Sable Wyvern
THAC0 Defender
- Joined
- Jun 25, 2021
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Preamble and Introduction
So, this thread is to be an accounting of my Mythras Dark Sun game. As per my previous ACKS thread, this is not a story hour. I am not aiming to regale you with my amazing fiction and deep characterisations. Instead, I will talk about the events of the sessions, my thought process, the way the players reacted and other such things.I'm not sure I should be doing this, but everyone expects an actual play, apparently. Peer pressure is a bitch. I don't know how long I'm going to keep at it and this could die on its arse after only a few sessions. Don't get too invested: you have been warned.
That said, I managed to maintain my ACKS actual play for two years which, honestly, surprised me. Maybe I can manage something similar here.
The Path to Mythras Dark Sun
So, about ten years ago (I thought it was more like 14 years, but I just checked the original publication date on RQ6, and it couldn't be more than 12 years at most) I suddenly found myself wondering why I knew nothing at all about Glorantha. How had this major game setting never intruded on my life in any meaningful fashion? I recalled Runequest, and very strangely named adventures like "Apple Tree Lane" in MilSims mail order catalogues from the late 80s and early 90s, but that was really the extent of my knowledge.So, I started looking into it, and discovered Runequest 6. It looked really good, and Glorantha was huge. I ended up picking up Runequest 6, as well as the magnificent two-volume, system-free Guide to Glorantha, plus a few other classic RQ/Glorantha products. I was looking forward to The Design Mechanism's Runequest Glorantha.
Then, TDM lost the Runequest licence, and RQG was canned. Loz and Pete were extremely polite and professional about the whole thing, but I was not alone in feeling that Chaosium seemed to have treated them quite poorly. Their rules were really good, though. I'd come to RQ for Glorantha, but I realised I had no desire at all to chase Glorantha back to Chaosium. I stayed for Mythras.
Checking the TDM catalogue, I found Thennla, which was really cool. The coolest part, though, was Assabia. I now wanted a dark, Arabian game with genies and demons. Except, Assabian Rites did not exist yet. All good, I could wait.
So, I waited. And waited. And waited.
Eventually, it became clear there would be no Assabian Rites (I was wrong about that, but I was right enough). I started hunting around for another Persian or Arabian Nights style setting. Despite the widespread influence of stuff like Sinbad, Alladin and Ali Baba, I was surprised to discover almost no RPG settings were out there to provide an Arabian Nights experience. There were a few minor ones, and there was Al Qadim.
Fuck it, I decided to give Al Qadim a chance. Maybe there's something there I can use or adapt?
Al Qadim was, shockingly, really fucking good. I ended up hunting down copies of most of the boxed sets on eBay, and I did a reasonably comprehensive conversion to Mythras over a number of years.
Then, at some point, because working on Al Qadim had opened my eyes to the world of 2e-era AD&D settings, and the fact they might be a lot better and deeper than I had realised, I ended up deciding to take another look at Dark Sun.
I had held a Dark Sun boxed set in my hands in 1993, in a university book-store. It seemed pretty cool, and I thought seriously about buying it, grabbing a bunch of AD&D stuff, and giving it a go. I wonder how much my gaming life might have changed had I done that, instead of sticking with Rolemaster for another ten years? I didn't do that, though.
A year or two later, I had a chance to look at a friend's copy, and it still seemed cool(ish), but AD&D wasn't my thing, and I never looked deeply.
Well, it turns out Dark Sun is as at least as good as Al Qadim, and probably more suited to Mythras. Dark Sun is a bit rougher and smaller and shallower, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. A lot of what I find great about Dark Sun are vague concepts and ideas that provide an especially fertile ground for bigger ideas. (I should probably note there is a huge amount of depth in a lot of the prehistory, backstory and other material that came out after the original boxed set, but most of that is of little interest to me.)
Anyway, the point is that Dark Sun is awesome, and I again did a conversion to Mythras. Now, I don't think AD&D is a great fit for Al Qadim, but it might be arguable that Mythras isn't necessarily the best fit either. Dark Sun, though – Mythras fits it perfectly. So many ideas and concepts in the original material, that needed to be shoe-horned into AD&D, and when I go to apply them to Mythras, the perfect mechanic is already right there, ready to go.
I have wanted to run Mythras for 10 years. I have found the perfect setting for it, one I think is really damn cool, and I have a player who has wanted to play in the setting for decades. And so, here we are: Mythras Dark Sun.
We're still about four weeks away from session zero, and most of the players have just started to think in earnest about the sort of characters they want to play. I will probably have a bit more to say about my prep and thoughts for the campaign before that point.
At this stage, the expected PCs include:
- Thri-kreen ranger/psionicist (psychometabolist/psychoporter)
- Thri-kreen gladiator
- Human sorcerer (preserver), focusing on plant and animal spells.
- Human psionicist (clairsentient/telepath)
- Mul (probably fighter?)
- Unknown
Noteworthy links:
Mythras Dark Sun general thread.
How to Kick ACKS.