Different Dark Suns 2

Back in 2014, I did a post on "Different Dark Suns." There I kept the dying earth desert as the essential element but changed other things about Athasian culture. But what if we just ditched the desert?

Green Hell, Dark Sun

Athas is dying, but not because it's drying up, but because it's been choked out by a dreadful fecundity. Torrid jungles have swallowed most of the former civilization. The roads between city states must be cut anew every few weeks. Metal armor and weapons quickly corrode and rust away. The jungle is not just alive, but hungry. With the dimmer sunlight, plants have been forced to become predatory. Athas more as some versions of Pulp Venus, Weinbaum's "Parasite Planet" being particular useful, perhaps.

Frozen Beneath A Dark Sun

The sun isn't just dark, but dim, and Athas is frozen in its final Ice Age. There are deserts, true, but deserts of trackless white. The sorcerer-kings' main drawn would be their ability to create magical warmth in the cities to keep people alive. We'd have to forego that Brom barbaric costuming...Well, maybe not if we believe Joe Jusko:

Dark Sun: Daggers in the Night

The party's caravan arrived at the Silver Springs Oasis. Eowen and Egon went to try to deliver a message given to them by the elf Iseela back in Dur-Taruk for  Toramundi, Chieftain of the Silver Hand Tribe that controls the carvanserai. With the mention of Iseela's name they are taken through confusing back alleys and underground passages until they are are ushered into a room where the chief sits cross-legged on the floor with a shaman.

Toramundi accepts the coded message. Egon asks him for help with information on Golothlay Canyon. He laughs and tells them he doesn't believe that the House Madar treasure exists, and he thinks they are on a fool's errand which can only lead to their deaths. Any other information will cost them.

Egon and Eowen pay his price in silver and obtain a map which will allow them to skirt some of the known dangers on the way to the canyon. Their employer, Urum ath Wo, is pleased because he has been unable to find a guide. He bids them bed down near the animals and heads off for better accommodations.

That night, while Eowen is on watch, she discovers two masked elves attacking some of the merchants in the party in their sleep. She sounds an alarm, and Egon and Keeb-Raa join the fight. They kill one assassin, but the other runs away. Eowen gives chase, but looses him in the twisting passages of the ancient structure.

Keeb-Raa manages to use his healing magics to stabilize the wounded merchant.

Dark Sun: The Bandits of the Crimson Oasis

The last two sessions of our Forbidden Lands Dark Sun campaign saw the party (now having made the acquaintance of the dune peddler Egon the Honest) taking yet another job from the dwarf merchant Urum ath Wo. Urum believes he has reliable information regarding the rumored treasure of the merchant prince Darom Madar said to be hidden in the remote Canyon of Golothlay.

Urum plans to do this deal separate from his work for House Zawir, hoping to strike out on his own. Egon negotiates the party not just decent pay, but a share in future profits.

The arrangements made, the small caravan heads out for the Silver Springs Oasis with the party acting as guards and scouts. At Silver Springs they plan to palaver with Chief Toramundi of the Silver Hands, the elven tribe that holds the Springs. Urum believes he has specific knowledge of the desert that might be helpful.

Along the way, they avoid an erupting swam of baazrag, and notice a halfling spying on them. Eowen the Elf tracks the halfling back to a small oasis, but finds whoever was there has already left. Fearing an attack, she heads back to the caravan, but is waylaid by the halfling. She kills the halfling, but hears that a fight has begun in the arroyo the canyon the caravan was passing through. 

The others are set upon by a dwarf ornamented like a sun priest, and three human bandits. After a short battle, the dwarf and one of the humans are dead. The other two surrender. Looting the bodies, they take studded leather armor and find a pouch with two potion fruit.

Putting some distance between themselves and the canyon, they decide to stop for the the night and make camp.

Dark Sun: The Sand Raiders

I've run two sessions now of Dark Sun using Forbidden Lands (and the Burning Sands Dark Sun adaptation you can find online). To keep it easy as we were getting used to the system, I decided to run the short adventure in the 4e Dark Sun book.

At the caravanserai of Dur-Taruk, the party (Eowen, Elf Ranger; Insam, Ranger; and Keeb-Raa, Thri-Kreen druid) accept a job from a dwarf factor named Urum ath Wo of the merchant house Zawir. It seems a Zawir caravan arrived with one wagon missing and with it its cargo of grain, wine, and wood. Fifty silver was offered for clear directions to the cargo or its return, and the party is eager for the coin.

