Just in case you missed it we've added Blood Sand Arena to the products catalog along with a link to download it from Wizards of the Coast
The fires of the crimson sun burn hot as your group of vagabonds band together to face intrigue, betrayal, and the beasts of Bloodsand Arena. Can your group survive and earn glory in the world of Dark Sun?
This Dungeons & Dragons adventure folio, created for Free RPG Day 2010, previews the Dark Sun setting, available in August 2010. Bloodsand Arena is designed for 1st-level characters and contains two short adventures, a double-sided poster map of key encounter areas, and a pack of six pre-generated D&D characters.
Wizards of the Coast has
allowed Baldman Games to distribute their Ashes of Athas convention games to the non-convention crowd. You'll be able to sign up to receive the chapters over at Baldman's site.
Some important information from their announcements page:
- No one (not even us) can host the adventure files anywhere.
- Only the admins and Baldman Games can provide adventures.
- When you e-mail us (or send us a message via these forums), we will send you adventures, one chapter at a time.
- When contacting us, please include your e-mail so we can send you the files and the chapter(s) you need.
- You can run those adventures, or if you are a convention organizer, you can provide them to your DMs for use at the convention.
- You cannot otherwise redistribute or share or post the files anywhere. If you do, this will likely result in Ashes of Athas distribution being closed down!
- Adventures you received from us can be run anywhere you please (home play, stores, conventions, desert caravans...). You can run them multiple times - whenever you please.
- When you request adventures we will provide a link to pregens, maps, and campaign rules.
I suspect that, by having everyone request directly from the source, Wizards is looking to easily gauge the interest in the game; this is a good thing.
Besides D&D & Pathfinder, Dungeon World seems to have gained some traction as a rules set for Dark Sun. You can find Travis Stout's excellent writeup of Dark Sun Classes for Dungeon World, there's also some equipment and useful tags such as Fragile for weapons.
Geneome talks about using Dark Sun with Dungeon World in : Dungeon World Defiling
Ritorix talks about his Green Age of Athas setting design for his PBP Dark Sun Dungeon World game.
On a non Dungeon World, but still Dark Sun note, G+ User Svebor Midzic found a cool article about ancient shark tooth swords that have a definite Dark Sun feel in the Dark Sun G+ Community.
Here's a conversion of the A Little Knowledge intro adventure included in the original 2e Dark Sun boxed set, converted to 3e.
A Little Knowledge 3e Adventure(offsite)
Today on the Going Last podcast, blogger and Ashes of Athas OP author/admin, Teos announced that the complete Ashes of Athas campaign will be available for home play.
Listen to episode 94 of Going Last at about the 52 minute mark for details.
As mentioned in the podcast you can also watch Teos talk to Mike Shea of Sly Floursh in their Looking Back on Dark Sun Organized Play Campaign video on Mike's youtube page.
Rare and mythical even in the Green Age, the Athasian Unicorn survives today only in the foothills and Scrublands South of Kurn.
Athasian Unicorn
Sheena and Kazaruth walked towards each other on the barren land of the Salt Flats. Each could see the other, but neither's face showed any recognition of the other. Both of them had been instructed by their Elemental Lords to travel through the Salt Flats. Neither of the inexperienced priests knew why, but did as they were instructed.
Elemental spells for your 2nd edition AD&D Dark Sun game.
Part 23 of Lady of Shadows is up.
This was not going as I had planned.
“As you did not arrive with an army, might I assume you are not here to arrest my nephew?” Lord Talib’s voice was so soft as to be almost a whisper. His pale eyes seemed to look past me, and I wondered if perhaps he were blind.
After talking with some of the other staff at athas.org, I've decided to close the arena.
The code for the arena is based on a dead forum project; even when it was alive, the hacks that I made to enable single signon made things very difficult to keep up to date. Because of this, it's become a drain on server resources, and has actually made it more difficult to keep other aspects of the site up to date.
Considering that the traffic on the arena numbers in the single digit posts-per-month range, I think it's best put into mothballs.
While I'm going to be removing the site soon, I will be saving the database; if there's a demand for it, I'll see about setting up a read-only archive of the site.
Once the arena is removed, I'll be undertaking some infrastructure modernization efforts -- Some visible, some behind the scenes. I'll talk more about that later.
This month's Dragon magazine is live today:
Let the tarrasque run roughshod over your campaign. Save the town of Hochoch in the Grand Duchy of Geoff. Deck the halls with wondrous tapestries. Build fantastic inns and taverns from scratch. PLUS: The return of the decapus, the magen, the rhagodessa, and the thoul. We proudly present for your gaming pleasure, Dragon 418.
Rodney Thompson's Eye on Dark Sun is titled The Widow's Spirit, and features plot hooks relating to the bitter spirit of an executed templar-wife of Nibenay.
As usual, all Dragon content requires a DDI subscription.
