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80-479: Veiled Sun is a Dark Sun sourcebook made for Dungeon Master use. Veiled Alliance was written by Allen Varney and published by TSR . Doug Stewart was the editor. Brom was the cover artist, with interior art by Tom Baxa . Berin Kinsman reviewed Veiled Alliance in a 1993 issue of White Wolf . He stated that, "Overall, Veiled Alliance is one of the better products released for Dark Sun, and one of

160-519: A movie concept artist, and created illustrations for comics (by DC , Chaos , Dark Horse ) and computer games (for id Software , Blizzard , Sega and Activision ). Brom has also been active with a line of Brom fetish toys from Fewture and a series of bronzes from the Franklin Mint and paintings for novels (by Michael Moorcock, Terry Brooks, R.A. Salvatore , Edgar Rice Burroughs ). Brom returned to TSR in 1998, doing paintings for

240-479: A composite of dark fantasy , planetary romance , and the Dying Earth subgenre . Dark Sun ' s designers presented a savage, magic-ravaged desert world where resources are scarce and survival is a daily struggle. The traditional fantasy races and character classes were altered or omitted to better suit the setting's darker themes. Dark Sun differs further in that the game has no deities, arcane magic

320-539: A desert crossing can be fatal". The reviewer concluded that "if blood in the sand is the bag you're into, you'll find plenty to enjoy under the Dark Sun". Writing in Dragon magazine, Rick Swan gave the initial release 4.5 stars out of five. He warned that it would take "a skilled DM to handle the subtleties of the setting, not to mention the psionics rules and the fine points of the new races and character classes, but it

400-533: A dragon like Borys, sweeps in and transforms most of the riotous inhabitants into undead. He now rules the city-state where the living walk side by side with undead zombies and skeletons. In Draj, Azetuk the adopted son of the deceased Sorcerer-King Tectuktitlay was installed largely as a figurehead by Tectuktitlay templars, but manages to learn enough to transform himself into a true sorcerer-king. He takes control of Draj and begins to demand regular blood sacrifices in his temples. Balic has also fallen into chaos after

480-520: A focus for a spell that burns away Rajaat's shadow, the source of his tremendous power. This spell also causes a tremendous earthquake creating the Great Rift, a passage to the previously unknown Crimson Savannah and the alien Kreen Empire. The Revised and Expanded boxed set released in 1995 begins at this point with the destabilization of the Tyr Region's political power structure. The wake of

560-405: A formal fan site dedicated to Dark Sun fan creations. Reviewers of the fourth edition release of the setting were largely favorable. Christopher W. Richeson of RPG.net gave the setting an excellent rating, saying that update did an "excellent job of incorporating 4E's mythology without losing the harsh feel of the original setting". EN World gave the setting a B+ rating saying that the source book

640-411: A genre-bending take on traditional fantasy role-playing. The product line began with the original Dark Sun Boxed Set released for D&D's 2nd edition in 1991, originally ran until 1996, and was one of TSR 's most successful releases. Dark Sun deviated from the feudalistic backdrops of its Tolkienesque pseudo-medieval contemporaries, such as Greyhawk or Forgotten Realms , in favor of

720-419: A grim warning ... 30 years later, Dark Sun still feels relevant as a cautionary fable about unchecked power and a disregard for the environment." The campaign setting of Dark Sun is played on the fictional planet Athas. Novels and source books largely take place in the Tyr Region, though other areas are described for play. The exact landmass configuration of the planet or the existence of other continents

800-421: A handful of new or exotic fictional races, such as muls , half-giants , pterrans, thri-Kreen , and aarakocra . Subsequent resources introduced more races such as elans , drays , and maenads. Gerald Brom Gerald Brom (born March 9, 1965), known professionally as Brom , is an American gothic fantasy artist and illustrator, known for his work in role-playing games , novels, and comics . Brom

880-443: A healthy side of murderous human-sized praying mantises". John Baichtal of Wired described Athas as "the swords and sorcery equivalent of Mad Max: a desert world where water, steel and kindness are in short supply, where magic destroys the environment and the kings and queens are exclusively evil. Elves are untrustworthy merchants and halflings are cannibals. New PC races include muls (half-dwarves) and thri-kreen (insect men) add to

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960-709: A list of The Top 10 RPG Artists of the Past 40 Years, saying "Brom is arguably one of the greatest pure fantasy talents of his generation, and he still creates works just as sublime as he did in his 1990s glory." In 2019, Brom entered the Origins Award Hall of Fame. In his 2023 book Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground , RPG historian Stu Horvath reviewed the fantasy role-playing game Dark Sun and noted, "The art of fantasy illustrators Gerald Brom and Tom Baxa tie together this aesthetic-first high concept ...

