Reviews for City by the Silt Sea/Boxed Set

The average rating for City by the Silt Sea/Boxed Set based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-03-24 00:00:00 Douglas Dodd Right from the beginning, City by the Silt Sea starts the retconning. While the Prism Pentad probably has all the information on the Blue Age and the Green Age and the halfling lifeshapers and the Age of Magic and all of that, I hadn't read that when I first read this boxed set--and still haven't, actually--so it was all new to me. And while I can appreciate the people who don't like Dark Sun's extremely vague history being nailed down, there's a lot of parts of it I like. I'm fond of biotech, especially in RPGs, and I love the image of a Blue Age where all technology was grown by the lifeshapers and living creatures provided transportation, housing, medicine, communication, personal protection, and all the other conveniences of living. Then came the brown tide, which plunged the world back into the stone age until the Rebirth races were able to harness the Way. Using the power of the mind, they built a civilization on the shoulders of psionic masters and the backs of enslaved psyches until the rise of Rajaat and the Age of Magic destroyed civilization a second time, plunging Athas into barbarism from which it has never recovered. It reinforces the themes of Athas; that the world is in decline, that every major change is for the worse, and that the modern age is a fallen one and the grandeur of the past is gone, possibly forever. I also love the mention that some of the halflings took shelter from the brown tide in underground strongholds. I just imagine Fallout-like vaults, where the art of lifeshaping is still practiced after thousands of years, but has fallen to ritual and superstition, like the Jagged Cliffs. Or one where everything went wrong millennia ago, and now it's inhabited by a unique ecosystem of lifeshaped predators. The bits about the Dragon and Abalache-Re being dead and everything else from the Prism Pentad are awful, but fortunately they're just a few stray lines here and there and easily ignored in favor of the actual setting information. The content of City by the Silt Sea is a lot like Valley of Dust and Fire, right down to a dangerous journey through numerous perils to city run by a dragon and inhabitants who consider themselves innately superior to all others. There's actually a reason to travel there here, though, from rumors of ancient treasure in the ruins to companions who have quests to accomplish to hints of information from people who live nearby. It's set up as a series of locations in one book, including places like the Sunken City, which has an area of old Giustenal preserved by Abalach-Re in a dome of magically-hardened sand, or the Groaning City, where refugees from the Cleansing Wars fled from Dregoth until he found them decades later and continued the genocide, or Kragmorta, where the first attempt of Dregoth to create his perfect race were dumped as failures among the rivers of lava, all the way down to New Giustenal, the City of Dragon Bones, in the depths of the earth. Then there's an adventure book that provides reasons for the PCs to go through all these locations and things to do while they're there. It's a lot better about all this than Valley of Dust and Fire. It still assume some PC altruism, in the grand-but-bizarre tradition of Dark Sun adventures, but there's actually enough treasure there that they don't feel like it's a fool's errand, and there's no expectation that they'll beat Dregoth. They can spar with his minions, and foil his plans--possibly permanently--but a group of 4-6 5th to 9th level PCs is not going to be able to kill a 29th-level dragon in the heart of his citadel. I actually really like Dregoth as a character. Sure, he's a genocidal megalomaniac, but so are all the other sorcerer kings, and the depiction of New Giustenal makes it seem like it's the best place to live in the Tablelands. I mean, they have no slaves. That right there puts Dregoth head and shoulders above his associates, and later notes that Mon Adderath is actually a real friend and that Dregoth's dream is to recreate the glories of the Blue Age make him seem positively saintly compared to someone like Kalak. In the who's who of Dark Sun genocidal megalomaniacs, Dregoth comes out on top. I think it's that and the sandbox structure that makes City by the Silt Sea so great. Fiction often lives and dies by the villains, and that's especially true in RPGs. Giustenal is a great setting, Dregoth has noble goals compared to the other sorcerer-kings, but there are still plenty of reasons to oppose him and when the PCs escape, they're left with the question "What do we do now?" and plenty of possibility for answers to that question. That's how great adventures in an RPG end, and City by the Silt Sea is one of the great ones.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-01-03 00:00:00 James Robbins Continuing my walk through of our art books. This one brings back memories, especially from Dragon Magazine. The text is a bit lame, but also set up kind of as an ad for the different parts of the TSR world. And that world has more pieces than I remember existing. There is no real stories around the artwork, no techniques, no why did I do it this way. But still interesting. And not as dated as I would have expected.