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Dune Trader (AD&D 2nd Ed, Dark Sun Setting Accessory DSR2) by Anthony Pryor
In the harsh lands of Athas, even the bare necessities of life are hard to come by. The caravans of the traders ply the shifting sands, daring raiders and the elements to bring goods and hope to both the teeming hordes of the city-states and the isolated villagers in the trackless wastelands. Without the traders, life on Athas would be impossible. Dune Trader explores the lives of the people who are the lifeblood of Athas. The major merchant houses of the Tyr region are described, as well as minor houses, elven merchant and raiding tribes, and the mercantile tendencies of all the races of Athas. The personalities who drive these houses and tribes are detailed fully within these pages. A new character class is introduced here--the trader class. The DM receives complete instructions on how to run a trader-based campaign, and the players are shown how to play trader characters and start their own merchant houses. The most vital and exciting challenges on Athas await within this book!
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Published January 1, 1657
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About the author
Anthony Pryor
79 books7 followersI started writing in the iron age of roleplaying games, back in about 1986, writing material for FASA's Battletech before moving on to other products like Shadowrun, Bard Games' Talislanta, and TSR's second edition of Dungeons and Dragons. More recently I've done product development for White Wolf/Sword and Sorcery Studios' Scarred Lands setting and for Frog God Games. My new supernatural thriller trilogy The Shepherd is coming soon from Permuted Press, and is available for pre-order through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Google Play and Simon and Schuster. I look forward to hearing from readers here and on my blog, so feel free to drop me a line if you're so inclined!
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
April 27, 2013
Athas is a harsh, depleted land, and most places only survive due to the web of trade that crisscrosses the Tablelands like the veins and arteries that weave their way through a human body. So, doing a supplement on trading only makes sense, and Dune Trader manages to avoid a lot of the problems that books about economics in RPGs tend to fall into.
For one thing, the actual rules for dealing with trading are pretty simple. There's a chart showing the relative costs for goods in different cities and a way to determine random fluctuations in pricing, and a slight expansion of the barter rules in the class abilites for traders (about which more later), but most of the book is instead a gazetteer of the various merchant houses of the Tablelands, both big and small. The large ones actually tended to be more benevolent than I would have expected Athas' equivalent of major corporations to be, but the explanation given is that the ones that refuse to smuggle or deal in slaves tended to be founded by former slaves or adventurers and maintain their founders' moral codes. Of course, it may also just be a reflection of the infamous 2nd edition shift towards sanitizing D&D. There are seven major houses given, and a smattering of minor ones, plus some suggestions as to how the players would go about founding one.
I really like that part. The typical Dark Sun starting position of escaped slaves can get trying after doing it more than a couple times, and the player characters being the founders of a merchant organization provides plenty of the same difficulties as being slaves: resources are scarce, there are enemies on all sides, their fortunes can turn on a single incident, and they'll have to do most of the work for what they earn themselves. Also, it's a great excuse to travel across Athas and run into all kinds of shenannigans, which the book actually makes a point specifically about. The trading campaign should be an excuse to get the characters into different adventures, it says, not an exercise in manipulating spreadsheets and ledgers.
There's also descriptions of two elven tribes, one primarily mercantile and one tribe of raiders that's recently started trading, and an in-depth description of an elven market and how they manage to to offer contraband goods right under the sorcerer-kings' noses.
However, Dune Trader really does start to show the limits of the AD&D 2nd edition class/level system. Dark Sun made the proficiency system required, but classes were still mostly indications of combat power even then. There were thief skills, but the arguments about how effective "hide in shadows" really is continue to this day. The addition of a trader class breaks this still further because it ties mercantile ability to character level, which means that richer merchants need to be higher level, which leads to stuff like a woman in her early 20s being a trader 15/thief 8, or a man in his late 70s being a level 20 trader, and thus having tons of hit points and combat power, because levels are the only way to represent their skills accurately. Then again, classes and levels have never made sense in reflecting anything in the actual game world, so the best way to deal with it is just not to think about it too hard.
The trader class is a bit weird, too. As a rogue class, most of its abilities deal with thievery--it gets all the thief skills plus the poisoning ability of Dark Sun bards, and the only ability actually related to trading is the ability to fast-talk people. It seems like it'd be a lot better as a kit available to any class that offered that power in exchange for reduced combat ability or weapon proficiencies, but that's not the route they took.
Other than that, I don't have anything bad to say about Dune Trader. It's a great look into small-scale economics and the best way to get players involved in an interesting way with trade, either as traders themselves or just through interactions with the merchant houses.
