Numeria Fallen Stars- Adapting to Dark Sun

See my Dungeon Denizens post for what I am trying to with these posts.

For those unfamiliar wit Numeria it was a worn torn, battle scarred country filled barbarians and giants, etc… then a giant space ship crashed on it. So it’s a post-apocalyptic land of barbarians and high technology.

THUNDARRRRRRR THE BARBARIAN!

Ahem.

I actually found comparatively little in this one. Unless you decide to have a space ship crash land on Athas (which contradicts lore in so many ways), translating the high tech stuff and history of the region to make them even remotely Athasian would be way too much work to be worthwhile.

Not to say it’s useless. From a general rules stand points they’ve got some interesting rules on messing with players with strange traps, fluids, alchemy, etc that could be repurposed.

Zhen worms- A pretty weak monster but has interesting setting applications. Harvest for alchemical ingredients, etc.
Targotha- huge freaky monster that swims in tar and oil. Would be a cool way to have a sea monster with no water.
Bloodrush- blood sucking tumble weeds. There are rules for how they can be ingredients and how they are harvested by communities. Athasian farmers raising blood sucking killers for the euphoric tea they can provide…
Mutant template- Simple but awesome template. Dark Sun is a game where you can introduce monsters with bonus abilities and penalties all the time as simple flavor. This would give them some more game ramifications.

Plain of Ten Thousand Swords- This is a haunted battlefield. A battle involving thousands ended in a curse, trapping the souls of all the warriors in their weapon. All the weapons are now enchanted. A person takes the blade, fulfills the quest of the warrior spirit and then owns the weapon. Pretty awesome. To make it Athasian, I would recommend something post Cleansing Wars, or towards the end. That way you can make it Athasian weapons and materials… rather than 10,000 magical STEEL swords.

Battle of Greyshot- Huge battle between humans and giants. A human cairn built on top of a giant’s cairn. Area still littered with additional cairns and giant weapons. The leader of the giants is a unique undead trapped within the giant’s cairn. He also has an artifact which gives him control over giants. This fits easily into Athas, and offers lots of possible story ideas. I imagine Dregoth would want to keep the undead giant sealed, but that artifact…

I would say that is about it. Big parts of it are just incompatible with Dark Sun. However, the things that fit, work really well.

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Do Tome of Horrors. There is a 3.5 version.

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Not really contradicting lore… there is a sub-section of Athas fans which contend that lifeshaping was science based genetic manipulation from the beginning. Also, halflings fit more easily into tight starship quarters.

Thus Athas may have been a colony. And the explosion of races the much delayed opening of the robotic genetic archives. And the reason why no one can find a life womb? The only functioning ones left are inside a starship at the bottom of the silt sea, all the rest broke down with time. Certain halflings actually managed to inherit some of the genetic changes necessary to becoming a lifeshaping master, and thus preserved it far beyond the life expectancy of the life wombs.


Plus, the Clone spell was introduced to D&D via a starship origin in the first place; some wizards studied the remains and the items recovered from the starship (in Blackmoor on Oerth) and developed the clone spell based on the deciphered information.

So it is plausible. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, after all. =D

( The F.S.S Beagle, exploratory vessel of the Galactic Federation - Captain Bork Riesling, commanding; was the crashed starship, if anyone was curious.)

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