The party is able to pick up the trail of the lost wagon and track it to a place it was set upon by saurian silt runners.  In fact, some of the silt runners are still there, and the party engages them in combat, ultimately emerging victorious. The bodies have attracted the attention of a pack of kruthiks. The party has to kill them before they can follow the tracks showing where the silt runners too the cargo. They lead to the ruins of an ancient tower.

Stealthily approaching the tower, the party finds a vault where the silt runners and their leader have taken the cargo and the still-living wagon crew. The leader is a largely reptilian creature who has a dagger coated with some greenish ichor. He doesn't get a chance to use it because Insam puts an arrow through a gap in his carapace and kills him.

In the battle that follows, one silt runner escapes but the others are slain. The party decides the cargo is too much trouble for them to carry back, but they free the crew, and after making camp for the night in the vault, they return to Dur-Taruk in the morning for their payment.

Dark Sun: The Pristine Tower

"The effect of this cannot be understood without being there. The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you."

- Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer

The Pristine Tower is a mysterious structure in the deserts of Athas. It is first mentioned in Denning's novel Amber Enchantress, but later figures into an adventure Dregoth Ascending. I'm going to ignore for this post what the Tower is and the roll it plays in the history of Athas, as that's something one might or might not want to use in there own campaign, but I think the Pristine Tower as enough interesting things about it, it's worth including even without the backstory.

Tower is at least mutagenic, perhaps reality-warping. While the novel is disappointingly bland in the description of its environs, I think you can easily borrow strange details from Annihilation (the film or the novel) or perhaps Roadside Picnic, though with more emphasis on the biological rather than the technological.

We are told that anything that bleeds within the zone around the tower (perhaps anything that is injury) begins getting remade as some other creature. This is the source of the "new races" of Athas--like the nikaal or the humanoid baazrag. Also it creates unique mutations like Magnus, who was born of elves but looks nothing like one, and the half-human, half-insectoid Prince Dhojakt.

The fact that mutation only seems to occur after bleeding (or perhaps injury) is interesting. Is the Tower exerting some sort out of control healing field? Or is it trying to produce lifeforms better suited to survival on Athas and just needs better access to genetic material than intact skin provides? Or perhaps it's just a mutagen changing everything in range slowly, and natural healing just gives a more rapid avenue for that process?

In the novel, the area around the Tower is inhabited by rather normal creatures, but I think the chimeric creatures of the Annihilation film are more appropriate. You could also use my Random Zonal Aberrations tables. Of course always keep in mind that "weird for Earth" isn't necessarily weird for Athas.

Dark Sun: The Shadow King of Nibenay

The original Dark Sun campaign setting calls the Sorcerer-King Nibenay "a bizarre and enigmatic
figure." He is seldom seen by his people--to the degree that rumors sometimes spread than he has died. All his Templars are women, and they may or may not all be his wives. By the 4e version of Dark Sun they were definitely his wives, though the marriage is "purely ceremonial."

In the later versions of the setting, Nibenay is seldom seen because he looks like a humanoid dragon. But in the novel Amber Enchantress, Nibenay is inhuman, though more of a mollusk-arthropod creature. I like this version better for reasons I discussed in an earlier post.

Nibenay is called the Shadow King because he's so reclusive. I think we could do better and have him typically giving audiences from behind a screen so he's seen only as a shadow (and likely a magically or psionically generated one). Perhaps he even uses his powers only to appear as some sort of shadow puppet. Maybe he appears to those who have displeased him in any place in the city in the same way?

Nibenay's son Dhojakt is monstrous in form, as well. In the canon, this is due to actions of his mother, but I think it might be interesting if Nibenay himself was just rather to only partial human children. Nibenay is not only trying to ascend to a transhuman form himself, but to breed progeny who are also transhuman. He's the family-oriented Sorcerer-King.

Here I would draw inspiration from Gregory Keyes' Chosen of the Changeling duology where the royal family descended from the River God sometimes produce inhuman fish or water aspected children the royals keep locked away. Also, there's the recent comic book limited series the The Goddamned: The Virgin Brides by Jason Aaron and R. M. Guéra where a cult of nuns on an isolated mountain are offering up child brides to angels, and then tending the monstrous, Nephilim children.

