Good morning! I’ve resolved to stop apologizing for long delays in my blog posts; clearly this is a once-every-coupla-three-weeks sort of a thing for me, at least as my schedule stands these days. I’m currently dealing with pieces of five different products in various stages of the pipeline, and they’re all far enough out that I can’t really say too much about them. So let me talk about a couple of projects that I worked on many months ago but are out or close to coming out: Dark Sun and Condition Zebra.
The Eladrin of Athas
A few months back I talked about finding a place for the dragonborn in Dark Sun. This time around, I thought I’d take a look at another core 4e race, the eladrin. Now, some of you Dark Sun purists might be inclined to say “High elves don’t have any place in my Athas!” But we think it’s important for someone who’s new to the D&D game with 4th Edition to find many/most of the things they regard as being in the core of the D&D game in the Dark Sun setting. If someone out there is a huge eladrin fan – you know, the guy or gal at the table who *always* plays an eladrin – we don’t want to give him or her a reason not to give Dark Sun a try. So that means we’d want to find a place for the eladrin to appear in Dark Sun. Only… different. If halflings are savage cannibals, and elves are nomadic thieves and raiders, we wouldn’t want eladrins to be highly civilized, graceful arcanists off in their own lush green faerie-plane. It’s an important part of the Dark Sun experience that familiar races and characters have bold new “takes” that throw them into different roles, and that means the eladrin receive an Athasian makeover too.
The first step in re-envisioning the eladrin was to think about their homeland, the Feywild. Where do eladrin come from in Athas? We decided that the answer was still the Feywild—but the Feywild isn’t what you might expect. The Feywild is “nature turned up to 11.” In most worlds, that means magical forests, wondrous glades, and so on. In Athas, that means “magical desert.” Think of the mesalands around Sedona, the Painted Desert, or the mysterious Rub’ al Khali of Arabia: A place where humans aren’t meant to go, a place of the genies. The Feywild of Athas is dying, however, and it no longer exists as a continuous, parallel plane. It’s a few scattered pockets that don’t connect to each other; journeying from one Feywild locale to another means returning to Athas to make the trek.
In fact, some of the Arabian myths about genies actually match up pretty well with the eladrin concept of a magical race living in an invisible otherworld that’s only a step away… if you know how to get there. So in Athas the eladrin become a mysterious, greatly feared race rumored to dwell in the Lands within the Wind—the strange otherworldly deserts and “hidden cities” that travelers sometimes stumble into in the middle of the most desolate wastelands. Here’s a great example something from previous Dark Sun lore that fits: The mysterious Siren’s Song in the Forked Tongue Estuary. The madness that leads travelers to wade out to their doom in the silt comes from mind-bending wards and fences of mirage that guard an eladrin hold in the isle’s Feywild.
Eladrin as the “unseen people” of the deserts is a good start, but it’s only half of the concept. The other key conceit of the eladrin in core D&D is that they’re creatures of arcane magic, a culture that lives and breathes wizardry and enchantment. So, naturally, Dark Sun turns that on its head. In Athas, eladrin have abandoned arcane magic, recognizing it as the force that has defiled the world. They are instead masters of psionics. Eladrin “veiled warriors” slay any arcanists they encounter near their lands, and spy on the templars and minions of nearby sorcerer-kings, guarding what’s left of their fraying Feywild refuges. It’s only a matter of time until the Lands within the Wind cease to exist altogether, and things that were hidden return to the mortal world—but the eladrin hope to stave off that day as long as they can.
Condition Zebra Here!
Over to War at Sea... Nice to see that folks are getting their long-awaited Condition Zebra boosters! I have a very fine windowsill armada anchored just outside my cube. Some folks have been wondering about our costing system; rather than go into it in any great detail now, let me just say that sometimes we put a premium on a piece we don't want to see too many of in play. A good example is the Schleswig-Holstein from a set or two back; we deliberately costed it a bit higher than we thought its stats warranted because we simply didn't want the best German fleet build to center around 40-year-old predreadnoughts. And yes, Gneisenau is my way of saying "sorry" to Scharnhorst, which should have had the torpedo defense and is the rightful owner of the Long Shot.
Speaking of the Kriegsmarine, we're hard up against the real limits of capital ships in the German navy; I'm all ears for suggestions on how to proceed in future sets. We can do quite a few destroyers and smaller vessels still, but anything cruiser-sized or bigger is pretty much printed at this point. Would you folks be okay with an "Atlantic Breakout Bismarck" painted differently in a future set--essentially a reprinted Bismarck from set 1, perhaps with a few tweaks to its stats/cost and some new flavor text? Or would you rather see more hypothetical units? How about really hypothetical hypotheticals, like French ships that might have been captured or completed? For that matter, we're running low on Italian capital ships too, although we've got plenty more Italian light cruisers to play with.
That's all for this week. Hope to be back around the end of the month!
