Under the Darkest of Suns...

Growing up, I was a huge D&D player. Or, at least, I loved to play when I had the chance. And when I didn't have a group to play with (which was, sadly, the case more often than not), I worked on my own campaign ideas and compiled rules and (especially) spells for my favorite wizards. I played both BECMI and AD&D without discriminating between them, and Mystara was always my favorite published campaign world. And I played either 1st or 2nd edition AD&D without caring which was which, since they were so close to 100% compatible anyway. There were some things that didn't work, but they were easy to get around.

First edition was about adventures and pushing the boundaries of the rules; expansions like Unearthed Arcana and Oriental Adventures gave us a lot of new options, some of which were welcomed, others which were reviled. To this day, 1985 is still seen as the dividing line between 'real' AD&D and the '1.5' edition. For myself, I embraced it all, because it could all be used for fun.

Second edition was different. Sure, there were rule expansions all over the place; 2e gave us the 'splatbook' phenomena, where we would be provided with more than a hundred pages of information on a narrow topic (fighters, elves, necromancers, castles, historical settings, etc.). But what comes to mind when you think of 2nd edition AD&D? The campaign settings.

At the end of 1st edition's era, there were Greyhawk, Dragonlance, and the Forgotten Realms (and Mystara, though it wasn't called that yet, for BECMI). Kara-Tur, the Oriental setting, was stapled onto the FR setting, and that was about it (aside from the million or so homebrew campaigns out there). All three settings were popular, all three were pretty straightforward fantasy with minor tweaks.

But right off the bat, 2e provided us with Spelljammer and Ravenloft, one of which would go on to be super-popular, the other one...not so much. But they had this in common: They weren't generic, typical fantasy settings like the 1e worlds. Spelljammer was elves in space, with a mechanic that I later learned was based on old scientific and pulp-fiction theories of how space travel would work. It wasn't bad, but I wasn't interested in it (give me the generic stuff). As for Ravenloft, I wasn't into horror as a kid or a teenager, so it never got my attention.

The next world, however, was completely different, so different that I, in my narrow-minded view of fantasy, was repulsed by it. Dark Sun, a post-apocalyptic setting where the characters are totally overpowered and psionic powers are ubiquitous. Remember, this was in the days before the Pulp Renaissance, when an entire generation of readers had been trained to see Tolkien as the beginning and end of fantasy literature, where door-stopping series of epic fantasy were the only way to read in the genre. Dark Sun was completely out of that mind-set, and I wasn't ready for it.

Fast-forward to today, and while I'm still not 100% sold on Dark Sun, I can appreciate its roots a lot more. After all, the fantasy genre as we know it didn't start with Tolkien, but Burroughs, who began with the Barsoom stories set on what was essentially a post-apocalyptic Mars, with mental powers and strange creatures, powerful warriors and very little clothing. While Dark Sun isn't set on Mars, it's certainly drawing a lot of inspiration from stories like John Carter, as well as the same works that inspired the Gamma World game, Mad Max movies, and other wasteland settings.

The other thing about Dark Sun that stood out to me was the way magic worked: It sucked the life from plants and animals around it. Magic-users come in two flavors: Defilers and preservers. The preservers work to minimize the ecological damage; the defilers just wreck everything in their wake and quest for more power. It was a pretty not-subtle look at the enviropolitics of the early 1990s. But it was different, and I've come to understand that different isn't all that bad after all.

So, in my endless quest to compile everything D&D related (the official stuff, that is) up until the advent of 3rd edition, I've finally encountered the Dark Sun material. And, since I was hoping to put everything together into one single campaign, I've struggled with coming up with a way to integrate the magic-blasted landscape and different style of magic with the rest of the game's settings. How do you put Dark Sun on the same world as the Forgotten Realms, or Spelljammer?

Well, there are two possibilities, one of which is actually forbidden by the rules (either officially or in a Dragon magazine somewhere; I can't remember). First, Dark Sun is just another world that can be reached via Spelljamming. That's the one that was nixed by TSR, probably because of the power imbalance between Dark Sun and everything else.

The second one, and the one I'm inclined to go with, is that Dark Sun is, literally, the post-apocalyptic campaign world. As in, it's the distant future of the campaign setting, much like the Dying Earth books of Jack Vance are the far-distant future of Earth. It's a nightmarish future, one that would serve as an excellent object lesson for time-traveling heroes who find themselves trapped in the gladiatorial arena under Tyr, or stranded on an island in the Silt Sea.

This would explain the multitude of weird, psionic creatures that appear in the Dark Sun Monstrous Compendium. Some of them are just mutated versions of regular animals (like the Athasian Sloth, which is a giant, carnivorous killer) or 'regular' D&D monsters. It wouldn't be hard to come up with a story that allows PCs to experience Athas, and find out that there's a way to prevent it from becoming the actual future of their world.

I'll be giving Dark Sun a closer look in the future, because while it's still not a setting I'd want to run a full campaign in, there are a lot of interesting ideas therein, and it will certainly be worth reading the inspirational source material. Because it's pulp, and pulp is best.