1040-424: A lively online community developing around it. Only third-party material was produced for the third edition D&D rules, but a new official edition of Dark Sun was released in 2010 for the fourth edition . Dark Sun has been mentioned by developers, most notably Mike Mearls, and appeared in psionics playtest materials for Dungeons & Dragons for the fifth edition of the game. TSR released

1120-520: A pivotal change that launched the project in a new direction. Contributors to this project at its beginnings included Rich Baker , Gerald Brom , Tim Brown , Troy Denning , Mary Kirchoff , James Lowder , and Steve Winter . With the exception of Denning and Kirchoff, design veterans such as David "Zeb" Cook declined to join the conceptual team (though Cook would write the first two adventure modules: Freedom and Road to Urik ). The majority of project members were new to TSR, though not necessarily to

1200-457: A slave rebellion led by Rikus, Agis, Neeva, Tithian, and Sadira . Over the course of the adventure modules and the novels the metaplot advances radically, changing the Tyr Region with Rikus, Agis, Neeva, Tithian, and Sadira (from the novels), or the player characters at the center of the changes. Borys the Dragon is killed by Rikus and Sadira. Sadira becomes the first sun-wizard through the use of

1280-405: A third way to define a player character identity through archetypes or careers allowing them to more clearly describe their place or role within the world. Some variant classes central to the previous editions, such as gladiators, templars, and elemental priests, were introduced as themes. Themes proved very popular and were widely adopted in other settings. The scale of Athas was reduced slightly but

1360-555: A true dragon, a creature nearly unheard of in the setting, in order to be able to cast the spells required to maintain Rajaat's prison. The ritual that transformed Borys into a dragon caused him to go mad and embark on a century-long defiling rampage. The defiling during the Cleansing War had been substantial, but Borys's rampage was the tipping point that turned Athas into a hellish desert. Dark Sun's second edition metaplot

1440-409: Is commonplace, gladiatorial duels provide entertainment for the elite, and death permeates the culture. As rain falls only once per decade in some areas, water is more precious than gold. Due to the scarcity of natural resources, few wizards have access to books made of paper pages and hard covers; instead, they record their spells with string patterns and complex knots. Metal is also rare, affecting both

1520-630: Is entirely cut off from the rest of the universe. While it retains its connections to the Inner Planes , access to the Transitive Planes and Outer Planes is nearly impossible. The reason for the cosmological isolation is never fully explained. The cosmology for the original setting consists of the prime material plane and two other transitive planes: the Gray and the Black. The Black

1600-705: Is largely empty in proximity to Athas with the connections to other realms lost. As with previous editions, Athas sits close to the Elemental Chaos and the planet has a special connection to these planes. These planes are accessible from the World and vice versa. Contained deep within the Elemental Chaos is the Abyss . Athas is home to several of the standard high fantasy races, including elves , dwarves , half-elves , halflings , and humans , as well as

1680-405: Is reviled for causing the planet's current ecological fragility, and psionics are extremely common. The artwork of Brom established a trend of game products produced under the direction of a single artist. The setting was also the first TSR setting to come with an established metaplot out of the box. Dark Sun ' s popularity endured long after the setting was no longer supported, with

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1760-634: Is roughly equivalent to the Plane of Shadows and contains a mysterious realm of absolute nothingness called the Hollow that serves as a prison for Rajaat . The Gray is roughly equivalent to the Ethereal Plane in that it surrounds Athas, forming a massive buffer between the prime material plane and the Astral Plane and so cutting it off from Outer Planes . The Gray in this edition is the realm of

