What do I need to know before joining a Dark Sun game?

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This is a question best directed at the GM for the game in question.

If you were joining my Dark Sun game, you'd want to at least skim through my Mythras Dark Sun conversion document and, if you wanted some more detailed background, you could read the Wanderer's Journal from the original box set. Any other material would be unnecessary at best, and likely to be misleading or flat out wrong.
  • There is the original box set, which gives a pretty broad overview, and leaves lots of details to be filled in. This is all you would want or need for my game.
  • There is the expanded 2e version, that adds and changes a lot. This is probably a decent grounding on what is commonly accepted as canon. However, as mentioned, it would not be useful if you were joining my game.
  • There is the 4e version, which changes and adds material again.
  • You have all the stuff released by Athas Org, which adds to and expands on the expanded version. This is focused on 3e D&D, but much of it can be applied to any edition -- if you want it to.
Edit to add:

There are a pretty vast array of possible game styles within the Dark Sun setting. Running a trading house or merchant caravan. Managing a small village in the wastes. Gladiators. Escaped slaves. Urban intrigue (as nobles, or templars, or members of the secret society or preservers, or rebels). Exploring the wilderness beyond the Tablelands. Seeking lost treasures in the wastes. Seeking to restore the land. The list goes on.

In addition to understanding what is considered canon in the game in question, it would probably be handy to know what style of game is intended.
 
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James Gillen said:
Move to Las Vegas (or Phoenix) and stage a live action roleplay session outdoors in July. That should give you an idea.

JG
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I don't think he means to wait for over a month to get an answer, though...::honkhonk:
 
Here's something I probably stole from somewhere and cannibalized as a primer for a DS campaign:

Welcome to Athas

The world of Athas is unique in several ways. Many familiar trappings of fantasy games are missing or turned on their heads. Athas is not a place of shining knights and robed wizards, of deep forests and divine pantheons. To venture over the sands of Athas is to enter a world of savagery and splendor that draws on different traditions of fantasy and storytelling. Simple survival beneath the deep red sun is often its own adventure.

Newcomers to Athas have many things to learn about the world, its people, and its monsters, but the following eight characteristics encapsulate the most important features.

The World is a Desert: Athas is a hot, arid planet covered with endless seas of dunes, lifeless salt flats, stony

wastes, rocky badlands, thorny scrublands, and worse. From the first moments of dawn, the crimson sun beats down from an olive-tinged sky. Temperatures routinely exceed 45C by midmorning and may reach as high as 65C degrees or more by late afternoon. The wind is like the blast of a furnace, offering no relief from the oppressive heat. At night, the heat quickly escapes and the temperatures plummet. Athas is frigid at night and no easier to survive. Dust and sand borne on the breeze coat everything with yellow-orange silt. In this forbidding world, cities and villages exist only in a few oases or verdant plains. The world beyond these islands of civilization is a barren wasteland roamed by nomads, raiders, and hungry monsters.

The World is Savage: Life on Athas is brutal and short. Bloodthirsty raiders, greedy slavers, and hordes of

inhuman savages overrun the deserts and wastelands. The cities are little better; each chokes in the grip of an immortal tyrant. The vile institution of slavery is widespread on Athas, and many unfortunates spend their lives in chains, toiling for brutal taskmasters. Every year hundreds of slaves, perhaps thousands, are sent to their deaths in bloody arena spectacles. Charity, compassion, kindness—these qualities exist, but they are rare and precious blooms. Only a fool hopes for such riches.

Metal is Scarce: Most arms and armor are made of bone, stone, wood, and other such materials. Mail or plate

armor exists only in the treasuries of the sorcerer-kings. Steel blades are almost priceless, weapons that most people never see during their lifetimes.

Sorcery Defiles the World: The reckless use of arcane magic during ancient wars reduced Athas to a wasteland.

To cast an arcane spell, one must gather power from the living world nearby. Plants wither to black ash, crippling pain wracks animals and people, and the soil is sterilized; nothing can grow in that spot again. It is possible to cast spells with care, avoiding any more damage to the world, but defiling is more potent than preserving. As a result, sorcerers are generally reviled and persecuted across Athas regardless of whether they preserve or defile. Only the most powerful spell-casters can wield arcane might without fear of reprisals.

