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... )

A light dive into Thaumaturgy (or Blood Sorcery, if you prefer), the vampiric Discipline of making up magic shit with your blood!

Thaumaturgy's one of the most popular Disciplines among Vampire players for the simple reason that it's flexible and powerful. Learning Thaumaturgy opens the door for a character to develop a very large range of ( 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... )

Another chat with wickedthought brought out some more notions that may be useful to you game-running folx out there, this time for Vampire. I played for a time in a Vampire game that John ran and I noted to him that he was basically running a "thief game" with Vampire. I'll explain what all of this means and how it can help you to run Vampire games!


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A chat with wickedthought had me thinking about Personal Characteristics in D&D 5e-Personality Traits, Ideals, Bonds, and Flaws. As written, you use these to explain about your character and reveal their motivations. In the basic rules, when you play up a character's Personal Characteristic, you might be awarded Inspiration by the DM, because you've engaged in ( 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... )

Last time, I wrote a bit about some "unconventional" kinds of governments for your fantasy kingdoms. This time I'm going to look into how a nonhuman kingdom might change the use of the Pathfinder kingdom-building rules!
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