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.