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Dark Sun Campaign Setting Expanded and Revised
332 pages, Hardcover
First published October 1, 1995
30 people want to read
About the author
Bill Slavicsek
106 books23 followersBill Slavicsek's gaming life was forever changed when he discovered Dungeons & Dragons in 1976. He became a gaming professional in 1986 when he was hired by West End Games as an editor. He quickly added developer, designer, and creative manager to his resume, and his work helped shape the Paranoia, Ghostbusters, Star Wars, and Torg roleplaying games. He even found some time during that period to do freelance work for D&D 1st Edition. In 1993, Bill joined the staff of TSR, Inc. as a designer/editor. He worked on a bunch of 2nd Edition material, including products for Core D&D, Dark Sun, Ravenloft, and Planescape. In 1997, he was part of the TSR crowd that moved to Seattle to join Wizards of the Coast, and in that year he was promoted to R&D Director for D&D. In that position, Bill oversaw the creation of both the 3rd Edition and 4th Edition of the D&D Roleplaying Game. He was one of the driving forces behind the D&D Insider project, and he continues to oversee and lead the creative strategy and effort for Dungeons & Dragons.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
March 8, 2017
I wasn't originally planning to read the revised boxed set. I remember paging through it a long while ago, not liking most of the changes, and never really thinking about it again, and nothing I've heard since then had convinced me that I'd like it any better. But I'm reading through all of Dark Sun, and it seems like I should make sure that I do all of it. So what did I think?
It was okay. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of stuff here I didn't like, but there were more parts I liked that I expected. Most of the changes to the Tyr region are awful, but a lot of the areas expanded on outside of it are great additions to the world.
As an example, take Saragar. I've seen people who don't like it because it's a verdant paradise with an actual lake of water and Athas' only surviving lizardmen, and it's well protected by the three Mind Lords, and life is relatively peaceful, but this is a society where one of the laws is "happiness must be maintained" and there are literal thought police who "adjust" citizens who demonstrate too much discontent. I love that contrast, because it drives home one of the main problems for people who want to improve life on Athas--what price are they willing to pay to achieve it? Saragar has peace and security, but at the cost of their freedom even down to the freedom of their minds. Is that worth it? Are the city-states brutal because they have to be to survive, rather than because the sorcerer kings are dicks?
In comparison, Kurn is awful because it undercuts this. There's no tradeoff at all. Oronis is an avangion--a literal magical being of peace and light--and he's founding New Kurn as a magical marble city with flowing water and trees and there's no want or slavery and everyone lives in peace and
. Suddenly, there's no moral quandry about how to improve Athas because there's a template set and the answer is obvious. Just be Lawful Good and throw a bunch of magic at it and your problems are solved. What an incredible letdown.
I like the Deadlands because they're so over the top. How do you get even less hospitable than blasted rocky wastelands and endless expanses of salt flats? Plains of pure unbroken obsidian crawling with zombies!
One thing I don't like is how they're zombie gnomes and zombie pixies and zombie orcs and so on, though. This ties into the larger point that I don't how much Athas' past has been nailed down. Like I said in my Black Spine review, I like Athas better when the past was a weird science fantasy world of psychic technology and bizarre creatures rather than just being any other D&D world, and the Cleansing Wars and Rajaat and the Champions killing off the wemics and trolls rub me the wrong way. I like the Blue Age/Green Age/Brown Age distinction, but the transition between the Green Age and Brown Age, less so.
There's an area called the "Bandit States," but the cities have names like Plunder and Ravish so I can't take them seriously at all.
