SVGames
So, for those that havn’t heard, you can pick up the ESDs worldwide. That’s right, no more international restrictions! SVGames is the new distributor for all of WotCs ESDs, including the complete collection of Dark Sun ESDs.
Classes updated
A revision of the Classes chapter is now available.
More previews
A second round revision of the races chapter has been released. Up for the first time are previews of the classes and magic chapters.
Races
A preview of the Races chapter of the playtest document is available. There are some changes from the material on the site, including a few last minute tweaks and a lot of editing. The site will catch up once we release the playtest document – maintaing changes in two different data sources concurrently is a nightmare I’m not going to deal with.
The races document includes the ten races from DS2. These races will be frozen for the duration of the playtest freeze; additional races will be appearing on the site once the doc is released (and won't be frozen). For the moment, the most important thing is to get this PDF out the door. Some of those additional races will probably find their way into DS3 at a later point.
Please direct your comments and questions to either the Dark Sun Mailing List or to the Message Boards. Public discussion tends to reduce the number of duplicate comments I find in my inbox.
Let me stress again that this is a PREVIEW ...
The ghostly silence ....
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…
Servers
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.
Race Updates
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.
Class Updates
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.
New Feats
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.
Bard, re-re-redux
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.