The problem is that it wasn’t just the only information provided to the PCs. At release it was the only information provided to the DMs as well so they had to accept it was the truth to run a campaign.
It does work brilliantly as a piece of fictional work to give the players an unreliable taster of the world but DMs need factual.
Way I see it, having an unreliable narrator is a setting’s way of giving the players permission to alter things as they see fit. The Wanderer was likely always meant to be an unreliable narrator, but I suspect he was meant to point DM and PC alike in a good direction towards the truth.
Sure the DM always has liscense to tweak any setting they use as they see fit, but the Wanderer showed how little was truly understood of the world. It was up to the DM to decide the broader history of the world. What happened to the Green Age? Who were the SMs before the current rulers? What is the Dragon? None of these questions are answered, but all are implicitly asked.
That first Wanderer’s Journal could easily have been the “elevator pitch” for the setting, just polished up a bit for release. It does certainly draw you in and summarize the setting well (even if some of the details are invalidated later on).
I doubt anyone can truly answer that question, but I’ll tell you both what I’ve heard from people who worked on Dark Sun and what I can find looking at clues:
On an episode of the Bone, Stone, and Obsidian Podcast, one of the interviewees was the head designer for Elves of Athas, an early Dark Sun supplement, who confirmed that he had no idea whatsoever of the true history of the world or even a lot of details of the city states. Similarly, the Dune Trader sourcebook has a pile of infamous continuity errors. Really, few Dark Sun products managed to be internally consistent, much less consistent with the rest of the setting. (Good example here: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water claims in 2 almost back to back paragraphs that the paraelemental planes of Athas are the same as the ones of the Great Wheel and that they are completely different, which is it?)
Even the head designers, Tim Brown and Troy Denning, seemed to have communication problems, with books worked on by one (ex. Dragon Kings) being heavily contradicted by the other (ex. parts of the Prism Pentad). Or just look at the description of the box set Dragon of Tyr compared to Dragons Kings compared to Prism Pentad. According to Troy Denning in an old interview, they could never even agree on whether or not there were once gods on Athas, or the number of Champions of Rajaat.
There are other weird things too. A truly old dragon magazine held Psi-Shadows, a monster designed to be a call forward to the upcoming Dark Sun campaign, that feels a bit like a very early version of shadow giants, but works completely differently in all respects. Or how about the many monsters in the monstrous compendium for Dark Sun that were never even given a reference in the Prism Pentad.
As best as I can tell, the truth is that there was a lot of disagreement, things just thrown in there, and, most critically, a lack of open communication between people working on the setting from the very beginning. I don’t believe the Wanderer was meant to be unreliable, at least not to the degree that he looks with the benefit of hindsight, but the secrecy shrouding the setting was not just targeting the players, or DM’s, but the designers themselves.
Me unreliable? Pfft!
But yeah, it’s been answered. It’s the perspective of the Wanderer, like a journal or such. DMs should feel free to accept or alter whatever they see fit in their campaigns.
Good post, OP.
The setting changed. Troy Denning wrote his books, which overturned the setting as originally described by the Wanderer.
That said, I think that the Wanderer was writing his journal in good faith but it was highly speculative. For one, I believe that the Wanderer got it wrong about the wars between the city states. I think that the wars are mainly theatrical, similar to the wars in the novel 1984.
Even the Verdant Passage gets it wrong. In the Verdant Passage there is a reference to raids of Tyrian granaries by other city states. Thus the granaries are protected by a huge stone slab which are psionically moved into place whenever Tyr is attacked. By the end of the Prism Pentad you realize that those kinds of raids simply don’t happen.
Like you, I am a first boxed set originalist. The athas dot org templarate much prefers the Revised Campaign Setting. Therefore, I have proposed that Athas could have different histories.
Maybe Rajaat and Haflings were part of it. Maybe they weren’t. The point is that history on Athas is occulted. 98% of people on Athas know nothing of real history.
Don’t get me started on the demographics. The problem is that the staff at TSR didn’t understand demographics. Go with the fluff, and forget the numbers they provided.