Sorcerer-Kings Rule the City-States: Terrible defilers of immense power rule all but one of the city-states.

These mighty spell-casters have held their thrones for centuries; no one alive remembers a time before the sorcerer-kings. Some claim to be gods, and some claim to serve gods. Some are brutal oppressors, where others are more subtle in their tyranny. The sorcerer-kings govern through priesthoods or bureaucracies of greedy,

ambitious Templars, who can call upon the kings' powers.

The Gods are No More: Long ago, when the planet was green, the brutal might of the primordials overcame the

gods. Today, Athas is a world without deities. There are no clerics, no paladins, and no prophets or religious

orders. In the absence of divine influence, other powers have come to prominence in the world. Psionic power is

well known and widely practiced on Athas; even unintelligent desert monsters can have deadly psionic abilities.

Shamans and druids call upon the primal powers of the world, which are often sculpted by the influence of

elemental power.

Fierce Monsters Roam the World: The desert planet has its own deadly ecology. Many creatures that are

familiar sights on milder worlds have long since died out or never existed at all. Athas has no cattle, swine, or

horses; instead, people tend flocks of erdlus, ride on kanks or crodlus, and draw wagons with inixes and mekillots. Wild creatures such as lions, bears, and wolves are nonexistent. In their place are terrors such as the baazrag, the gaj, and the tembo.

Familiar Races Aren't What You Expect: Typical fantasy stereotypes don't apply to Athasian heroes. In many

settings, elves are wise, benevolent forest-dwellers who guard their homelands from intrusions of evil. On Athas, elves are a nomadic race of herders, raiders, peddlers, and thieves. Halflings aren't amiable river-folk; they're xenophobic headhunters who hunt and eat trespassers in their mountain forests.
 
Moracai said:
Here's something I probably stole from somewhere and cannibalized as a primer for a DS campaign:

Welcome to Athas

The world of Athas is unique in several ways. Many familiar trappings of fantasy games are missing or turned on their heads. Athas is not a place of shining knights and robed wizards, of deep forests and divine pantheons. To venture over the sands of Athas is to enter a world of savagery and splendor that draws on different traditions of fantasy and storytelling. Simple survival beneath the deep red sun is often its own adventure.

Newcomers to Athas have many things to learn about the world, its people, and its monsters, but the following eight characteristics encapsulate the most important features.

The World is a Desert: Athas is a hot, arid planet covered with endless seas of dunes, lifeless salt flats, stony

wastes, rocky badlands, thorny scrublands, and worse. From the first moments of dawn, the crimson sun beats down from an olive-tinged sky. Temperatures routinely exceed 45C by midmorning and may reach as high as 65C degrees or more by late afternoon. The wind is like the blast of a furnace, offering no relief from the oppressive heat. At night, the heat quickly escapes and the temperatures plummet. Athas is frigid at night and no easier to survive. Dust and sand borne on the breeze coat everything with yellow-orange silt. In this forbidding world, cities and villages exist only in a few oases or verdant plains. The world beyond these islands of civilization is a barren wasteland roamed by nomads, raiders, and hungry monsters.

The World is Savage: Life on Athas is brutal and short. Bloodthirsty raiders, greedy slavers, and hordes of

inhuman savages overrun the deserts and wastelands. The cities are little better; each chokes in the grip of an immortal tyrant. The vile institution of slavery is widespread on Athas, and many unfortunates spend their lives in chains, toiling for brutal taskmasters. Every year hundreds of slaves, perhaps thousands, are sent to their deaths in bloody arena spectacles. Charity, compassion, kindness—these qualities exist, but they are rare and precious blooms. Only a fool hopes for such riches.

Metal is Scarce: Most arms and armor are made of bone, stone, wood, and other such materials. Mail or plate

armor exists only in the treasuries of the sorcerer-kings. Steel blades are almost priceless, weapons that most people never see during their lifetimes.

Sorcery Defiles the World: The reckless use of arcane magic during ancient wars reduced Athas to a wasteland.

To cast an arcane spell, one must gather power from the living world nearby. Plants wither to black ash, crippling pain wracks animals and people, and the soil is sterilized; nothing can grow in that spot again. It is possible to cast spells with care, avoiding any more damage to the world, but defiling is more potent than preserving. As a result, sorcerers are generally reviled and persecuted across Athas regardless of whether they preserve or defile. Only the most powerful spell-casters can wield arcane might without fear of reprisals.

