A preview of the feats chapter is available.
I’m working out some fixes and editing on the Equipment chapter; that will probably be the next thing. The spells chapter is under heavy editing at the moment, and I’m not quite sure when that’s going to be done…
The Races and Classes chapters have been frozen. Barring anything totally catastrophic that needs to be fixed, these are going to be the versions of the chapters that go into playtesting.
Next up: Equipment and feats; we’re filling in some holes on those, and will hopefully be releasing a preliminary version by the end of the weekend.
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.
A revision of the Classes chapter is now available.
A second round revision of the races chapter has been released. Up for the first time are previews of the classes and magic chapters.
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 ...
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…
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.
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.
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.