A player over on a DARK SUN Discord server asked for some random tables for things that traders might have when encountered on the road in Athas, with an eye to things that could motivate an adventure, so here we go!Of note, if you want your players to engage in bartering with traders over mundane goods, or to look for opportunities to buy ( Read more... )

If you read the 4e DARK SUN adventure Marauders of the Dune Sea you'll note that there's a shrine with fountains filled with clean water drawn from a deep aquifer. Once the PCs have eliminated the various creatures from this underground locale, it… kinda seems like the sort of place where you might just set up shop and stay for a while. There’s ( Read more... )

If you spend a lot of time playing DARK SUN (or other games set in post-apocalyptic denuded wastelands) you probably have a lot of scenes set in big, open, empty deserts. Open desert battlefields are as ubiquitous to this genre as warehouses are for gunfights in cyberpunk games. But once you've fought for your life on a couple of empty desert ( Read more... )

This post was inspired by a poster on the DARK SUN Facebook group asking about tracking food and water supplies in the game.

DARK SUN veterans know that your food and water are often in short supply. A perilous journey across a trackless waste can be made even more dangerous if a sudden sandstorm destroys your food, or a sneaky pack of jozhals ( Read more... )

One of the built-in assumptions of the DARK SUN setting is that powerful heroes will want to change and reshape the world, to return it to its former verdant glory. The preserver metamorphosis-the process of a powerful wizard turning into an avangion, a being of life and hope-requires the creation of unsullied forests, and even the elemental lords ( Read more... )

The elemental cleric is a staple of the original DARK SUN setting. While largely cast aside in the later 4th edition material, the elemental cleric fills an important niche: They demonstrate that there are still great powers in the world, but that all of these great powers have some kind of flaw. Templars serve false gods; the sorcerer-monarchs are ( Read more... )

In the original incarnation of the DARK SUN game, the supplement Dune Trader detailed the independent traders who ventured from city-state to city-state, hawking their wares and sometimes engaging in shady dealings. Players could take on the Trader class and deal with the problems of trying to move caravans of goods, bribing templars, buying low ( Read more... )

The original DARK SUN boxed set includes a small section of rules regarding the shift in alignment of characters suffering from extreme thirst. In short, if your character's dying of dehydration, morals and scruples slip away, and the character becomes overwhelmed with the need to acquire water to slake that burning thirst, no matter the cost ( Read more... )

In the DARK SUN campaign setting, spellcasters face specific threats and challenges in tandem with the powers that they wield. Preservers and defilers are both pariahs and social outcasts; defilers have special difficulty concealing their magic, while preservers are specifically hunted and killed by the sorcerer-kings (not to mention angry mobs who ( Read more... )

Magical treasures are a mainstay of Dungeons & Dragons games. After all, they're the means to acquire special bonuses and powers that your character might otherwise never have -- and for players interested in building their character stories, every magic item is a piece of the character's history, a reminder of past adventures and a glance backward ( Read more... )