Dark Sun: Everything Wants to Kill You

AUDIO VERSION (not home so quality is lesser than usual, sorry about that)

I'd been looking for some cool fantasy setting book to absorb like a sponge and regurgitate to my players in half-remembered bursts of vivid daydreaming. Dark Sun is a vibe.

 

For the uninitiated, Dark Sun is a TSR AD&D 2nd Ed. era setting which does an OSR before the OSR.
I'm talking science-fantasy, planetary romance, post-apocalypse, desertpunk, survival horror D&D.
You have this desert world (sandy wastes, rocky badlands, sea of silt, rare oases) that's burning hot all day and freezing cold in the night, no seasons, just implacable heat and wind and treacherous terrain and wherever there's life, everything from the bushes and cacti to the (giant) insects and beasts (mostly reptiles) want to murder you. Then you have City-States with Sorcerer-Kings that act like they're Gods (notably absent from the setting are actual gods, by the way), slaves and gladiatorial fights are ubiquitous, you've got scheming nobles, vicious merchants, and "templars" who are the military elite of the Sorcerer-Kings as well as most of the administrators and city officials doing their bidding. You have elf nomads who dual-class as merchants and raiders, half-giants, half-dwarfs, thri-kreens aka bug people, cannibal halflings (basically your Brave Savage racist, colonialist trope - personally I made them more feral, less hippie-like, but they also openly trade with other cultures and aren't as insular or averse to technology, as well as making ritual cannibalism a thing that everybody does for X or Y reason). Oh and dwarves with specific interests that build entire communities and have generations after generations of their own going after That One Big Life Project. When they're not slaves - seems like most half-giants, half-dwarves, thri-kreen, halflings or even elves found in human-centric areas like City-States tend to end up as slaves. The book tiptoes around it, I see it as an opportunity. Humans of Athas are pretty racist, overall. Sexism is magically absent, no mention of whores or courtesans either because 2nd Ed. TSR is for Christian Moms. I put them back in. If we have slaves, then we have sex slaves, harems for Sorcerer-Kings, and the occasional successful luxury dancer-courtesan-companion who manages to make it. There's ONE dragon, and it's magic is so powerful it sucks the life right out of every living thing around it when it casts a spell, and it has psychic powers. There's also a metaplot which I don't care about. The supplements may be interesting but I like the broad overview given by the boxed set only and will avoid ruining the setting's appeal by learning all of its CANON secrets. The introductory adventure is interesting, although very railroady and I am in the process of turning it into a more functional hexcrawl area for a Wilderness focused sort of approach.

I ran two, two hours each, two PCs each, sessions in the setting so far, after reading the boxed set and the introductory adventure. First session used Into the Odd, second session was ran in FKR fashion with what I'm calling Dead Serious (cause Burlesque Macabre sounded too pretentious). I made the switch to a simpler system because as surprising as it may sound to some of you, I've reached a point where even ItO feels crunchy to me. Actually no, the issue isn't exactly that: rather, it's that as Patrick Stuart aptly pointed out on tweeter when he did a nightly read-through of Electric Bastionland, it's a game for the Interpersonal. You have a small group of Characters doing stuff. It works great at this scale. For a more wargamey approach with a ton of entities involved in skirmishes and stuff, if you're like me and don't want to abstract things like unit numbers or equipment and whatnot, a simpler set of procedures may work better. Anyways, I set x-in-6 chance for things based on context and that's all of the baseline rules. I do use some more detailed stuff for SURPRISE (d6 vs d6, beat by 3+ to Ambush/Avoid), INITIATIVE (d6 vs d6, high roll goes first then take turns, tie = simultaneous initiative with a chance for simultaneous kills on both sides), HIT LOCATION (1-2 leg, 3 torso, 4-5 arm, 6 head) and don't really record HP, instead recording injuries directly: ATTACK QUALITY (1 Miss, 2 Block/Dodge, 3-4 Injury, 5 Downed (Maimed), 6 Downed (Killed)). No XP, no levels, no classes (but characters are defined by their Background which essentially a fancy word for Class - chargen is near-instantaneous, just need a name, pronouns, background. Equipment is easy to do - carrying more than one bulky item hinders you in most activities, you also get ten inventory slots to carry stuff which I may or may not change later. Gotta do a Google Sheets for the Party and Character Sheets, which I like to keep grouped. Each player gets a stable of 3~ PCs to pick from, the others are treated as NPCs when relevant (morale, loyalty) and may become PCs when useful (for example in this session the Thri-Kreen player lost his translator so he took control of the halfling for social situations until they find an interpret so his favorite character can communicate). 

This is a Wagon, it is being tracted by two Mekillots. This particular one belonged to slavers, the property of which included the PCs. The opening of the adventure involves attempting and failing to break free, then ELVES ATTACK and set fire to the wagon but leave slaves alone, then you're set free into the desert to wander, but you don't really get any way to orient yourself so you wander randomly and stumble upon prepared encounters, which are mostly a sampling of the local flora and fauna's deviousness and lethality. I tried running it straight which resulted in the first 20-30 minutes of our first session being Not So Good - I thought the players could easily figure out ways to proactively make stuff happen, but with no gear and little prospects they kind of just have to follow what's setup. Sucks but the lesson I learned is: you should start the adventure after the PCs got freed, grabbed a bit of equipment and have them immediately stumble upon a hand drawn map and show them the area and some points of interests, to make it a sandbox from the get-go.
Anyways they drank some poisonous water after getting attacked by vampiric bushes, ate some poisonous catcus, cut down tree-like cacti for their delicious watery meat, safely avoided an encounter with a GAJ (PSIONIC HORROR), stole the wax ball full of water from a giant wasp as it was fighting bird-men, and generally had a good, if survival-oriented, time in the first session.

Second session we tried the new rules so after they decided to go back to the sandy dunes (they had landed in some maze-like canyons during the first session), they found other escaped slaves and together, laid an ambush and attacked some surviving slavers from the ELF ATTACK. I ran it pretty freeform but in some detail, it lasted probably 30 minutes but we had a blast, lots of brutal violence which our young adult brains find delicious, it felt gritty, dangerous, heavy on consequences, and absolutely anti-heroic. The other hour and a half was spent dealing with the survivors and the dying, abandoning a PC to be eaten by a desert lion to avoid another fight as everyone was injured (RIP Bogra the Gladiator, Session 1 - Session 2), and talking about using the halfling as a projectile. Also some handwaved socializing at a dwarf village the party reached as we had to wrap things up. PCs got a briefing and a job to do now: the ELVES have poisoned the OASIS and KIDNAPPED ITS DRUID to mess with the DWARVES because said dwarves were coerced into lending their oasis and water to a legion from a nearby city-state (Urik) - the elves don't care about the context, only that the dwarves helped their enemy, and so are trying to exterminate them. The dwarven elder thus asked the party to recover the druid, although one wonders how the village will survive the 300 or so elven raiders in the long-run.