delerak
GDB Superstar
PK'ed by jcarter
"When you want to fool the world, tell the truth." - Otto Von Bismarck
Posts: 1,656
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Post by delerak on Jan 27, 2013 13:09:29 GMT -5
Talking about it in another thread got me excited and looking around again. Found this great site: www.digitalwanderer.net/darksun/Left click and drag to pan around the map and check out the DS map.
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Post by jcarter on Jan 27, 2013 21:21:39 GMT -5
I was always fond of Dark Sun lore because there was such a hopelessness element to it. Whereas in Armageddon the landscape is desert with giant worms, grasslands with giant turtle, salt flats with giant lizard, mountains with giant mantis, silt sea with giant octopus, desert with giant raptors, and desert forest with cannibals, Dark Sun has some real character.
There's more variety than just desert, desert + scraggly trees, and rocky desert; you have terrain like small marshes, a ridge of forests, etc. It's actually 'believable' enough that a city could sustain itself off the land there, as opposed to Allanak that manages to grow wheat in the Sahara. Then there's places like the Dead Land, an obsidian land where the undead can freely walk; it's pretty creepy. The landscape hasn't just been depleted by defilers, it's been twisted by the magic.
I'm really not at all sure how staff can say they're now appropriately distanced from the Dark Sun setting because they killed off kanks. You've still got man-eating halflings, the Silt Sea, defilers and preservers, city states run by sorcerer kings, muls, etc that are all basically unique to Dark Sun AFAIK. It's incredible how they could so blatantly just rip off Dark Sun and yet in 20+ years of game development manage to avoid getting close to the actual charm or intricate details that made the world interesting.
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delerak
GDB Superstar
PK'ed by jcarter
"When you want to fool the world, tell the truth." - Otto Von Bismarck
Posts: 1,656
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Post by delerak on Jan 28, 2013 20:09:18 GMT -5
They did an okay job. The only real reason I play Arm is because of it's DS roots. I haven't played in about a month now though, just lost the desire to login. It happens.
As far as DS. It's as simple as this. All classes/races are from Darksun. All of the General Docs are pretty much DS. The cities are DS cities, Tuluk = Tyr. Allanak = Urik. All of this DS lore is there it's just hard to spot for anybody who hasn't read the DS campaign material religously, I could blow your mind with how much similarity there is.
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Post by succulentgroin on Jan 28, 2013 22:07:06 GMT -5
Blow away, my knowledge of Dark Sun is very limited.
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delerak
GDB Superstar
PK'ed by jcarter
"When you want to fool the world, tell the truth." - Otto Von Bismarck
Posts: 1,656
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Post by delerak on Jan 29, 2013 12:58:49 GMT -5
Off the top of my head:
Stony Barrens, Wave Dunes, Tablelands, Silt Sea, Salt Flats. And More. All of these "arm" geographic locations are clearly taken from the DS Wanderer's Guide to Athas. The room names themselves are taken from a legend which describes terrain features.
Onto animals. Mekillot, Tembo, Gaj, Jozhal, Scrab, Silt-Horror, Carru, and many more I don't feel like listing. All from DS.
Races: Half-giants, Mantis, Halflings (the corpse eating concept), Gith, Elves (the 8 foot tall running kind), all from DS.
Classes: Defiling magick, Preserving magick is a DS system, it is actually the heart of the whole campaign as defiling magic has wrecked the world. Psions and psionics in general however DS makes it far more rare. For instance being able to speak into someones mind is huge and would have to be a very powerful psion to do that.
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deadelf
staff puppet account
Posts: 42
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Post by deadelf on Jan 29, 2013 14:57:08 GMT -5
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delerak
GDB Superstar
PK'ed by jcarter
"When you want to fool the world, tell the truth." - Otto Von Bismarck
Posts: 1,656
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Post by delerak on Oct 24, 2013 7:56:32 GMT -5
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delerak
GDB Superstar
PK'ed by jcarter
"When you want to fool the world, tell the truth." - Otto Von Bismarck
Posts: 1,656
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Post by delerak on Oct 24, 2013 8:01:54 GMT -5
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CRabbit
Clueless newb
Where have all the escru gone..
Posts: 69
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Post by CRabbit on Oct 24, 2013 10:26:28 GMT -5
Believe in Darksun psionics are needed to properly pilot a skimmer over the silt sea. Seeing this map again makes me think, why did Arm stop where they did? So many cooler places out there.
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delerak
GDB Superstar
PK'ed by jcarter
"When you want to fool the world, tell the truth." - Otto Von Bismarck
Posts: 1,656
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Post by delerak on Oct 24, 2013 10:42:38 GMT -5
Because they never change anything. Look at my most recent post with the Wanderers Journal in it and read through it. I mean just listen to this:
Look around you! The crimson sun beats down from a shimmering sky, scorching the life from everything that crawls or flies or runs. Listen! This is a land of blood and dust, of unending earthquakes, scouring sand squalls, and swift, violent rainstorms that deliver lightning and death from the sky. This is my home: Athas. It is an arid and bleak place, a wasteland with a handful of bleak cities clinging precariously to a few scattered oases. It is a brutal and savage land, beset by political strife and monstrous abominations, where life is grim and short.
Seriously people. READ THIS DOCUMENT.
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delerak
GDB Superstar
PK'ed by jcarter
"When you want to fool the world, tell the truth." - Otto Von Bismarck
Posts: 1,656
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Post by delerak on Oct 24, 2013 10:47:14 GMT -5
What really is salt in the wound is the fact that Arm had it so right in the beginning with Darksun then screwed it all up by adding a metric fuck-ton of other "original" content of their own. A good example is the fact that in Darksun on Athas it rains about once a year maybe two years. Makes sense considering. On Arm it never rains (except that one HRPT) and this makes ZERO sense. It would have to rain at some point or else you're just dealing with nonsensical fantasy that doesn't explain anything ever. It's a cop out.
The water sources they have are kind of silly as well. There should be more oases and these oases should be heavily fought over as resources or walled up and a village created around. Unfortunately they didn't do this. They didn't continue with how great and RIGHT Darksun was about the whole setting. The stuff that was built 20 years was golden but they never continued it. Arm has only had a handful of new areas in the past decade. The sea of silts expansion is the last thing I can think of, other than that everything that you see on the maps has been there forever.
Which is fine. I just don't like the fact that they don't have a lot of what Darksun had. Saying it's not Darksun is another cop out. It's just a piss poor watered down version of it. It took everything great about DS implemented in sloppily and then slapped the name Arm on it. Just read the pdf file I posted and you'll see all the shit that they could be doing but aren't.
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Post by Prime Minister Sinister on Oct 24, 2013 16:30:47 GMT -5
i never knew of darksun until i started playing armageddon and to me the difference between the two is kinda like the difference between the walking dead and george a romeros originals
except not really
it kind of looks like armageddon has been trying to evolve into its own thing and in some ways they get it right but in others not so much
theyre stuck in limbo between too much like darksun to stand out and not enough like darksun to scratch that particular itch
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Foyle
staff puppet account
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Post by Foyle on Oct 26, 2013 13:49:14 GMT -5
I can see the similarities and can't argue against the influence but stating that after 20 years it's still a Dark Sun rip seems to be a bit of a stretch. All art is a riff of something or other. Hell, the entire fantasy genre still feels the shadow of J.R.R Tolkien in some shape or form. I'm actually more concerned at the touted concept that players can (through time and effort) cause significant change in the world, but the more I read here the more it seems that most of that change is superficial. I think that that is what's been keeping the game from truly evolving in an organic manner.
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