D&D 2E Definitive Darksun

Zardnaar · Nov 28, 2023

So back in the day we played Datksun. But we only had the original boxed set. We didn't know about the events of the prism pentad or the rest of the DS material.

Ran in again using 3.5. Didn't feel right even with the rules from Athas.org.

So looking at running it again using original 2E stuff. I'm looking at ignoring the events of the Prism Pentad. If Kalak dies I want the PCs to do it or at least be involved/organize it.

Anyway printed out the player stuff from the original set plus Dune Trader and earth, air, fire, water.

In dead tree format only have Dragon Kings and revised boxed set.

Basic idea is use material from 1991-93. I only want to print off the player facing stuff. I'll be using the City State of Tyr, Ivory Triangle and Veiled Alliance pdfs but not planning on printing them. DM stiff I'll use at home, paraphrase it or print out just what I need.

Considering using optional rules like critical hits and some of the complete books eg Fighter and Tome of Magic.

Adventures will be more inspirational than used as written. Let's face it 2E Adventures espicially Darksun ones are not good.

So what's the best material you need? Context I also have to carry it (3 copies of 2E PHB, complete psionists+fighter books).

Thoughts?

Voadam · Nov 28, 2023

I really liked the first boxed set and the world it set up. I was quite disappointed the Prism Pentad took the promise of the setting and had novel protagonists take away the toppling of a number of Sorcerer Kings from the PCs, it seemed a natural mega adventure concept that would have been fun to run.

I got a lot of use out of Dragon Kings, but more as a general 2e sourcebook, my longtime wizard character loved protection from time and improved haste.

The big PC sourcebook you have not listed is The Will and the Way for Dark Sun specific psionics expansion. The psionics handbook stuff was enough for my limited Dark Sun purposes but everybody gets psionics in Dark Sun so having more variety is nice if you are fairly familiar with the base Complete Psionics material.

There are also PC sourcebooks for Dark Sun Elves and Thri Kreen which are a bit more niche as well as the Complete Gladiators Handbook which focuses more on arenas than PC options.

On the DM side I am big fan of the Dark Sun Monstrous Compendium appendices Terrors of the Desert and Terrors Beyond Tyr. The monster palette goes a big way to saying powerful psionic desert post apocalypse Dark Sun specific D&D.

I am not familiar with the modules so I cannot recommend or steer you away from any as resources.

Zardnaar · Nov 28, 2023

Voadam said:
I really liked the first boxed set and the world it set up. I was quite disappointed the Prism Pentad took the promise of the setting and had novel protagonists take away the toppling of a number of Sorcerer Kings from the PCs, it seemed a natural mega adventure concept that would have been fun to run.

I got a lot of use out of Dragon Kings, but more as a general 2e sourcebook, my longtime wizard character loved protection from time and improved haste.

The big PC sourcebook you have not listed is The Will and the Way for Dark Sun specific psionics expansion. The psionics handbook stuff was enough for my limited Dark Sun purposes but everybody gets psionics in Dark Sun so having more variety is nice if you are fairly familiar with the base Complete Psionics material.

There are also PC sourcebooks for Dark Sun Elves and Thri Kreen which are a bit more niche as well as the Complete Gladiators Handbook which focuses more on arenas than PC options.

On the DM side I am big fan of the Dark Sun Monstrous Compendium appendices Terrors of the Desert and Terrors Beyond Tyr. The monster palette goes a big way to saying powerful psionic desert post apocalypse Dark Sun specific D&D.

I am not familiar with the modules so I cannot recommend or steer you away from any as resources.

Think I've got all of that on pdf.

Kreen and Elves a bit niche. I'll see what people actually roll up if no one plays a psion it's DM material.

Enrico Poli1 · Nov 30, 2023

Besides the DS Boxed Set, the essentials for me are Dragon Kings; The Will & The Way; Earth, Air, Fire & Water; Dune Trader; Monstrous Compendium DS Appendix.
I also love Valley of Dust & Fire.
The only good adventures are Dragon's Crown and Merchant House of Amketch.

Mark Hope · Nov 30, 2023

My core stuff is the original boxed set plus pterrans and aarakocra, loads of kits, Dragon Kings, Dune Trader, Veiled Alliance, City-State of Tyr, Will and the Way, and other bits added for flavour. I use fighting styles from CFH, with more we homebrewed, made my own kits, added some non-core races (ssurrans, gith etc), and compiled all the spells and psionic stuff in one place. I also reworked psionics but I don't really like the end result and will be working on that again. I put my houserules and other stuff together in individual books - you can check them out here if you like:

Dark Sun 2e Hacks : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Hacks from the To Tame A Land stream for playing Dark Sun 2e

archive.org

Also, I ran the initial run of adventures and streamed them - if you can sit through watching other people playing D&D (weirdly, I can't

) you can catch those here:

AnderNGmx · Mar 17, 2024

Mark Hope said:
I put my houserules and other stuff together in individual books - you can check them out

thanks for these, i will read them this week

McXanaxinAlcohol · Jun 7, 2024

Hopefully this is not too off topic;

I am looking to bring my 2e group into the Darksun campaign setting in a month or so, probably using original adventures(DS/DSQ/DSM/DSE) and tweaking them as needed.
I vaguely remember having a some of my best AD&D experiences with the aforementioned content 24 years ago and after rereading some of the box set content; I am reminded why I found the Darksun setting so compelling.

