D&D: The Birth Of Dark Sun, A World Of Apocalypse – PRIME
Dark Sun is a world unlike any other in the D&D cosmology–full of blazing hear, apocalyptic furor, and debilitating magic, here’s how it was born.
Apocalyptic magic, ancient dragon sorcerer-kings, and a desert-drenched world where survival is a struggle–these are the guideposts of Dark Sun. It is a world unlike any other in Dungeons & Dragons for many reasons. It was the first world to leave behind the Tolkien-esque medieval pastiche, it was the first one to come with a built in metaplot, and moreover, it is a world without gods. What makes this world so popular? And how did it come to be? Join us as we take a look through the birth of the dying world of Dark Sun.
If the 80s were defined by a sort of bullish, misplaced optimism that the distrust and crises of the 70s were behind and a time of unchecked, coked-up expansion was opening up, the 90s were a defiant, cynical middle finger that struggled against the ways society let down a generation. Distrust, deconstruction, and grit were everywhere, from the jagged lines of once-clean four-color comic heroes, to the particular hell that was Looney Tunes merch back then.
And Dark Sun is a suitably dark D&D setting, whose origins lie entirely in a side product of TSR’s called Battlesystem. In 1989, TSR released a new edition of Battlesystem, which was a tabletop miniature wargame designed to handle mass combats. The 2nd edition in particular was focused entirely on miniatures, which is a sort of irony because of D&D’s origins as a wargame.
Battlesystem would go on to garner critical acclaim for TSR, winning an Origins Award for Best Miniatures Rules, and was widely praised for streamlining the complex rules of 1st edition–though one of the systems cut back on the most was magic, which was considered “woefully incomplete,” with an emphasis on the military rather than the magical. A fact that would ultimately lead to poor sales for the product.
Which is important to bear in mind because Dark Sun originally was developed as a project called War World, intended to be a whole campaign setting to give life to the new rules. The initial draft of Dark Sun is a stark difference from the final version, which has more in common with sword-and-planet sci-fi than what you might think of as fantasy.
This bold new direction is what helped cement Dark Sun in the hearts of many gamers, but as you might expect, the decision to branch out from the tried and true is sure to make any executive nervous. TSR was no different, and as they developed their marketing strategy for the new product, familiar elements like dragons and dwarves and halflings worked their way back in, but by then, the team developing it had been fully committed to the post-apocalyptic aesthetic. At’s an aesthetic that can basically be described as Brom-core.
If you’re unfamiliar with Brom, I genuinely don’t know what to tell you. Google is right there and you are in for a world of dark fantasy delights. But as Brom recounts, he got to design the entire look and feel of the setting, and even wrote on it:
“I pretty much designed the look and feel of the Dark Sun campaign. I was doing paintings before they were even writing about the setting. I’d do a painting or a sketch, and the designers wrote those characters and ideas into the story. I was very involved in the development process. I’ve been fortunate to be involved in the development end of a lot of projects I’ve worked on, from role-playing games to computer games.”
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In much the same way that Tony di Terlizzi was Planescape, Brom was Dark Sun. The two were inseparable. And much like with the development of Planescape, the team responsible for working on Dark Sun enjoyed the benefits of executive attention being focused largely on other, more traditionally marketable projects, which meant that most of the people on TSR were new to the company and didn’t have the same preconceptions that had bogged down other projects. This led to more experimental concepts.
“Using the desert as a metaphor for struggle and despair, this presents a truly alien setting, bizarre even by AD&D game standards. From dragons to spell-casting, from character classes to gold pieces, [Dark Sun] ties familiar AD&D conventions into knots.”
Even the most casual player might know that on Dark Sun magic is considered evil, as it drains the life energy of the planet and is responsible for the decline of the world. It’s why you see cannibal halflings and psionics everywhere. Dark Sun was designed to capitalize on another forthcoming book, the Complete Psionics Handbook, which is why in early Dark Sun almost everyone and everything is psionic to some degree.
The setting ended abruptly in 1996, and at the time many wondered what had happened, as the product line had been performing decently with supplements in the works–though now we know it was because TSR was in its death throes; just one year later Wizards of the Coast bought Dungeons & Dragons.
Now with a return to classic realms like Ravenloft in the works, fans are wondering–how long before we return to the desert world of Dark Sun.
