Dark Sun is a harsh desert world where traditional fantasy races have adapted to the wasteland in exotic new ways, and civilization is found in teeming city-states in the grip of nigh unrivaled tyrant Sorcerer-Kings who dominate their population with Mind as well as forbidden Magic. It is a mix of Dune, Mad Max, Gladiator, Tolkien by way of Conan, and the ancient historical world (think Rome, Greece, etc.) all weaved together and honed into a fine point by the visionary artwork of Brom.
I
first saw the AD&D Dark Sun Boxed Set cover when I was a young one
and I never got over the siren song of the savage tablelands of Athas.
When D&D 4th edition rolled around, Dark Sun was revisited as the Dark Sun Campaign Setting: A 4th Edition D&D Supplement. On free RPG Day in 2010, the adventure book Bloodsand Arena was released, and this book had the very good idea of making the uniqueness of Dark Sun front and center by summarizing the Eight Characteristics of Athas in single sentences, which I will reiterate below.
Eight
Characteristics of Athas
1. The World Is a Desert
2. The World Is Savage
3. Metal Is Scarce
4. Arcane Magic Defiles the World
5. Sorcerer-Kings Rules the City-States
6. The Gods Are Silent
7. Fierce Monsters Roam the World
8. Familiar Races Aren’t What You Expect
Each of these eight characteristics were further explored in about three paragraphs each, but this list serves as a quick and dirty primer for what players can expect about the Dark Sun world.
What
I am doing with Dark Sun, is adapting the setting and its mechanics to an OSR
ruleset that is more lightweight than most systems. I am familiar with
AD&D, as I started with those rules when I was first introduced to Dungeons
and Dragons in the 90s. I think the
AD&D rules are overly fiddly in general, so I am not using that system to
run Dark Sun.
I
enjoy the OSR heartbreaker Begone, FOE! written by mellonbread and
magnificentophat so I am working on adapting Dark Sun to that system, because
it is a streamlined short system of approximately 20 pages. The most current
version of Begone, FOE! is Revision 15.
For me this is a long-term project that I work on in the background occasionally. I am documenting this on the blog to motivate myself and archive material that hopefully someone else may find useful.
While
wrestling with translating mechanics and rules from one system to another, I
find it is easy for myself to sort of lose sight of the overall vison of Dark
Sun that I want to portray to the players.
To remedy this, I have written up something I called “Bits and Pieces,”
which are sensory focused descriptions that I want to put into my games. I may turn these descriptions into
characters, setpieces or experiences.
Each of these description fragments are intended to be independent of
each other.
Bits
and Pieces
1. A
female dancer on a stone table in a tavern. A psionic tattoo of a sandworm on
her chest and stomach undulates in electric blue as she spins with a skirt made
of alternating vivid red and green elbow-length feathers.
2. A
contraband merchant beckons you into a shadowed alley. Suddenly a bandanna
wearing man puts a blowgun to his lips and your world explodes into twinkling
purple cloying dust…then the darkness of slumber.
3. A
craftsman baking thin, brittle clay tablets that crawl with iridescent yellow
letters, written by a psionic scribe.
4. A
leathery-skinned mercenary, body crisscrossed with scars, stands calf deep in a
warm sand dune, the grit of fine glittering sand collecting at the corner of
his eyes and the taste can never be fully expelled from his mouth.
5.
That relief you feel when you find a lone cactus in the desert with swollen
fist sized cactus fruit. Careful peeling of the spine covered green skin with
the jagged shard of a femur, unwraps a densely packed moist dark purple fruit
dotted with seeds worth masticating for their gummy liquid.
6.
The heady syrup of broy, fermented kank nectar, sharp with the taste of potent
cinnamon and ginger clings to your lips as it coats your throat.
7.
Abrasive sand against sweat soaked leather, stinking with salt. Your pulse
pounding so hard it causes tremors in your wrists as you grip a brittle
bleached-white femur. The overwhelming tidal wave of sound rising from the
coliseum crowd as they roar for blood.
The brash clangor of bronze horns as they announce your name, gladiator.
8. A
riot of crimson- and bone-colored petals rain down from above as flutists pipe
delicate melodies and drummers resonate in your skull in time with the
rhythm. The blazing sun is mercifully
blotted out for a moment, a moment that turns to trembling terror as something
colossal with a cloying animal musk that reclines on a palanquin jingling with
iron chains comes to rest in the parade. An ancient unspeakable malice sweeps
over you, prickling at the back of your mind, as
you prostrate yourself, lips pressed against the earth and dirt ground into
your teeth.
Switching gears, I also want to present some excellent free resources I found on the Dark Sun subreddit, r/DarkSun, and elsewhere around the internet.
Dark
Sun Resources
2. Dark Sun 5th edition by Marcus Stout
3. Dark Sun Tables and Alchemy Book by u/tutt_88
If
you are interested in Dark Sun at all, or want a framework for filling out
encounters/details/tables for your own sandbox game or game world, I highly
recommend taking a look at the Dark Sun Tables document.
I am
a little surprised something this extensive and quality was released for
free. For example, in the Location
Exploration Finds of Athas d100 table, it has a strong variety of
desert/wasteland terrain encounter locations that suggest plots and are great
hooks for hex/point crawling. There is
even a reference to the Ozymandias poem by Shelly.
“Eroded
Sorcerer-King Statue - A toppled statue, its face worn away, 50 cp in bronze
fragments.”
If
you just need Goals, Secrets, Virtues, Vices, or Moods for your NPCs even in a
normal (Tolkien-esque) fantasy setting, this document has you covered. Again,
with 1d100 tables for each entry.
The
Entrees and Food Items Sold in Athas and the Crafting Materials of Athas tables
really let the themes and flavor of Dark Sun enter your campaign on a personal
level.
Also
the Dark Sun Tables pdf would work very well with the Sand Marches by Jesse
Heining, below.
The
whole thing is really cool.
4. Dark Sun Sand Marches by Jesse Heinig
A free West Marches style campaign setting for Dark Sun that is a whopping 378 pages, The Sand Marches has been several years in development and even contains rules for high level Dark Sun play. Really worth your time to read.
5. Athas.org
The clearing house for almost all the Dark Sun information you want. Established since 2000, Athas.org hosts a number of articles, a podcast and more free products than you can shake a stick at.
6. Dark Sun for the Mythras system
 |
| Battle Brothers Blazing Deserts art |
Here
are a handful of links to music on youtube that I find inspirational for
writing or thinking about Dark Sun subjects.
Some
of these are from the soundtrack of the video game Battle Brothers’s
expansion Blazing Deserts, which are composed by the group Breakdown Epiphanies.
If
you have any suggestions to add to this list, please let me know in the
comments below.
Dark Sun Soundscape Inspiration
1. Hans Zimmer: Dune Part Two Theme [Extended by Gilles Nuytens]
3. Breakdown Epiphanies - Battle Brothers OST - 37 - Snake Mountain
4. Breakdown Epiphanies - Battle Brothers OST - 35 - Al-Anwar's Pride
5. Breakdown Epiphanies - Battle Brothers OST - 36 - The Gilder's Eye
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