Dark Sun Redux

Cause the old post is a long way away…

Rich Baker did a live chat on the new Dark Sun today. Lots of interesting info, some of which speaks to our questions!

Most importantly: “Preserving is the default. If you just cast a spell and don’t say anything, you’re assumed to preserve. However all arcane characters have a new Defiling at-will power, which you can use when you use daily powers, at the cost of hurting your allies (and killing plants, of course).”

That’s very cool. Bonus damage available at a real price.

Also cool: no divine power. The divine power source doesn’t work there, cause no gods. That is a big change to 4e world design philosophy, and a good one.

[4e] Dark Sun

I’m honestly very surprised. Mainly because a year or so ago I tried and failed (“they tried and DIED!”) to make the old Dark Sun setting work with 4e. Defiling/Preserving and elemental “clerics” were the biggest challenge. It sounds like they may tie the Primal source into elements so I’d expect the elementalists to be worked in there with a new class or two (actually they may put some of the classes into PHB3 as each of the setting books has only had 1 class in it so far, right? I could see an Elementalist class in PHB3 and save Templars or something for DS), but I don’t know what it will mean for existing Primal classes like Druid or Shaman. Divine I’d imagine as being limited to worship of the Sorcerer Kings, which has pretty awesome implications. No idea how preserving and defiling will be handled, especially across the great variety of Arcane classes.

So I have an intense academic interest in seeing how they pull this together.   I know the developers have said they really wan to push the limits of what 4e is capable of in the next year with PHB3, so this is going to give them a chance to really shake it up a bit.

Anyway, neat. The guessing is over, let the impatient speculation begin!