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Psionic Artifacts of Athas
Great adventure book
128 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1996
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 9, 2015
The biggest sin that a book of monsters or magic can commit is to be boring, and Psionic Artifacts of Athas definitely commits that sin.
For starters, less than a third of the book is even about artifacts, and less than half of those are psionic. The psionic artifacts don't even get pictures, unlike the magical or lifeshaped artifacts, and the major aspect that makes psionic artifacts so interesting--that they're intelligent, with their own personalities and goals that might not match with those of their wielders--is usually brushed over in a sentence or two. A lot of the psionic items don't even get that. The book adds a new psionic devotion called "Empower," which is distinct from the Empower psionic science in that it's really boring. It makes items that work like magic items, with charges and no intelligence and all that, except a note that they work on psionic power. That's really it.
Maybe it's that the designers realized that the concept of psionic items all having their own personality and intelligence and goals sounds amazing on paper, but when individual GMs have to sit down and design items for their game, making every single item interesting and unique is a herculean task. It's like how originally Athas had skeletons and zombies, and everything else was a unique, individual monstrosity with its own bizarre powers and weaknesses. Except developing each intelligent undead as a unique monster is pretty annoying and makes it hard to write adventures and to compare power levels, so Dark Sun got kaisharga and meorty and krag and so on. Similarly, now there are Wands of Psionic Detection and Obsidian Necklaces and Rings of Time Shifting that are magic items in all but category. Not surprising, I suppose, but not exciting either.
I mentioned lifeshaped items above, and that's another problem I have with the book. Huge swaths of the content are straight-up reprints from Windridres of the Jagged Cliffs, without any of the information on the rhul-thaun. There are few new items scattered among them, but the two books were published less than a year apart and they're already recycling a bunch of stuff because they couldn't think of enough psionic artifacts? And on top of that, the new items are mostly boring. A lot of them are just stat boosters, like tendonils for strength or soolmons for wisdom, and some of the normal items like climbing boots now inexplicably permanently bond with their owners.
I did like the weeper, though. It's a weird wormlike creature that weeps extremely flammable tears that can be collected and bottled to make weapons. Also, if mistreated it has a chance of exploding, and it has a chance to explode randomly even if treated like a king. I just envision a rhulisti Doc Brown running out of a flaming organic building yelling, "Great Scott!" or whatever the biotech halfling equivalent was.
The first section of the book has all the new items, and while some of them are neat, a lot of them had oddities that annoyed me. The Last Tree as a transformed nature master from the Blue Age is a neat concept, but the way he transformed himself sounds pretty much like magic, which we know the nature masters didn't have. The Planar Gate from Dregoth's palace specifically says that it only allows itself to be used for knowledge-gathering and exploration and will refuse to function if anyone tries to send an army through it, which invalidates the entire plot of City by the Silt Sea because now there's no way Dregoth can bring through a bunch of devils to augment his forces. This is especially weird because the Psionatrix from Dragon's Crown is in here too, and the entry takes the events of that adventure into account and also provides suggestions of what to do if it never happened. The corundum wormskin seems neat until you realize that it's a ripoff of God Emperor of Dune. Ktandeo's Cane lets the user cast wizard spells...but it was made by a halfling, who don't have wizards? All these minor annoyances mean that none of the artifacts really grabbed me and said "You need to use this in a game."
The best part of the book, and the only thing that saves it from the one-star dump heap, is the random charts for rolling up artifacts. There's a bunch of categories, like Elemental Fire or Divination or Summoning or Fate, and a list of curses and catastrophes the artifact can cause too. And while most of the actual effects are just "Cast [Spell] X/day," there are some standout ones like Fate or Catastrophes. And sure, sometimes a PC gets an artifact and takes a one-time hit of 5d10 damage when they pick it up for the first one, and sometimes they're afflicted with a wasting disease that requires them to roll a Constitution check every month or lose a point of Constitution, ending when they give up the artifact or die, but that's randomness!
Those charts are a dozen pages out of a 128-page book, though, and they don't do enough to save the bland mediocrity or blatant padding of the rest of it. What a sad way for the original Dark Sun line to end.
For starters, less than a third of the book is even about artifacts, and less than half of those are psionic. The psionic artifacts don't even get pictures, unlike the magical or lifeshaped artifacts, and the major aspect that makes psionic artifacts so interesting--that they're intelligent, with their own personalities and goals that might not match with those of their wielders--is usually brushed over in a sentence or two. A lot of the psionic items don't even get that. The book adds a new psionic devotion called "Empower," which is distinct from the Empower psionic science in that it's really boring. It makes items that work like magic items, with charges and no intelligence and all that, except a note that they work on psionic power. That's really it.