In the Tyr Region, the sorcerer kings of Balic, Draj, Tyr, and Raam are now either dead or imprisoned, and so is the Dragon, which is silly in the usual fantasy sense of nothing happening for millennia and then multiple world-shaking cataclysms all at once. I do like a couple of the changes, like Draj being run by the psionic schools with a puppet king in place or Balic being taken over by the merchant houses, but not enough that I want the sorcerer kings gone. That just brings to mind how incredibly awful Freedom was and how all of these changes happened when Dark Sun got on the metaplot train. There's a quote in the beginning that stood out for me:
The mechanics side is mostly the same, so I won't cover it in major detail. There are two new races, aarakocra and pterran, but they seem like odd choices since each of them is from a single, relatively low-population village. Warriors get an extra 1d4 strength, which is a great benefit even if the warrior/caster divide isn't as strong in Second Edition. Some of the thief skills from Dragon Kings are included in the base game, though there's no Detect Illusion or Dig Tunnel. A few magic items that never really made any sense, like the potion of dragon control, are removed instead of half-heartedly shoehorned in. These are all good changes.
The weirdest thing is that there are rules for defiling magic and drawing different levels of energy, possibly letting defilers cast more or fewer spells, but they make it obvious that the defiling occurs when the spells are memorized, not when they're cast. So the iconic image of the defiler chanting and the ground turning to ash around them...no longer happens? What an incredibly odd thing to change.
There's a separate booklet with rules for psionics. They're the same as the system in Player's Option: Skills & Powers, with MTHAC0 and MAC and contact as a proficiency and wild talents no longer being able to get super lucky, roll disintegrate when they make their character, and have a 50% chance to kill anything and a 5% chance to kill themselves. As with all balancing, some of the wild energy is lost in the transition.
However, it's overall awful because it makes psionic combat, and thus the whole Telepathy discipline, useless. Powers require open minds to use, and a mind with PSPs left is still closed, so psionic attacks reduce the target's PSPs. But attacks all cost more PSPs than they reduce the target's PSPs by, on average, so the attacker will run out faster than the defender. Thus, the ideal action in psionic combat is to do literally nothing, not even defending, until the attacker exhausts themselves, then the defender lashes out and reduce their attacker to zero PSPs, followed by mentally enslaving them. And since most Telepathy powers require an open mind to use, the whole Telepathy discipline is basically nonfunctional. Non-psionic minds require only a single successful attack to open, but how many of those are there on Athas?
The Complete Book of Psionics was a weirdly complicated mess, but these mechanics do the opposite of what they're supposed to so they're even worse.
There's also an adventure in the boxed set, but it only stood out because since the Blue Age is the new hotness, that's what it's all about. The mission is to escort a pterran back to his village in the Hinterlands, and along the way the party runs into a halfling druid who seeks stories from the Blue Age, finds Blue Age ruins, fights a symbiotic Blue Age lifeshaped artifact, blue blue bleu. The Blue Age was longer ago than the entirety of real-world recorded human history and Athas has been through a lot more world-shaping cataclysms in that time, and I find it amazingly unlikely that anything would have survived, especially not a nearly-intact city.
Seeing the picture of halfling tablet about the "wanderer" and the rhulisti returning and the note that the Messenger didn't come back on schedule in the back, now I understand the rumors about the Messenger being a Blue Age lifeshaped starship with some rhulisti in stasis I've heard. I actually think that would have been pretty cool, and a better way to introduce lifeshaped technology back into the setting. But that one picture is all the development it got, so we'll never know.
So that's Dark Sun Campaign Setting Revised. A few good ideas, and some good places, but buried in a lot of faff and annoyance and actively terrible changes. If I ran a game myself, I'd keep a few places like Eldaarich and the Deadlands and the Last Sea, throw out all the other plot developments, and let the PCs do what they want without trying to force them into being heroes. This is one product of 90s metaplot obsession I think we could have done without.
It was okay. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of stuff here I didn't like, but there were more parts I liked that I expected. Most of the changes to the Tyr region are awful, but a lot of the areas expanded on outside of it are great additions to the world.
As an example, take Saragar. I've seen people who don't like it because it's a verdant paradise with an actual lake of water and Athas' only surviving lizardmen, and it's well protected by the three Mind Lords, and life is relatively peaceful, but this is a society where one of the laws is "happiness must be maintained" and there are literal thought police who "adjust" citizens who demonstrate too much discontent. I love that contrast, because it drives home one of the main problems for people who want to improve life on Athas--what price are they willing to pay to achieve it? Saragar has peace and security, but at the cost of their freedom even down to the freedom of their minds. Is that worth it? Are the city-states brutal because they have to be to survive, rather than because the sorcerer kings are dicks?