Thanks for that. So it looks like it was more a result of lack of communication and co-ordination rather than a conscious choice. Possibly as a result of TSR wanting to throw out as much as possible as quickly as possible.
I’ll probably be sticking to my version of head canon, which kind of ignores much of the fluff after the initial Wanderer’s Journal but will utilize a lot of the mechanical stuff if it works.
You’ve spotted a fundamental issue of all fiction- in a fight between consistency and narrative, narrative must win for the sake of the story.
Besides, I’ve always liked the idea of a story from one vantage point, which necessarily suffers from all the biases and mistakes you would expect from an eyewitness account.
Nearly every narrative mistake can be dismissed with this kind of hand waving. For example:
-Counting heads is hard, so numbers will always be unreliable in eyewitness accounts.
-For the Dragon, he only despoils cities who piss him off, and only to set an example. That’s probably why the Wanderer knows of this scaremongering story.
-The tombs were probably being confused with the word monuments, and the tombs don’t have to be necessarily for the SM’s themselves. Maybe the Wanderer knows they’re defiler material components.
-The changing map could simply reflect simple ignorance, and the same problems which have always afflicted map makers – unreliable information from explorers and the politics of their patrons.
It seems to me that the wanderers information being wrong was at least partly by design. The wanderer himself says a lot of the information in his journal is from second hand accounts and other less than reliable sources. This I assume was designed so that the DM would be free to make final decisions about their campaign.
It just had the added benefit that if the writers changed directions the original boxed set wouldn’t be seen as of no use.
As a personal anecdote I was running a campaign based on the marvel universe. Warned my gamers my campaign would be set at a time based on my own experiences with those comics and I would not always adhere to marvel cannon otherwise I wouldn’t be able to tell my story. Well I had a player who insisted on arguing every point where characters were supposed to be and what was out of character for them to do based on issue # idontgiveadarn.
I prefer the wanderers journal approach.
Psionic Retrieve manifested on this thread since it is relevant to the lore question I asked in the Revival thread just a bit ago, found here: Hey! Templars. Did you ever thought rejuvenate or add new blood for help? .
Personally I love that the Wanderer is unreliable because it makes all the inconsistencies tolerable. Just right them off as the narrator and change the details to the DMs story.
I too like the original boxed set as a starting point, which is why I liked 4e’s take. The website’s original charter with WotC was that we were to stick with the timeline and thus the revised boxed set, but I never liked the killing of 3 SK’s, it changed the dynamics too much.
I also like the idea of different histories and make one called the Arcane Apocalypse.
What about they faked their deaths? Cliche, I know, but still a workable possibility if done with finesse and chutzpah.
I’m fine with this as a philosophy, but it doesn’t change the fact that there needs to be an official baseline to use when writing new materials under the charter.
I’ve seen this in the charter. Thing is, I’m honestly not sure WotC truly cared even back then, much less now, if a few things here and there got tweaked. Ignoring the Prism Pentad is, of course, out of the question, but given what Paizo did in their 3e conversion, or what WotC themselves did in 4e, I feel the charter is being held up as more of a straitjacket then it should be.
I mean, depending on how you look at it, shouldn’t the complete changing of the Scorcher’s powers in Dregoth Ascending be a violation of the conversion agreement? What about the Neskos or the Hafling/Kreen Avangion ruled city state from Terrors of the Deadlands? Or Egendo from Faces of the Forgotten North? Heck, even the use of a Champion of Rajaat template, a la Lynn Abby’s work, is a potentially massive lore change that clashes with much of WotC held continuity, if athas 3e is held up as canon per the charter.
My point is that unless and until WotC actually steps in, which I have no faith will ever occur, I believe that we should try to sort things out as a community as much as possible.
There’s a history of contingencies, clones, undead, raises and resurrections in AD&D. Just pick one. The SKs and Q’s have been around for so long they should have at least 3 backup plans to “come back” in some form or another.
I don’t think there does. This is one of the issues that comes up with having canon. If you nail things down then you can sometimes write yourself into a corner. But if things are left vague you can always massage things later to fit what you need at the time. From my reading we haven’t had a “charter” since 4th edition. WotC hasn’t reasponded to use about it for years. I’m under the assumption that it no longer exists.
