Bryan H. Rombough

L7 at the Uptown Bar, Minneapolis (1991)

Arcane Shadows (1992) is the third Dark Sun flip-book adventure. It picks up directly after Road to Urik and pairs partially with the novel The Crimson Legion. Thankfully, threads diverge from here. This is basically the first of many fairly simplistic adventures (escort an injured VIP!) that are puffed up by the wrinkle of attempting to survive Athas’ harsh environment (oh hey, this bamboo is really a giant killer turtle!).

That’s OK though! I am actually interested in Athas’ harsh environment, unlike, say, throwing a bunch of soldiers together and then seeing how many stay standing. Exploring the world in this module gives players a better sense of the stakes for their newly freed city and how unlikely survival might be. But it also gives a little bit of hope by introducing the avangion, the weird alien/angle things that high level preservers can transform into in hopes of healing the devastated world. This is the opposite of the life energy stealing magic of the Dragon of Athas and the parasitic sorcerer-kings. These two poles really form the core of the setting’s overarching themes. What I am not sure of is how aware players were of just what the Dragon and the Sorcerer Kings were up to — it’s been so long that I can’t recall if this was common knowledge going in, or if it was a big twist. Someone tell me, if you recall!

You would think that with Asticlian Gambit (1992) straying away from the plot of the Dark Sun novels that it would be the least on-rails of the Dark Sun adventures, but you’d be wrong! There is a caravan. The players are going to join it, one way or another. They are going to go to Gulg. They are going to meet the queen and she is going to throw them in the dungeon. Hey, there’s a dungeon, though! I think this is the first one in Dark Sun? But, you know, not that kind of dungeon.

They get out and become nobles by participating in a hunt that uses a flowchart that I…I don’t understand what is going on in this part and the flowchart seems broken. They then wind up in Nibenay and the Shadow King makes them go back to Gulg to steal the queen’s necklace. There’s a dungeon that also involves a flowchart, which is maybe the worst way to design a dungeon?

This conspectus was provided by my friends @nobleknightgames.

This is the conspectus for the ill-fated revised and expanded version of the Dark Sun campaign setting (1995). This one does a better job of of showing off the forthcoming products (all of which actually came out, which is surprising for how brief a lifespan the line had). On the downside, it is hideous to look at.

I find the poster part particularly offensive to the eye. Instead of doing the sensible thing and presenting one big map, the world map is actually rather small in the middle and is flanked above and below by enlarged details, which, OK. But then all three of those are hovering over a third enlarged detail that is impossible to comprehend because it has three maps in the way. Not to mention, one of them is pixelated. Sprinkled throughout for flavor is a seemingly random assortment of spot illustrations. Gag.

When Dark Sun was initially under development as War World, TSR was looking for a high stakes campaign setting catering to high-level PCs. The hardcover Dragon Kings was the book intended to guide those characters beyond level 20.

There’s some great material here. Perhaps most central to the campaign setting, it details the process by which a defiler wizard can transform into the devastatingly powerful and ecosystem-destroying Athasian version of a dragon (or, the angelic, vaguely New Age-y Avangion, for preservers). There are also rules for psionic enchantments, some sweet war vehicles (Brom’s illustrations of which are **chef’s kiss**) and new high level spells (at least one of which defies the unexplained fact that Athas is cut off from the outer planes, but we get a sweet Baxa glabrezu, so whatever).

This is the Dark Sun book I flipped through the most over the years. Also the one got the least use. The published Dark Sun metastory adventures tapped out around level 15 and, because of the strictures of the metastory, supplements that allowed for a more traditional custom-written campaign that could get to level 20 and beyond didn’t start to appear until after my group’s Dark Sun interest faded in favor of the billion other things TSR was publishing at the time. Once again – 90s-era TSR shooting itself in the foot.

This is the City-State of Tyr sourcebook for Dark Sun. Because of the early focus on the Dark Sun metaplot, TSR only got around to publishing a sourcebook about its central city setting in 1993, two years after the box set release, which probably seems strange in retrospect. For all its brilliance in design and aesthetic, many of the same bone-headed business decisions that plagued TSR companywide hampered Dark Sun’s success.

This is a great sourcebook. Everything you need to know in order to run a game in Tyr after the assassination of its sorcerer-king, Kalak, is in here. And in defining the state of the city after Kalak’s death, the book spends plenty of time discussing how it was before the slave revolt, so it is handy for games before the metastory, too. I haven’t a clue who the cool plumed dragon dude on the cover is, though.

The art is a bit unusual for…hey, wait a minute. Is that Tony DiTerlizzi? It is!

Which brings me to another interesting aspect of City-State of Tyr: it seems to be a bit of a dry run for the design of Planescape’s Sigil. There are a number of parallels, the strongest being the Warrens, a poor district of the city that guards don’t dare enter, much like the Hive in Sigil.