In comparison, Kurn is awful because it undercuts this. There's no tradeoff at all. Oronis is an avangion--a literal magical being of peace and light--and he's founding New Kurn as a magical marble city with flowing water and trees and there's no want or slavery and everyone lives in peace and
. Suddenly, there's no moral quandry about how to improve Athas because there's a template set and the answer is obvious. Just be Lawful Good and throw a bunch of magic at it and your problems are solved. What an incredible letdown.I like the Deadlands because they're so over the top. How do you get even less hospitable than blasted rocky wastelands and endless expanses of salt flats? Plains of pure unbroken obsidian crawling with zombies!
One thing I don't like is how they're zombie gnomes and zombie pixies and zombie orcs and so on, though. This ties into the larger point that I don't how much Athas' past has been nailed down. Like I said in my Black Spine review, I like Athas better when the past was a weird science fantasy world of psychic technology and bizarre creatures rather than just being any other D&D world, and the Cleansing Wars and Rajaat and the Champions killing off the wemics and trolls rub me the wrong way. I like the Blue Age/Green Age/Brown Age distinction, but the transition between the Green Age and Brown Age, less so.
There's an area called the "Bandit States," but the cities have names like Plunder and Ravish so I can't take them seriously at all.
In the Tyr Region, the sorcerer kings of Balic, Draj, Tyr, and Raam are now either dead or imprisoned, and so is the Dragon, which is silly in the usual fantasy sense of nothing happening for millennia and then multiple world-shaking cataclysms all at once. I do like a couple of the changes, like Draj being run by the psionic schools with a puppet king in place or Balic being taken over by the merchant houses, but not enough that I want the sorcerer kings gone. That just brings to mind how incredibly awful Freedom was and how all of these changes happened when Dark Sun got on the metaplot train. There's a quote in the beginning that stood out for me:
But heroes are desperately needed in this harsh, savage world. . . . Heroes like the ones who stepped forward to destroy the sorcerer-king Kalak and set Tyr free. Heroes like those who risked everything to kill the Dragon and keep Rajaat the Warbringer from devastating the land."Heroes." Most of the adventures were about heroes solving problems, but I've always thought of Dark Sun as much more traditional sword and sorcery, like the Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories, where the protagonists are motivated by survival and wealth and living another day, not saving the world. Second Edition's obsession with the PCs being heroic do-gooders was often an odd fit, and rarely did this stand out more than under the crimson sun.
The mechanics side is mostly the same, so I won't cover it in major detail. There are two new races, aarakocra and pterran, but they seem like odd choices since each of them is from a single, relatively low-population village. Warriors get an extra 1d4 strength, which is a great benefit even if the warrior/caster divide isn't as strong in Second Edition. Some of the thief skills from Dragon Kings are included in the base game, though there's no Detect Illusion or Dig Tunnel. A few magic items that never really made any sense, like the potion of dragon control, are removed instead of half-heartedly shoehorned in. These are all good changes.
The weirdest thing is that there are rules for defiling magic and drawing different levels of energy, possibly letting defilers cast more or fewer spells, but they make it obvious that the defiling occurs when the spells are memorized, not when they're cast. So the iconic image of the defiler chanting and the ground turning to ash around them...no longer happens? What an incredibly odd thing to change.
There's a separate booklet with rules for psionics. They're the same as the system in Player's Option: Skills & Powers, with MTHAC0 and MAC and contact as a proficiency and wild talents no longer being able to get super lucky, roll disintegrate when they make their character, and have a 50% chance to kill anything and a 5% chance to kill themselves. As with all balancing, some of the wild energy is lost in the transition.
