Sorry about the relative silence on the site; we’re still alive. I’ve been working on setting exactly what is going to go into the DS3 playtest document. There are a few debates that need to be resolved first, and then some heavy editing is required.
Here’s the deal with the playtest document: It’s not going to be “official” (that is, we’re not putting it through the vetting process with Wizards) for a while. Instead, we’re going to publish the document, and leave it alone for six months or so. In that time, we’ll be collecting your feedback. After six months (or so), we’ll unfreeze the document and consider any needed changes.
No, I’m not sure exactly when we’re going to release the playtest doc. It shouldn’t be too much longer, but life being what it is, we’ll see…
athas.org is going to be changing servers in a few weeks. The move is largely to deal with some technical / administrative issues that I’ll refrain from ranting about here. I’m going to have to rewrite the site, as Cold Fusion is not available – but the new server isn’t available just yet either. It’s not going to be as bad as that sounds, and I intend to make the transition as smooth as possible.
After much playtesting and arguing, we have taken most of the races either down a notch to make them even with the Player’s Handbook races, or made them ECL +1 and took them up a notch.
The Druid class has been revamped. It’s much closer to the PHB class now. Flavorwise, the ties to a specific guarded land have been removed from the class – unlike previous versions of Dark Sun, the Druid class is now untethered. A Prestige Class representing the scary-powerful-druid-as-a-gardener is being polished.
Also seeing an update is the Ranger class, featureing some simplifications and clarifications.
Rounding it out, the Rogue class has also been updated – normalized against the PHB with a few new 10th level options thrown in.
As you may have noticed, the “Tarandan” prestige class is being subsumed into the psion class, and replaced by a series of Tarandan feats. This week brings a number of gladiator and other non-psionic feats, as well as an expansion and revision of Tarandan feats.
The bard is back as a core class. After working the class out for a prestige class, we realized that we’d managed to make it pretty unique – and also more generalized than a prestige class is really supposed to be. So, a little stretching, et voila!
In other news, the Psychic Warrior gets a light facelift – new flavortext. Additionally, the Tarandan prestige class has been declared defunct.
The content of the site has been reorganized, so that everything can be found in one place, instead of being buried under six different URLs. All the monsters are now in /monsters, instead of /unofficial/monsters, /official/totdl and whatever future DSMC supplements we make … easier for me to maintain, and easier for you to find things. All your old links should still function, and they should take you to the Right Place.
After long argument, playtesting, and reviewing WotC’s growing body of information on ECL rules, we have made changes to a number of the races. Furthermore, a new player character race, long in the making, has finally appeared: the Jozhal.
