I’m new here but recently discovered the amazing burned world of Athas and fell in love with it. I had a bit of time on my hand so I decided to convert what I liked from the base setting (I’m far to be an expert on Athas) and added a couple of creatures that I like from past editions (mostly 3.5 and 4th edition port) and thought would be a good fit, plus a couple of my own cooking (look at the Templar section mostly).
I took inspiration from A LOT of existing material, as well as images and pictures from published monster manual, fanmade artwork and some other from Devianart.
Note that this have not been playtested, and is not a final version (the paging is currently HORRIBLE) so all feedback is welcome if you think some creatures need adjustment.
Technically, we were developing Dark Sun in the same time period we were getting Ravenloft off the ground, so we tried to limit all the classic horror tropes in the Athas setting. It wasn’t a hard-and-fast rule, as I recall, just a notion to keep the two lines distinct and separate.
I don’t think we ever created a game reason that there could be no lycanthropes on Athas, we just didn’t put any there.
So I was thinking of adding a couple of things to the manual, following the idea of the templars with Tribes (slave tribes, raider tribes) and taking inspiration from the Slave Tribes book (2nd edition). Would that be a worthy addition and can someone recommand other material that are describing similar groups?
Merchant House could maybe be interesting as well? any reading recommendations on that would be great also.
I saw there was Tieflings added in the 4th edition to Athas, does that mean they have Fiends to? so far the only kind of fiend I’ve read about were the Rakhsasa.
The 2nd edition and the 4th edition settings have some important differences, and that was reflected in the monster manuals for both. The 3.5 Monster Manuals (Terrors of Athas and Terrors of the Dead Lands) were compiled from all the sourcebooks from the original setting and all the splatbooks, along with a few monsters that were in the two videogames released that didn’t appear in any guides (I.e The Mountain Stalker).
The 4th edition Monster Manual had some pretty big differences from the 2nd and the 3.5 monsters (Such as Thrax not being undead). So I would treat them as two separate books, as the 4th edition update ignored most of the second edition expanded world, such as the Dead Lands and the Last Sea.
As for lycanthropes on Athas, there is one creature from 2nd/3.5 which fills the role of lycanthropes under the dark sun, The Pakubrazi.
Athas is surrounded by The Gray, which is the final resting place of souls and makes travel to the outer planes very hard. Therefore, theres not much point in fiends going to Athas (they exist to tempt or force mortals into sin so their souls go to the plane of the fiends allignment, so whats the point of going to Athas if there are no souls to claim?), so there were no Tieflings in 2nd edition. They were a playable race in 4th though.
oh nice creature this Pakubrazi, very disturbing, I’ll add them to the next update.
Thanks for the answer on the fiends, it makes sense then that there is no demon/devil and the like. I do like the concept of Rakshasa and will keep them in there though. People are free to simply ignore them if they feel like they don’t fit in their story.
So is there any monsters in particular from the Terrors of Athas/Terrors of the Dead Lands you would like to see converted? Don’t be shy on the list, I can include them in my next update.
At the moment I’m mostly going through backgrounds and spells (a lot of creatures have too many spells, I tried to restrain myself to fit more with the 5th edition but habits die hard, I’m at the core a 3.5 player).
Awesome work and please post updates! 5E conversions are time-consuming, thank you for contributing this to the community.
I am currently working on converting and blending together all of the Dark Sun 2.0 & 3.5 setting data into a single document. The Homebrewery is a fantastic tool and I encourage any other motivated individuals here to use it and help bring the burnt world into the limelight.