For one thing, the actual rules for dealing with trading are pretty simple. There's a chart showing the relative costs for goods in different cities and a way to determine random fluctuations in pricing, and a slight expansion of the barter rules in the class abilites for traders (about which more later), but most of the book is instead a gazetteer of the various merchant houses of the Tablelands, both big and small. The large ones actually tended to be more benevolent than I would have expected Athas' equivalent of major corporations to be, but the explanation given is that the ones that refuse to smuggle or deal in slaves tended to be founded by former slaves or adventurers and maintain their founders' moral codes. Of course, it may also just be a reflection of the infamous 2nd edition shift towards sanitizing D&D. There are seven major houses given, and a smattering of minor ones, plus some suggestions as to how the players would go about founding one.
I really like that part. The typical Dark Sun starting position of escaped slaves can get trying after doing it more than a couple times, and the player characters being the founders of a merchant organization provides plenty of the same difficulties as being slaves: resources are scarce, there are enemies on all sides, their fortunes can turn on a single incident, and they'll have to do most of the work for what they earn themselves. Also, it's a great excuse to travel across Athas and run into all kinds of shenannigans, which the book actually makes a point specifically about. The trading campaign should be an excuse to get the characters into different adventures, it says, not an exercise in manipulating spreadsheets and ledgers.
There's also descriptions of two elven tribes, one primarily mercantile and one tribe of raiders that's recently started trading, and an in-depth description of an elven market and how they manage to to offer contraband goods right under the sorcerer-kings' noses.
However, Dune Trader really does start to show the limits of the AD&D 2nd edition class/level system. Dark Sun made the proficiency system required, but classes were still mostly indications of combat power even then. There were thief skills, but the arguments about how effective "hide in shadows" really is continue to this day. The addition of a trader class breaks this still further because it ties mercantile ability to character level, which means that richer merchants need to be higher level, which leads to stuff like a woman in her early 20s being a trader 15/thief 8, or a man in his late 70s being a level 20 trader, and thus having tons of hit points and combat power, because levels are the only way to represent their skills accurately. Then again, classes and levels have never made sense in reflecting anything in the actual game world, so the best way to deal with it is just not to think about it too hard.
The trader class is a bit weird, too. As a rogue class, most of its abilities deal with thievery--it gets all the thief skills plus the poisoning ability of Dark Sun bards, and the only ability actually related to trading is the ability to fast-talk people. It seems like it'd be a lot better as a kit available to any class that offered that power in exchange for reduced combat ability or weapon proficiencies, but that's not the route they took.
Other than that, I don't have anything bad to say about Dune Trader. It's a great look into small-scale economics and the best way to get players involved in an interesting way with trade, either as traders themselves or just through interactions with the merchant houses.
Read
June 3, 2022As I start my 7/32 Dark Sun reviews, I have to admit, my fingers are beginning to cramp.
And that's probably fine because Dune Trader is a perfectly fine and perfectly straightforward RPG book in this, what I'm calling the second wave of Dark Sun materials. What I'm calling the first wave was covered by reviews 1-4 -- the core box, the Monstrous Compendium, the first adventure, and the Dragon King book: the products that set up the world and introduce the big twist that the kings are dragons.
Here, in the second wave, which is probably products 5-10ish (but don't quote me on that yet, some of them I haven't even read yet), the focus is on advancing the metaplot of the assassination of King Kalak; and on drilling down into the world and exploring what's already been given. So the core box talked about slavery and ex-slaves, and the Slave Tribes book dug into that; and the core box talked about the importance of trade in this resource-poor world, and here we have a book all about the merchants who keep the cities alive.
Just as Slave Tribes spent over half of its pages detailing some tribes and how the PCs might interact with them (help the good tribe, fight with the bad tribe), again ~58 pages out of 96 in this book are dedicated to detailing different merchant houses: the big houses (each city has one, each merchant house influenced by the culture of its home city), small houses, and the elven traders (and raiders) that are only somewhat accepted by the cities.
(The chapter on the elven tribes also serves a little bit as a cultural guide for elves in this world, but then they went ahead and produced a whole other book on that topic, so I wonder if there was more that they cut out, or if they felt there was demand for it.)
I don't really have much to say about these chapters, but generally I give it a thumbs up: there's enough info on each house to give the DM a hook or two, with some wiggle room for however the DM wants to fill in some info. Like, each major house has three or four NPCs described, usually something like: the leader of the house, their right hand assistant, and the scheming child who has their own agenda, not always evil. So that's enough for an adventure or even maybe a patron, but also gives the DM enough empty space to maneuver.