Sorcerer-Kings Rule the City-States: Terrible defilers of immense power rule all but one of the city-states.

These mighty spell-casters have held their thrones for centuries; no one alive remembers a time before the sorcerer-kings. Some claim to be gods, and some claim to serve gods. Some are brutal oppressors, where others are more subtle in their tyranny. The sorcerer-kings govern through priesthoods or bureaucracies of greedy,

ambitious Templars, who can call upon the kings' powers.

The Gods are No More: Long ago, when the planet was green, the brutal might of the primordials overcame the

gods. Today, Athas is a world without deities. There are no clerics, no paladins, and no prophets or religious

orders. In the absence of divine influence, other powers have come to prominence in the world. Psionic power is

well known and widely practiced on Athas; even unintelligent desert monsters can have deadly psionic abilities.

Shamans and druids call upon the primal powers of the world, which are often sculpted by the influence of

elemental power.

Fierce Monsters Roam the World: The desert planet has its own deadly ecology. Many creatures that are

familiar sights on milder worlds have long since died out or never existed at all. Athas has no cattle, swine, or

horses; instead, people tend flocks of erdlus, ride on kanks or crodlus, and draw wagons with inixes and mekillots. Wild creatures such as lions, bears, and wolves are nonexistent. In their place are terrors such as the baazrag, the gaj, and the tembo.

Familiar Races Aren't What You Expect: Typical fantasy stereotypes don't apply to Athasian heroes. In many

settings, elves are wise, benevolent forest-dwellers who guard their homelands from intrusions of evil. On Athas, elves are a nomadic race of herders, raiders, peddlers, and thieves. Halflings aren't amiable river-folk; they're xenophobic headhunters who hunt and eat trespassers in their mountain forests.
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That looks like it's based on 4e, with talk of primordials, shamans and primal power sources. Most of it seems to have general applicability, though.

Oh, and I note it seems to assume Tyr has fallen.
 
This is the very basic introductory spiel my players got:

Dark Sun is an AD&D setting that was originally designed with four guiding principles: base it on certain artwork by Brom, integrate psionics, integrate mass combat and subvert expectations.

The mass combat part soon fell by the wayside, but the rest resulted in one of the most unique AD&D settings.

While the classic D&D races are still present, they are very different from the default – elves are lanky, tribal nomads; dwarves are hairless and obsessively single-minded; halflings are xenophobic cannibals. Half-giants and mantis warriors are playable PC races. There are no orcs, goblins, ogres, bugbears or kobolds; mammals are rare, and many of the Dark Sun animals and monsters are insectoid or reptilian. There are no gods, and instead of mages guilds there are psionic schools.

The land is a desert, and temperatures reach 50°C daily. There are a number of cities, with cultures based on various different ancient civilisations (Phoenician, Aztec, Greco-Roman, Ethiopian, etc), each ruled by a despotic Sorcerer King.

Between the cities are wide expanses of desert, with small, scattered hamlets and roving tribes of elves and mantis warriors. It is worth noting that the land is not completely blasted and devoid of life – there are areas of Saharan dunes, Arizona badlands, Australian scrubby desert, and so forth. There are even some limited regions of actual forest. Life is hard, but not impossible.

The vibe is very much Mad Max, with psionic monsters and tyrannical god-kings instead of cars and Tina Turner. It's certainly a very 80s, heavy metal, over-the-top, sword-and-sorcery kind of feel.
 
Sable Wyvern said:
That looks like it's based on 4e, with talk of primordials, shamans and primal power sources. Most of it seems to have general applicability, though.

Oh, and I note it seems to assume Tyr has fallen.
Click to expand...
Yeah, I think it was from 4e. Tyr has been liberated! :wink: I ran DS for a short while in Savage Worlds system, but it fell apart, because of player commitment issues. I probably should give it another go sometime, now that I'm running for a more stable group of people.
 
Moracai said:
I think that he means "The wind is like the blast of a furnace, offering no relief from the oppressive heat."
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If I wanted to research the game to that level of detail I could visit Australia, which is exactly like that and has the added benefit that all the natives creatures including the trees and Sydney bogans will try to kill me.
 
