dark sun

On the off-chance you haven’t seen them, there are many more Dark Sun characters available on top of the characters from the D&D Experience.

First up, there are those from the D&D Encounters series. The folks over at Dungeon’s Master have posted a PDF containing all six characters.

You can also download the characters from [Bloodsand Arena][bsa].

There is, however, a hitch. Anyone who doesn’t use WinZip to extract the files will see error messages along the lines of “unsupported compression method.” Apparently the archive was created with WinZip, which now defaults to a proprietary compression algorithm. I don’t really blame Wizards for this, to be honest— they’re not the ones who’re apparently trying to destroy interoperability with other Windows apps, let alone cross-platform apps. Thanks for nothing, WinZip!

For my part, I held my nose, installed it, extracted the files, and promptly uninstalled it. It’s a nasty piece of software. If it weren’t for this, I wouldn’t have touched it with a 10′ pole. [7zip][7z] is more than sufficient.

For those of you that don’t have a Windows machine handy, well, you’ll need a workaround. While I can’t vouch for this link from a security standpoint, it does look like someone else has compiled another ZIP file containing the PDFs. Hit this RapidShare link if you’re desperate. I opened it on a Mac and didn’t have any trouble.

As I’m sure you already knew, yesterday was Free RPG Day! Although I was curious about many other I only picked up a couple. Supplies were running low by the time I got there, and I’d rather leave those things for someone who might be more passionate about those games.

I picked up the L5R offering. I played 1st Edition back in college and a friend of mine mentioned that they’d have a 4th Ed item out for Free RPG Day. It’s quadruple redundant to say that I also picked up Wizards’ Dark Sun offering, Bloodsand Arena. You know what else I did? I ran it. Last night.

I’ll try to keep it light on spoilers, but I can’t promise anything.

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Blog, I have a confession. I’m pretty excited about Dark Sun.

Granted, this blog went dark for a while for a good reason: I haven’t had many cycles left for D&D. For one thing, I bought a house and moved. That’s cool except it’s hugely disruptive. Even a few months later, I don’t feel that the house is really in a state for running a game or playing it.

For another, I got into a beta for some game nobody’s ever even heard of. And by that I mean a game I played a whole bunch in college and got pretty heavily into again when they announced Starcraft II in 2007. In addition to taking up a bunch of my time, I got into watching professional matches. What can I say? I used to think it was really cheesy until I realized that this is basically a “sport” that I actually care about.

At any rate, I was blissfully unaware of such as the The Plane Above book and PHB3 until I swung by my FLGS the week before. I’ll be frank and say that of the two, I am far more excited about The Plane Above. I know, I know. Those of you that are familiar with my preferences are shocked, I’m sure. Once I’m finished reading it, I should probably write up a post about it.

The second part was the latest D&D/Penny Arcade podcast. I’ve listened to the previous ones, and they’re devilishly fun. Nothing quite kills the boredom of a long ride on the bus than these. Hopefully my fellow passengers take my intermittent giggling as harmless.

In any case, I’ve got just a bit of a bug. We’ll see if it manifests into anything substantial. The Starcraft II beta is closed for now, I’ve got nothing lined up, and I think some sort of exploration/sandbox-y game set in the Astral Sea could be quite a bit of fun.

Have you guys seen this, the Dark Sun characters from D&D XP 2010? Courtesy of Critical Hits, there’s a scan of same. I’ve had a glance and I have some impressions.

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