I'll start with a disclaimer: I read the stickies for the "brainstorming & development" area and I'll note that part of what I stitched together remakes a lot of lumpley's (Vincent's?) playsheets in the style I wanted. So I'm certainly borrowing a bunch of content. The extent of my "publishing" intention is the sharing of the pdf. Also, I pushed this material to the Dark Sun Google+ group. My players have encouraged me quite heavily to distribute this packet. In other words, please let me know if I need to take this down and alter it in any way. It goes as far as this post and the upload to Google+
Now, here's what I'm talking about:
Two years ago I had an exchange with
Mike Shea wherein he referred me to Dungeon World. A lot of exploration ensued and led me to Apocalypse World. Here's the deal: I love Dark Sun. It is everything I've ever wanted out of a campaign setting. Especially that original 1991 box set. I don't really love D&D mechanics, though (some of my players do, but that's a different story).
And when I read Apocalypse World, all I could think about was that box set. All the principles, the style, the feel. The map with a few key places filled in and tons of bleak deserts and salt flats with god-knows-what eeking out an existence (play to find out!). It made me feel exactly how I felt when I first read through the Dark Sun boxed set. These two things needed to go together.
So I started Googling to figure out if anyone put them together. And they had! I list the full credits in the packet, but it starts with
Mike Pfaff's Dark Sol post from 2010. I later found some Dungeon World Dark Sun hack(s) and
Andrew C.'s Dark Sol II. Pfaff's Dark Sol spoke to what I wanted. But it wasn't exactly what my players wanted; or that's what they thought.
I figured that, with a little "old skool D&D" tweaking to the mechanics and a nice set of formatted Dark Sol playbooks I could get my grognards to play AW and not even know it. That lead to me building formatted playbooks for Pfaff's Dark Sol. That lead to a much longer adventure that turned into
this. I'm calling it Dark Sol III to honor those before me.
Hopefully a few people can read through it and maybe enjoy the read. My players and I are certainly enjoying the AW approach to Dark Sun.
Last thing: this isn't for everybody. In fact, it might not be for anybody (save my group). It is probably too-D&D or "rules heavy" for the real AW crowd. And it is probably too "Indie" (or whatever) for the D&Ders. I'm a DM/GM/MC that wants to play AW with a group that wants to play D&D, and this is how we met in the middle. If you don't have that problem, you might not like this much. That's OK with me. :)
Cheers!