However, it's overall awful because it makes psionic combat, and thus the whole Telepathy discipline, useless. Powers require open minds to use, and a mind with PSPs left is still closed, so psionic attacks reduce the target's PSPs. But attacks all cost more PSPs than they reduce the target's PSPs by, on average, so the attacker will run out faster than the defender. Thus, the ideal action in psionic combat is to do literally nothing, not even defending, until the attacker exhausts themselves, then the defender lashes out and reduce their attacker to zero PSPs, followed by mentally enslaving them. And since most Telepathy powers require an open mind to use, the whole Telepathy discipline is basically nonfunctional. Non-psionic minds require only a single successful attack to open, but how many of those are there on Athas?
The Complete Book of Psionics was a weirdly complicated mess, but these mechanics do the opposite of what they're supposed to so they're even worse.
There's also an adventure in the boxed set, but it only stood out because since the Blue Age is the new hotness, that's what it's all about. The mission is to escort a pterran back to his village in the Hinterlands, and along the way the party runs into a halfling druid who seeks stories from the Blue Age, finds Blue Age ruins, fights a symbiotic Blue Age lifeshaped artifact, blue blue bleu. The Blue Age was longer ago than the entirety of real-world recorded human history and Athas has been through a lot more world-shaping cataclysms in that time, and I find it amazingly unlikely that anything would have survived, especially not a nearly-intact city.
Seeing the picture of halfling tablet about the "wanderer" and the rhulisti returning and the note that the Messenger didn't come back on schedule in the back, now I understand the rumors about the Messenger being a Blue Age lifeshaped starship with some rhulisti in stasis I've heard. I actually think that would have been pretty cool, and a better way to introduce lifeshaped technology back into the setting. But that one picture is all the development it got, so we'll never know.
So that's Dark Sun Campaign Setting Revised. A few good ideas, and some good places, but buried in a lot of faff and annoyance and actively terrible changes. If I ran a game myself, I'd keep a few places like Eldaarich and the Deadlands and the Last Sea, throw out all the other plot developments, and let the PCs do what they want without trying to force them into being heroes. This is one product of 90s metaplot obsession I think we could have done without.
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July 19, 202228/32 of my Dark Sun project.
So, sigh, I think I've come to some conclusive thoughts about Dark Sun and the failure of the product line:
(a) it started with a good idea and a clear frame for character action: rather than heroics against the backdrop of a livable cod-European/Tolkien world, we get a harsh eco-cide world with a little more emphasis on pure survival; of course, this being D&D -- at heart a heroic fantasy -- all of the adventures in the line basically forget the whole "you have to fight to survive" and present a more common heroic motivation.
Even if that paucity of non-heroic motivations points out the limitation of adventures in the line, it's still fine and goes along with the setting: there are corrupt and evil sorcerer-kings who are killing the world to gain power, keeping down the 99%, and everything sort of falls in line with that thematic. You, as heroes, want to stop the destruction of the world, free the slaves, help the good wizards in the secret society, etc.
Even some of the metaplot helps push this central conflict: when a bunch of heroes -- kind of like the player characters later in their career -- band together to kill a king and save a city, that gives the PCs both a home to protect (Tyr, the one city without slavery) and a model to follow.
(b) Then, perhaps remembering their success with Dragonlance as a series of novels and game books (and forgetting how hard it was to orchestrate two separate types of art when both are supposed to be world-shaking), they decided to start with a novel series that was all about upending large parts of the world:
King Kalak of Tyr died in book 1, but by book 5, three other sorcerer-monarchs were gone, as well as the Dragon, and also the dragon's home city was replaced with a giant storm that occasionally spins off mini-storms to the rest of the world, and also there was a huge earthquake that opened a pass into a new area of the world and a new metaplot.
So while the game line started really strong in the first box set (which is where most of (a) is from), once they started the fiction line running alongside (in (b)), they had set themselves a problem that anyone who reads comics will be anticipating: how to bring the world back into continuity.
