So the big news from Wizards of the Coast at GenCon was that the next setting they will be producing will be Dark Sun. Timetabled for the tail end of 2010 the first book to come out will of course be the Campaign Guide.
I’m torn on this one. On one hand I’m not a fan of fourth edition D&D but on the other hand I was a huge fan of the original version of Dark Sun for second edition. So much so it was all we played for several years until I joined a new group that only ran Forgotten Realms.
From the information that WotC gave out at the con it seems like we might actually get a faithful attempt at bringing Dark Sun into the current system. I was joking about on Twitter this morning about how they could mess it up but after looking again at the press release and the blogs of those that were there I’m quietly hopeful. So hopeful in fact that I might actually give up my card carrying hatred of the system and give it another go when it gets released.
So what is it that’s making think this is a good idea? Well aside from originally wanting Dragonlance to be the next setting I can completely understand their reasoning behind it all. They have a system that currently has a couple of settings on the bookshelves of stores but everything they have out there is very similar. They are being compared to computer games like World of Warcraft with the style as well as the game play. So they now want to push the boat out and show us just what the system can do with you give it something like Dark Sun to play with.
They have a couple of the original writing team on board who really want to get this project going and seem to want to keep it’s history and style rooted in the original books. I’m slightly worried about the comment they made about making sure that the re-release of the Prism Pentad novels fit in with the back story in a way that allows it to ‘one possible way things turn out’. But that aside going on their interview in Dragon 378. I’m quietly optamistic.
I also think that 4e’s reliance on mini’s and battlemaps may be able to improve on the one thing about Dark Sun that I really didn’t like. Structured one on one fights in a normal roleplay you can get away with but when it comes to gladiators and the games I think the 4e combat system will work fantastically well. I’m still not a fan of it for most settings but I think arena combat will really benefit from it.
Considering the changes brought in for the revised edition that made it’s way onto the shelves not long after the original setting was published I’m really curious to see where they are going to take this. It’s not a setting where you can just shove everything 100 years into the future as everything will be almost the same. Unless there were major uprisings the bad guys will still be there and if they are beaten then it changes both the feel of the game but also the earth itself will change as the amount of defilers on the planet drop dramatically with the Templars out of the equation.
Suffice it to say I’m looking forward to it and August next year can’t come soon enough!
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I just thought I should share a quick memory. Back in the summer of 1989 my friends and I had had just started our journey into the world of roleplaying. We were playing Rolemaster but I was reading Dragon magazine on the side and really fancied trying Dungeons and Dragons but it would be another few months before we would get the chance.
As the year drew on my friend was given the old D&D set for his birthday and I sat telling them about everything I’d read. The one thing we always found strange was that our GM rarely gave us more than orcs and dragons to fight against but with D&D there were loads more to choose from with just as many unfamiliar tongue twisting names. Every day we played we would pick a new monster and the GM would find a way to fit them into the story somehow.
There was one monster we could never find in the books though. I’d seen the name mentioned in Dragon a few times when reading about D&D but the stats always eluded us. That monster was of course the Gygax. We could never find any pictures of the thing either so our imaginations ran wild. We thought of it as a giant Hydra like monster that could level whole towns in a second. Before long our GM drew up stats himself and for the rest of the year we ran a game where the culmination would be taking on the Gygax to free the kingdom and either win the princess’ heart or be rewarded with enough beer to drown in depending on which character you talked to. It was immense.
It was about 4 years later when we found out that the Gygax I had seen mentioned in the magazine was actually Gary Gygax and not some monster that had been made up for the game. I blame it on being from Scotland where most surnames start with Mc or Mac. We just didn’t stand a chance of beating our imaginations into submission.
Other thoughts and memories can be found at Unclebear’s website
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Just over a week ago Greywulf wrote an entry about molding your playing group around the idea of a superhero team. Everything from team name to matching outfits was mentioned but it managed to fire my memory into overdrive when it mentioned strongholds. It’s something I’ve not done for years but someone in our group would always end up either taking over an existing building or creating one from scratch if they had the time and resources. It would almost always be left to me to design them however but I always enjoyed that side of things.
A quick personal and educational history lesson. When I was at school the exams you sat when you were 16 were just changing from O Levels to Standard Grade style papers. In fact by the time it came for me to sit those exams my school only did one O Level course and it was the last year they would be running it. Guess who took that class? I loved Technical Drawing so much that it was basicalluy the only class outwith Computing that I looked forward to each week. In my prelim exam I was the only person in Scotland to score a perfect 100% and apparently my teacher found out I scored a 99% in the final exam. Either way I was good at it so you can understand now why I didn’t mind when it came to designing the strongholds.
Something that always annoyed me about the systems we played was that they either went one of two ways. You were either told that at a certain level you could build a stronghold and gave you a very basic set of rules and descriptions for doing so or you had books like Castles and Ruins for Rolemaster that broke it down to the level where were almost having to work out how much to pay each labourer and when he’d take his tea breaks. We ended up throwing all those rules out the window though and basically allowing the players to design anything they wanted and the GM would come up with a price and a time scale for building it. Once that was agreed the player would bring me a rough sketch and I’d draft it up from there. The same would happen for any vehicles or spaceships for our sci-fi games except it would usually be the GM that would ask me to do that for them.
I was flicking through my old tech drawing papers the other day and came across what was possibly my favourite, if not the most simplistic, building we ever designed and used. During a D&D Mystara campaign we had spent the best part of 3 months real-time fighting our way through undead infested swamps before finally banishing what ever evil being was at the centre of the infestation. At the end of the day our party found the treasure trove but missed one of the side chambers. Being a Cleric I stayed behind for a few days to try and make some changes to the land around me and finally stumbled upon the remaining treasure. Being a holy man I decided that it was put to better use by building a church on this god forsaken land than filling the rucksacks of my fellow adventurers. I’ve never quite worked out whether that was my character being selfish and greedy or trying to do the right thing. I did it anyway.
So after a few weeks going back and forth between the DM and myself we finally came up with the above design for my church. It is a very simple design but all I could build with the limited funds. Eventually my church sent a couple of clerics to help with the rebuilding of the land and by the time the campaign ended a small village had sprouted up around the outside of the walls. We were right in the heart of the wasted lands but we were gradually clawing it back for the living.
I loved drawing the castles, buildings and vehicles over the years. I just wish more of them had survived.
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