Maybe it's that the designers realized that the concept of psionic items all having their own personality and intelligence and goals sounds amazing on paper, but when individual GMs have to sit down and design items for their game, making every single item interesting and unique is a herculean task. It's like how originally Athas had skeletons and zombies, and everything else was a unique, individual monstrosity with its own bizarre powers and weaknesses. Except developing each intelligent undead as a unique monster is pretty annoying and makes it hard to write adventures and to compare power levels, so Dark Sun got kaisharga and meorty and krag and so on. Similarly, now there are Wands of Psionic Detection and Obsidian Necklaces and Rings of Time Shifting that are magic items in all but category. Not surprising, I suppose, but not exciting either.
I mentioned lifeshaped items above, and that's another problem I have with the book. Huge swaths of the content are straight-up reprints from Windridres of the Jagged Cliffs, without any of the information on the rhul-thaun. There are few new items scattered among them, but the two books were published less than a year apart and they're already recycling a bunch of stuff because they couldn't think of enough psionic artifacts? And on top of that, the new items are mostly boring. A lot of them are just stat boosters, like tendonils for strength or soolmons for wisdom, and some of the normal items like climbing boots now inexplicably permanently bond with their owners.
I did like the weeper, though. It's a weird wormlike creature that weeps extremely flammable tears that can be collected and bottled to make weapons. Also, if mistreated it has a chance of exploding, and it has a chance to explode randomly even if treated like a king. I just envision a rhulisti Doc Brown running out of a flaming organic building yelling, "Great Scott!" or whatever the biotech halfling equivalent was.
The first section of the book has all the new items, and while some of them are neat, a lot of them had oddities that annoyed me. The Last Tree as a transformed nature master from the Blue Age is a neat concept, but the way he transformed himself sounds pretty much like magic, which we know the nature masters didn't have. The Planar Gate from Dregoth's palace specifically says that it only allows itself to be used for knowledge-gathering and exploration and will refuse to function if anyone tries to send an army through it, which invalidates the entire plot of City by the Silt Sea because now there's no way Dregoth can bring through a bunch of devils to augment his forces. This is especially weird because the Psionatrix from Dragon's Crown is in here too, and the entry takes the events of that adventure into account and also provides suggestions of what to do if it never happened. The corundum wormskin seems neat until you realize that it's a ripoff of God Emperor of Dune. Ktandeo's Cane lets the user cast wizard spells...but it was made by a halfling, who don't have wizards? All these minor annoyances mean that none of the artifacts really grabbed me and said "You need to use this in a game."
The best part of the book, and the only thing that saves it from the one-star dump heap, is the random charts for rolling up artifacts. There's a bunch of categories, like Elemental Fire or Divination or Summoning or Fate, and a list of curses and catastrophes the artifact can cause too. And while most of the actual effects are just "Cast [Spell] X/day," there are some standout ones like Fate or Catastrophes. And sure, sometimes a PC gets an artifact and takes a one-time hit of 5d10 damage when they pick it up for the first one, and sometimes they're afflicted with a wasting disease that requires them to roll a Constitution check every month or lose a point of Constitution, ending when they give up the artifact or die, but that's randomness!
Those charts are a dozen pages out of a 128-page book, though, and they don't do enough to save the bland mediocrity or blatant padding of the rest of it. What a sad way for the original Dark Sun line to end.
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July 21, 202232/32 of the Dark Sun reread project -- cue the triumphant trumpets for completing this project!
But no triumphant trumpets for this book -- if anything, maybe a sad trombone.
But let's back up a bit: there's a long tradition in roleplaying publishing of just putting out books of things, usually magical things, usually magical weapons. Some of these books are full of original items, and sometimes they are compilations of things that have been published before; and in that, they're a lot like monster manuals and should function for the DM/players like monster manuals. You should be able to open one of these books and find something that makes you say, "oh, I can't wait to throw that at my players and see what happens" or even "hey, this would be perfect for an adventure."
So what is this book and why does it fail? Well, partly it's a naming problem: the world of Dark Sun has a lot of psionics, but it also has magic, and halfling life-shaping (covered in Windriders of the Jagged Cliffs, and this book sets out to cover all three categories of things, and both regular items (that your PCs might encounter a lot of) and one-off artifacts (that should be the focus of whole campaigns). So we've got like six categories of things to cover, which means we'll only have room for so many in each category.
But wait, why are they even covering -- and just reprinting -- the life-shaped stuff from Windriders, which was barely a year old? I guess there's an argument to be made that they need this info so that you can understand the life-shaped artifacts, but frankly, if I didn't buy Windriders, and I'm not using life-shaped stuff, then I'm probably not using life-shaped artifacts. Put life-shaped artifacts in that book and don't reprint regular life-shaped items.
OK, so now we've got four categories left and, wait a minute, almost all of these magic artifacts are things that appear in other adventures or novels, and almost every one has the warning "this is very powerful, so be careful about introducing it to your campaign." Well, I'm not interested in the Psionatrix (last seen in Dragon's Crown) unless I want to run that adventure, so I don't need this here. You know what I could use as a DM? Maybe some advice or example adventures that involve some artifacts. So let's cut this out as it exists, and replace it with artifact adventure advice.