I feel like Nibenay's Templars are both his cult and the source of his brides. There could be in number of inhuman children sulking about his massive and forbidden palace.

Dark Sun: The Gray

Cosmology is really on comes up and references to certain monsters or magic in the original Dark Sun campaign setting, but in the second edition supplement Defilers and Preservers the "planes" called the Gray and the Black are established. The Black mainly serves a backstory purpose or to be a place for monsters to be from. It's similar to the Plane of Shadow/Shadowfell, a concept I've felt to be of limited utility in most settings, Dark Sun included. 

The Gray is a different story. It at once solves one potential problem with the Great Wheel: there are too many afterlifes. It also provides a thematically appropriate underworld for the this particular setting.

The Gray is described as a "dreary, endless space" or "ashen haze." In conception it's not unlike Hades or Sheol. Like the River Lethe of Greek myth, the Gray steals memory and identity, but in this case the environment leeches it from them. Eventually their spiritual being becomes one with the gloom.

The only thing I don't like about the Gray as described is that I don't think it should be featureless. More interesting to me, would be if it mirrored in most respects the desert landscape of Athas, except perhaps more desolate. It would be doubted with ruins of dead cities and the tombs and monuments to long dead potentates who thought they could carry their riches into the afterlife--and perhaps, in a way they did, for all the good it did them.

Of course it should be possible (though not easy) to visit the Gray, like visiting the Underworld in Greek mythology. The souls of the dead are probably not dangerous for the most part to visitors, but the the ghosts that could pass between the Gray and the mortal realm might well be.

Dark Sun: The Desiccated Sea

Here I'm going to break a bit more with Dark Sun as published than I have in my previous posts. I'm afraid I don't really like the Sea of Silt. I know realism doesn't really have much of a place in a fantasy setting about sorcerer-kings and dragons, but it isn't very realistic. Also, I think it robs the setting of a bit of it's desert feel because it gives kind of an "out." Travel across the Sea of Silt is more difficult that ocean-going travel, true, but it provides some of the same type of adventuring opportunities. This could be a feature, but I see it as a bit of a bug.

Instead of the Sea of Silt, I'd just like to have a dried up sea. A harsh, saltpan basin dotted with a few shallow, hypersaline lakes where only bacteria can dwell, and tall mesas that were once islands. In other words, something like the Mediterranean would have been during the Messinian salinity crisis of the Miocene.

It would be an incredibly harsh environment, potentially. If the Sea of Silt had anything like the depth of the Mediterranean basin the pressure at the bottom would be something like 1.5 times that of "sea level" above it, and the temperatures might soar to 170 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer according to some models.

Given that salt is a quasi-element in D&D lore you would loose the Silt Sea creatures, but you could replace them with bizarre creatures of the the Quasi-elemental Plane of Salt if you wanted. You can still have giants on the islands if you wish (in an inversion of the tendency to insular dwarfism), but you can also have isolated city states in Planetary Romance fashion.

If one wanted commerce across the expanse, that would still be possible, but likely it would be via flight. If not that, land-sailing across the saltpan. It wouldn't be the most pleasant way to travel, but it could be done (if one avoided the summer months assuming temperatures as mentioned above, but we don't have to assume temperatures so high, either).

Once a thriving port, now a dead city on the cliffs

Dark Sun: The Lion of Urik

Supreme over other kings, lordly in appearance,
he is the hero, born of Uruk...

- The Epic of Gilgamesh

I am Hamanu, King of the World, King of the

Mountains and the Plains, King of Urik, for whom

the roaring winds and the all-mighty sun have decreed

a destiny of heroism...

- Dark Sun Campaign Setting (1991)

Urik's name was no doubt inspired by the ancient Mesopotamian city-state of Uruk. It's Sorcerer-King Hamanu likely got his name and love of law and order from the Babylonian king Hammurabi, but I think his character is a bit more analogous to the Sumerian, mythic hero Gilgamesh. 

