Monday, August 16, 2010

Dark Sun 4e Review: Timeline Reboot

The best part of the new edition of Dark Sun is a reboot to the time just after the Death of Kalak in Tyr. Tyr becomes the first free city in the age of the Sorcerer Kings and has to fear attack from outside and treachery from within. This is probably the best time for gaming in the world since it is undergoing major change but without all the silliness you got in the Dark Sun Revision after the Prism Pentad cycle is complete. The Sorcerer Kings are still the dominate presence in the world and life for people who do not follow their rules can quickly get very deadly especially in their City States.

The only limiting part of this timeline point is that characters who want to become real movers and shakers in a city state only really have an option of this in Tyr as opposed to later where more states have lost their nearly invinciable Sorcerer Kings. We had a great campaign based out of Balic after Androponis's disappearence since less stuff was written about the city. The GM had more freedom to develop the location and the factions fighting for control.

3 comments:

  1. Brad, I agree. While we had a ton of fun in Balic back in the day, this timeline reboot is far better than what they tried to do with a 3.5 Edition Darksun. If you are interested, I can send you the more prescient points of that. What i can say, is that if you had a Wanderer's Journal (which I do) you can see that some of the entry's in the back are word for word. Which is fine, some detail, but lets the Dungeon master flesh out things as they desire. So I am pleased with the timeline revision.

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  2. I still have all of our classic dark sun books. I got out the Dark Sun revised edition to compare it to before I released that they were set in different peroids.

    Interesting thing is that I have very few of the other second edition stuff AD&D stuff. Might have the necromancers handbook. Ofcourse you got almost everything else when Norma cleaned up the gaming stuff(AD&D 1 and 2, Star Frontiers, Gamma World, Shadowrun, Earthdawn, Battletech)

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  3. I haven't sold any of the 2ED stuff yet. You can have anything you want, I will send it to you. I bought much of the 2ed Dark Sun stuff on Ebay. I don't have the Earthdawn stuff. I can't find the Star Frontiers adventures though.

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