Lords of Brain

Fourteen years after abandoning the Dark Sun line of products, Wizards of the Coast released a new campaign setting based on the current 4E ruleset this August.  I recently picked up the brand new books and spent a very good while reading them and rereading bits of them.  Before I get into my impressions, I feel like I should put my opinion in context by writing about my thoughts of both the original Dark Sun world and the new 4E rules in general.

Dark Sun:  The Original

In 1991 TSR, Inc. released the original Dark Sun campaign setting, and I didn’t take any notice of it.  My first exposure was two or three years later after the setting had several supplements and a small line of strong novels written by Troy Denning.  It was a fantasy world gone wrong, incorporating all the worst elements from post-apocalyptic fiction and gritty genre bending fantasy.  By which I mean I was hooked instantly.

Dark Sun, for the uninitiated, is a violent campaign setting for the roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons.  The entire flavor of the game turns traditional fantasy conventions on its ear and does its own thing without regard to likes of J.R.R. Tolkein, Gary Gygax, or the medieval tone of every other RPG out there.

The world of Dark Sun is called Athas.  It is a desert planet, and most of it goes generations without a single rainfall.  There are no oceans, rivers, or lakes.  Water, scarce as it is, is not quite the rarest commodity around.  Metal is gone from the world.  Only the very wealthy can afford anything made from metal.  All tools, weapons, and armor are crafted from bone, wood, and obsidian.  Ceramic pieces are traded instead of copper pieces.

It is, literally, a place of fire and sand.  The sun is huge and swollen and red, the sky is crimson and much of the surface is covered in yellow sand.  Here is the first roleplaying game where the environment was the first, last, and best enemy the player characters had to defeat.  In so many games, its easy to assume your characters are doing the sensible thing and eating and drinking enough water each day that you really don’t have to keep track of it.  In Dark Sun, there are consequences to not having enough daily rations marked on your character sheet.  A journy from one city-state to another had to be carefully planned simply because an average party couldn’t carry enough water with them to make the journey safely.  They would have to forage on the way.  This made for all manner of dastardly scenarios the DM could spring on the players.  Good times.

But not everything is as fun for the DM.  Player characters have unique advantages here that can give even a seasoned DM fits.  Observe the character creation process... roll 5d4 for the six attributes.  This allows for a character with abilities ranging from 5 to 20 points.  Additionally, there were several races that allowed for a bonus to Strength (half-giants famously gave +4 bonus).  I ran a campaign where my strongest character had a STR 22.  D&D, especially the old AD&D was so skewed in giving bonuses to Strength that this particular character threw my game balance way off.  I had to learn quickly to adjust encounters that had to be solved in ways other than combat, or if combat was the only course then it would be equally challenging to all players.  My first few combat encounters consisted of nothing more than the half-giant defeating everything while the other players simply had to stay out of the way.  I view this experience as a positive, since it forced me to be a better DM, it forced me to look at things other than just hack and slash, and the lessons I learned in that Dark Sun campaign are still useful to this day.

I loved every inch of that game.  It was so new, so different.  It was the ultimate fantasy world, in a way.  Not only was it a place I couldn’t visit, it was a place I would never want to.  But I could enjoy making characters be as wicked as I wanted them to be.  See, the whole notion of doing good for good’s sake is so alien on Athas that Paladins didn’t exist because no one, not one single person on the planet, had even the faintest concept of chivalry.  And that’s pretty wow for a fantasy roleplaying game.