The Cheating Bastard's Dark Sun Shortcuts For Lindwyrm And Similar

[taichara]

So you want a Dark Sun-esque setting of your own, eh?

At the minimum concept, for an Athas-like sword-and-sorcery post-apocalyptic (how many hyphens are we gonna use here) world, you need:

- a hellblasted desert, courtesy of the apocalypse

-> with a scattering of Weird or Extra Hazardous (or Both) Geographies

- water rules

- psionics
- using magic is more difficult, destructive, kind of sucks, and gets you In Deep Trouble like as not
- despotic city-states with themes to fight and free the people of
- one Walking Apocalypse kaiju-type monster or entity
- non-metal weapon rules if you insist and you hate yourself


Let’s make some inspirational tables and rules-lets to cover a lot of these, shall we?


Rolling Up A Despotic City-State
(you want 1d6+2 of these)

d8	Despot’s Quirk	Theme	Known For
01.	random rages	survival of the fittest	war-psions
02.	random purges	austerity	mysterious water source
03.	super-surveillance	flamboyance	construct army
04.	worshiped	silence	undead army
05.	concerningly “considerate”	the sun	undead nobility
06.	iron control	prestation	intricate craft
07.	whim and foppery	sacrifice	magic hunters
08.	leads (fearful) worship	skullduggery	mysterious food source

Fighting Us Some Despots

Adventures in a not!Athas are as likely – or more likely – to involve fucking with the despots and their cronies as anything else. Shit sucks; make it suck less. Ambushing supply trains, disrupting despotic ceremonies, teaching or guarding secret education classes, planting or supplying or transporting secret gardens, freeing the enslaved, sabotaging blood-gardens, finding new wells; the list goes on.

d8	Who Gathers Against The Despots?	How?
01.	emancipators and freed slaves	in dreams
02.	rogue horticulturalists	coded petroglyphs
03.	artisans and artists	stylized dance
04.	restoration spellcasters	psychic messages
05.	a freedom ethos in the arenas	in person, coded
06.	followers of a new faith	ciphered messages
07.	merchants and traders	coloured patterns
08.	secret scholars and self-made ruiners	messenger beasts

Some Weird &/Or Hazardous Geographies
(you want 1d3+1 of these, at least)

Over all, the setting can be assumed to be a patchwork hellscape of sand dunes, feeble oases, broken ruins, stony expanses, and so forth. But it helps to have a smattering of oddities --

01. The Razor Cliffs
02. The Bone Drifts
03. The Sea Of Dust
04. The Radiant Dunes
05. The Fallen Moon
06. The Cold Mountain(s)
07. The Phantom Plateau
08. The Rivers Of Salt
09. The Stone Forest
10. The Razordust
11. The Glasslands
12. The Magma Seas



The Ruins Of The World
(you want 1d2+1, perhaps)

What traces remain of what cam before the apocalypse, though?

The ruins of the world are

01. corrodied metal, sharp and militaristic
02. smooth stone, cyclopean, sigil-etched
03. dead wood and twisted roots and strange green stain
04. shattered ripples of glass towers
05. only recorded in palm-sized crystalline ovoids
06. dizzying inscriptions on thin glassy leaves
07. gargantuan forms of bone and ivory
08. glazed polychrome and studded with dead seeds


The Walking Apocalypse

Because having some terrible entity even the despots fear and placate makes things spicy!

d8	It is	It demands	It was
01.	The Beast	magic	land avatar
02.	The Corpse	slaves	ascended despot
03.	The Jackal	corpses	degenerated despot
04.	The Dragon	crops	mad sorcerer
05.	The Serpent	artworks	ascended animal
06.	The Worm	souls	fallen angel
07.	The Hunter	minds	ancient construct
08.	The Vulture	psionics	abandoned godling

Rules and Bits

* Magic is the death of the world

- all spells require 1 hp/lvl of effect to cast (above and beyond “standard” costs, slots etc)
- dodge the hp tax by draining life from the land, 3’ radius/lvl cast

-> drain even more to boost your casting level higher

- the drained terrain has everything growing on it die promptly and terribly and dustily

- or, take 1 action/casting lvl to prepare spell and slowwwly draw power safely

* Everyone gets a psionic ability, 1 hp/use cost

- make a “common talents” table to roll on, or just live dangerously)

-> this is in addition to any psionic ability from kith or class

* If you want metal weapons to be special
Don’t make metal/various nonmetals a sea of stat differences, it’s a pain. Instead:

- metal weapons grant +1 to hit and stage up one damage die
- metal armour grants +2 to the armour’s AC but doubles water needs

Random breakages also suck and are a pain. If you want more fragile non-metal gear, give them a number of usages before breaking/uselessness. This also reflects retouching stone, sharpening bone or horn, etc.

* Water.
Lindwyrm already has a note on food. To that, add:

- you require one “water ration”/day, half if inactive
- fail to have water ration, Save or -2 from all rolls, daily, cumulative

- dead after 1d3+2 days of no water, sorry man

A few classes? Sure, why not --

Gladiator: d8 HD. Armour: Any. Weapon: d8
- Living Weapon: d6 for unarmed attacks; cause Bleed 2, # day equal to lvl +1
- Fearsome Fame: Rally allies/audience (+2 next action) or force ML test at -2, 2 daily/lvl

Praetor: d6 HD. Armour: light, med. Weapon: d4
- Despotic Magic: cast spells via despot’s gift (no extra hp cost), 1 “slot”/2 lvls
- Law: +2/lvl to tests of bureaucracy, law, espionage; can command populace in home city-states

Trader: d6 HD. Armour: light, med. Weapon: d6
- Canny: +1/lvl on tests involving haggling, hiring, or bureaucracy; +2/lvl to survival and poison Saves.
- Contacts: On entering a community, can locate a place to stay and 1 (+1/lvl) sources of info, specific good or rumours. +2 to hireling ML.