This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, Stu is feeling nostalgic about Dark Suns past, so we take a look at Dragon Kings, the best-worst book in the line! Also, a fair amount of discussion about our late Prince of Darkness, Ozzy Osbourne (Correction: Sabotage came after Sabbath Bloody Sabbath).

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The post Dragon Kings appeared first on Vintage RPG.

It also isn’t the finale of anything. That’s a bold lie of the marketing copy — this is entirely unconnected to the events of the previous scenarios and introduces it’s own, self-contained problem for epic-level characters. So there was this order of master psionicists and one of them kicked the butts of all the others because he decided psionics are actually what’s wrong with Athas, so he go an ancient artifact called the Psionatrix and is using it to suppress psionic ability in everyone except himself and his acolytes. Enter the (now psionics-less) players to go break the Psionatrix.

This thing sprawls across three plot-heavy books. Nearly everything, including the overland travel, is an event. It’s maybe the most event heavy event crawl I’ve encountered? Way worse than any Ravenloft adventure I’ve seen.

Hilariously, I bought this back in the day, based mostly on the cover. Problem was, my group hated psionics, so there weren’t any psionic-heavy characters, so they didn’t care when someone turned off the world’s psionics. That was pretty much it for my brief run at Dark Sun.

The post Dragon’s Crown (1993) appeared first on Vintage RPG.

They get out and become nobles by participating in a hunt that uses a flowchart that I…I don’t understand what is going on in this part and the flowchart seems broken. They then wind up in Nibenay and the Shadow King makes them go back to Gulg to steal the queen’s necklace. There’s a dungeon that also involves a flowchart, which is maybe the worst way to design a dungeon?

Hey, at least there is an encounter with a cistern fiend, one of my favorite Dark Sun monsters.

The post Asticlian Gambit (1992) appeared first on Vintage RPG.

That’s OK though! I am actually interested in Athas’ harsh environment, unlike, say, throwing a bunch of soldiers together and then seeing how many stay standing. Exploring the world in this module gives players a better sense of the stakes for their newly freed city and how unlikely survival might be. But it also gives a little bit of hope by introducing the avangion, the weird alien/angle things that high level preservers can transform into in hopes of healing the devastated world. This is the opposite of the life energy stealing magic of the Dragon of Athas and the parasitic sorcerer-kings. These two poles really form the core of the setting’s overarching themes. What I am not sure of is how aware players were of just what the Dragon and the Sorcerer Kings were up to — it’s been so long that I can’t recall if this was common knowledge going in, or if it was a big twist. Someone tell me, if you recall!

This is a favorite Brom cover for me. I also like how Baxa (and Brom, to some degree) will put stuff in the art that has no support in the text, like the little cyclops squirrel that is with the avangion, or the lizard giant on the cover. Gives me room to imagine some stuff into Dark Sun myself, you know?

The post Arcane Shadows (1992) appeared first on Vintage RPG.

A couple more thoughts on the flip-book format. They’re certainly a novel approach to running a game, especially for novice DMs. They remind me a bit of the earlier One-on-One Adventure Gamebooks TSR from 1985-1987, and have their roots in the S-series modules, which also included art handouts for players. They’re also crazy hard to re-pack once you pull everything out of the folder. The resale value on my copy of Freedom just went way down a couple minute ago.

The action is split pretty evenly between faction-crawling to assemble the army in the city and then a big, Battlesystem battle. Kind of a snooze for me. Dark Sun changed a lot from conception to the store shelf, but the original concept of “War World” lingered in lots of weird ways, some good (undead war beetles!), some bad (all this mass combat). Of all the things that can happen on Athas, the one I am least interested is armies battling.

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This is Freedom (1991), the first scenario for Dark Sun outside the campaign box. Inside are the aforementioned flip books and a short story that also includes NPC details. The DM flipbook is pretty much solid text, but interesting: it’s full of notes on how to run the encounters and events, from tactics to NPC roleplaying notes. Often, there are forking narrative choices at the end of an encounter. I used to think these were railroady as all get-out, but looking at them again, they’re really ahead of their time, balancing a highly plotted scenario against player choice, with a whole lot of support presented pretty clearly. I…wouldn’t mind bringing this format back, maybe.

The Player flipbook is where are the maps and rad Baxa illustrations are — many in color! There are some pre-gens in there too. These represent a high production value that was pretty much unmatched elsewhere in the hobby at that time.

There are issues, of course. The scenario mirrors the events of the first Dark Sun novel, The Verdant Passage, with the players beginning as slaves, escaping and then taking part in the uprising against the sorcerer-king. While it never gets weird like Dragonlance, the novel characters appear as NPCs and there is potential for the players to feel like they’re the B-team. It also uses Battlesystem to run the uprising, which, ugh.

