Legend of the Burning Sands - Remastered

UPDATE! October 2025

Work will begin shortly on some typo fixes and other error correction that's been brought to my attention.

I'll also get "starters" for the Awakenings factions online during the next push.

I've taken down the Landscape districts for now, given the contentious nature of AI generated art. I am looking to pay for artists willing to put their spin on the Jewel of the Desert so I can return these Landscape districts to circulation!

Thanks again for your continued support!

What is Legend of the Burning Sands?

Legend of the Burning Sands was a trading card game produced in 1998 and 1999 by Alderac Entertainment Group and Five Rings Publishing Group. It was set in the Burning Sands, northwest of Legend of the Five Rings’ Rokugan and drew inspiration from the Arabic folk tale collection, “One Thousand and One Nights,” as well as Persian, Egyptian, Indian, and other Middle Eastern mythologies. Legend of the Burning Sands attempted to blend this into a rich, diverse setting.

What's new in the Remastered Edition?

The underlying structure of the rules and card text are largely unchanged. However, just about everything was reworked in some way or another with a mind to bring Legend of the Burning Sands mechanics up to a more modern standard of templating. The Remastered Edition now uses a few more defined game terms and other keywords to add clarity in how some mechanics work. Errata and clarifications were folded into the card text where needed. The singular "They/them" is used to replace the awkward turn of phrase "his or her," and wherever appropriate as a gender-neutral pronoun. A packet of fiction is also included "as-found" so that one can enjoy the lore and stories. Some of the flavor text was altered to not use racial slurs that were unfortunately common at the time of Legend of the Burning Sands' production.
Each card frame now has a new coat of paint and a 300 dpi layout. Cards are available for download in two different formats: high quality JPG format cards without bleed for easy home printing, and ultra-high quality TIFF format cards with a bleed for printing actual cards using any number of print-on demand services. Also included are custom tokens to use for the game, available in both formats.

Medinaat al-Salaam, the Jewel of the Desert welcomes you!

It has been many years since some of us have visited, but the City of a Thousand Stories has endured. Take a seat on your carpet and enjoy your journey through this Remastered edition of Legend of the Burning Sands!

How did the Remastered Edition come about?

Back in 2005 some friends and I who were big fans of Legend of the Five Rings wanted to give Legend of the Burning Sands a try, but the cards were already difficult to get a hold of. After a post on the AEG forums to gauge interest, a small group of us set out to create easy to print proxies and streamline some of the more difficult to parse mechanics. We went strong for about eight months and created a 400-ish card set culled from the full set we titled "Vale of Midnight." We had almost come to an agreement of card templates, but then life slowly happened to most of us, causing the project to stall.

The desire to revisit this project was something that was always on the back burner for me, but the timing was never right and the idea of a full remaster always felt too daunting. When Yahoo! shut down their groups a few years ago and I got an email giving me a last chance to archive our work, I decided that this was something that I had to make happen. I figured out a way to make the workflow manageable and got to work. In 2018, I posted my first rough draft of revised card layouts to the Legend of the Burning Sands forums on BoardGameGeek.com. The response I got was encouraging and overwhelmingly positive. With some help from a few people there, and one of the people from the old Yahoo group assisting in fixing the artwork, I dove into re-writing the rule book for the game and revising the card text to a more consistent template. The goal was now to preserve the game for future generations.

What's left to do?

Starter decks for the Awakening factions are being worked on, and plugins for LackeyCCG and Tabletop Simulator are planned for eventual release.

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