Dark Sun (Sol Oscuro) was promoted in the Dragon Magazine #2 (Spanish Edition). I have always been interested in everything about the desert, so I was inmediately drawn to the setting. I remember the description of the new races and the new weapons along Brom’s superb drawings.
A couple of days later I saw the box in a Department Store. I looked at it for a loong time. The price was a bit steep for me, but I finally decided to buy it. Best decision ever. I quickly read all the material there and I bought Freedom (Libertad) as soon as it hit the stores.
Since then I have been in love with everything related to Athas and its inhabitants.
My introduction to Dark Sun was the Wake of the Ravager Crpg.
In retrospect, quite ironic, since that game has a lot of thing that truly don’t belong to Dark Sun (like mind flayers or umber hulks).
Then I found athas.org (when 3.0 itself was quite young), and got really into the setting.
I originally got into D&D when 3.5 came out and as I grew up I fell in love with AD&D 2e. After a few campaigns in Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk using 2e I decided to take a look at other material from that time and stumbled across mentions of the Dark Sun campaign setting. All I remember hearing about it in the past was that it was a sort of post apocalyptic fantasy setting with an emphasis on gladiators, the slave trade, and a more primitive and savage world than the usual high middle ages/early renaissance style default D&D takes.
I first got my hands on the revised campaign setting, and seeing that it updated a lot of existing material and moved a lot of existing story lines forward I hunted down the original boxed set online. Working with both versions I cobbled together a working setting of my own and introduced the PCs to it all. Ever since they’ve been working towards a means of assassinating Kalak of Tyr while navigating a complex conspiracy between the sorcerer kings and I haven’t looked back since.
The very first time I played Dark Sun was back with the original boxed set. Our DM was the only one who had ever seen it before and our introduction was A little Knowledge from the set. He set it up so we intentionally wouldn’t know anything about it. Each of us played ourselves, found passed out and naked in the desert by a slave caravan. 3 fighters, a ranger, and a thief trying to figure out where we were, how we got there, and none of us could even speak the language. It made for a memorable introduction and I’ve loved the whole setting since.
I’ve collected everything I can ever since, and while I’ve stopped basically at 3.5, I’ve pulled information from the newer books and tried to integrate everything no matter how far fetched it was. Some things needed tweaking to make it all work, but I love the setting. I’ve even used that same type of beginning to introduce others to the setting and during the early 2000s was running 6 different groups through adventures every week. I’ve lost touch with basically all of them, but maybe one day…
A friend bought the first boxed set when we were still kids and didn’t really have a clue how to play. We both would up buying Expanded and Revised (and I got his set when he stopped playing, so I actually have 2 of the cloth maps now, hooray!), but still were too young as a group to get the setting. The Shattered Lands game was the first real taste that clued me in, and remains my favorite video game to this day, and Dark Sun is easily my favorite setting.
My discovery of the Dark Sun Setting was an Announcement Article in the Polyhedron Fanzine, complete with full description of a “typical” Athasian Monster - The Psi-Shadow.
Also, the fact that it was the “power setting”, because your PC’s Attributes were 5-20 [roll best 5 of 6d4], and not the usual 3-18.
1e Boxed Set. Drove to Vegas from Northern California with my dad to spend the summer, and he took me to the local comic book store and let me buy whatever I wanted to tide me over for the trip. Got the first boxed set and spent the drive and trip devouring it.
I enjoyed what I read so much (my eyes were better then) that I started to collect everything for it. I’m still yet to run a campaign but hope to do so in 2020. I’ll be using the 4E rules as they remain my favourite version of D&D from the 39 years I’ve been playing and DMing.
I started with the first boxed set when it was released (so '91?). I think I was tired of the railroad-y nature of Dragonlance, which was what a lot of my friends were playing at the time. I made a point of buying the modules for Dark Sun last, and out of habit, I still tend to not run them. Some of the bigger, early games I ran were in Athas and I’ve been keeping up on the online forums mainly as a reader. I run a Play-By-Post game over Facebook that’s been going strong since March 2019.
I did not get introduced to it until late, when the 4th edition versions came out.
From there I went back and got my hands on every piece of it I could from the original setting to the revised version and read them all, every source book and adventure. I was infatuated with Dark Sun at that time and I still love the setting.
However, as some may recall here, I never got far in running a game. Could never find a group that was interested in the settings. It would be fun I said, it was too dark they said. The setting’s harsh tone and hopeless nature with strong themes didn’t appeal to most people I tried to bring it up to. Aw well, I have the books at least.
So until I find someone to share it with, I shall continue to simply wander through the world alone in my imagination.
A lot of people only slightly familiar with the setting says things like that. Athas is harsh, but there is much opportunity for heroism, albeit a hardnosed kind of heroism rather than the romantic prince on a white horse heroism. Ditto the people that don’t read the source material and declare that the Dark Sun setting is tantamount to an endorsement of slavery and “bioessentialism”. At my age I am old enough to remember people that insisted that certain movies that they had no seen be banned, merely because they had heard that it was against the public morals. We see the same trends today, merely relabelled and further weaponized by the incestuous amplification of the social media echo chamber.
People will keep coming to Dark Sun because it is a great setting. The one setting that truly stands out.
I was a player in a big Forgotten Realms campaign back in the day. Our group met weekly for loooong Friday sessions. But it was exhausting for the DM, so we had the idea that someone else should DM a different campaign setting, and we’d alternate weeks. I skimmed the available settings… I liked our game, but I was never inspired by Forgotten Realms because it was just too much of a Tolkein knock-off for me. Ditto Greyhawk and Dragonlance. Ravenloft was way too campy. But Dark Sun, I loved its subversion of the original tropes from the beginning.
It’s disappointing that people think it’s “too dark” or “too grimdark” because Dark Sun ought to be recognized as the most essentially moral campaign. It’s always a bit lame, to me, when the big bad guy is just an evil storm giant or something who wants to throw rocks at the village. It’s easy morality. Athas has the moral themes we wrestle with in real life-- it’s systemic oppression, environmental degradation, lust for power, tyranny, the struggle for freedom and justice, and so on. It’s really the only campaign world where you primarily fight against the hard and important evils of the world, rather than the trivially easy ones.
Grappling with the idea that a man (or woman, or whatever - a person) could be the ultimate villain, rather than a dragon or a demon lord, IS likely what makes poeple think DS is too grim.
The same way buying life insurance feels morbid.
But, yes, the struggle against that evil is what makes playing dark sun not…IDK, brutally soul crushing. “Keep Home Alive”, as it were.
I PC and DM a lot of grimdark settings and they almost never bother me since a very common theme my groups go with is the struggle to make our little corner of the world a better place.
Dark Sun has the added advantage of you being able to feasibly topple a Sorcerer King or ensure Tyr becomes less awful than the other city states.
Starting from a bad place and earning your happy ending feels a lot more powerful to me than settings where you have Elminster shaped guard rails to ensure things never get too bad.