[1] Dark Sun differs further in that the game has no deities, arcane magic is reviled for causing the planet's current ecological fragility, and psionics are extremely common.
[2][9] 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.
[10][11][12][13][14] Despite player interest, game publisher Wizards of the Coast has chosen not to reissue the setting due to ingrained controversial content such as slavery, genocide and racial savagery.
[16] Contributors to this project at its beginnings included Rich Baker, Gerald Brom, Tim Brown, Troy Denning, Mary Kirchoff, James Lowder, and Steve Winter.
A five-book fiction series, the Prism Pentad, written by Denning and edited by Lowder, was released beginning in 1991, in coordination with the boxed set.
[18][19] The final release 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.
[18] 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 the Coast.
[21] 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 the Blue Age.
[24] 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.
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".
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 is worth the effort.
[31] 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.
"[32] 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.
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).
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.
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.
The unbridled use of defiling magic unleashed by Rajaat and his Champions during the wars desolated the land, turning much of it into a savage, desert wasteland under a burning crimson sun.
Approximately 2,000 years before the current age,[34]: 14 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.
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).
Some advances in the metaplot were controversial among fans as releases such as Mind Lords of 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.
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 psionic dragon-lich Dregoth, who resurrected himself after being slain by the other Sorcerer-Kings for attempting to become a dragon like Borys, sweeps in and transforms most of the riotous inhabitants into undead.
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.
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 Black 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.
[26]: 5 [17] Other standard fantasy races such as ogres, kobolds, or trolls, for example, are all assumed to have been destroyed during the Cleansing Wars or simply passed from the world in previous ages.
[43] Arcane magic in Dark Sun differs substantially from more traditional fantasy campaign settings in that it draws from the life force of the planet or living beings.
In January 2011 at the D&D Experience Convention, Wizards of the Coast and Baldman Games launched an organized play campaign set in Dark Sun.
[67][68] Later adventures took players from Altaruk and Tyr across the Tablelands (Urik, Gulg, Nibenay, and many wilderness locations) to confront an ancient primordial awakening in the Sea of Silt.
IDW Publishing released a five-issue comic limited series, Dark Sun (2011) by writer Alex Irvine and artist Peter Bergting, based on the campaign setting called Ianto's Tomb.