So my on going attempts to challenge myself with adapting Dark Sun material continues.
Frostburn- Wizards of the Coast 3.5. Great book. All the information you could ask for to run a game in an artic or cold environment, land sea or air. Aaaaaand… I honestly found very little. It’s a great book, and I love it, but taking any of this would be a hard sell in Athas. For monsters we do have some megafauna, urskans (angry bear people) and elemental weirds. The latter are snow and ice, but could be rethemed to water or air.
I also do like the skull talismans. Mechanically, they function just like potions. The spell is written or painted onto the skull and to activate it, you smash or break the skull. If you are looking for an alternative to using fruit potions, this would be a fitting way to do so.
Storm Wrack- Like the above, a great resource for exploring adventures in seas, oceans, lakes, elemental plane of water. Etc. I honestly thought I could get more. More like NOTHING. I tried folks, I really did. If I got anything, it’s information on things like sea caves. A sea cave emptied by the death of the oceans would make a fine dungeon.
Complete Book of Necromancers-This one proved frustrating. This is a fantastic book, and I love it. However, other than some pretty sweet NPCs I got very little I felt was a good match for Dark Sun. There are some atmospheric things about psionics, but not really much else.
I like the skulls as potions idea for defiler potions, as potion fruit doesn’t make sense for them. I had been using small obsidian balls that had to be swallowed, but I like the skull idea too. Perhaps I’ll use both.
The Complete Book of Necromancers might not be the greatest Dark Sun resource (although you should be able to pull something for Gray-casting Necromants from it), but it does have one little tidbit of interest: Kazarabet/Zaribel was first introduced in the Al-Qadim boxed set Cities of Bone and that set has some interesting sites and adventures that you can drop into Dark Sun with a little work - I have (along with the Ruined Kingdoms box too - the Geomancers make for perfect DS villains by making them students of Rajaat who succeeded in drawing life energy from the planet itself).
The obsidian balls are the size of small marbles, so they should pass right through. The gross part is when defilers reuse them.
Just kidding. I have them magically dissolve.
Otherwise players would try and reuse them.
Im liking the idea of the skulls and the obsidian orbs/marbles as spells or potions. I kind of liked the potion fruit idea in the Shattered Lands game. Maybe that was because they were glowy and sparkly. But it really is kinda of out of the normal theme of Dark Sun.
I had an idea that instead of scrolls or potions that spells were created into palm sized clay disk talismans that when broken, read from, magic word spoken, etc, it would would activate.
