Halflings

there was some flood that hit tuluk and the north, right? they probably got swept off in it. maybe sailed away to the elemental plane of water to be waterworld halflings and mer-halflings. probably just wiped out

um unless u were taking a break lyse u shouldve been around for that hrpt lyse

all the halflings got drowned out during the floods and went extinct

it was the same one where undertuluk got flooded and allanak got attacked by fire beasts

Looking back on it, I can see why mantis/halfling/and gith were removed, it draws the playerbase away from the main spheres of the game, what's the use in having 60 players actively in game, if you only have 20 of those in each respective sphere, and of those 20, 10 of those are probably off mudfucking, idling, or hunting. With spheres being very open, not seeing a single pc soul in supposedly highly populated areas could be very realistic. This combined with the attrition rate ARM has for newbies, yeah slimming the playable options was probably a -good- choice.

Halflings: Yeah we saw them in Tuluk every once in a while, but it was a bit of an immersion breaker, when you had two or three running with half-elf hunting crews, and the rest of their npc buddies were trying to eat your face.

Gith: Everyone's favorite sparring friends? PC's that actively opposed the killing of everyone's favorite sparring friends?! How can this be bad?! Anyway, gith are inherently evil from my understanding, and as a race they could out of the barn be very damaging to the pbase, when they're directly hostile to everything that isn't gith that happens to roam into their lands. I can't account for their player, or how they were actually played. I imagine there might have been some cooperation between gith and other races, but it would have been jarring, if that were the case.

Mantis: Too alien for most players to conceive/play, and the majority of the interactions between normal players, and the mantis would have been hostile as well, look to the gith.

Kank: This one was well played at least, the kank plague was introduced, you didn't see them sold at vendors, but they were still tamable. Eventually the supplies phased out, the kank material armor phased out, and the tamable mounts phased out. It was pretty realistic, and I have no problem with how the staff handled this. Furthermore, at the time, kank were the poor man's mount, and everyone wanted a war beetle that could afford one, so not much was to be missed when they added war beetles to Allanak.

I guess I'm notalgic for what might have been, rather than what was. Removing content for the sake of rounding up the playerbase to consolidate it - a foreign concept to me, but I can see the logic there.

It's a miscommunication of lore, trying to be DarkSun yet not, compounded by players of lackluster quality and tinted with the fear of community death that has robbed ME of a potential cool scenario or character concept. I feel like a passenger boarding a ship constantly in the state of sinking.

I just wish there'd be a soul searching and we returned to the source material, which was professional and thoroughly capable of sustaining plot threads.

A hard-reset is too much to hope for?

Actually, I started playing the game again for the first time since 2008 within the last year give or take. So yeah, I kind of missed a lot of stuff. I've pretty much spent this past few months, relearning the game. Which is one reason I think this board is great, it would've taken me much longer to remember everything all over again plus the changes.

Couple of other thoughts

i feel like wotc would be cool with a mud using darksun material all the mud would have to do is acknowledge that it's a darksun game. I could be wrong about that, but I feel like I'm not.

i think the reemergence of halflings in the game would actually make a cool story arc.

it doesn't make too much sense to me that you take two or three elements of darksun and suddenly it's not darksun. Arm is darksun without halflings and kanks.

It's not a darksun game. It's a hybrid of darksun and dune, plus some unique content. Mindbending female templars, mindbending "anything that isn't a female templar", (desert post-apocolyptic world + spice) = dune, not dark sun. People should stop obsessing about how they ruined the dark sun game by removing some of the dark sun elements or making the dark sun elements something other than dark sun. Really this has been hashed out so much by so few people that the horse isn't just dead. It's been pulverized into dust and you keep clubbing the ground hoping you can get it to die again. Just stop. It's embarrassing.

I agree about the kank disappearance being done really well. I played when there were some PC halflings but I think it was just one of those "good idea in theory" things. I wish there could still be NPC halflings that the staff could sometimes animate as plot-drivers. At least that'd be more interesting than 40 different varieties of kryl.

They should definitely add a wandering raider clan like Dune Stalkers or Red Fangs or Sand Blasters or whatever the fuck they were called. Tuluk needs a decent replacement for the Undertuluk, and the Rinth needs the Sandas or similar back again. The meta-plot of north vs. south only happens in spurts and if your timing isn't good you'll miss out on any of the fun. So there needs to be more "point of conflict" for people to latch on to.

Never played with gith PCs but I heard about the one time they opened up a couple of roles and the PC giths were pked like - a week after they genned or something. I played down in Red Storm back when half of the hooded NPC figures were the Sandlord's gith guards. Had some fun RP with them a couple of times. Mantis - totally understand why they're not open to players but I'd like to see more "intelligent" clutches either codedly or animated.

does that mean the salt flats giant worms are the source of all the spice drug about? anyone ever managed to ride one?