1840-552: Is set back to just after the original Dark Sun' s first adventure, Freedom (1991). The sorcerer-king Kalak is dead and Tyr is a free city-state but the future of Athas beyond that is up to the players. Game designer Richard Baker said the design team wanted the game to begin when Athas had the most possibilities for adventure and offer a version of the setting where the Prism Pentad storyline would be possible but not mandatory. The fourth edition setting strayed far less from

1920-408: Is some contention within the source material as to whether or not there were ever deities in the setting. The AD&D source material seems to suggest that there weren't ever any gods involved with Athas, while the 4th edition setting leaves the option open, more explicitly stating that the gods were destroyed or driven away by malevolent elemental spirits. Clerics and druids instead draw power from

2000-472: Is unknown. Athas is a devastated world, the result of magic run amok. Most of Athas is an empty desert, interrupted by a handful of corrupt city states controlled by power-mad sorcerer-kings and their spell-wielding lackeys. The brutal climate and the oppressive rule of the sorcerer-kings have created a corrupt, bloodthirsty, and desperate culture that leaves little room for chivalric virtues common to fantasy settings (hence why paladins are excluded). Slavery

2080-489: Is worth the effort. The Dark Sun setting is that good". The original Dark Sun product line was one of TSR's most popular releases in the 1990s with an enduring fan following. In the 1990s, fans formed multiple mailing lists, fan sites, and discussion boards concerning the setting. These fan sites grew to such a size and scale during the 1990s that TSR filed legal paper work against them for infringing on their copyright. TSR eventually relented after fan outcry and established

2160-754: The Alternity game, the AD&;D role-playing game and its Forgotten Realms and Planescape lines, and covers for Dragon and Dungeon magazines. His work is included in the book Masters of Dragonlance Art . He has also returned to painting for book covers for TSR's successor Wizards of the Coast , including the covers for the War of the Spider Queen series and reprints of The Avatar Series . In 2014, Scott Taylor of Black Gate , named Brom as #4 in

2240-520: The Complete Psionics Handbook proved more successful—all characters and creatures were psionic to a greater or lesser degree—but designers regretted the extra time involved in attaching these rules to practically every living thing in the campaign world. The Dark Sun game line ended abruptly in late 1996. When TSR released its product schedule in Dragon #236 (December 1996) no Dark Sun products were included. The final release

2320-491: The Inner Planes / Elemental Chaos . Dark Sun's extensive metaplot spans several fictional ages into its past and is described by a narrator called the Wanderer who presents an in-game account of Athas's history in their Wanderer's Journal . According to this account the planet progressed through several ages roughly corresponding to the color of the sun and the state of the planet. The Wanderer's Journal begins with

2400-578: The World Axis cosmology, but retains its traditional cosmological isolation. The Feywild, known as the Lands Within the Winds, is largely absent with its few remaining access points being jealously guarded by the remains of the eladrin on Athas. Shadowfell , known as the Gray on Athas, acts as a barrier between Athas and the other planes. The Astral Sea is accessible via the Gray but the realm

2480-572: The Blue Age. Athas.org was also given permission to convert and release two unpublished second edition sourcebooks, Dregoth Ascending (2005) and Terrors of the Dead Lands (2005), which was based on TSR's unpublished Secrets of the Deadlands . In 2010, Wizards of the Coast released Dark Sun for the fourth edition of D&D . The setting was chosen because designer James Wyatt felt that

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2560-593: The Champions, led by Borys of Ebe , rebelled against their creator and used one of Rajaat's talismans, the Dark Lens, to imprison him in a shadow realm known as the Black. With Rajaat imprisoned, the former Champions renamed themselves Sorcerer-Kings and despotically divided up the surviving city-states among themselves. His escape would spell doom for all of them, so the former Champions selected Borys as Rajaat's warden. As warden, Borys would need to be transformed into

2640-476: The Coast. David Noonan created an updated version of the setting for Paizo in 2004 that was published in Dragon magazine and Dungeon magazine that presented rules for 3rd edition. This version took place three hundred years after the last published setting details and sought to return the setting's metaplot to something closer to the original boxed set. This version also provided rules and setting details for

2720-470: The Edenic Blue Age when Athas was once covered with a vast body of life-giving water under a blue sun. Halflings ruled Athas during this time, building a powerful civilization. They were nature-masters and life-shapers, able to produce anything they needed by manipulating the principles of nature itself. The age came to an end by accident. The halflings of the great city of Tyr'agi tried to increase

