guys talking about the causeway?
Which is the "bridge" between the Valley and Ur-Draxa itself crossing the lake of fire not a method of entry or exit through the great dust storm.
Originally posted by Deceitfulelf
I'm about to start a new Dark Sun Campaign set after the Prism Pentad and I was wondering what kind campaigns are currently being run. What time period does everyone play in and how much of the official canon do you adhere to in your campaign? Just looking for some ideas to beg, borrow or steal :D
Wow, answering this post takes me back...
Of course, I DM'ed the whole line of adventures from Freedom to Dragon's Crown (IMO probably the best gaming experience I've ever had), from which, with 3 players with character trees of 4 PC's each, only the human psionicist, human dune trader, and human necromancer survived, although the latter was possessed by an undead demon and went stark raving insane.
I later brought these characters back and edited Forest Maker so that it took place 75 years in the future, when the PC's had advanced to 22nd lvl dragon, 26th lvl trader, and 25th lvl psionicist, with a newcomer 21st lvl rain elemental who used a modified version of Pak's split-personality trick to get 128 prionic attacks per round. That adventure was also tied in to a larger world-hopping campaign that was centered around Mage: the Ascension (the PCs in DS were the characters in a roleplaying game played by the Mages in the "real world", but some of the Mage's got a nasty Paradox backlash and got sucked onto Athas). Using sphere magic on Athas: that was absolutely the ape's banana's.
The last 2e campaign I ran started with 4 gladiator PCs and one PC as the Templar slavemaster in Balic. The 2nd adventure we ran took place when Andropinis was imprisoned in the Black, and I decided that he had been using powerful magic like a dam to keep the silt sea at bay. WIth him out of the way, the barriers collapsed, and the city was flooded to rooftop lvl with silt, enabling the PCs to escape during the ensuing chaos on board a skimmer commandeered by the Templar PC, who in turn was kidnapped by the Gladiators. ALthough it was never finished, the endgame was to have the templar travel into the Cerulean Storm and find a way to liberate his King.
I started a 3e DS game as an all-halfling campaign, centered around the village of Thamasku on the Jagged Cliffsabout 15 years after the Prism Pentad. The PCs started out at 11th lvl, and were prominent players in rhul-thaun society (one LE halfling fighter 11 was the captain of the city guard, who took the Leadership feat, and then had all his cohorts and minions be fighters who took the Leadership feat, all of whose cohorts and minions too the Leadership feat...; a TN halfling ranger 6/druid 5 who was a lead explorer and cartographer of the swamps at the base of the cliffs; a CE halfling brute 5/ magama cleric 6 who had been abandoned as an infant in the swamp and raised by Reggelids as semi-feral; and a halfling NE rogue 5/psywar 6 who ran secret assassination missions for the lifeshapers). The campaign centered around a high lvl dray defiler who had been sent by Dregoth to steal a specific piece of high-technology from the lifeshapers called the Lifeseed, except for the fact that a splinter faction of Psionicist from the Order from 700 years in the future whose job it was to explore the Timestream had other plans...
IMHO, if you really want to capture the "feel" of a Dark Sun campaign the way I invision it, just make sure you design your story around three simple rules:
1) Most PC's will die. Inform the players ahead of time of this fact, and make sure they've all got full character trees. Life on Athas is brutally harsh; never have a casualty rate lower than %50, and make sure it's the PCs who *aren't* powergamers who get killed first.
2) Good guys finish last, or dead, or both. Agis ends up betrayed by his childhood friend at the bottom of the Silt Sea. Korgunard is eaten as an avangion sandwich with vegemite by a feral halfling psionicist. Always reward PCs for stabbing each other in the back, participating in the slave trade, or eating each other for lunch, and make sure that do gooders' life is difficult-to-nearly-impossible.
3) Athas is a moral wasteland. This is a corollary of the first two rules. Make sure no good deed goes unpunished. PCs who want to do things like join the veiled alliance or free slaves should always face a steep uphill battle, while evil PCs should profit without consequences (except of course, for non-min/maxed evil PCs; see Rule 1). Even victories for Good should result in a net gain of zero: you free the slaves of Tyr, and then find out you're running a welfare state, and the Templars are still in control; you kill an evil monster and the even bigger evil monster that it was controlling becomes unleashed; you start a druid grove to replenish Athas, but your fololowers become CN eco-terrorists who destroy every man-made object within 100 miles, etc...
Oh yeah, and have fun!
1) Most PC's will die.
2) Good guys finish last, or dead, or both.
3) Athas is a moral wasteland.
Good lord, these need to be printed in big letters, bold, with some kind of eye catching funnky font, and posted up at the top of the thread lists and made sticky.
I always found it interesting that the majority of the people still play Athasian heroes, out trying to make things better . . . and often suceeding, at least in small ways. As I've said before, I ran my adventures with more of a fatalistic theme. We never really used the character tree system much (never took us too long to simply whip up a new crit once someone died), but death was a common enough occurence. Few if any PCs lived more than 5 to 6 levels from the campaign start, but thankfully, my long term players were very adapt at creating new and interesting personalities to role-play. Ignorence though, should be the most fatal aspect of Athas. 'Not knowing' has killed off more players in my games than anything else whether its not knowing how to survive in the wastes, not knowing the intricate nature of halfling diplomacy, not knowing the webs of intrigue spun by the self righteous nobles of the city-states, or even not knowing what is growling away beyond the next couple of dunes. Ignorance on Athas is certainly not bliss, its an executioner with an urge. Looking back now, I realize that most PCs died outside of the 'normal' combat encounters. The exception of course being the den of tembo, although that's not really a 'normal' combat encounter either.
The other campaign is set a few years earlier and is a bt intermitent nowadays but the group is just starting Black Spine