Worldwide Game Day, Darksun edition

Saturday August 21st was worldwide game day and WoTC was throwing a big Darksun release party with running an encounter. This is basically part of the Encounter series they've been running the last month or so.
I met up with my gaming buddy Zach at Heroes & Villains and joined in the game. We had us two, two other guys that were friends, and a women and then the DMs son. That filled all the available slots, and we began right away.

I am an old school sweetheart of Darksun. I had nearly all the books and boxed sets. The psionic book The Will and the Way still remains one of the greatest game supplements to come out! The setting of Darksun was very compelling, at every turn you are struggling, whether you are in a city or not, everyone is vying for survival and its often on the backs of others that you do. Slaverly, dead gods, dead races, psionic powers, deadly new classes, even more deadly new creatures, whats not to love?

On to the adventure. We started as a group that had known each other for a while and were approached by a government official of the new free city of Tyr (which I pronounce TEER, but others including our DM, do not) to follow a map to a magical cistern that was created by some Preserver many moons ago. We promptly agree and away we go! But wait! We are approached again, and then again by other 'interested' individuals. This creates some tension between who we should trust and how we should screw. we mull it over and head into the desert.

Travel in Darksun is generally very dangerous, one could easily die from exposure to the elements and being from Tucson, I can attest to how easily dehydration can sneak up on you. We make some checks, others fail and loose some healing Surges and continue to fail and loose some hit points. One party member tries to use the Heal skill to some effect. Not to bad so far! Then we spot a man at an oasis or sorts inviting us over. Of course its a trap.

The man is a dune runner elf, and he and his men are here to steal our map and in the process make us all dead. In the end he fails horribly and dies a miserable arrow filled death thanks to Zach and his Thri-Kreen priest. We gather some loot and head off towards what we hope will be a worth while expedition into the dunes.

More Fort checks and more Heal checks and we are at an outcropping of rock with a cave entrance. Cautiously we entered the cave and this appeared to be the magic Cistern! A hole atop the cave pulled in wind and stripped the moisture from it and it dripped into a hole in the floor where we immediately went to check out. Doing so proved to be painful.

A crazed beast jumped out and attacked us! It appeared to be a super angry Tiger bear thing that claw claw bit at people, but it did so very strangely. It would swipe at people and bite at other people and a claw would send us flying, no die check from us. This thing had a ton of hit points and we all got taken to half our hit points. It retreated down the hole and we took a moment to heal, and it returned to hammer us some more!
I missed nearly all my attacks vs this creature, which really sucked. Eventually we took it down. The entire time it was using some sort of Death Field on us, was horrible.

We healed up again and started to head back after looting/looking around and of course were attacked by some bad guys. These were mercs from the City State of Urik, a rival town. The leader was apparently a mage or something and we made pretty quick work of him. He died as he jumped through a portal (dimension door?).

We hurried back to Tyr and tried to make the best of a bad situation. We had three parties interested in our find and some were willing to kill for it, so we tried to give everyone a little something. This got us bum rushed into an arena where we surely will meet our end. At least that was the end of the adventure!

Analyzing the Adventure: I'd give this a B-, its pretty straight forward, its built for having limited time and limited player experience, which it did well. Running it outside of this event you could easily slip it into a game and expand on the RP portions of it. The pregen characters were OK, but severely lacking in some skills that seemed obvious, no sneak character and no healing character, despite having a priest, he had no healing! There was also only one character with Arcana, which means you can get stuck a lot.

Purpose of the Adventure: I'll rate it at a D. The whole point is to showcase Darksun. Besides the heat/exhaustion checks what would a total newbie player note differently from any other game setting? Not much, some crazy ass monster, yes, but then again if you are a newbie, any monster is gonna be crazy, Rust Monster? CRAZY!

The elements of Darksun are very easy to encapsulate and the adventure didnt do very well at capturing that. The whole Free City of Tyr is a huge thing, at least in the OG version it was. A living god was killed by slaves! thats Huge! and there was no talk about Kalak and his fall from power! there are huge hooks in this game and none of them seemed present. Preserver/defiler magic was only mentioned in passing really, and the cataclysm of Darksun was glossed over quickly.

Showcasing 4e: C-  The 4E wasnt presented very well either. There is so much new stuff here that its crazy they just sit you down and shove you out into the water. Good Luck! this might have been the DMs thing but it seems like they just send you an adventure and so OK now play and people will just get it. Shouldn't there be a little oversight and a boiler plate text for new features? Seems very short sighted.

DM: I forget his name, I'll give him a C+ to B-. Im uncertain how well he knew 4E, I know he didnt know the Darksun setting very well at all, he didnt know Urik was a city state and it was one of the old school adventures Road to Urik! Come one! Not being familiar with 4E beasts, I not sure he was playing the Tigerbear thing correctly. Can it just auto-knock you down on a hit? can it attack Claw and Bite, move and then do it all again in the same round? that cant be right. How do you place its second move? Its curious. He did some weird stuff. Like the last encounter with the Wizard he jumped through a Dimension Door but I got an attack of Opportunity as he moved towards it and killed him, but he still got through it. Shouldn't it have blinked off? Our wizard couldn't ID the spell with a Arcana 23 roll? I suppose its flavor really, but was a little annoying to have a body get away after getting your ass kicked. right?

Anyhows, Im not convinced 4E is worth a damn, it really seems like its $E, so many damn books, so expensive, tons of extras and no end in sight! A slew on 'new' books including the Red Box Edition, which is playing with my heart strings, is coming out in September! Can the money sucking juggernaut be stopped? If this years Ennies awards are any indication WoTC is sucking wind hard core at least form the fanboys perspective. Pathfinder and its 3.5+ is kicking all sorts of ass. It will be interesting to see where the next year will lead these two systems.

Best of luck to both of them!