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Dying Earth Complete Set (Kickstarter Edition)

By: Goodman Games

Type: Collection

Product Line: Dungeon Crawl Classics - Dying Earth

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Product Info

Title
Dying Earth Complete Set (Kickstarter Edition)
Publisher
Author
Marc Bruner
Publish Year
2023
Dimensions
14x10x4"
NKG Part #
2148047075
MFG. Part #
GMG5260
Type
Collection

Description

The Dying Earth Complete Set includes:

  • Dying Earth Boxed Set
  • DCC DE #0 - The Black Obelisk
  • DCC DE #1 - The Laughing Idol of Lar-Shan
  • DCC DE #2 - The Sorcerer's Tower of Sanguine Slant
  • DCC DE #3 - Magnificent Machinations at the Grand Exposition
  • DCC DE #4 - Mind Weft of the Moonstone Palace
  • DCC DE #5 - Penumbra of the Polar Ape
  • Three color posters of amazing Dying Earth art
  • Punch-out grudge tokens
  • Player's Libram
  • Primer of Practical Magic
  • Intimate Anatomy of Several Creatures and Personages of the Twenty-First Aeon
  • A 22" x 17" map of the environs of the Dying Earth

    What is the Dying Earth?

    “Mazirian shook off the spell, if such it were, and uttered a spell of his own, and all the valley was lit by streaming darts of fire, lashing in from all directions to split Thrang's blundering body in a thousand pieces. This was the Excellent Prismatic Spray – many-colored stabbing lines.”

    The Dying Earth is a fictional future created by author Jack Vance set in the distant twilight of the earth as a dim red sun sheds its last life. Jack Vance is one of America's greatest science fiction and fantasy authors, a writer whose works indelibly changed the landscape of imaginative fiction and influenced countless others — both writers and gamers — who followed in his wake. A writer of multiple genres, he is best known to fans of role-playing games for his Dying Earth novels.

    The setting of the Dying Earth itself is wondrously evocative; the sun is feeble and red and often pulses with miasma-like wens that evoke fear or resignation from the earth's remaining few inhabitants. It is a slowly eclipsing, lonely future of a dying species that is so ancient its history has been lost or forgotten. Yet it is also filled with stories, both new and old, and rich, eccentric characters and supernal beings which contain an epic, illimitable quality even in the face of its surcease. It is an odyssey written for the end of the world.

    Vance's stories are filled with evocative descriptions and the almost casual use of obscure words, building a characteristic entablature of language in his novels that evokes Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and Dunsany, but with a craftsman’s affinity for restraint and economy and a storyteller’s delight in pulp and action. There is a lyrical quality to his prose.

    Another mark of his work are the characters, often captious in their discussions and resigned to fate, with offhand postulates of logic and philosophy that make them seem almost alien, yet filled with a familiarity due to their all-too-human foibles. Above all, Vance thought of himself as a speculative anthropologist, exploring through his characters and settings the limitations and abilities of humanity.

    Vance's works played a significant role in the development of the tabletop gaming hobby. He is listed as one of the six most influential authors in the creation of Dungeons & Dragons in the famed “Appendix N” where Gary Gygax describes his primary sources for the game. The stories of the Dying Earth were one of the inspirations for the magic system, often called “Vancian,” in which magic-users memorize spells from their librams, and once cast, forget them for the day. Several of the spells and magic items found in the game were also inspired from Jack Vance’s works: The Excellent Prismatic Spray, Imprisonment, and Evard’s Black Tentacles spells; the Robe of Eyes and IOUN Stones, the latter being stones harvested from the core of neutron stars that are being sliced away by the Nothing at the edge of the universe and are therefore rare and difficult to obtain. Gary Gygax also cited Vance's influence on the thief class, with the amoral and picaresque Cugel the Clever being as much an inspiration as Roger Zelazny’s Shadowjack.

    DCC Dying Earth follows the tradition of keeping Jack Vance's contributions alive in the fantasy role-playing hobby, extending the Appendix N elements that inspired the DCC RPG with the fantastical places, peoples, monsters, and magic of Vance's Dying Earth stories.