Hamanu is the most heroic of the Sorcerer-Kings. Not in the modern sense of being a noble or a fighter for good, though. He is neither. Rather, he is a hero more ancient sense: a doer of mighty deeds. While the Dark Sun campaign setting perhaps intended Hamanu more as a brilliant tactician and military strategist rather than a man of arms, I feel likely he's much more interesting (and differentiated from the other Sorcerer-Kings) if he is a mighty-thewed warrior, imbued with magical might. I envision him something like the titular Exalted of the any edition of the Exalted rpg, or perhaps Solomon David from Kill Six Billion Demons:

A side issue (but an important worldbuilding one, I think): Hamanu's banner. We are told in multiple places that Hamanu's (i.e. Urik's) troops care a "lion banner." The novel The Crimson Legion once describes it as a "lion that walks like a man," but nowhere where else gets this specific. The novel later has Hamanu assuming or projecting a monstrous, leonine form. 

This would suggest Athas, a world with beetle-like draft animals and reptile-bird mounts, has mundane lions. To be fair, Athas has mundane humans, so it's not impossible. It's also possible lions died out back before the cataclysmic times that changed the world from some more typical fantasy setting to its current state and exist now only as semi-mythical heraldic beasts. That's not a bad explanation, but I prefer my Athas to never have been a standard fantasy world, favoring a more Planetary Romance environment. I assume "lion" is a translation--like "Barsoomian lion" is sometimes used for "banth" in Burroughs's Mars series. In fact, I say just choose your favorite depiction of a banth and that's your Athasian lion.

Dark Sun: Tumult in Tyr

In the Dark Sun campaign setting, the city-state of Tyr is presented as on the brink of some drastic change. The Sorcerer-King Kalak has confiscated the slaves of the nobles to build his ziggurat, is taxing the people unmercifully to pay for it, and is neglecting his trade obligations to neighboring states. Kalak's reasons for doing this and the results of his actions for for his city play out in the novel The Verdant Passage and in the module Freedom.

In canon, revolution comes to Tyr as Kalak tries to bootstrap himself into dragonhood, and he's thwarted and killed. These events are reflected in the descriptions of Tyr in the revised campaign setting and the 4e Dark Sun setting book.

There are a few other interesting tidbits regarding Tyr. It has the only iron mines in the region. It has a Senate made up of the city nobles that are marginalized and at odds with Kalak's templar bureaucracy. Kalak keeps the still-living, severed heads of former allies Sacha and Wyan around to advise him, and they live on blood. (There is some discrepancy about who Sacha and Wyan are/were. Verdant Passage has Kalak claim they were chieftains that helped him conquered Tyr, and Sacha is presented as the progenitor of the Mericles noble house. In both later novels and rpg material, they are fellow "champions of Rajaat" killed by the dragon.)

Metaplot aside, resolving "Tyr as powder keg" too quickly in the line feels like a misstep to me. I would drag this out, let PCs get involved with the interplay of the factions. Even if they have no desire to become revolutionaries, there's a lot of interesting gameplay that could be wrung from this, whether the players approach it like Yojimbo or just work to avoid it.

I would ditch the name "the Senate" (too much Roman association) but keep the oligarchy as a faction, maybe remaining it the Council or Supreme Council (which the chief governmental body of Carthage was called) or even "The Mighty Ones" (the literal translation of the council advising Phoenician kings).

I love Kalak's plan to jumpstart himself into a dragon, so that has to stay. I also think the severed head advisors are a great touch. I would borrow a bit from Clark Ashton Smith's "The Empire of the Necromancers" and say that Sacha and Wyan (I would change those names, too) were sorcerers and colleagues of Kalak who all came together to the village of Tyr, which at that time was in a small, marshy, wetland amid the ruins of a more ancient city. The three built the city, perhaps with undead labor, but eventually Kalak betrayed and killed the other two.

Dark Sun: The Templars

 

We're told in the original Dark Sun campaign setting that the Templars are "clergymen devoted to the sorcerer king of their city. Like other priests, they are granted spells in return for their worship." Also, they "dominate the king's bureaucracy." The revised box set expands on this slightly saying they serve as city guards and in the army, they oversee the city's administration, and they "maintain the illusion that the sorcerer king is a god by using their absolute power to enforce worship and homage to their ruler."

The problem with these portrayals is it seems at odds with what we are told about individual city-states and their sorcerer-kings. Some sorcerer-kings are viewed as gods, it's true, but some (we are explicitly told) just style themselves as rulers or whatever. Also, despite their name implying the existence of temples, we are not, across all the city-states, given any indication of temples' existence or what the practices within them might be. The first Dark Sun novel, Denning's The Verdant Passage supports the view of the setting material, with Kalak of Tyr viewed as a king and little evidence he is worshipped by anyone (though there is a mention of the templar's leading his "veneration.").

