Dark Sun: Feral Classes

The barbarian an the druid classes didn't required much changes. Just some renaming and tweaking for flavor sake.

The barbarian totems for example, since there are no wolves, bears and eagles in Athas, I had to look around for beasts with similar qualities. The Klar is literally a big nasty bear, so the choice was easy. The Dagorran (as presented in 4E) is a tracking beast that hunts in packs, so very much like the wolf, specially the benefits provided by the wolf totem. Finally the eagle was a hard one, I could not find a bird of prey besides the Kes'trekel, which is more a carrion bird. I really don't like it for a totem, but for now I'll leave at that—perhaps later I'll work a new totem from scratch based on an Athasian beast.

Regarding the druid, I gave the circles a little name tweak, and created new circle spells lists, more appropriate for Athas peculiar geography. I was tempted at first to use just four types of terrains: the Tablelands, the Sea of Silt, the Ringing Mountains and the Forest Ridge—I guess someone can try this simpler approach and use the desert, coast, mountain and forest spell lists, respectively. But I rather worked on the types of terrains presented in the 4E Dark Sun Campaign Setting book. Some of the spell lists may seem repetitive, because the differences are subtle. My three main focuses when creating the lists was theme, traveling, and survival in each particular terrain. Let me know what do you think.

Barbarian

Brutality is a way of life in Athas, as much in some of the cities as in the dwindling tribes of Athas’ harsh wastes. Nibenese sages claim that the potential for savagery is in every sentient race, and the history of Athas seems to support their claim.

Dark Sun on 5th Edition

I remember back in the late 90s when I flip to the back of my AD&D Dungen Master Guide. There was this list of campaigns, with cool logos an tiny covers of material on the side page. There they were all of the now classics, Mystara, Forgotten Realms, Ravenloft, Planescape and Dragonlange. But from all the descriptions this one catched my imagination like no other:

The Dark Sun world is the AD&D game's most savage game setting—a desert realm scorched by a relentless sun, blasted by the destructive magic of generations of evil wizards. It is a land of evil sorcerer-kings and powerful psionincists who command astounding mental powers. In this wild and brutal landscape, a single adventurer can alter the course of history and forever change the world. One of those heroes could be yours!

Most savage game setting! I wanted it so bad. Unfortunately, back in the day getting D&D material in my country (Mexico) was quite hard. Specially in my home town. When I finally got a chance to visit a gaming store in Mexico City, I had to suck it up and buy the only box they had, Forgotten Realms.

Ever since the Dark Sun setting it's a thorn in my side. Now the material is available as PDF in dndclassics.com but my players and I had stopped playing 2E long since, 3E didn't see any Dark Sun official books, and even though there was a Campaign Setting book for 4E, the fourth wasn't my edition at all.

Now I'm back playing 5th Edition. And as I said in my last post, there's a psionics playtest for 5E. Thus and the fact that I'm about to finish my Rise of Tiamat game (All players must die!) I've decided to take that thorn out and play a Dark Sun campaign, even if that means making a whole bunch of house rules.

Starting with the house rules, I present to you my take on the wizards of Athas. I tried to capture the feeling of careful casting and mastery of the Preserver vs reckless casting and quicker advancement of the Defiler. I hope you like it! (Italics are text taken from the original boxed set)

Athasian Wizard

A wizard is able to capture and master magical energies. However, in Dark Sun, magic is irrevocably linked to the environment. The casting of magical spells and the enchantment of magical items always draws energy directly from the living ecology in the vicinity, destroying the life there. Wizards can choose two paths toward mastery of magical energy.

"It's a trap!" Finding traps in D&D 5E

My first time as a player, in the not so new D&D 5th Edition, I played my favorite class (of course): a Rogue. Back then, I hadn't read thoroughly the PHB so I made the wrong assumption, by reading the skills list, that my Rogue will be needing Intelligence (Investigation) to look for traps. Imagine my surprise when I tried to look for them and my DM tells me to roll Perception! We argued a little, but at the end I conceded (because you don't want to piss-off your DM =P), and ask him to let me change my character, so that I may have proficiency in Perception instead of Investigation. He agreed.

And that was it. I was going to just accept that now you look for traps with Perception. Even when it felt weird, because (for me), when you're looking for traps... well, you are actively looking for them, right? For me that's "investigating", and it kind of fits the Intelligence stat because you're supposed to know what you are looking for. I mean, when I think about it, if me (the actual real me) was supposed to be in a dark dungeon looking for traps, I will die on the first step because I have absolutely no clue what a trap should look like. It's a know how, knowledge, ergo Intelligence. I consider Perception (and Wisdom) a more intuitive thing, instincts and senses are involved. But anyways, as I said, I was accepting the new system as is. Until running The Rise of Tiamat adventure!

Perception and/or Investigation?

So here I was reading my beautiful new module, when I found out —in the Tomb of Diderius section— that a player can make a Wisdom (Perception) check DC 24 or an Intelligence (Investigation) check DC 18 to find a plate that is part of a trap, but not the trigger. The trigger itself was somewhere else and it required a successful Wisdom (Perception) check DC 22 (I'm not including any details about the actual trap to avoid any spoilers). Now, hold on a second! Why can a character find part of the trap with either Wisdom (Perception) or Intelligence (Investigation)? And why is way easier to do so with the latter? Alright —I said to myself— the actual trap still requires Wisdom (Perception) check to find, let's stick to that. So I kept reading, and three pages later I found another trap, that can be detected with a successful Intelligence (Investigation) check DC 15! What!?