2800-578: The Last Sea and Windriders of the Jagged Cliffs explicitly introduced more science fiction elements, such as the lifeshaping magics of the halflings, that had previously only been hinted at. At the point the source material lays out for play the beginning of the Age of Heroes when the sorcerer-king's hold on the Tyr Region has recently been challenged with the assassination of Kalak of Tyr in

2880-725: The Order were part of his official proposals for 1997. An invasion of the Kreen Empire was also being considered, according to Melka, along with the mystery of the Messenger and a product on the Silt Sea. Dark Sun was not officially supported by the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons , but Paizo Publishing and the fans at Athas.org kept the setting alive through the use of the Open Game License issued by Wizards of

2960-586: The Pristine Tower, a powerful talisman that could harness the energies of the sun. The light of the Pristine Tower burned away the brown tide but also changed the planet. The sun changed from blue to yellow. The endless sea receded, revealing a verdant world of plant life. The halflings' civilization came to an end and most of them withdrew from the world and spiraled into savagery. The last of the nature-masters transformed themselves into new races, becoming humans, demihumans, and other humanoids that repopulated

3040-407: The Pristine Tower, putting her at a level of power equal to the sorcerer-kings. Tithian uses the Dark Lens to free Rajaat, believing he will be transformed into a sorcerer-king as a reward. Several sorcerer-kings are lost or destroyed during the ensuing battle with Rajaat. Andropinis is imprisoned in the Black while Tectuktitlay is killed. Rajaat is ultimately vanquished by Sadira using the Dark Lens as

3120-446: The Tyr Region. A side-bar briefly describes the true history of Athas, which differs slightly from the original. First, the gods were destroyed or driven away from Athas by malevolent elementals known as primordials. The loss of true gods created a fault in the world that allowed for the potential for arcane magic, which Rajaat discovers; the remainder of the metaplot up to the modern era is similar to 2nd edition. The Tyr Region remains

3200-511: The adventure modules tying directly into Denning's fiction and vice versa. The culmination of the tangled metaplot was summarized in Beyond The Prism Pentad (1995) in preparation for the release of the revised and expanded boxed set , released a few months later, which presented the setting after the events of the modules and novels. Some advances in the metaplot were controversial among fans as releases such as Mind Lords of

3280-484: The age of 24. Brom contributed to all of TSR's game and book lines, particularly the Dark Sun setting: "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

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3360-479: The boxed set. Set a decade after the first boxed set, the Expanded And Revised boxed set released in 1995 updated the setting to reconcile the events and characters introduced since the initial 1991 release, and gave more details on the world outside the Tyr Region. Following the setting's release, poor sales for Battlesystem soon stopped its further inclusion in Dark Sun products. The tie-in with

3440-522: The cities supported by wonders created with psionics. Among the new races was a rare and powerful race known as the pyreens. One of their number, Rajaat , would bring about sweeping changes to Athas. Rajaat discovered magic eight thousand years before the current age. Seeking more power he took possession of the Pristine Tower. Here he mastered this new force and developed two distinct ways; one that preserved nature, known as preserving, and one that exploited it, known as defiling. He taught preserving magic to

3520-512: The core rules than its AD&D counterpart. Rich Baker reported that the design team wanted the campaign setting to mesh closely with the new core rules and source material, such as the Player's Handbook , than previous editions had. Effort was made, however, to ensure that these more generic elements stayed true to the unique feel of the setting. The most notable fourth edition change expanded character building by introducing themes. Themes were

3600-472: The cover for the initial release. His artwork also appeared on book covers from authors such as Michael Moorcock , Anne McCaffrey , and Terry Brooks . Brom contributed conceptual work to computer games such as Heretic II , and several top creature houses for films such as Stan Winston Studios; he also co-created, art directed, and illustrated the Dark Age collectible card game. He has since worked as

3680-591: The creation of the Cerulean Storm and the earthquake that caused the Great Rift results in powerful storms and destructive aftershocks. The Wanderer discovers the lost halflings of the Jagged Cliff, as well as the psionic utopians of the Mind Lords of the Last Sea. In May 2004, David Noonan wrote a brief update for the setting for the 3rd edition rules. The setting picked up three hundred years after

