Created by @JesseHeinig The Sand Marches presents a complete campaign setting for DARK SUN, using the 2nd edition AD&D rules. Fight to survive the barren wastes far from the city-states, explore the deserts and salt flats, wrest lost treasures from ancient ruins and monster-haunted caves, build and protect your own settlement. As a West Marches campaign, this setting is designed for play by groups with an ad hoc organization, but it can also serve as the foundation of a linear saga. This campaign includes: An overland hex map for a remote area of the Tablelands, Compiled guides for overland travel, survival, weather, and random encounters, all drawn from official 2nd edition AD&D sources, Fully keyed encounters of various difficulties, to give your players several regions to explore and challenge, Semi-random map placement to ensure that even players who’ve played the campaign before aren’t always going to see the same things in the same locations, A random dungeon generator with geomorphs and stock tables, so that you can quickly build ruins in the sand, New monsters, treasures, and psionic powers, A mysterious story to change the course of Athas for high level gameplay, Twenty pre-generated characters
Wow! What a huge job! I’ll read it carefully before commenting on the content, but I’m already very grateful to everyone who participated in sharing it with us.
What do you envision as a good lead-in/introduction to the campaign and region? In other words why specifically would you imagine a group of PCs would choose to stake out the Southern Wastes broadly and this settlement specifically? Should the players be told that there are rumors of treasure filled ruins in the region or would it be better to keep the focus on survival early on by casting the players as refugees similar to the various NPC inhabitants of the settlement, maybe even lead things off with some sort of mass escape from a slave caravan or silt skimmer or some such?
I’m mostly considering how to pitch the campaign, particularly for players that are more used to a more narrative lead-in to a campaign
My usual vague handwave is that each player decides why they are persona non grata up in the more central Tablelands. Maybe you murdered a templar, or you seduced a noble’s wife, or you were falsely accused of heresy against a sorcerer-monarch. It’s a little bit of flavor, and you can encourage players to discuss it as a group in case they want to come up with some kind of shared disaster (maybe they all escaped from a round-up, or they were all part of a small trade house that was crushed by its enemies, or they were all accused by a powerful and corrupt templar and fled before they could be killed).
Once the PCs gain several levels, there’s not much to stop them from going back north, as long as they are careful. After Name level, it takes so much experience to gain further levels that if you want a long-running campaign you need other places for them to go, anyway. Plus, if a PC has a backstory with an antagonist, they may enjoy getting a chance to come back and give their enemy a comeuppance.
At the outset, the PCs are assumed to have fled into the desert with a small group of refugees, and their earliest gameplay is just about finding enough food and water to survive. Once they establish that they have a spot where they can settle and use as a central location for exploring, they need to gather resources to build it up. That means materials, extra food, and treasures. The regular D&D dungeon-style adventures come in here as PCs are hunting around for better weapons and armor, tools, maybe even magic or psionic items. Ideally, for the low levels they should always be a little “hungry” metaphorically—chasing the next upgrade to make their lives a bit easier.
Fantastic resource. I admire all the hard work that went into putting this adventure together. My gaming group has been talking about running Dark Sun for years, since we aren’t able to game regularly during the summer, this adventure inspired me to start a play-by-post narrative game based on the materials.
I’ve run into a question about Settlement Resources that is unclear. Hoping someone can provide clarity.
Starting on page 13, resources like food & water, materials, and security are rated from None to High.
Then food & water and materials indicate that 100 lbs brought back from excursions is equal to 1 unit. A unit of Security isn’t described.
Finally on page 22, security project gain units of security.
Is the intent that gaining a unit of a resource, also increases the level of the resource? For example, the characters bring back 100lbs of rations from their excursions, does that raise the settlements food & water level from none to low. Then later they spend a unit of food & water on the Train a Militia project. Does the settlement level of food & water drop from low to none, and the Security level increase from none to low?
The intent is that, at low levels at the start of the campaign, your characters are always lean on supplies and trying to bring back anything of use. This could be carcasses from creatures that they kill, timber from the desiccated wood or from a cactus stand, or even treasure from a random encounter (large scorpions have a treasure type).
You can increase your settlement’s ratings by bringing back certain things, or by completing projects. As you do projects you’ll spend some things to raise other things. There is a bit of strategy to this, because you can only improve Security with projects, and it’s harder to improve your Food & Water rating because leftover food is consumed, while your Materials go into a stockpile and when you accumulate enough, your Material rating increases.
If your players are very lucky they may encounter something that gives them a lot of Food or Materials at the outset, or during a long expedition. Usually, they’ll have to complete several expeditions to get enough stuff, and then run a project to improve the settlement.
Here’s an example of how this might go:
Team organizes to go find something so they don’t die of starvation or thirst
They head into the desert and use the Looking for Trouble rules to have an encounter
Team fights, say, a small group of goraks. They butcher the carcasses and wind up with 14 lbs. of food and 14 lbs. of materials (bone, hide, sinew)
Team forgot to bring salt so they can’t preserve the meat. They eat some, keep exploring, lose half of the meat to spoilage, and eat the rest the next day.
Team has a lucky roll and runs into the desiccated wood. They hack up the trees but they don’t have enough carrying capacity to carry all 250 lbs. of wood. They manage to carry 100 lbs. of it.
Team heads back home. En route they run into a cactus stand and they get 6 lbs. of food.
Upon arrival, their excess food is used up to help feed the community.
They deposit the materials that they brought back. 100 lbs. of materials → Materials from None to Low. The extra 14 lbs. of materials goes into the stockpile and is saved (unlike food, which is used up).
One of the team members uses downtime to run a project: Dig a Well. They use up one level of Materials. Their Material goes Low → None again, so they have no spare materials, but their Food & Water goes None → Low. They now start subsequent expeditions with a small amount of Food & Water.
In general, PCs should quickly realize that bringing back materials is their best bet early on, because they can use that to build all kinds of things, and they can store the unused materials. Food & Water is only useful if they bring back a large amount (100 lbs.) and raise the settlement rating, otherwise it’s just going to get used up (but at least they have something to eat while adventuring). To gain Security, they have to run projects that cost them Food & Water or Materials, so that is something that comes later.
Remember:
If your Security rating is None, then everyone starts with 1d6 points of damage at the start of an expedition, due to incidental environmental damage.
It takes 8 oz. (half a pound) of salt to preserve 1 lb. of meat, or half that amount (a quarter pound) if you have Cooking proficiency. If you don’t preserve meat that you get from creatures that you kill in the desert, then half of it spoils every day that you’re out. You can buy salt as part of your starting equipment, as it’s useful in food preservation but you can’t just eat it by itself.
For PCs who didn’t take useful nonweapon proficiencies for building up the settlement, the earliest projects they probably want to complete are Dig a Well and Dig a Protective Ditch (or Build a Palisade, if you have a fighter). Having some Food & Water helps you get a good start on expeditions, while having Security prevents you from starting with incidental damage and lets you get NPC hirelings.
Very cool adventure, didn’t realize it was in 2e in the Tower lol, that’s badass! Another campaign to add to my list of “cool shit I gotta run”
If you mean the Pristine Tower dev group, technically, I’m not part of that. Athas.org was kind enough to allow me publish through them and thus to use the fan license. The Sand Marches was a personal passion project; I wrote all of it, and hired artists and an editrix.
I used 2e because I wanted the project to feel like something you could imagine seeing on the shelf of a game store in 1994, and I didn’t want to wade into the many and varied 5e versions of the setting.
