I play Barcan I’ve been role playing him more silly and out of it, probably more then he should be. We found the fire mote and I had Barcan called it Steven, and Barcan became quick friends with the mote. He disappeared in our game managing to warn us about assault, which made Barcan upset that he lost his new friend and I’ve decided to make him say that the mote Steven will live on in the fire magic that Barcan uses.

Barcan has very poor defenses but I decided to play him as we missed having a ranged character in the encounters program. I’ve liked him so far and can see some of the choices that they made for his character. This is my first time playing as a cosmic sorcerer and I’m inspired to try building one of my own.

He wasn’t that useful during the skill challenge since he didn’t have any primary skills that could be used but we made it in the end and everyone made their final endurance checks.

In the encounter we were in the center almost the entire time the two defenders both marked the two large Kanks which helped the other characters out. No one was even dropped. Vuka followed the background of the Kanks as well, he had the bug in a grab most of the time and our DM allowed him to ride the Kank as he wailed on him.

We enjoyed this week and it was nice to role play the characters and seeing things that are out in the desert that are not trying to kill us. I was expecting to have some one drop this encounter but we did come close.

I used the Fire Elemental as a role-playing device, but also as a way to help the players out after the brutality of last week.

To make the elemental more interesting, I decided that as a protector of life it actually had some kind of healing power. Instead of writing glass letters in the sand, it would sear the words into the flesh of the sorcerer, and then heal him… I’d typed out its sentences before the session, so I could reveal the words rather than speaking them myself.

The players were really beat up after last week, so I decided to give them a free Comrade’s Succor ritual: the elemental would cast it, and provide a few extra surges to go around. This meant it was sacrificing itself to save the players, which they enjoyed.

Later, in the encounter with the Kanks, one of my players, upon making a Nature check to recall that Kanks are sometimes kept as mounts, decided that she wanted to capture and tame the kanks. The party was entirely caught up on the idea, and decided to knock the smaller kanks unconscious in order to rear them as future mounts. I devised and impromptu skill challenge, where the players had to Heal the wounded kanks, and then use a combination of Nature, Intimidate, Athletics, Endurance, and Acrobatics to sucessfully break the kanks. I don’t know how this will play out in the future of the season; the kanks they took are too small to ride and I ruled that breaking them involved removing their acidic spittle, but it provided a fun roleplaying moment that clearly overshadowed the combat.

> Jarvix is completely out of healing surges
AMEN! I am also playing the Uni-Horned one + feel lucky to have one surge left! Thanks, David S.

(By the way: the whole time, I didn’t realize that we were playing encounter/week 1.)

Hey, if you want to learn anything about the ‘classic’ (2nd edition) dark sun setting, I’m pretty well versed and have most of the books. I used to run a DS game 15 years ago and its still my favourite setting. I keep trying to start a new campaign up, but I never have the time.