AsenRG said:
Also, magic's bad, OK?
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Well ... unless you're mage for an elf tribe. Or for some independent community in the wastes. Or a card-carrying-member of the Veiled Alliance. Or just a misunderstood preserver. Or a cleric. Or your version of magic is called psionics and everyone is convinced it isn't actually magic at all.
 
It's pretty close to a classic swords-and-sorcery setting, but with some idiosyncratic elements. It definitely has a 1990s post-apoc vibe, especially with the wastelands, and psionics, and the prevalence of cannibalism. It's something that could only have arisen as a response to mainstream D&D, but it definitely isn't mainstream D&D.

I find myself comparing it the films Beastmaster and Gor (please don't take that as a recommendation to watch the movie, much less a suggestion to read the so-called novels on which it was based). Hot weather, city-states, evil temple priests, an uprising of the common people led by a powerful outsider. There's definitely a John Carter feel to it, too, but less grounded in early 20th century futurism (so no radium guns, oddly scientific sounding names, etc).

There's definitely a theme that the wilderness is a deadly place to survive in, but the city is a different kind of deadly place to survive.
 
Moracai said:
I think that he means "The wind is like the blast of a furnace, offering no relief from the oppressive heat."
Click to expand...
It is not officially "hot" in Las Vegas until you open your front door to check the mailbox, which is in the shade, and you take your first breath of outdoor air and immediately have to cough it out because it is scalding your lungs from the inside.
Anything else is just "warm".

JG
 
spittingimage said:
If I wanted to research the game to that level of detail I could visit Australia, which is exactly like that and has the added benefit that all the natives creatures including the trees and Sydney bogans will try to kill me.
Click to expand...
The Western Desert lives and breathes
In 45 degrees
 
spittingimage said:
If I wanted to research the game to that level of detail I could visit Australia, which is exactly like that and has the added benefit that all the natives creatures including the trees and Sydney bogans will try to kill me.
Click to expand...
Yeah, Athas is much like Australia except the insects on Athas are smaller.
 
I am confused. I thought according to Pub Lore (the only acceptable form for truth), Austrailia was a all too real and terrifying place and New Zealand was the obviously fictional country, much like Ruritania.

Do I need to go and Tipp-Ex-out another country from my Collin's World Atlas?
 
PolarBlues said:
I am confused. I thought according to Pub Lore (the only acceptable form for truth), Austrailia was a all too real and terrifying place and New Zealand was the obviously fictional country, much like Ruritania.

Do I need to go and Tipp-Ex-out another country from my Collin's World Atlas?
Click to expand...
I think that whole area of the Pacific-adjacent is suspect.
 
That's easy, just read the Dark Sun players guide your GM lends out... :ooh: oh, it's 30 years later. :errr: I guess teleport to the library and materialize the booklet? Dunno, I'm too elderly in spirit for this modern world, back to sleep. :sleep:
 
opaopajr said:
That's easy, just read the Dark Sun players guide your GM lends out... :ooh: oh, it's 30 years later. :errr: I guess teleport to the library and materialize the booklet? Dunno, I'm too elderly in spirit for this modern world, back to sleep. :sleep:
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This is still the correct answer, it's just that the players' guide may be a pdf.
 
For playing a DarkSun game it is absolutely critical to decide if you're on team straps & buckles or team rags & scraps (random spikes and shatp edges are not optional). Plus, for full authenticity, you'll want a randomly generated emo edge lord backstory, complete with piles of dead relatives and having to eat your favorite childhood pet to survive.
 
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James Gillen said:
It is not officially "hot" in Las Vegas until you open your front door to check the mailbox, which is in the shade, and you take your first breath of outdoor air and immediately have to cough it out because it is scalding your lungs from the inside.
Anything else is just "warm".

JG
Click to expand...
Don't forget if you go for your mail and forget to put on your shoes... blood blisters. I've had blood blisters from the rocks and sand in the desert out there while spending summers at the Colorado river. You don't forget your shoes or flip flops more than once.
 
Oh yeah, then there's the thing where every bard ever is an assassin, everybody knows they are an assassin, and still treats them like a normal bard, because of traditions. :hehe:
 
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