Fantasy Heartbreak Workshop

Another response to a  Quora question . Choose one or roll 1d20: 1) Dragons are the bower birds of the monster world. They need to make their lairs as shiny and full of cool stuff as possible to attract a mate. 2) The riddle: In marble walls as white as milk, Lined with a skin as soft as silk; Within a fountain crystal clear, A golden apple doth appear. No doors there are to this stronghold, Yet thieves break in and steal the gold. Actually alludes to dragon eggs, the embryos of which require gold during certain developmental stages. 3) There was once a more common form of vegetation called Glintweed, whose leaves had an iridescent sheen when viewed in direct sunlight. For various reasons this plant functioned as ideal nesting material for dragons. Unfortunately, as humanoids began to mine large quantities of precious metal ores, dragons started running into a variant of the dragonfly / oil problem : To the instinctual side of a dragon’s brain, lustrous highe...

On Sep 19, 2012 +Ramanan Sivaranjan said: Any Dark Sun game I run now could never live up to the game I imagine in my head. I never actually played Dark Sun back when I was buying and reading all the books, so it's even more mythic than it really should be. But yeah, old school Dark Sun hex crawl. I can imagine that. This is pretty much exactly my experience of Dark Sun:  An epic setting that no one every played, and which could now never live up to the promised dream. BUT, a hex crawl seems like the prefect fit.  And I say this as someone weened at the teat of story-ish, plot-heavy AD&D adventures, an who has never played a hex crawl (and precious few dungeon crawls) in my life. I think the thing is that the big ticket plot features in the setting are all so in your face: killing off a sorcerer-king, inter-city-state politics, saving Athas from further environmental disaster, etc.  If those are your goal, it's so front-loaded from the get-go that being kill...