Without providing a unified "origin" for the templars and their role, I feel like not only should their exact nature vary from city-state to city-state, but also their name. I suppose for ease of discussing them as a class, templar serves as  well as anything, though. For most city-states I like the approach of the setting material and the novel: sorcerer-kings are venerated but not worshipped. (The distinction, may admittedly, be a fine one, but it exists.) The sorcerer-king forms the core of the city-state's civic religion: it's holidays, festivals, and foundational myths. There are no gods on Athas, but there is an afterlife, so perhaps fidelity to the sorcerer-king is tied in dogma to reward in the hereafter. The templars officiate at public observances (except when the sorcerer-king is present) and punish those who don't appear sufficiently devoted. As bureaucrats they also have a role in legal preceding that interact with the civic religion. 

Many of the city-states are probably a bit more fascistic than ancient world cities in the popular imagination. I feel like scarcity of resources would tend to push them the direction of Immortan Joe's Citadel in Mad Max: Fury Road. I could see some smaller ones having a cult (used in the modern sense) kind of character.

The Mutants of Dark Sun

 

Under the description of humans in the original Dark Sun campaign setting it's noted that:

On Athas, centuries of abusive magic have not only scarred the landscape—they've twisted the essence of human appearance, as well. Many humans in Dark Sun look normal... Others, however, have marked alterations to their appearance. Their facial features might be slightly bizarre; a large chin or nose, pointed ears, no facial hair, etc. Their coloration might be subtly different, such as coppery, golden brown, hues of grey, or patchy. The differences may be more physical, such as webbed toes or fingers, longer or snorter limbs, etc. 

This interesting tidbit doesn't really get much play in the rest of the 2nd edition version of Dark Sun. The revised campaign setting doesn't mention it at all. The 4e campaign setting does not that Athasian humans have unusual traits and exaggerated features, but it only hazards that it might be the effects of the magic that brought ruin to the land.

This might not count as minor

I think this is a feature that enhances the post-apocalyptic element of Dark Sun and further plays into the theme of magic as ecologically ruinous. It would be particularly good way to set apart the tribes of the wastes or hinterlands from the people of the cities. Perhaps some prejudice exists against those too tainted in some city-states? (It would fit with their generally oppressive, slaveholding, heavy-stratified nature.)

In any case, it gives us an excuse for an array of Masters of the Universe or Carcosa style people with unnatural skin tones, a variety of Star Trek alien foreheards/ear shapes and the like.

Dark Sun: Sorcerer-King Ascension

 "I am a brother to dragons, and a companion to owls. My skin is black upon me, and my bones are burned with heat."
- Job 30:29-30

One thing I forgot to touch on in my last Dark Sun post--and it's a key trait of the Sorcerer-Kings--is their transhuman state. The first box set gives us very little on this, other than it's references to the dragon, but by the time of Dragon Kings, it is established that all defiler mages can potentially walk a path to becoming the monstrous personification of destruction, a dragon. Preservers, it turns out, can become the the mothman-looking avangions.

This is presented somewhat differently in the novels between the first box set and the hardcover. In Crimson Legion, Hamanu appears as a leonine creature. In Amber Enchantress, Nibenay is sort of immense arthropod-type monstrosity. Later works will suggest Hamanu can appear however he wishes and retcon Nibenay to having a dragon-type form. 

Admittedly, there is room to interpret their appearances in the novels as not their actual forms. They are mighty sorcerers and psionicists, after all. It seems just as likely to me, though, that the original plan was to have every Sorcerer-King have a unique transformation. In any case, there's nothing stopping me from running with that idea, whatever their intention. Maybe they're all going to be "dragons" (so as not to change the terminology), but dragon is a broader class of forms than a single, reptilian-humanoid body plan? It certainly dovetails with the elements I want to emphasize to look at it that way.

Dark Sun: City-States and Sorcer-Kings

art by Alcatena

The main action of the first Dark Sun material is set in the Tyr Region, also called the Tablelands. This is an area a bit bigger than the land area of Britain or a bit smaller than the land area of Colorado, for comparison. There are seven city-states, each (at least in the beginning) ruled by a Sorcerer-King.