3760-450: The dead where undead creatures and necromancers draw their power. The Gray, however, is thinner in regards to the Ethereal Plane , bringing access to the Inner Planes with relative ease. Dark Sun's Inner Planes have different paraelementals based on natural phenomena: rain lay between air and water; sun between air and fire; magma between fire and earth; and silt between earth and water. The 4th edition setting places Athas clearly within

3840-525: The development end of a lot of projects I've worked on, from role-playing games to computer games." According to Shannon Appelcline, Brom "contributed the unique illustrations for Dark Sun that helped to set it apart from the other TSR games with their more typical fantasy drawings". His paintings have been published in collectible card games such as Wizards of the Coast 's Magic: The Gathering and Last Unicorn Games ' Heresy: Kingdom Come . Brom's paintings, along with Frank Frazetta 's, were used in

3920-400: The development of the visual look of the game series Warlords . In 1993, after four years at TSR, Brom returned to the freelance market, still specializing in the darker side of the roleplaying game, card game, and comic book genres. Shane Lacy Hensley came up with the idea for the game Deadlands after he saw Brom's cover to Necropolis: Atlanta from White Wolf , and got Brom to do

4000-470: The disappearance and reappearance of their sorcerer-king Andropinis . Tyr remains free from sorcerer-king rule and has managed to defend its walls from multiple assaults from Urik. The city-state is now ruled by a council of nobles and preserver mages from the Veiled Alliance. In 2008, Athas.org released a new edition of the Dark Sun campaign setting for the 3.5 rules. This edition picks up

4080-494: The economy and the quality of equipment. The ceramic coin, made from clay and glazed in various colors, is the primary medium of exchange, worth about a hundredth of a gold piece. Due to a scarcity of metal, weapons and armor are made from natural materials such as bone, stone, wood, carapace or obsidian, and are prone to breaking. Only a single dragon exists in all of Athas, a monstrosity whose appearance heralds disasters of catastrophic proportions. Arcane magic draws its power from

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4160-457: The few pockets of civilization left in the Tyr Region. These city-states tightly control the few remaining reservoirs of fresh water, the food supply, and other precious resources such as obsidian or iron. Troy Denning 's Prism Pentad novels brought sweeping changes to the metaplot of Dark Sun and were also closely tied to playable adventure modules such as DS1: Freedom (1991) and DSQ1: Road to Urik (1992). This trend continued with

4240-475: The few with crossover potential into other AD&D game worlds." Overall, he rated the game a 4 out of a possible 5. This Dungeons & Dragons article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Dark Sun Dark Sun is an original Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) campaign setting set in the fictional, post-apocalyptic desert world of Athas. Dark Sun featured an innovative metaplot , influential art work, dark themes, and

4320-400: The geography was largely unchanged. The edition change created other notable differences including templars as warlocks, the dray becoming dragonborn , the introduction of new core races such as tieflings and eladrin , and the exclusion of races from previous editions: elans, maenads, pterrans, and aarakocra . The new fourth edition races were given Athasian twists in a similar manner to

4400-407: The industry (Winter having worked at GDW ). Steve Winter suggested the idea of a desert landscape. His inspiration drew partly from Den by Richard Corben and the fiction of Clark Ashton Smith . The Dark Sun setting drew much of its makeup from artist Brom 's imagery: "I pretty much designed the look and feel of the Dark Sun campaign. I was doing paintings before they were even writing about

4480-462: The kind of inspiration most people expect from me, but he just painted things so well. To me it's not so much the genre but the way it's done, and you have to admire his technique." At the age of 20, Brom started working full-time as a commercial illustrator. By age twenty-one, he had two national art representatives, and was doing work for such clients as Coca-Cola , IBM , CNN , and Columbia Pictures . TSR, Inc. hired Brom on full-time in 1989 at

4560-413: The life force of plants or living creatures, with the potential to cause tremendous harm to the environment. As a result, wizards and other arcane casters are despised and must practice in secret. Psionics are extremely common with nearly every living thing having at least a modicum of psionic ability. Athas has no deities and no formal religions other than the cults created by the sorcerer-kings. There