The solution -- and opportunity -- is a revised box set that describes the world we already know (now with updates from the adventures and novels) and also adds on to it. (There's also a whole thing about how this box set was released after some of the D&D 2nd edition "Player's Options Books," which gave new rules for characters, so there's some new rules here too.)
That might have been reasonable, but as someone who never really liked how the metaplot gummed up the perfectly good story engine, I was always going to have some questions about this new world. For instance, if the first box set -- and a lot of the adventures -- were about foiling this or that sorcerer-monarch, this presents a world where about 1/3 of the cities have lost their tyrants. That could be a fascinating world for adventures: in the absence of obvious tyranny, how do these cities function? How can the PCs make a life for themselves or even make the world better? But that's not really what this book is about, and as near as I can tell, not what TSR had planned for further adventures.
Because, yes, we get some updates on the world -- though, hoo boy, we already got those updates in Beyond the Prism Pentad, sometimes word-for-word:
Prism Pentad: “Of course, Hamanu's promise wasn't unconditional. Though the Urikites didn't have to fear change, they did have to fear their king.”
Revised Box: “Hamanu’s promise wasn’t unconditional. Though the Urikites don’t have to fear change, they do have to fear their king.”
But we also get more pages on the larger world, some of which I really like, even if each particular location is sparsely described. So, for instance,
* the Thri-kreen book promised more about the empire of the Kreen in the Crimson Savanna, and we get some of that;
* but we also hear about villages of the aarakocra (bird people -- which here in Athas look like vulture people, which I really like) and the pterrans (wingless pterodactyl people, which... huh?);
* and we hear about the dead lands to the south where creatures who were exterminated in the genocidal wars live on as undead;
* and we get some info on the halfling villages who still practice life-shaping magic;
* and lastly, we're given three strange city states that cut themselves off from the rest of the world and we're just hearing about now, which ... makes total sense in one case, makes some sense in another, and doesn't really make sense in the third case.
Now, each of those three cities is kind of interesting: one is led by a sorcerer-king who realized he was evil (cue Mitchell and Webb sketch) and decided to be good, building a secret utopian city where slavery is illegal and only good magic is allowed; another city is run by a paranoid sorcerer-king as a prison city that doesn't want anything from the outside world; and the third is a hidden city that sealed itself off in the Green Age of the world and where unhappiness is illegal and discontent is squashed by literal thought police.
So those are all interesting places to adventure in (well, the utopian city might lend itself less to adventures, as utopias do), just as it might be interesting to adventure in the city state of Balic without a sorcerer-king and now run by the merchant houses in an uneasy peace. And yet...
Yet it's clear that designers of this game aren't so interested in the Tyr region anymore, or only as a place to protect against the imperial Kreen army which surely would be one of the next metaplots (along with the undead dragon Dregoth rising up, though even that seems to be a little sidelined; oh and then there's another undead lord rising in the south).
I guess my main complaint here -- familiar to folks who have read me reviewing some D&D stuff before -- is that there's no focus. Like I said, the original conception of the world started with the idea of a "war world," where everyone was fighting everyone and only fighting mattered; but by the time it got into readers hands, there were preservers vs. defilers and the Veiled Alliance and evil kings. But what do you do with Dark Sun now?
I have a guess that a TSR press release would say "whatever you want!" but that's a real non-answer. Maybe we could look to the included adventure for some clues as to what you do. The adventure has three parts and parts 1 and 2 are just like so many other Dark Sun adventures: you get recruited for a job in a needlessly convoluted way that is really there just to give you practice rolling dice and then you go on a dangerous desert trip. Is that all Dark Sun is? Dangerous desert trips? Well, in any earlier Dark Sun adventure, you'd also have to fight in an arena, but in this adventure, you investigate a city exposed by the recent earthquake and find a terrible bioweapon from the past. Which is, honestly, not terrible -- though the art of the host halfling with the grafted bioweapon is terrible -- and does show something the game is interested: we're done with fighting the sorcerer-monarchs, now we're gonna be about delving into the history of the world.