Thinking about revising Dark Sun with the elements I mentioned before in mind, but also with any eye to the setting's inspirations, I find the Tyr region a little bland. Each of the city-states has a real world culture as inspiration (sometimes maybe a mashup of two), which gives you a bit more of a hook than just generic D&D Sword & sorcery city-states, true, but I think we can do better--at least in terms of my stated goals.

Here I would look to Planetary Romance, as it's a genre full of city-states separated by desert: Mars/Barsoom and Llarn (from two Gardner Fox novels) come to mind, but there are lot of others, and we don't need to limit ourselves to inspiration from only desert planet planetary romance. What these stories typically portray are cities at once more homogenous and more flavorful than Dark Sun's as presented. 

Most Planetary Romance takes place in a cultural region sometimes covering a whole planet. The cities in that region mostly have the same political arrangements, speak the same language, and have a consistent material culture. In order to make then distinct (and interesting places for adventure), they tend to have one unusual thing about them. It could be one of the things I mentioned above is slightly different or it could be the pursuit of some exotic pastime, a cultural eccentricity, an exotic terrain/natural resource or something physically about its people. (Flash Gordon and Mad Max: Fury Road represent the extreme end of this, perhaps, with polities that are essentially themed.) The more flavorful unique elements, of course, tend to be on the fantastic side rather than the mundane. My post on the Sword & Planet setting of Zarthoon illustrates this, though it leans a little in the Flash Gordon direction. Still, it gives you the idea.

This game in Storm is one of those unique elements

Dark Sun at once makes the cities a bit distinct in terms of mundane details, but they are mostly lacking that hook--a fantastic element to spur adventure. The Dark Sun cities in most cases don't have a high concept thumbnail description, unless you reference what real world culture inspired them.

The description of the Sorcerer-Kings themselves is part of the problem. A bit more "wizard from Thundarr" vibe would certainly help, I think. There is a transhuman aspect to what the what the Sorcerer-Kings are after, so I feel like they should, at least in some cases, feel like they are moving away from human a bit. maybe?

So from this perspective, I plan to take a look at the city-states in upcoming posts.

The Dials of Dark Sun

While I haven't heard its creators name specific works, it seems clear that the Dark Sun setting draws inspiration from Planetary Romance, Sword & Sorcery, and Post-Apocalyptic media. Paying attention to the features of these (sub)genres, one could "dial" up or down their presence in the game to tailor the setting to a specific experience, without needing to eliminate any one of components entirely.

In considering this, I realized that those three genres actually wind up having quite a bit in common. I've thought of some specific elements that 2 out of the 3 share. (I'll be ignoring similarities between Planetary Romance and S&S, because they are likely genetically related genres.) Before I present my lists, a comment about "post-apocalyptic" in regards to Dark Sun. I suspect DS is mostly inspired by Mad Max and related 80s post-apocalyptic films (The degree to which these films share some aesthetics with barbarian films in the same era in the wake of Milius's Conan, I'm also not going to get into.) I don't think DS draws much from say post-apocalyptic literature of earlier decades or even post-apocalyptic films of the 70s. The similarities I'm going to point out are with this particular Mad Max branch of the genre.

Anyway, here's what I thought of:

Planetary Romance and Post-Apoc

• Lots of wilderness, most often desert 
• Isolated, weird communities
• A mishmash of technology in use
• Lost technology

S&S and Post-Apoc

• Outsider, loner, (badass) heroes
• savagery vs. civilization
• violence
• grimness

There are major differences, of course, but it was surprising to me how well they mesh. I think it would be relatively easy to turn up the Planetary Romance by having the city-states of the Tablelands be more like the Red Martian cities of Barsoom, and the technology level of the pre-apocalypse world be higher, without really losing the post-apocalyptic struggle for survival. Alternatively, you could dial down the survival themes are play up the heroic stature of the protagonists without losing any of the other Dark Sun trappings.

There is a fourth dial and that's Dungeons & Dragons. It's probably the reason there is both magic and psionics and certainly the reason there are elves, dwarves, and halflings, different from standard as they are. The need to be marketed as a D&D campaign is probably the source of much of the dissonance in the setting, but on the other hand, a D&D setting is what it is. 

Images Under A Dying Sun

 Thinking about doing something with this old post condensing my ideas about Dark Sun. Here are some images that get me in the right frame of mind. No actual Dark Sun art here, though of course a lot of that is pretty inspirational.