To my knowledge, this was @DiTerlizzi’s second TSR gig. I suspect working on City-State of Tyr was a valuable experience in world building that paid dividends a year later on Planescape. To be sure, we’d have to ask him. (Spoiler: I did - he will illuminate us in the comments if he has time). [NOTE: This refers to the instagram feed @VintageRPG]

Dune Trader (1992) follows Slave Tribes (1992) as the second in a series of sourcebooks intended to open Athas up to traditional campaign play away from the core Dark Sun metastory. (Your guess is as good as mine as to whether this was the intention all along, or if it is an early sign of weakness in the popularity of the metastory). This is one of my favorite sort of RPG books: a cool idea, ripe with potential for an entirely different kind of D&D campaign, that wasn’t entirely thought out, that likely no one ever seriously used and was subsequently left unsupported after initial publication.

The book introduces the Trader class. You read that right: class, not kit. The Trader is a rogue-type character whose abilities focus on poisoning, fast talking and accumulating NPC agents That last ability starts at level 10. The expectation is that a Trader will go along with a group of adventurers through levels 1 to 9 and act as their faceman on trade-oriented adventures. Starting at level 10, the campaign would transition to the building of a formal trading house with the former adventurers acting as loyal agents in ever more high stakes political and economic ventures. It feels very Dune to me, which, I guess, is cleverly right there in the book’s title.

All this sounds super cool and fun. The problem, and it is a big one, is that D&D is so intertwined in tactical combat. If an encounter focuses on combat, the Trader is essentially useless. If the Trader can fast-talk the group out of a violent confrontation, the other characters are superfluous (and they get no XP, to boot). I would love to run the trade game that Dune Trader wants to be, but D&D seems to be the wrong system in which to run it.

Much of the problem comes from making the Trader a full-fledged class. If you homebrew it down to a kit, problem solved. The rules for fast talk are also a great set of guidelines for Charisma checks in general (if you want rules to support your roleplay, that is). I bet my main issue would have been solved had the concept gotten more support, but to my knowledge, it didn’t. Bummer.

Dark Sun’s initial adventure modules (one in the campaign box, seven more individual releases in two separate story arcs) had a novel design innovation. Instead of the familiar booklet for the DM only, these are housed in a foldout box-sleeve, consisting of a short story and two flipbooks – one for the DM containing the info needed to run the game, one for the players full of illustrations of the action. They’ve got a super cool feel to them.

This is the second retail adventure, Road to Urik. Freedom, which I sadly no longer own, is the first and is set during the slave revolt of Tyr detailed in the first Dark Sun novel, The Verdant Passage. Road to Urik picks up directly where the previous module left off, with an army from the city-state of Urik threatening to seize Tyr after its sorcerer-king’s death. It lines up with the second Dark Sun novel, The Crimson Legion.

These flip-book modules seem like the must have been expensive to produce, but they are only two bucks more than your basic softcover sourcebook (though you get a heck of a lot more material with one of those). They’re certainly a novel approach to running a game, especially for novice DMs and remind me a bit of the earlier One-on-One Adventure Gamebooks TSR from 1985-1987, and have their roots in the S-series modules, which also included art handouts for players.

You sure get a lot of art, which is central TSR’s goals for the setting. On the other hand, they were mostly on rails thanks to the metastory and feel more single-use than you average adventure module (which sounds silly, I know). I know I played this, but I don’t have any strong memories of it. And since TSR abandoned the form after only a handful of publication, I suspect the market was as ambivalent to them as I was.

The Dark Sun campaign setting is a bit of a watershed moment in the late period of TSR’s history. If Spelljammer (1989) was their first high concept game setting (fantasy roleplaying…but in space!), Dark Sun was the first setting that focused on aesthetics and metaplot before all else.

Dark Sun’s world of Athas is a brutal place. Water is scarce, the land drained of vitality through corrupt magic. Power is consolidated into the hands of a handful of sorcerer-kings, each ruling their own city-state with an iron fist. Slavery is widespread. Contrasting with vanilla D&D, psionics are common, gods are absent and arcane magic is a blight on the environment. Obvious inspirations for the setting include Spartacus, Dune, John Carter of Mars and Mad Max. (It probably goes without saying, but considering the political climate these days, Dark Sun seems to have renewed relevance as a cautionary fable about unchecked power and disregard for the environment)

All this is tied together in a visual sense by the art of Gerald Brom and Tom Baxa, the former bringing an alien (and often sexy) vibe with his cover paintings, the latter contributing a jagged, mutated sensibility with his interior illustrations. Together, they created a look – blasted, red, dry, sweaty, hostile – that defined Dark Sun as much if not more so than the settings designers.

Those designers – Timothy Brown and Troy Denning – aren’t to be overlooked. Dark Sun took TSR’s experiments with metaplot in Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance and brought them to their logical conclusion. This is the first D&D campaign setting to have a metaplot baked into the box set, with adventures taking place within the events and fallout of Troy Denning’s series of novels, rapidly changing the status quo of the region. At the outset, Dark Sun is less of a sandbox and more a series of carefully plotted set pieces.