Which is... fine, I suppose, but I could just as easily send a bunch of PCs into a ruin in the Forgotten Realms. OK, granted, the halfling life-shaping thing is a neat gimmick, but "they once controlled the power of life" isn't an interesting theme (to me) in the same way as "the sorcerer-kings are destroying the world right now to power their own fantasies." For one thing, it's all in the past.
What's a PC to do now? Well, I'm off to look at the last four products to see if I can find an answer.
Also lastly, I don’t love the layout / color for these books, and the art is all fine, but pretty middle-of-the-road fantasy stuff -- not nearly as weird as Baxa's and Brom's art.
So, sigh, I think I've come to some conclusive thoughts about Dark Sun and the failure of the product line:
(a) it started with a good idea and a clear frame for character action: rather than heroics against the backdrop of a livable cod-European/Tolkien world, we get a harsh eco-cide world with a little more emphasis on pure survival; of course, this being D&D -- at heart a heroic fantasy -- all of the adventures in the line basically forget the whole "you have to fight to survive" and present a more common heroic motivation.
Even if that paucity of non-heroic motivations points out the limitation of adventures in the line, it's still fine and goes along with the setting: there are corrupt and evil sorcerer-kings who are killing the world to gain power, keeping down the 99%, and everything sort of falls in line with that thematic. You, as heroes, want to stop the destruction of the world, free the slaves, help the good wizards in the secret society, etc.
Even some of the metaplot helps push this central conflict: when a bunch of heroes -- kind of like the player characters later in their career -- band together to kill a king and save a city, that gives the PCs both a home to protect (Tyr, the one city without slavery) and a model to follow.
(b) Then, perhaps remembering their success with Dragonlance as a series of novels and game books (and forgetting how hard it was to orchestrate two separate types of art when both are supposed to be world-shaking), they decided to start with a novel series that was all about upending large parts of the world:
King Kalak of Tyr died in book 1, but by book 5, three other sorcerer-monarchs were gone, as well as the Dragon, and also the dragon's home city was replaced with a giant storm that occasionally spins off mini-storms to the rest of the world, and also there was a huge earthquake that opened a pass into a new area of the world and a new metaplot.
So while the game line started really strong in the first box set (which is where most of (a) is from), once they started the fiction line running alongside (in (b)), they had set themselves a problem that anyone who reads comics will be anticipating: how to bring the world back into continuity.
The solution -- and opportunity -- is a revised box set that describes the world we already know (now with updates from the adventures and novels) and also adds on to it. (There's also a whole thing about how this box set was released after some of the D&D 2nd edition "Player's Options Books," which gave new rules for characters, so there's some new rules here too.)
That might have been reasonable, but as someone who never really liked how the metaplot gummed up the perfectly good story engine, I was always going to have some questions about this new world. For instance, if the first box set -- and a lot of the adventures -- were about foiling this or that sorcerer-monarch, this presents a world where about 1/3 of the cities have lost their tyrants. That could be a fascinating world for adventures: in the absence of obvious tyranny, how do these cities function? How can the PCs make a life for themselves or even make the world better? But that's not really what this book is about, and as near as I can tell, not what TSR had planned for further adventures.
Because, yes, we get some updates on the world -- though, hoo boy, we already got those updates in Beyond the Prism Pentad, sometimes word-for-word:
Prism Pentad: “Of course, Hamanu's promise wasn't unconditional. Though the Urikites didn't have to fear change, they did have to fear their king.”
Revised Box: “Hamanu’s promise wasn’t unconditional. Though the Urikites don’t have to fear change, they do have to fear their king.”
But we also get more pages on the larger world, some of which I really like, even if each particular location is sparsely described. So, for instance,
* the Thri-kreen book promised more about the empire of the Kreen in the Crimson Savanna, and we get some of that;
* but we also hear about villages of the aarakocra (bird people -- which here in Athas look like vulture people, which I really like) and the pterrans (wingless pterodactyl people, which... huh?);
* and we hear about the dead lands to the south where creatures who were exterminated in the genocidal wars live on as undead;
* and we get some info on the halfling villages who still practice life-shaping magic;
* and lastly, we're given three strange city states that cut themselves off from the rest of the world and we're just hearing about now, which ... makes total sense in one case, makes some sense in another, and doesn't really make sense in the third case.
