Before characters were created, we settled on a starting point for the game. The king of Tyr, Kalak, a mighty sorcerer-king whose assassination kicks off the beginning of the Dark Sun metaplot, hired the party to explore Mount Narran, an enormous mountain a couple of weeks south of Tyr, and investigate an implausible rumor that there was a hidden city of elves beneath the mountain. The party finds zero drow, but instead stumble upon a secret hidden magical site, where an enormous amount of elemental power lies dormant.

Vero decided to play a controller, Bert a leader, Carla a striker, and Doug a defender. Thus were all our bases covered. More specifically:

Vero decided to play Kyahasha, a changeling (inspired by a changeling NPC in the books) templar hybrid wizard-psion dreamwalker, who maintains multiple identities among various communities in and around Tyr.

Bert created Trevia, a human elemental priest shaman rainmaker.

Carla toyed with a kalashtar (reskinned as a psionically adept human ethnicity) but ended up with Aya, a human templar warlock preserver.

Doug made Thom, a half-giant gladiator fighter whose paragon path I don’t recall.

To ensure that the characters started the game with some history and personality, and to provide hooks I can mine as GM, I talked the players into this exercise, lifted from Spirit of the Century. The conceit is that a new series of Dark Sun gaming novels are being put out by TSR or whoever, starring the player-characters and establishing their backstories and relationships. Each player came up with a loose summary of a novel starring their character, then two other players described how their characters were supporting cast members in that novel. Then we repeated the process, giving us a total of eight novels, with each character the star of two books and guest-starring in four others.

There (Thom, with Kyahasha and Trevia)
Queen of the Dwarves (Kyahasha, with Aya and Thom)
Fleeing Across the Sands (Trevia, with Thom and Aya)
Lost in Time and Space (Aya, with Trevia and Kyahasha)
Path of Reckoning (Aya, with Thom and Kyahasha)
Rusted Rain (Trevia, with Kyahasha and Aya)
And Back Again (Thom, with Trevia and Aya)
The Sun Also Rises (Kyahasha, with Thom and Trevia)

For my own amusement, I wrote summaries of the resulting stories in the style of a high school girl doing recaps for someone’s blog, which follow.