Big meta plots were becoming a focus around now, but the Dark Sun metaplot is kind of controversial. This scenario immediately blew up the status quo presented in the campaign box set and that made just as many people uneasy as overjoyed.

Oh, and, maybe you are like me and always thought this cover art by Brom was weird — Neeva, a gladiator, has like a king’s ransom of metal (rare in the setting) on her and just generally doesn’t look quite right. That’s because the painting predates Brom’s work on the setting, it’s actually the portfolio piece that got him the job.

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So, my thing with Dark Sun is that I really enjoy the setting, and reading about it and thinking about it, but I don’t particularly want to play it. It’s just a vibe mismatch, no greater criticism, but you should probably have that firmly in mind when I say I absolutely love like, every single monster in this book. It is maybe the most successful appendix in a lot of ways. For starters, it solidifies the notion that everything in Athas is trying to kill you. Even the simplest acts required for basic survival are fraught with danger—that snake monster on the cover, for instance, lives in cisterns and purifies the water, but also kills and eats anything that stops for a drink. So, you know, don’t get thirsty on this desert world. This one does a much better of presenting the “Dark Sun version of X” than Spelljammer or Ravenloft (where is like, oh, look, a Kender Vampire). Flip through this thing you get just as much a sense of life on Athas as you do from the box set. That’s pretty solid work.

Easley cover, doing well again with the selection of creatures. We have an Athasian sloth, a cistern fiend and a so-ut (aka rampager). Even these three do a good job of selling Athas as a place of yawning, hungry maws.

The post Monstrous Compendium Dark Sun Appendix (1992) appeared first on Vintage RPG.

I find the poster part particularly offensive to the eye. Instead of doing the sensible thing and presenting one big map, the world map is actually rather small in the middle and is flanked above and below by enlarged details, which, OK. But then all three of those are hovering over a third enlarged detail that is impossible to comprehend because it has three maps in the way. Not to mention, one of them is pixelated. Sprinkled throughout for flavor is a seemingly random assortment of spot illustrations. Gag.

And sadly, not nearly the worst of them.

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Hambone opens the show (00:18) and Stu laments the weather (it’s frickin’ hot).

First up, the guys have been playing Tales From the Loop (02:15). Being an 80s sci-fi RPG, Stranger Things comes up immediately and the guys touch on the difficulty of nostalgia marketing (02:50). They then get into the simplicity of the system (03:15) and rundown the mechanics (04:30). Discussion wraps up on the joys of setting an RPG in the town where you live (05:50) and how well the game focuses on narrative over mechanics (08:45).

Conversation turns to Dark Sun (11:56). Stu summarizes the game, explains how it put aesthetics first and how groundbreaking that was at the time (13:55). The inflexibility of D&D as a system comes up, and Hambone reveals a rumor about the lack of playtesting at TSR (15:44). They discuss the problem with turning novels into RPG modules (17:23) and Stu runs downs some of the problems he has with Dark Sun (20:01), TSR’s lack of support for the setting and how TSR’s business model was at fault (21:01).

Despite all this, Stu firmly believes Dark Sun is cool (21:47), particularly the art of Brom and Baxa. The guys digress into a discussion of tentacle monsters (23:00) then talk about some 5E rumors (25:54) and the contrast between the current D&D business model compared to the TSR of old. Also, psionics are weird (28:54).

Stu opens his mail from World Champ Game Company (30:15) and delights in their Deals with Demons zine, an alternate death system for D&D 5E.

The guys say their farewells (32:49).

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Correction: to simulate the harshness of the world of Dark Sun, new characters start at level three, not level one. Stu’s greater point, however, stands: Dark Sun was intended to run through 30 character levels but only received support through level 15 or so.

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Tune in two weeks from now for the next episode. Until then, may the dice always roll in your favor!

The post Dark Sun appeared first on Vintage RPG.

There’s some great material here. Perhaps most central to the campaign setting, it details the process by which a defiler wizard can transform into the devastatingly powerful and ecosystem-destroying Athasian version of a dragon (or, the angelic, vaguely New Age-y Avangion, for preservers). There are also rules for psionic enchantments, some sweet war vehicles (Brom’s illustrations of which are **chef’s kiss**) and new high level spells (at least one of which defies the unexplained fact that Athas is cut off from the outer planes, but we get a sweet Baxa glabrezu, so whatever).

This is the Dark Sun book I flipped through the most over the years. Also the one got the least use. The published Dark Sun metastory adventures tapped out around level 15 and, because of the strictures of the metastory, supplements that allowed for a more traditional custom-written campaign that could get to level 20 and beyond didn’t start to appear until after my group’s Dark Sun interest faded in favor of the billion other things TSR was publishing at the time. Once again – 90s-era TSR shooting itself in the foot.

I’d be keen to hear stories from y’all about Dark Sun campaigns that DID make it to the epic levels, though! Surely someone out there turned into a dragon, right?

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