That being said there is a bit of a problem. My current 2e group likes to be able to jump around campaigns settings using the same characters. We shift from Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Dragonlance, Ravenloft, Al-Qadim, Lankhmar, and Mystara with a bit of hand-waving homebrew saying the adventurers simply took a merchant vessel across the ocean to said campaign lands(or were sucked in to the mists for Ravenloft)~ Details of the voyage being fleshed out as needed. For the most part this works out mechanically

With Darksun I see a balance problem with this setup. In all other settings, Attribute roles are performed with a 3d6 rolls so the range is typically 3-18 racial bonuses set aside. In the Darksun's Athas; character Attribute rolls are 5d4 which results in a range of 5-20 though the effects seem to be stated to act the same, IE: 20 Strength in Athas is the same as 20 Strength in Forgotten Realms. Characters created in the Darksun campaign world Athas are inherently more gifted or stronger than anywhere else and we will undoubtedly have people from other campaign settings participating in Darksun adventures and vice versa.

I am looking for solutions to this balance problem. The Brute force approach would be to simply add +2 to all attributes when someone enters Athas from another world and any character leaving Athas suffers -2 to all attributes but this feels a little ham-fisted. I also considered having people who enter Athas gain like a 30% Experience Bonus while there and Darksun characters take a -25% EXP penalty when adventuring outside of Athas. There is always the option to do Nothing and just let the dice fall where they will.

Any thoughts on balancing this problem?

Voadam · Jun 7, 2024

McXanaxinAlcohol said:
Hopefully this is not too off topic;

I am looking to bring my 2e group into the Darksun campaign setting in a month or so, probably using original adventures(DS/DSQ/DSM/DSE) and tweaking them as needed.
I vaguely remember having a some of my best AD&D experiences with the aforementioned content 24 years ago and after rereading some of the box set content; I am reminded why I found the Darksun setting so compelling.

That being said there is a bit of a problem. My current 2e group likes to be able to jump around campaigns settings using the same characters. We shift from Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Dragonlance, Ravenloft, Al-Qadim, Lankhmar, and Mystara with a bit of hand-waving homebrew saying the adventurers simply took a merchant vessel across the ocean to said campaign lands(or were sucked in to the mists for Ravenloft)~ Details of the voyage being fleshed out as needed. For the most part this works out mechanically

With Darksun I see a balance problem with this setup. In all other settings, Attribute roles are performed with a 3d6 rolls so the range is typically 3-18 racial bonuses set aside. In the Darksun's Athas; character Attribute rolls are 5d4 which results in a range of 5-20 though the effects seem to be stated to act the same, IE: 20 Strength in Athas is the same as 20 Strength in Forgotten Realms. Characters created in the Darksun campaign world Athas are inherently more gifted or stronger than anywhere else and we will undoubtedly have people from other campaign settings participating in Darksun adventures and vice versa.

I am looking for solutions to this balance problem. The Brute force approach would be to simply add +2 to all attributes when someone enters Athas from another world and any character leaving Athas suffers -2 to all attributes but this feels a little ham-fisted. I also considered having people who enter Athas gain like a 30% Experience Bonus while there and Darksun characters take a -25% EXP penalty when adventuring outside of Athas. There is always the option to do Nothing and just let the dice fall where they will.

Any thoughts on balancing this problem?

When I had a player in my 2e Ravenloft game make a replacement gladiator character from Dark Sun I had him use the same stat generation method options as everybody else in the non-Dark Sun campaign so they would be on the same playing field. It worked fine and he was still a very strong tough warrior.

In Dark Sun high stats and starting at 3rd level and universal wild talents makes strong characters from the beginning despite things like the lack of metal weapons and armor. Outsiders coming in will generally have their gear and so their tanks will have much better ACs balanced against the higher stats and the extra psionics of the natives.

High stats are fairly mechanically impactful in D&D, but so is AC. High stats are less impactful if you are using the revised setting where they stretch the bonuses out so a DS 20 strength is less bonuses than a non-DS 18/00 strength.

AnderNGmx · Jun 8, 2024

McXanaxinAlcohol said:
That being said there is a bit of a problem. My current 2e group likes to be able to jump around campaigns settings using the same characters.

Any thoughts on balancing this problem?

Well, they will need lots of sunscreen, umbrellas and all sorts of other stuff. This will be tough. If they just change dimensions or planar travel it will not fit fully, unless you start weaving element after element until you have a huge framing device.

To keep it simple you can do the following.
You can have them reincarnate in a way or transmigrate their souls in a mini-adventure that will serve as a transition into bodies of Athasian player races. Before the transmigration they will learn athasian lore in the place in which this will take place.

AnderNGmx · Jun 8, 2024

Then you can have the dwarf become an athasian dwarf, humans to humans, elves to elves and so on.

You can make some exceptions for very strong humans to half-giants or dwarves and perhaps humans to muls if the players wish to play those races. Their stats will be adjusted by the racial adjustments of the athasian races and other racial traits will be added/removed.

When the adventure(s) ends they return to their own bodies in another setting and continue their journeys.

It will be fun.

D&D 2E Definitive Darksun

Zardnaar

Legend

Voadam

Legend

Zardnaar

Legend

Enrico Poli1

Adventurer

Mark Hope

Hero

Dark Sun 2e Hacks : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

AnderNGmx

Explorer

McXanaxinAlcohol

Purveyor of AD&D

Voadam

Legend

AnderNGmx

Explorer

AnderNGmx

Explorer

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