Thirteen Tips to running Dark Sun in 5th Edition

1. 101+ Dungeons and Dragons headcanon 
2. 101+ Planescape adventure hooks
3. 101+ Dark Sun adventure hooks
4. 13 Tips to Running Planescape in 5th Edition
   
5. 13 Tips to Running Dark Sun in 5th Edition
   

    Dark Sun is one of my favorite campaign settings but one of the least played according to sales figures at TSR during the heyday of Loraine William's tenure as CEO. It is a difficult setting to get a handle on as it rejects the traditional good versus evil setting to do something more akin to fantasy Gamma World. No Dungeonmaster's Athas was the same as some were ones that emphasized the dark antihero element while others emphasized the heroic liberation fantasy. Others were drawn to the survival element and others still the loin cloth clad barbarians and sexy gladiators. Dark Sun was a big influence on my writing early on as its austere survival-orientated bleakness was in mind when I wrote on Cthulhu Armageddon.

    Here's a few suggestion for how I choose to roleplay the setting. Some of these are against the original choices of the setting and my own interpretations but I feel these all together are good ones for people who want to experience life on a dying but fantastic world.

1:] Dark Sun as Desert Punk and Planetary Romance

    In 1912, Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote a story of a Civil War veteran visiting a post-apocalypse high tech society that had been reduced to naked people murdering each other for ancient rivalries. Over the course of the series, they would find out that many of the religious cults of the world were scams and that ancient conspiracies were designed to keep the people in bondage under technological wizard kings. John Carter would go on to liberate the slaves (somewhat ironically given which side he fought for in the Civil War) and become a legendary hero. It was grand, romantic, and weird for an author who predated most pulp fiction.

    Simultaneously, Athas also draws from modern day post-apocalypse stories with Mad Max being an influence. There's bands of weird roaring tribals that look like depraved versions of your typical fantasy world. This was once a world like Krynn or Toril but it's since been turned by evil magic into something that Immorten Joe would find perfectly acceptable. Finding the right balance between heroic fantasy and anti-hero survival stories is a hard choice but my recommendation is to look to Fallout for inspiration. Specifically where our Vault Dwellers go out into the wilderness and proceed to kick the bandits as well as fascists in the ass. Athas is a shitty-shitty place but it is also a hopeful one because the should make a difference.

2:] Establish your game's maturity level with your group ahead of time

    One problem people ran into while running Dark Sun is that they stumbled in just how dark and serious they wanted to run the place. In simple terms, the villains not only won in Athas but they won a long time ago and rule over the ashes. A simple analogy to make is that the Tablelands are Mordor and there's six or seven Saurons living in close proximity to one another. Slavery is a thing that the city states practice and it can be easy to fall into the trap of assuming that your player characters are meant to find as normal as your typical Ancient Egyptian or Roman would. Which, honestly, isn't the kind of attitude many players will find fun or heroic. That's not getting into the fact that many Dungeonmasters are interested in exploring how "dark" the setting can get and that's led to some horror stories over the years.

    My general take on the setting is akin to Mad Max: Fury Road as a general maturity take. R-rated with a lot of appalling horrible stuff taking place in the background but you don't need to dwell on it. Player characters, barring a villain campaign where everyone is all in, should be part of the heroic liberated slaves and working class of Athas out to overthrow the evil sorcerer King as well as liberate the masses. Nothing about the reign of their millennia-long tyranny is natural and the majority of people are oppressed by it rather than invested. You're out there to change this world. Some players may be more interested in a "Game of Thrones-esque" darkness mixed with Athas and that's fine or a much lighter story about gladiators and insect people. This is fine. Just establish that you're all on the same page.

3:] Toss out the original level scaling

    The original 2E book Dragon Kings established that the Sorcerer Kings were all 40+ level and a later adventure flat out said, "Oh, you can't kill Borys. Even though we've already given him ridiculous stats and superpowers, if your players somehow succeed then he's a clone or whatever." Troy Denning notably looked at this and went, "Screw this" before writing his 13th level or so heroes killing them off one after the other in the Prism Pentad. Honestly, as I grow older, I'm kind of with Troy on this. My suggestion is that each Sorcerer King is somewhere around 16th to 20th level with this making them formidable but not unkillable.

    You may argue that this dramatically changes the feel of the campaign setting from a place that is utterly screwed to some place that could, theoretically, be liberated from tyranny. To which I say, yeah, that's the point. If I'm playing STAR WARS, I don't expect to fight the Emperor or Darth Vader but if I'm 16th level then I'm up there with the people who could defeat them in this alternate reality.

4:] Mine the Novels but don't be beholden to them 

    One of the most controversial things about Athas is the Prism Pentad wrapped up most of the story beats and resolved a lot of the setting's mystery. I never had an issue with this as the aforementioned Star Wars is a place I've enjoyed playing during Palpatine's reign as well as Legends-inspired warlord period following his death. Dragonlance had a similar "problem" and I don't really think there's anyone who has an issue playing the War of the Lance period. Hell, some people I know play the Kingpriest era despite knowing how that ends.