(The end of the book includes a description of a few styles of caravans and locations, which could have fit in with these chapters. I suspect they're at the back just for layout issues, and/or to avoid questions about why they provided some types of caravans but not others.)
The back third of this book is also interesting to me, especially, the part about the economics of this world. I'm always a sucker for a chart that shows what resources are in high supply where and low supply where else.
What's less interesting -- but again, might've been catnip to me in my teens when I was reading the back and deciding what book to buy -- is the new trader class, which... really doesn't need to be a class. Introduce some new proficiency skills, maybe some new rules and tables on running a merchant campaign, but this class doesn't really do anything.
But ultimately, who picks up D&D thinking "I can't wait to amass a fortune through clever arbitrage!"? That's more of a Traveller thing. So the material here about how the PCs might get involved with the merchant houses is playable; the stuff about trading and the new trader class is... perhaps useful for a smaller audience.
(Lastly, a biographical note: I did buy this book as a child but must've lent it out or lost it during some move, so I had to reacquire it. Well, not "had to" but was compelled to. Once I collect all these books, though, will I want to keep them?)
And that's probably fine because Dune Trader is a perfectly fine and perfectly straightforward RPG book in this, what I'm calling the second wave of Dark Sun materials. What I'm calling the first wave was covered by reviews 1-4 -- the core box, the Monstrous Compendium, the first adventure, and the Dragon King book: the products that set up the world and introduce the big twist that the kings are dragons.
Here, in the second wave, which is probably products 5-10ish (but don't quote me on that yet, some of them I haven't even read yet), the focus is on advancing the metaplot of the assassination of King Kalak; and on drilling down into the world and exploring what's already been given. So the core box talked about slavery and ex-slaves, and the Slave Tribes book dug into that; and the core box talked about the importance of trade in this resource-poor world, and here we have a book all about the merchants who keep the cities alive.
Just as Slave Tribes spent over half of its pages detailing some tribes and how the PCs might interact with them (help the good tribe, fight with the bad tribe), again ~58 pages out of 96 in this book are dedicated to detailing different merchant houses: the big houses (each city has one, each merchant house influenced by the culture of its home city), small houses, and the elven traders (and raiders) that are only somewhat accepted by the cities.
(The chapter on the elven tribes also serves a little bit as a cultural guide for elves in this world, but then they went ahead and produced a whole other book on that topic, so I wonder if there was more that they cut out, or if they felt there was demand for it.)
I don't really have much to say about these chapters, but generally I give it a thumbs up: there's enough info on each house to give the DM a hook or two, with some wiggle room for however the DM wants to fill in some info. Like, each major house has three or four NPCs described, usually something like: the leader of the house, their right hand assistant, and the scheming child who has their own agenda, not always evil. So that's enough for an adventure or even maybe a patron, but also gives the DM enough empty space to maneuver.
(The end of the book includes a description of a few styles of caravans and locations, which could have fit in with these chapters. I suspect they're at the back just for layout issues, and/or to avoid questions about why they provided some types of caravans but not others.)
The back third of this book is also interesting to me, especially, the part about the economics of this world. I'm always a sucker for a chart that shows what resources are in high supply where and low supply where else.
What's less interesting -- but again, might've been catnip to me in my teens when I was reading the back and deciding what book to buy -- is the new trader class, which... really doesn't need to be a class. Introduce some new proficiency skills, maybe some new rules and tables on running a merchant campaign, but this class doesn't really do anything.
But ultimately, who picks up D&D thinking "I can't wait to amass a fortune through clever arbitrage!"? That's more of a Traveller thing. So the material here about how the PCs might get involved with the merchant houses is playable; the stuff about trading and the new trader class is... perhaps useful for a smaller audience.
(Lastly, a biographical note: I did buy this book as a child but must've lent it out or lost it during some move, so I had to reacquire it. Well, not "had to" but was compelled to. Once I collect all these books, though, will I want to keep them?)
November 28, 2019
The accessory about commerce in the harsh desert of Athas. This book is the perfect beginning point for something quite uncommon for RPG adventures: those related to opening markets, to supply markets, to discover them; that profit through commerce is the perfect reason for adventuring. Here are in detail de commercial houses of the major city-states, expanded rules for commerce, and the main settlements and markets. A fatastic change of pace for normal adventuring in AD&D.
December 3, 2022
Adds interesting depth to the setting, but might not be of especially wide applicability - this is D&D, not Traveller. Full review: https://refereeingandreflection.wordp...
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews