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Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 2nd Edition
The Complete Gladiator's Handbook
From the dusty arenas of Athas comes The Complete Gladiators Handbook, read to arm the fiercest DARK SUN campaign antagonist. Numerous new kits, details of Tyr region's arenas, quick summaries of combat rules, a martial arts system, and suggestions on how to run arena games are within these pages. So gird your weapons - your opponents await!
128 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 1993
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
April 5, 2014
I honestly expected this book to be mediocre at best when I first started it, and probably would have skipped it entirely if I weren't trying to read through all the Dark Sun books in order. As the amount of stars I gave it probably told you, that was an entirely unwarranted opinion and after a rough start it turned out a lot better than I expected.
First, in the very beginning there's a comment about an arena with 15,000 spectators cheering for a crowd. The population figures given for the cities mean that that would be roughly ~70% of the city's population in the arena at any one time, which is insane. Though not as insane as the later mention of 40,000 people in the arena. I guess that's when Tyr invites everyone in Urik to come to the games.
Then comes the kits section second, and like most kit collections in AD&D 2nd edition, with the notable exception of the ones in Player's Option: Skills & Powers, they're an even mix of badly-balanced, worthless, and ill-considered. Shoutouts go to the Professional Gladiator, which has advantages and disadvantages that are literally exactly the same as the base gladiator class, the Blind-Fighter, who has to spend 2 weapon and 2 non-proficiency slots on being able to fight while blind in a very narrow range band, and the Gladiatorial Slave, who has the benefit of specializing in two single melee weapons and can gain a bonus of +1 strength, dexterity, or constitution in exchange for a -1 in both intelligence and charisma. Note that by default, gladiators can specialize in as many weapons as they want, making this kit a pure hindrance. The other kits are mostly unmemorable, though the Beast-trainer and the Reaver aren't bad.
The real standout is the jazst, though. They're traveling harlequins who perform ritualized mock-combat before the battle starts in order to rile up the crowd, but that's not why they're worth talking about. It's because of this passage:
The best part of the kit section is the list of example gladiators after each kit. Most of them are boring, but special mention should be made for "Gall the Obtuse," who has been raised three times, accidentally impaled himself four times, and is currently dead, and for Gaanon, the half-giant with an axe.
There's a proficiency section, but it suffers from D&D's usual over-specificity that led to stuff like Use Rope. Dirty Tricks and Taunting here are both proficiencies, which implies that people who don't have them can't do them, which is terrible. Unless you're playing Dungeons & Dragons: The Secret of Monkey Island, you probably shouldn't need specific training to insult people successfully.
The weapon section is mostly filled with really odd and overly specific weapon types--for example, "the carikkal is made by lashing a length of mekillot bone to the jawbone of a jozhal"--but this isn't actually a problem, since retiarii were a thing. Weird weapons is one good way to keep the crowd interested.
After that, though, the book gets really good and it's what pushed it up to four stars for me. There's a whole section on attack and defense maneuvers, like trips and targeting limbs and hitting people in the head and bleeding damage based on weapon type and martial arts for unarmed combat and so on that's fantastic and that honestly should have been included in the Dungeon Master's Guide. One of the reasons for Linear Fighter/Quadratic Wizard is that wizards have lots of rules they can point to whenever they want to do something with their powers, but warriors have to throw themselves on the mercy of the GM. If the wizard wants to put people to sleep, they can flip open the Player's Handbook, turn to the spell section, and point to sleep, and there are clear rules for how it works. Warriors who want to knock someone out with their weapon in AD&D 2nd Edition have to...hope the GM is feeling generous. Sure, don't play with jerks, but the problem is that without consistent rulings or a mutually-understood framework, the players of warriors can't properly evaluate the relative worth of their tactics in battle, and the rules here let them do that.
Though being able to chop people's heads off before their hit points run out is another arrow in the fight over what hit points really mean, admittedly.
There's a section on arenas in the city-states that's actually pretty cool. Gulg's arena is a mile away from the city and filled with greenery, making some fights a cat-and-mouse battle through the bushes. Raam's arena has a chasm separating the spectators from the combatants, and occasionally fighters fall in and are impaled on the thorny brambles below. Urik's arena is a former obsidian mine, and portions of the grounds are razor-sharp or burning hot.
Also, there's a sentence that mentions the
The book ends with a large section on running gladiatorial campaigns, including descriptions of training, the careers of gladiators, a fame/infamy system, how the arena can be just as full of policking and intrigue as the courts of the sorcerer-kings, and so on. I have to admit, the description of the training offered by the city-states sounded really bizarre to me. After all the mention that gladiators are an investment and they are valued for their potential to bring in lots of money to their owners, their training involved a suspicious amount of firepits and spikes and archers using live ammunition to teach them dodging.
Oh, and here's the description of humans as gladiators:
Finally, before reading this I never really understood the Baxa hate. I mean, sure, Brom is obviously the superior of the two, but other than Baxa's tendency to give people shark teeth for no reason I never really saw what was so awful, but after reading The Complete Gladiator's Handbook I can understand some of the antipathy. While there were plenty of reasonable pictures, there were a lot showing beings that probably don't exist anywhere on Athas, like the bizarre multi-limbed fish-lizard-man on page 34. There was also some pictures where I wasn't sure what had happened, or where the characters' positions didn't make sense based on what was happening in the scence. Also, a lot of recycled art, but that's not his fault and is kind of endemic to Dark Sun books anyway.
I'd say this is worth it for the expanded combat options alone, and the glimpses into Athasian society are a nice frosting on top of the cake. And for anyone who starts with the cliche "you're all combatants in the arena together" new Dark Sun game pitch, this book is a good read as well.
First, in the very beginning there's a comment about an arena with 15,000 spectators cheering for a crowd. The population figures given for the cities mean that that would be roughly ~70% of the city's population in the arena at any one time, which is insane. Though not as insane as the later mention of 40,000 people in the arena. I guess that's when Tyr invites everyone in Urik to come to the games.
Then comes the kits section second, and like most kit collections in AD&D 2nd edition, with the notable exception of the ones in Player's Option: Skills & Powers, they're an even mix of badly-balanced, worthless, and ill-considered. Shoutouts go to the Professional Gladiator, which has advantages and disadvantages that are literally exactly the same as the base gladiator class, the Blind-Fighter, who has to spend 2 weapon and 2 non-proficiency slots on being able to fight while blind in a very narrow range band, and the Gladiatorial Slave, who has the benefit of specializing in two single melee weapons and can gain a bonus of +1 strength, dexterity, or constitution in exchange for a -1 in both intelligence and charisma. Note that by default, gladiators can specialize in as many weapons as they want, making this kit a pure hindrance. The other kits are mostly unmemorable, though the Beast-trainer and the Reaver aren't bad.
The real standout is the jazst, though. They're traveling harlequins who perform ritualized mock-combat before the battle starts in order to rile up the crowd, but that's not why they're worth talking about. It's because of this passage:
Jazst prefer steel but will settle for the brightly colored, flexible feather/scales of the Z'tal lizard. The individual scales deliver 1 point of razor damage per scale. Up to 10 can be safely mounted on each appendage of the Jazst's performing outfit. If a successful hit is made against a gladiatorial opponent, the PC rolls 1d10 to see how many razor feather scales came in contact with the intended vic-tim. If a Jazst is forced to grapple with an opponent, she may be able to bring more than one set of razors to bear. Jazst may otherwise choose and specialize in other weapons as the gladiatorial class.So, 1d10 damage per limb, and more than one set can be used at once. Therefore, the best solution is to jump on the opponent and wiggle around, doing 4d10 damage. Also, there's a later mention that they get two attacks a round, letting them do 8d10 damage every round, which a higher damage output than all other PCs and most creatures. Also, this is available at first level. All-jazst party?
The best part of the kit section is the list of example gladiators after each kit. Most of them are boring, but special mention should be made for "Gall the Obtuse," who has been raised three times, accidentally impaled himself four times, and is currently dead, and for Gaanon, the half-giant with an axe.
There's a proficiency section, but it suffers from D&D's usual over-specificity that led to stuff like Use Rope. Dirty Tricks and Taunting here are both proficiencies, which implies that people who don't have them can't do them, which is terrible. Unless you're playing Dungeons & Dragons: The Secret of Monkey Island, you probably shouldn't need specific training to insult people successfully.
The weapon section is mostly filled with really odd and overly specific weapon types--for example, "the carikkal is made by lashing a length of mekillot bone to the jawbone of a jozhal"--but this isn't actually a problem, since retiarii were a thing. Weird weapons is one good way to keep the crowd interested.
After that, though, the book gets really good and it's what pushed it up to four stars for me. There's a whole section on attack and defense maneuvers, like trips and targeting limbs and hitting people in the head and bleeding damage based on weapon type and martial arts for unarmed combat and so on that's fantastic and that honestly should have been included in the Dungeon Master's Guide. One of the reasons for Linear Fighter/Quadratic Wizard is that wizards have lots of rules they can point to whenever they want to do something with their powers, but warriors have to throw themselves on the mercy of the GM. If the wizard wants to put people to sleep, they can flip open the Player's Handbook, turn to the spell section, and point to sleep, and there are clear rules for how it works. Warriors who want to knock someone out with their weapon in AD&D 2nd Edition have to...hope the GM is feeling generous. Sure, don't play with jerks, but the problem is that without consistent rulings or a mutually-understood framework, the players of warriors can't properly evaluate the relative worth of their tactics in battle, and the rules here let them do that.
Though being able to chop people's heads off before their hit points run out is another arrow in the fight over what hit points really mean, admittedly.
There's a section on arenas in the city-states that's actually pretty cool. Gulg's arena is a mile away from the city and filled with greenery, making some fights a cat-and-mouse battle through the bushes. Raam's arena has a chasm separating the spectators from the combatants, and occasionally fighters fall in and are impaled on the thorny brambles below. Urik's arena is a former obsidian mine, and portions of the grounds are razor-sharp or burning hot.
Also, there's a sentence that mentions the
reddish green Athasian skywhich is a fantastic mental image.
The book ends with a large section on running gladiatorial campaigns, including descriptions of training, the careers of gladiators, a fame/infamy system, how the arena can be just as full of policking and intrigue as the courts of the sorcerer-kings, and so on. I have to admit, the description of the training offered by the city-states sounded really bizarre to me. After all the mention that gladiators are an investment and they are valued for their potential to bring in lots of money to their owners, their training involved a suspicious amount of firepits and spikes and archers using live ammunition to teach them dodging.
Oh, and here's the description of humans as gladiators:
Humans can be good or bad partners. Humans possess an overwhelming desire for personal gain regardless of its costs to others. Humans lack a compunction to lying, cheating, stealing, or killing one another. If those things can be overcome, then and only then do humans make good partners.Maybe Thomas Hobbes wrote this section?
Finally, before reading this I never really understood the Baxa hate. I mean, sure, Brom is obviously the superior of the two, but other than Baxa's tendency to give people shark teeth for no reason I never really saw what was so awful, but after reading The Complete Gladiator's Handbook I can understand some of the antipathy. While there were plenty of reasonable pictures, there were a lot showing beings that probably don't exist anywhere on Athas, like the bizarre multi-limbed fish-lizard-man on page 34. There was also some pictures where I wasn't sure what had happened, or where the characters' positions didn't make sense based on what was happening in the scence. Also, a lot of recycled art, but that's not his fault and is kind of endemic to Dark Sun books anyway.
I'd say this is worth it for the expanded combat options alone, and the glimpses into Athasian society are a nice frosting on top of the cake. And for anyone who starts with the cliche "you're all combatants in the arena together" new Dark Sun game pitch, this book is a good read as well.
Read
June 18, 202215/32 of the Dark Sun reviews.
This is a perfect example of a book I loved as a child, and sort of scratch my head over now.
I mean, it’s clear why I liked it--there’s a bunch of kits for the gladiator class, a bunch of special rules to make combat more “interesting” (like bleeding rules and a special table to show what sorts of martial arts attacks gain advantages against what sort of martial arts defenses). And I didn't even mind back then that it collects a lot of already used color art for the campaign line. Heck, back then it was harder to find the covers--that was back in the day when I would cherish a catalogue--so I was probably more than find with recognizing the covers of Ivory Triangle and Slave Tribes when they got reused.
And besides rules that might work for D&D in general, there’s also Dark Sun-setting specific info, like new weapons and maps of all the famous arenas, which, while not strictly necessary in a player book, does help paint a picture of what life as a gladiator might be like.
But today, I look at it and--well, let’s step back and ask: “what would I want a player book on gladiators to have in it?” And that makes me have to admit, I don’t even know why gladiator has to be its own class. (But then, in my old age, I want fewer rules and options, not more.)
But OK, taking that massive, blood pressure-ruining grain of salt into account, actually, this book kind of hits what I would want: there’s some fun one-line description of famous gladiators, info on what day to day life as a gladiator might be like (though again, I want more fluff and less “if you get a massage, you get a +2 to Endurance tests”), and some historically-inspired notion of what the arena is for and what sorts of contests go on in there.
And we get all that, just loaded up with a lot of rules info, which, frankly, is what you need when you’re playing AD&D 2nd edition. Gosh, maybe rereading this book especially shows how my taste in games has changed from July 1993 when this book was released.
But one thing that this book is definitely missing is something that some of the other class-books have, which is info on what it’s like to role-play a gladiator—what sorts of drives and inspirations fuel them, what their novel-like backstories might be. Putting something like that in this book would also point to what I think is a big hole in the gladiator class: if you have a whole class focused around one non-adventure activity (like the dune trader with trading), what would make them go on more traditional adventures?
Or put another way: why do they even have this class as an option for players?
This is a perfect example of a book I loved as a child, and sort of scratch my head over now.
I mean, it’s clear why I liked it--there’s a bunch of kits for the gladiator class, a bunch of special rules to make combat more “interesting” (like bleeding rules and a special table to show what sorts of martial arts attacks gain advantages against what sort of martial arts defenses). And I didn't even mind back then that it collects a lot of already used color art for the campaign line. Heck, back then it was harder to find the covers--that was back in the day when I would cherish a catalogue--so I was probably more than find with recognizing the covers of Ivory Triangle and Slave Tribes when they got reused.
And besides rules that might work for D&D in general, there’s also Dark Sun-setting specific info, like new weapons and maps of all the famous arenas, which, while not strictly necessary in a player book, does help paint a picture of what life as a gladiator might be like.
But today, I look at it and--well, let’s step back and ask: “what would I want a player book on gladiators to have in it?” And that makes me have to admit, I don’t even know why gladiator has to be its own class. (But then, in my old age, I want fewer rules and options, not more.)
But OK, taking that massive, blood pressure-ruining grain of salt into account, actually, this book kind of hits what I would want: there’s some fun one-line description of famous gladiators, info on what day to day life as a gladiator might be like (though again, I want more fluff and less “if you get a massage, you get a +2 to Endurance tests”), and some historically-inspired notion of what the arena is for and what sorts of contests go on in there.
And we get all that, just loaded up with a lot of rules info, which, frankly, is what you need when you’re playing AD&D 2nd edition. Gosh, maybe rereading this book especially shows how my taste in games has changed from July 1993 when this book was released.
But one thing that this book is definitely missing is something that some of the other class-books have, which is info on what it’s like to role-play a gladiator—what sorts of drives and inspirations fuel them, what their novel-like backstories might be. Putting something like that in this book would also point to what I think is a big hole in the gladiator class: if you have a whole class focused around one non-adventure activity (like the dune trader with trading), what would make them go on more traditional adventures?
Or put another way: why do they even have this class as an option for players?
November 3, 2009
Great book on the gladiator class of Dark Sun. Lots of new useful materials. The book contains 9 gladiator kits, notes on arena staff and renowned NPCs, gladiator optimisation, new weapons and combat options, quick look at the arenas of Tyr, as well as detailed information on how to run a gladiator-centric campaign.
June 27, 2012
great book about dark sun gladiator's for dnd!
February 23, 2014
A must for fighting in Dark Sun. It gives a nice perspective on how gladiatoral shows are run, the culture of the arena, and fighting!
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews