No quibbles, just slightly-tangential commentary inspired by a line towards the end:
To be honest, out of the ones that have been published/I have read Freedom is the only meta-plot advancing adventure that I enjoy. To me it makes sense that somewhere in the world there should be at least one place where the PCs can have adventures without running afoul of the sorcerer kings. (Though I know there are those who'd prefer, and I could also run/play in a game where the city is still sorcerer king controlled and the PCs are constantly trying to keep a low profile.)
That said, it probably would have been better to include the information on a free Tyr in the boxed set, rather than having people who missed DS1 be confused when they picked up anything else and saw mention of a free Tyr.
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I think the real end of Dark Sun for me was Black Spine. You could argue that it was a laudable effort to bring DS into the more mainstream Planescape/Spelljammer interconnected worlds bit, but the whole bit about Githyanki mind-bombs...ugh.
That said, it probably would have been better to include the information on a free Tyr in the boxed set, rather than having people who missed DS1 be confused when they picked up anything else and saw mention of a free Tyr.
Sounds like they should have included the 'Freedom' adventure in the boxed set, actually. That would have been an interesting thing to do.
I never got to play in the Dark Sun world, but it keeps sounding interesting...
Thank you for this review; I've read so many good things about DS but have never managed to get around to reading it myself.
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I think I am in the minority but I always preferred the Revised edition of Dark Sun. The rules were tweaked a bit more. They background info was more complete, since it included information from several of the novels that had been published by that point. And ti came with an awesome cloth map.
As far as the flip book adventures in Dark Sun went, I never liked them. The art never was all that good in them(its wasn't the great Brom art that was in the books) and players had a habit of always flipping through them to see what might be coming up.
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The revised setting was great by itself, but compared to the ruthless despair of the original was lacking. basically, in the original evey 'civilized' place was under the yoke of the sorceror-kings. There wasalso a lotfospace of gm's to do their own stuff.
In revised, many kings were dead/killed, and their cities were either replaced or conquered by someone. Plus, it kind of lessened the mystiquer of the sorceror-kings, who were supposed to be invulnerable to nearly anything.Also, they killed of borys the dragon, who was cool.
Ofcourse, you could always conbine both box sets (they are very similar anyway, and the rules are almost the same with only a few tweaks; revised also comes with psionic rules) and play the game you want.
The original also had the templar class, which they did not include in revised for some stupid reason.
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