4640-428: The metaplot two years after the Wanderer's discovery of the Last Sea. Following prophesied signs, Dregoth takes to the surface and makes his bid for true divinity. The fourth edition setting presents a much abridged and somewhat different backstory that alludes to the original metaplot but doesn't explicitly reference it. Little is known in-game about the history of Athas and what is known is largely myth, legend, and/or

4720-464: The more recent Red Age, a time of profound war and strife that left the world a blasted, desolate waste. Game play begins during the Desert Age, similarly to 2nd edition, with the world a barren wasteland and its few remaining habitable places being lorded over by the sorcerer-kings. Sorcerer-king Kalak of Tyr has been assassinated and the liberation of Tyr has sparked a glimmer of hope and renewal in

4800-471: The new third edition player character races such as elans and maenads. Athas.org presented another update to the setting for 3.5 in 2008. It was a rules-only conversion that provided everything needed to play in the Dark Sun world through the non-epic levels. The Athas.org version also condensed the metaplot information and presented a much broader view, allowing players an opportunity to create campaigns in virtually any era of Athas, even as far back as

4880-525: The only bastion of civilization on Athas but is tyrannically ruled by the sorcerer-kings. No mention is made of the events of the Prism Pentad . One of the hallmarks of the Dark Sun setting was Athas' cosmological isolation, something that broke with the rest of the canonical Dungeons & Dragon ' s universe. Many of Dark Sun 's AD&D contemporaries are accessible via planar travel or spelljamming , but Athas, with very few exceptions,

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4960-464: The original fantasy races. Possibly the most significant change to the setting was the alteration to its cosmology. In previous editions, Athas had a setting specific cosmology that was isolated from the rest of the D&;D universe, making it nearly impossible to access via other planes or spacelanes . Fourth edition instead presented Athas squarely within the standard D&D cosmology, though it

5040-443: The post-apocalyptic desolation of FGU 's Aftermath game, GDW 's Twilight 2000 game, and other after-the-holocaust RPGs". The original Dark Sun Boxed Set released in 1991 presented the base setting details wherein the Tyr Region is on the verge of revolution against the sorcerer-kings. A five-book fiction series, the Prism Pentad, written by Denning and edited by Lowder, was released beginning in 1991, in coordination with

5120-606: The propaganda of the sorcerer-kings. The fourth edition metaplot describes three ages: the Green Age, the Red Age, and the Desert Age or the Age of the Sorcerer-Kings. As with the original metaplot, the Green Age is earliest visible sign of civilization but suggests that rare tales tell of an earlier age, possibly the Blue Age. The end of the Green Age is described similarly to the original metaplot. The Green Age gave way to

5200-401: The public but secretly selected 15 human students with a potential for both psionics and magic for a darker purpose. Using the power of the Pristine Tower to harness the energy of the yellow sun, he transformed these 15 into his Champions . Besides their native psionic powers and defiling magic, they were imbued with immortality and the ability to draw magical energy from living creatures through

5280-414: The sea's fecundity in order to produce more creatures and plants. The experiment failed, however, instead choking the sea with a toxic brown tide that spread across the waters, killing everything it touched. The Wanderer's Journal claims that the Green Age began approximately 14,000 years before the setting's starting period. Desperate to save themselves and Athas from the brown tide, the halflings built

5360-442: The second edition and the events of the Prism Pentad. The guide outlined some of the important events that had taken place since then, and largely focused on the city-states and the fate of the remaining sorcerer-kings. The city-state of Raam is on the verge of collapse after the death of its sorcerer-queen. The psionic dragon-lich Dregoth , who resurrected himself after being slain by the other Sorcerer-Kings for attempting to become

5440-589: The second edition of Battlesystem , its mass-combat ruleset, in 1989. In 1990 the company began pre-production on a new campaign setting that would use this ruleset, the working title of which was "War World". The team envisioned a post-apocalyptic world full of exotic monsters and no hallmark fantasy creatures whatsoever. TSR worried about this concept, wondering how to market a product that lacked any familiar elements. Eventually, elves, dwarves, and dragons returned but in warped variations of their standard AD&D counterparts. The designers credited this reversion as

