You’d normally expect a monster book to end right after the “Zombie” entry, but we’re only at the two-third mark on this one. We’re now entering the section on the “Personages of Athas”.

The book has a really short intro for it, explaining that it takes a lot of skill and luck to survive for long in this world, and that this is a sample of people who managed to do exactly that and are therefore remarkable.

The difference between the entries in this section and the ones in the monster section are not mechanical. As far as I can understand, every entry in this section concerns one or more specific individuals. And while I haven’t read every entry yet, I also suspect the book doesn’t expect them to automatically be your enemies. They could be entirely neutral to your goals, or they might even be potential allies. While one of these things is also often true about the monster entries, both should be true for everyone in this section.

I think this is why the Dragon of Tyr was in the monster section. He is a specific individual, but he’s also the “final boss” of Dark Sun. By default, he’s not particularly interested in making new alliances and no PC party who isn’t completely rotten to the core would think of allying with him for real.

The Sorcerer-Kings, however, are in the Personages section, because I imagine PCs might want to form temporary alliances with some of them against the others. We’ll also see a bunch of much lower level randos.

As I stated in an earlier post, I decided to move the Dragon’s description to this section as I consider him to be more of a Personage than a monster. So we’ll start with him on the next post.