Yeah, I really wish that I’d known about dark sun long enough to talk to the Epic Bureau back in the day about why they went with many of the decisions they did regarding dark sun’s epic rules and the levels of the sorcerer kings. I trust your work, as built upon it, a lot more even if it’s just as rough in some areas.
Don’t get me wrong, some good stuff came out of Legends of Athas, but in general this site seems to have simply died the day 4e came out, leaving a tremendous number of things unfinished and unexplained. I mean, people have been begging for Secrets of the Dead Lands for over a decade, and everything I’ve heard about it basically says that its actually complete, but nobody seems to either have it or know who to ask to get permission to release it. It’s so strange to me.
I’ve been reading the old wizards forums threads. Basically what happened was a design decision to balance advanced beigns with characters from other classes of the same character level, equal to other epic characters. This had unintended consequences, such as most people coming up with sorcerer kings at around the 70th level range. Another consequence was that the Epic Bureau could not come up with a credible Sorcerer King in their mandates mid-30s level range. They did produce Dregoth, who doesn’t have enough Base Attack Bonus to even land a hit on an epic character.
I understand the decisions, and why it happened. The alternative they were considering was no better either. They were thinking of requiring 9/9 of spellcasting/manifesting, and only giving what they were providing in LoA, which is even weaker than what they eventually decided on. I spent 18 months trying to fix the Epic Bureau’s work before finally giving up and going back to the drawing board. It was then that I realized that I had already created a framework that is perfect for advanced beings, and only needs to adjusted for Dark Sun.
I had written an article for the Ravenloft fanzine Quoth the Raven on Death Knights, where I boosted their power with a salient ability framework. See the article here.
The best course of action is simply to publish what is available as an alpha version. The longer this drags on, the more likely it is doing to be vaporware. Dark Sun is littered with vaporware. You can see dead projects all over posts in the old wizards forum archive. Best just publish what has been produced.
This. My confusion comes from how at least one 99% complete product managed to become vaporware in the first place. It’s not like this site or its fanbase imploded like TSR did, but it might as well have, judging by how much stuff just seems to have been dropped, regardless of current status.
My guess would be kids, work, and other priorities are the cause. They had the best of intentions to complete the work, but it didn’t work out like that. Its time. RELEASE.
What I would like to see done is finalize my Epic Athas work (that’s on me, and I released my preliminary work to get feedback before it is finalized), and also collaboratively release a Dark Sun supplement similar to Dragonlance’s Legends of the Twins.
It would build on the very first box set and answer the unanswered questions - except there will be 10 different answers for every single question.
Original boxed set: No champions, no Rajaat, no halfling progenitors. The tale told in the Prism Pentad novels is POSSIBLY the truth of Athas. It might be possible that Athas is the homeworld of the Mind Flayers. Maybe the Sorcerer Monarchs are devils or demons. Back in the day, people would put their own spin on Athas, its history and its reality. We should do the same.
Personally, I don’t have a problem with many of the official answers, but I would still like to help. At the very least, it’s a nifty thought exercise. What-if’s can be very fun.
For many people the official answer - that is, the loss of all those SMs by Free Year 10, altered the setting that they had grown to love too much. And when WoTC came out with 4E Dark Sun, they made sure not to persist in that error.
That doesn’t mean what happened in the PP can’t happen. What it means is that if it does happen, the PCs must be at the center of that. Same with any other scenario.
Oh, this part I’ve had a problem with, but that’s less because I feel it was an inherently bad idea and more because it was poorly written and made a bunch of epic level badasses into chump change.
This I agree with in full.
I don’t agree with everything WOTC did in dark sun 4e, but this was an amazing call on their part. Of course the flip side of it is that they proved they could make Dark Sun at least mostly work, but they’ve just kind of floundered around at psionics a bit in 5e and that’s about all they’ve done since.
Yeah. That was the most unbelievable part of the PP novels, which I liked overall. I was like “nah, that did NOT happen”. If they were that easy to take down there would be no SMs surviving until now, period.
It’s weird. For all of its continuity flaws, Lynn Abbey’s Rise and Fall of A Dragon King pretty much attacked the absurdity of The Cerulean Storm’s ending in a bunch of very satisfying ways. That said, her sorcerer monarchs were just a touch too powerful for my tastes, not because I don’t like them being godlike (I do, hence why I love your work and prefer higher level sorcerer monarchs in 2e or 3e), but because their stats in 2e, while impressive, were nowhere near being godlike, except for Dregoth, or maybe Borys, had he ever received updated stats. Since I am a gamer, it can be hard for me to read tie-in fiction that bears little respect for the rough game stats, even if I think they were dramatically under leveled in 2e. (that said, overall I’d read Lynn Abbey’s work over Troy Denning’s any day of the week)
Lynn Abbey gets way too much hate for she tried to fix. She introduced a handful of inconsistencies herself, but it is far outweighed by the fixes she put in. For one, it never occurred to me that Sacha and Wyan could have been used by Tithian to provide spells to templars (and even to Tithian himself!), even though I don’t buy the idea that Kalak was not a Champion of Rajaat. What this tells me is that Lynn Abbey is intelligent and thoughtful.She acted as a real custodian of the Dark Sun setting.
Same. I never viewed them as godlike, but close to it compared to the mortals of Athas. In my framework, the assassination of Kalak using the Heartwood Spear is possible. But if Kalak was prepared for a fight, better watch out.
I wonder if WotC is will be willing to license novels. Authors do not really get that huge a payment, at least not authors like Lynn Abbey. It would be great to have her writing for the Dark Sun setting again.
A big part of why I want to see her notes is to see if any of my questions about the decisions she made were answered. Also, everyone talks about her interpretation of Hamanu and Sielba, but I’ve seen nobody talk about her interpretation of Inenek (Lalali-Puy) aside from that she gave her ogres instead of aarakocra to kill, which may have been deliberate because she decided Kalak wasn’t a champion. But seriously, though the Oba only shows up for like 5 seconds, Abbey has her act like a vicious, scheming, seductive bitch with severe temper problems and strongly implies (as in, actually states as Hamanu’s prevailing theory) that she slept with the majority of males of an entire race. Was this Abbey’s actual interpretation, just Hamanu’s viewpoint, or her accidently mixing Lalali-Puy with early interpretations of Abalach-Re? I was leaning towards the latter, but the one letter I could dig up from the forums had Lynn Abbey specify all the sources she had access to, and the original box set was not among them, and since the prism pentad went with a more “forest maker adventure” interpretation of Abalach-Re, it doesn’t seem likely that she even knew how Abalach-Re had been interpreted by early sources (hence why her “ghost” acts so strangely).
Edit: Normally I would just call Hamanu a sexist pig and move on. But what always stood out to me about that scene, having read the book at least 4 times, is how the majority of the book actually makes it very clear to the audience what is actually going on, if you read carefully, and Hamanu is called out by the narration or himself almost every single time that he’s wrong. Nothing like that is present in this scene. Even more strangely, Inenek gets exactly zero on screen appearances anywhere in the cleansing wars era sections of the novel.
If it was an intentional interpretation, virtually the only possible reason I can think of is because Lynn Abbey saw the basically naked picture of Lalali-Puy in beyond the prism pentad (a source she stated having access to) and drew her own conclusions. I don’t understand how someone could read the Prism Pentad books and come away with that interpretation of Lalali-Puy as a character. Bory’s, Nibenay, Dregoth, etc are all on point. Only Kalak (done intentionally, if controversially), and Inenek (???) have situations that differ massively from cannon.
I don’t sweat RaFoaDK because it is not canonical anyway. So the inconsistencies can be ignored while we mine it for good ideas.
Ogres may have been different in Athas. Perhaps ogres were small in number but individually powerful, similar to the ogre titans (psionic instead of sorcerers) of the Dragonlance setting.Just throwing that out there, but I doubt that Lalali-Puy was actually the Ogre-Doom.
By the way, I think much of the hate for RaFoaDK is because Lynn Abbey correctly showed that the ability to channel spells to templars came from the transformation by Rajaat into an advanced being, not after the cleansing wars by Borys granting the ability to do so by the other champions. The Revised Boxed Set, written by Bill Slavicsek, who misunderstood this aspect of Dark Sun lore, retconned Borys as the individual that made them into Sorcerer Kings. The mistake by Bill Slavicsek was clearly unintentional. He was working off the same material, the Prism Pentad books, as we had read.
I keep hearing that it’s not canonical (both here and on the old forums), but I’ve never seen a statement from an official source on that (and I’ve looked). It was certainly intended to be canonical, so I tend to notice when something differs widely from most of cannon but I can’t for the life of me figure out why.
This is really cool. Thanks.
I don’t hate this part. Lynn’s version makes way too much sense. That said, i still find it amusing how everyone, fan and writer alike, seemed to miss that Troy Denning destroyed the Dark Lens at the end of Prism Pentad 5.
As much as I might enjoy Lynn Abbey, from time to time, in her previous DS publications, I have a rather strong reticence to follow the story of a novel that quite literally ends my favorite campaign setting. Not only is the shark jumped, but the skier does not ever again return to the water.
There are those of us DS fans who perhaps bask too unreservedly in the reflected glory of the Champions of Rajaat. Lynn Abbey would have them as gods, omnipotent and inviolable to our favorite mortal heroes. For Abbey, Kalak has to be a lesser sort of sorcerer-king because the lowly mortal Heroes were able to kill him. Hamanu becomes a god who can ignore even the mightiest of heroines, Sadira, tossing her aside and her accomplishments with essentially the flick of a wrist. I guess all that high magic at the Pristine Tower, all the peerless will and accomplishment of an ex-slave, and all those adventures that quite literally saved the world just pale in comparison to Lynn Abbey’s Lion King.
Dark Sun is great because mortal heroes who dare to risk it all are able to overcome the odds and defeat monstrously evil tyrants. Abbey would make these kings and queens unassailable, and the heroics of our player characters largely pointless.
I say let the PCs be the real champions. Let the Champions of Rajaat be great and powerful, but let them know death even at the hands of mortal slaves like Sadira, Rikus and Neeva.