I mentioned this in another thread, but I thought I’d expand a bit more on something I have thought for a while now, and is heresy, which is that Advanced Beings as presented in game were done wrong.
One of the main tenets of Dark Sun is just how wide spread psionics is. In my opinion psioncs and psioncs alone should have been the only requirement for being a psionic being. Limiting them to just spell casters was wrong. My view is that any secondary classes should influence the type of advanced being you become, but that is the limit to its influence.
There should also have been advanced beings available to other classes as well, like fighters or thieves. Why is that? Well, for one it would make Hamanu make more sense.
In the original Wanderer’s Journal, it stated that most, but not all, of the rulers were defilers. Then you have the description of Hamanu, of how he is the greatest warrior around, never defeated in battle. Except that he was a defiler/psionicist, which doesn’t really match,
A better option would be a fighter/psionicist, making him a great warrior and general. So what about his advanced being form? Well, the answer has already been given in a way - he already has the ability to assume a lion form. What if, instead of a dragon, he was turning into a lion/man hybrid due to being a fighter/psionicist?
Anyway, just sharing my heresy and see what others thought.
I’m a lover of heresy, and I enjoyed yours but I don’t really think this idea about Hamanu is well founded, although I will concede it’s quite widely held.
Too much is made of Hamanu being “a fighter” with very little textual basis for it. From what I can see, the reasoning is as follows.
In the original boxed set, Hamanu is styled as a warrior king.
In The Crimson Legion Hamanu engages in a melee fight with Rikus and his comrades.
3.The description of Hamanu as a farmer turned soldier in Rise and Fall of a Dragon King.
I could raise various objections to this but it’s your heresy. If you could elaborate, it could lead to an interesting discussion.
I used to want every class to have its own advanced being type, mostly because I was so excited about the concept, but have since changed my mind, mainly because of 2 reasons:
1.too many advanced beings types dilutes the uniqueness of the concept and make it sort of mundane.
Becoming advanced being is the result of mixing psionics with some other source of magic. A warrior/psion would still be just that, because him being a warrior doesn’t affect the fundamentals of his psionics.
That being said I do wish for a templar advanced being, the result of renegade templar taking over and merging with some dead Sk living vortex using psionics
Advanced Beings for all!..is probably a bad idea, IMO, but it’s a seductive idea.
Melee advanced beings would make more sense in 4e () than 2e.
We had to deal with this a bit in Secrets/ Faces of thr Dead Lands - the idea that wizards could be great (or at leaast effective) generals, w/o Fighter levels.
I used a similar idea for one of my campaigns. Kalak died but he had clones. A templar captured the clones and through a reverse dragon ritual made himself a living vortex of energy that hungered for all life.
) than 2e.