OK, we've got three categories, and also, isn't this "regular magic items" stuff info that exists in the revised core box set?
And now we're down to psionic items and psionic artifacts as the last remaining categories, and heck, the last thing that actually fits the title. (Maybe that should've been a clue?) Now, I could see the argument that the psionic items should be included in the core box set and maybe psionic artifacts section expanded to include adventures. And I really mean that, because otherwise, every entry is basically the same and basically pushes you into thinking about them in the same way: this is a very powerful artifact, it can be dangerous, here's how to destroy it. So, are we just supposed to constantly reenact The Lord of the Rings?
Which brings me back to my opening comments: the point of a book like this is to have the DM say "wow, I can't wait to use that!" But most of the time, I kept saying either "this isn't very interesting" or "this seems to repeat another item in this same book" or -- for the interesting artifacts -- "where has this been for the last ~10 years of game time?"
This is a real disappointing book to end out the Dark Sun line, as it seems to try to capture the history and scope of this epic weird fantasy world, but mostly ends up seeming trite.
And with that, I'm done with the project? Or am I? Yes, yes I am -- I had a thought that I would review the 4th Edition version of the Dark Sun book, but I looked through it and was bored, so that's my review.
But no triumphant trumpets for this book -- if anything, maybe a sad trombone.
But let's back up a bit: there's a long tradition in roleplaying publishing of just putting out books of things, usually magical things, usually magical weapons. Some of these books are full of original items, and sometimes they are compilations of things that have been published before; and in that, they're a lot like monster manuals and should function for the DM/players like monster manuals. You should be able to open one of these books and find something that makes you say, "oh, I can't wait to throw that at my players and see what happens" or even "hey, this would be perfect for an adventure."
So what is this book and why does it fail? Well, partly it's a naming problem: the world of Dark Sun has a lot of psionics, but it also has magic, and halfling life-shaping (covered in Windriders of the Jagged Cliffs, and this book sets out to cover all three categories of things, and both regular items (that your PCs might encounter a lot of) and one-off artifacts (that should be the focus of whole campaigns). So we've got like six categories of things to cover, which means we'll only have room for so many in each category.
But wait, why are they even covering -- and just reprinting -- the life-shaped stuff from Windriders, which was barely a year old? I guess there's an argument to be made that they need this info so that you can understand the life-shaped artifacts, but frankly, if I didn't buy Windriders, and I'm not using life-shaped stuff, then I'm probably not using life-shaped artifacts. Put life-shaped artifacts in that book and don't reprint regular life-shaped items.
OK, so now we've got four categories left and, wait a minute, almost all of these magic artifacts are things that appear in other adventures or novels, and almost every one has the warning "this is very powerful, so be careful about introducing it to your campaign." Well, I'm not interested in the Psionatrix (last seen in Dragon's Crown) unless I want to run that adventure, so I don't need this here. You know what I could use as a DM? Maybe some advice or example adventures that involve some artifacts. So let's cut this out as it exists, and replace it with artifact adventure advice.
OK, we've got three categories, and also, isn't this "regular magic items" stuff info that exists in the revised core box set?
And now we're down to psionic items and psionic artifacts as the last remaining categories, and heck, the last thing that actually fits the title. (Maybe that should've been a clue?) Now, I could see the argument that the psionic items should be included in the core box set and maybe psionic artifacts section expanded to include adventures. And I really mean that, because otherwise, every entry is basically the same and basically pushes you into thinking about them in the same way: this is a very powerful artifact, it can be dangerous, here's how to destroy it. So, are we just supposed to constantly reenact The Lord of the Rings?
Which brings me back to my opening comments: the point of a book like this is to have the DM say "wow, I can't wait to use that!" But most of the time, I kept saying either "this isn't very interesting" or "this seems to repeat another item in this same book" or -- for the interesting artifacts -- "where has this been for the last ~10 years of game time?"
This is a real disappointing book to end out the Dark Sun line, as it seems to try to capture the history and scope of this epic weird fantasy world, but mostly ends up seeming trite.
And with that, I'm done with the project? Or am I? Yes, yes I am -- I had a thought that I would review the 4th Edition version of the Dark Sun book, but I looked through it and was bored, so that's my review.
November 28, 2019
As magic is very limited under the Dark Sun, and has devastating consecuences upon the land, psionics evolved as a way to deal with the harshness of the world. Here is a big cache of items from the legendary to the outright strange (the living items of the Halflings), very nice to add to the unique feeling of the world. Some of these atifacts are just world-shattering, though, and no DM wants more than one for his players.
May 1, 2015
good dark sun book,glad I own it.
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