I agree, I think WotC cared and it was in a giving spirit that they did it in the first place. Looking back at the “Official Homepage Requirements” , it doesn’t mention anything about the setting direction, just the website and what can and can’t be on it. Much of which no longer applies since WotC doesn’t have those features anymore (like the forums, online store, catalogs, player registry, etc). The part that is most relavant states,
“We encourage fan sites to begin making updates to their content to bring it in-line with 3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons as soon as possible. We will begin phasing out web pages that do not offer 3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons content soon after the launch of the new game system in August 2000.”
The other things must have been from private email…or they were assumed since this was before the times when settings were retconned or rebooted.
Personally I think we’re on our our own. However, I do think we should at least release the conent we have in a manner we said we would, IE in 3rd edition. And after that it can be modified to whatever other editions people want.
I agree 100%
More Herodotus than Thucydides then.
Still, the geography underwent a massive change from the above description and the rest of it that is cut off.
Because it offers creative freedom. The Wanderer’s Journal is so good because it’s short, vague and unreliable. It gives us a very rough sketch of Athas, then leaves it to us to fill the blanks. It’s not that the world presented in WJ is better, because there’s barely any world there. It’s the world you projected onto it that is 
I had the same experience with Ravenloft. I was introduced to it in 3e, during a time when it was divorced from D&D at large. The rulebooks were very vague on the details, it spurned my imagination like crazy. Then, when I found out the ‘canon’ lore, I was really disappointed. It didn’t live up to the rough potential of the setting.
Okay, I’m sold.
I remember that before I read about champions of Rajaat, I had all sorts of ideas about the SMs. I was certain Kalak was a lich, for example. Some SMs might be immortal, others might be undead; some may be (former) humans, others might be outright monstrous. There’s plenty you can do with that idea.
One thing I like about Champions or Rajaat is that they’re Dark Sun creatures to the core. Without them, SMs might turn into generic D&D villains in DS flavour. Let’s have a lich SM (heresy), a hag SM (heresy), a vampire SM (heresy)… And a mummy SM while we’re at it (double heresy). Oh, and a just-an-evil-sorcerer-psionist SM. All of these can be done well, but they’re awfully generic. Champions of Rajaat are unique Athas flavour.
Second, it leaves a huge blank: The absent species. If Champions of Rajaat didn’t kill them off, then what did? Or were they never there to begin with? I’m strongly against re-introducing them because, again, it’d make the setting more generic.
Finally, the Champions of Rajaat create a system of mutually assured destruction which (paradoxically) keeps Athas from sliding into extinction. They wage their petty wars, of course, but a total war would be a war to annihilation. It makes SMs stable - and predictable.
With stronger and weaker, mortal and immortal SMs, you’d get desperate, short-sighted rulers who’d do anything to achieve their goals. It’d lead to creeping devastation that’d slowly render Athas extinct. Which is the chief purpose of Champion of Rajaat SMs, I believe: They cull out the competition and don’t allow unpredictable upstarts to arise.
I think we’ll need some sort of homebrew system that explains how do you become an SM, how do they grant spells to their Templars, how are the city-states founded, etc. Perhaps we should expand on it in the Heresy thread?
The rulebooks were very vague on the details, it spurned my imagination like crazy. Then, when I found out the ‘canon’ lore, I was really disappointed. It didn’t live up to the rough potential of the setting.
Isn’t the mystery always more intriguing than the truth 
(apologies in advance to astronomers)
Let’s have a lich SM (heresy), a hag SM (heresy), a vampire SM (heresy)… And a mummy SM while we’re at it (double heresy).
Would now be the appropriate time to introduce Skeletor and Mumm Ra? 
Sorry to go completely off topic, but reminds me of a setting I once made where the only rulers were powerful monsters (dragons of the fantasy ilk as well as powerful undead had their own kingdoms).
Absolutely. No one will convince me that Borys didn’t scream ‘I HAVE THE POWER!!!’ when he transformed into the Dragon