5520-399: The setting's grittier, action oriented feel was a good fit for the fourth edition rules and because the setting demonstrated that Dungeons and Dragons games could go beyond the tropes and themes of standard medieval fantasy. This version was heralded as a return of the feel of the original 1991 boxed set taking the setting back before the events of the Prism Pentad. The metaplot's timeline

5600-420: The setting's uniqueness. It's a riot!" In his 2023 book Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground , RPG historian Stu Horvath noted, " Dark Sun is perhaps TSR's most obviously political product. Coming as it did in 1991, a year after activists brought the 20th anniversary of Earth Day to the international stage with a multi-million-dollar awareness campaign, it is difficult not to read the campaign setting as

5680-501: 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". Game designer Rick Swan described the setting: "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, this ties familiar AD&D conventions into knots". He said that Athas "shares

5760-443: The time as a kid, and it just stuck." Brom has been drawing and painting since childhood, although he had never taken any formal art classes. "I wouldn't exactly call myself self-taught, because I've always looked at the work of other artists and emulated what I liked about it. So you can say they taught me." Brom cites the work of Frank Frazetta , N.C. Wyeth , and Norman Rockwell as influences on his style: "Okay... Rockwell isn't

5840-542: The use of obsidian orbs. The process of creating the Champions turned the sun from yellow to red. Rajaat's ultimate desire was to exterminate all races except the halflings and return Athas to the splendor of the Blue Age. About 3,500 years before the current age, Rajaat assigned each of his Champions a race to exterminate and the ensuing years of struggle were known as the Cleansing Wars. The unbridled use of defiling magic unleashed by Rajaat and his Champions during

5920-409: The wars desolated the land, turning much of it into a savage, desert wasteland under a burning crimson sun. The non-existence of many of the typical D&D races, such as trolls and goblins, is due to these wars. The struggles would have continued to completion had the Champions not discovered that Rajaat's true plans did not include their survival. Approximately 2,000 years before the current age,

6000-465: The world and built new civilizations. The former halfling center of Tyr'agi was renamed Tyr and the other great cities of the Tyr region, such as Ebe, Bodach and Giustenal, were built during this period. Due to mutations caused by the power of the Pristine Tower, the new people of Athas discovered they were gifted with myriad psionic powers. Soon a high standard of living was achieved for those dwelling in

6080-454: Was Psionic Artifacts of Athas (1996) though two books, Dregoth Ascending and Secrets of the Dead Lands were rumored to have been near completion to the point that early versions were reportedly given to some GMs at the 1997 Gen Con Game Fair before the line ended. Prior to the line's cancellation, designer Kevin Melka claimed that another halfling product, a book on the dwarves, and a book on

6160-539: Was advanced through its novels and adventure modules . During this era TSR began to expand metaplots in other settings, such as Forgotten Realms , but Dark Sun pioneered the matching of fiction and adventure modules to engender and advance metaplots. The original 1991 boxed set begins at the end of the Brown Age (the Age of the Sorcerer-Kings) with the former Champions of Rajaat now tyrannically ruling over

6240-567: Was born March 9, 1965, in Albany, Georgia . As the son of a U.S. Army pilot he spent much of his early years on the move, living in other countries such as Japan and Germany (he graduated from Frankfurt American High School ), and in U.S. states including Alabama and Hawaii . Brought up as a military dependent he was known by his last name only, and now signs his name as simply Brom : "I get that asked more than just about any other question. It's my real name, my last name. I got called Brom all

6320-530: Was readable, and introduced innovative new mechanics to the game. The reviewer was critical of the source book, feeling it to be "incomplete" in both content and art work in comparison to the Forgotten Realms source books released two years prior. Looking back at the setting, Chris Wilson writing for Time describes the world as a good candidate for television adaptation, "a richly imagined world" with "traces of Dune mixed with Jedi-like powers and

6400-454: Was still difficult to access or exit. A reviewer for the British magazine Arcane commented: "There's plenty of atmosphere in Dark Sun and, despite the seeming uniformity of the geography, a great deal of imagination has gone into detailing its various regions". The reviewer also observed: "Life on Athas is particularly tough and short. Never mind the monsters; failing to take enough water on

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