Now, each of those three cities is kind of interesting: one is led by a sorcerer-king who realized he was evil (cue Mitchell and Webb sketch) and decided to be good, building a secret utopian city where slavery is illegal and only good magic is allowed; another city is run by a paranoid sorcerer-king as a prison city that doesn't want anything from the outside world; and the third is a hidden city that sealed itself off in the Green Age of the world and where unhappiness is illegal and discontent is squashed by literal thought police.
So those are all interesting places to adventure in (well, the utopian city might lend itself less to adventures, as utopias do), just as it might be interesting to adventure in the city state of Balic without a sorcerer-king and now run by the merchant houses in an uneasy peace. And yet...
Yet it's clear that designers of this game aren't so interested in the Tyr region anymore, or only as a place to protect against the imperial Kreen army which surely would be one of the next metaplots (along with the undead dragon Dregoth rising up, though even that seems to be a little sidelined; oh and then there's another undead lord rising in the south).
I guess my main complaint here -- familiar to folks who have read me reviewing some D&D stuff before -- is that there's no focus. Like I said, the original conception of the world started with the idea of a "war world," where everyone was fighting everyone and only fighting mattered; but by the time it got into readers hands, there were preservers vs. defilers and the Veiled Alliance and evil kings. But what do you do with Dark Sun now?
I have a guess that a TSR press release would say "whatever you want!" but that's a real non-answer. Maybe we could look to the included adventure for some clues as to what you do. The adventure has three parts and parts 1 and 2 are just like so many other Dark Sun adventures: you get recruited for a job in a needlessly convoluted way that is really there just to give you practice rolling dice and then you go on a dangerous desert trip. Is that all Dark Sun is? Dangerous desert trips? Well, in any earlier Dark Sun adventure, you'd also have to fight in an arena, but in this adventure, you investigate a city exposed by the recent earthquake and find a terrible bioweapon from the past. Which is, honestly, not terrible -- though the art of the host halfling with the grafted bioweapon is terrible -- and does show something the game is interested: we're done with fighting the sorcerer-monarchs, now we're gonna be about delving into the history of the world.
Which is... fine, I suppose, but I could just as easily send a bunch of PCs into a ruin in the Forgotten Realms. OK, granted, the halfling life-shaping thing is a neat gimmick, but "they once controlled the power of life" isn't an interesting theme (to me) in the same way as "the sorcerer-kings are destroying the world right now to power their own fantasies." For one thing, it's all in the past.
What's a PC to do now? Well, I'm off to look at the last four products to see if I can find an answer.
Also lastly, I don’t love the layout / color for these books, and the art is all fine, but pretty middle-of-the-road fantasy stuff -- not nearly as weird as Baxa's and Brom's art.
September 25, 2018
The Dark Sun setting is probably the closest that AD&D got to true, gritty sword and sorcery. It presents a harsh world where only the strong survive. It also changes a lot of things up, such as making metal rare (so a lot of weapons are made of bone), adding new types of weapons, new types of magic, and new races and classes.
April 7, 2007
I might not have played much D&D, but I loved buying and reading their supliments for ideas. Most of their campaign settings were foundational to FRPGs, but by the time I was in highschool I was tired of high-fantasy, and most D&D settings were either cliched (Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, Birthrigth) or lame (Ravenloft, Starjammers). Dark Sun was the most original thing I'd seen at the time, just when I was tiring of high-fantasy. Dark, violent, and alien, this inspired many a new, exciting adventure.
February 3, 2014
One of the best settings of AD&D, it mixes a harsh mesopotamian-african setting with postapocalypse and fantasy. Its take on magic (stealing life to do spells) and psionics (expanding your mind to survive) also makes it one of the most original D&D settings.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews