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The Dead Land

I’ve always liked the idea of Dark Sun’s “The Dead Land” and I’ve always seen it as an oversite that the 2E and 4E settings never expanded on it. Since 4E is still going strong, Wizards of the Coast can certainly surprise me and do an article or two on this part of Athas, but who knows. Luckily, a Dark Sun fan during the 2E days put together an overview of The Dead Land and posted it online (pdf). Given the lack of Dead Land material even today, I thought I would clean up the document and add some 4E notes. Once I started though, I realized it needed a bit more than a once-over. There was content and story in the original document that didn’t make sense and some sections I saw as unnecessary. So I edited the document. Continue reading “The Dead Land”

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Life-Shaping Resources

There was a type of “magic” that was introduced in the 2E Dark Sun world which hasn’t made a return in 4E, that being “life-shaping”. In its simplest form, life-shaping was a sort of biotechnology, neither magic nor psionics, but something wholly from the Blue Age of the world. It always seemed to me reminiscent of G.I. Joe’s Cobra-La.
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d20 Dice Shape vs. Perceived Performance

I hope everyone has seen the videos of Lou Zocchi discussing dice. In the videos he argues (quite well) that typical dice are manufactured in such a way that causes them to be misshapen causing both their overall shape to not be perfectly round and their edges to be improperly rounded. He (and others) have suggested that this misshaping causes the dice to be like an egg in that the die will more often roll with the sides of the “egg” displaying rather than the poles. So I decided to do some tests of my own to see if there was any weight to this idea.
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Ral Partha Dark Sun Mini Names: For the Record…

Back in the 90’s, and I’m sure even now, miniatures where often based on preexisting art, and in some cases there needed to be some liberty in defining what the mini was supposed to be based on the art. However, being what I would deem a “Dark Sun art historian” there are some legacy Dark Sun minis that were identified as one thing and the art showed the subject to clearly be something different. It has always struck me rather odd that the mini descriptions would miss the mark by such a large margin. So let’s look at the 4 minis that were named/packaged incorrectly in a post 18 years too late.
Continue reading “Ral Partha Dark Sun Mini Names: For the Record…”