    I don't think the canonical post-Prism Pentad material was very good but that's a different story from it being a bad premise as you have potentially thousands of would-be conquerors, petty Sorcerer Kings, theocrats, and more rising in the wake of the power vacuum. I had the survivors of Ur-Draxas invade and conquer the "liberated" kingdoms with the dragon worshipers working on resurrecting Borys. I may have drawn heavily from Fallout's Enclave for them. A bunch of deluded fantasy fascists deluding themselves into believing they can rebuild the world they destroyed.

    But the novels have a lot of good material to them such as the story of Rajaat, the Cleansing Wars, and things like Sun arcane magic. Maybe you want to have your PCs be the assassins of Kalak or discover the secrets of the Blue and Green Ages. Let's face it, if they haven't read the novels, it's not cheating.

5:] Athas is more Law versus Chaos than Good versus Evil, And Law is the Bad Guys 

    Part of Dark Sun's appeal to me is the fact that there's no Gondor, Knight of Solamnia, or Bahamut to appeal to in this setting. The closest thing to a force for good in the setting is the Veiled Alliance and they're closer to the Rebel Alliance or Harpers than people who can actually do good. Aside from the Free City of Tyr, most cities are treacherous tyrannies ruled by corrupt Templars as well as nobility who achieved their positions by hitching their wagons to the Sorcerer Kings.

    In simple terms, the PC's job as being heroes is not to patch a hole in the house's roof but to burn it down so a new one can be built in its place. There's no good guy authority to serve and if the PCs are very likely to be outlaws or bandits themselves. Emphasizing the corruption, decadence, and tyranny of the setting should incline the players to want to make their own alliance or throw a wrench into the gears of oppression. They should get used to also using safe houses, keeping a low profile, and other fun spy tricks.

6:] Athas stereotypes aren't the end all of characterization

    Dark Sun's chief selling point was similar to Planescape's in that it tore down a lot of the assumptions of D&D. Elves were not Tolkien-ish but more like the Fremen, halflings were jungle dwelling cannibals that turned out to be the ancient rulers of their world, and dwarves are life quest obsessed dudes who hate body hair. This is fun but the joke has lost some of its punch because we've got so many new variants of the traditional races in popular fantasy media. It's good to embrace the cultural differences of Athas but I think it's also important not to stick with the negatives ones alone but keep them as stereotypes in-universe.

    Which is to say in my games I make it so halflings aren't cannibals (anymore than anyone else in Athas when life is short), Muls don't kill their mothers when born (anymore than anyone else in pre-modern medicine child rearing times), and elves are only as likely to rob you as any other merchant unless you bring up how all elves are thieves in their presence. Throwing this in-universe rumor and slander about helps ground how the people of Athas are carrying plenty of pointless grudges about.

7:] Make Defiling a temptation for Preservers 

    This is a direct rules change but in 2E Defilers and Preservers had the same powers but Defilers leveled up much faster. You also were either one or the other. Defilers destroyed the land and ecology of Athas while Preservers just didn't. The books handled it as a choice between two different kinds of magic and leaving that for player characters is something I think would make the consequences more stark. 

    My suggestion is that Preservers can gain bonus dice by Defiling as well as possibly certain spells that aren't available to them otherwise. An easy solution would be that all Necrotic damage spells, Life Draining, and Necromancy are Defiler related. In a survival situation like Athas, you might find that extra bonus worth destroying the local oasis, "Just this once." I also recommend giving Defilers the ability to create ways of draining life from people and animals then "storing it" as an in-universe set of magical items.

 8:] Borrow heavily from 3rd party material for Psionics

    This one doesn't need to be explained but with no Psionics in 5E or sign of the new you need to either use house rules, the Mystic class, or third party material. Home brewing is possible with just substituting Sorcerer and a "psionic-y" spell-list (ESP, Mage Hand, Disintegrate) but this is inferior and a cheat. Then again, it might just be the easiest option. Sorcerers are also somewhat at odds with Athas as described unless you want to do the leg work about children being born witches and stoned to death unless found by the Veiled Alliance or Sorcerer Kings. Hmm. I better write that down.

     Now, obviously, if you are NOT playing 5E then this isn't a problem whatsoever. However, I would be remiss in not bringing up this issue if a DM wants to start a new campaign with new players not necessarily familiar with the old material. If you're a 3E grognard like me, you might even prefer point 8 to be, "Make sure your players are familiar with the setting assumptions of your edition." Because 4E Dark Sun (it does exist) also made dragonborn and tieflings a massive part of Athas.

9:] Survival should be a story seed not a mechanic

    I remember a Dungeon Master who managed to alienate all of his players by the fact that he kept meticulous records of food, water, and what his players were wearing before pretty much using that to wipe out everyone. He treated travel between the city-states as massive epic adventures. Needless to say, he was never played with or Dark Sun again by the players. None of us have grown up in a post-apocalypse dying world but our player characters certainly have and generally know the general needs to get from Point A to Point Z.

    There's nothing wrong and it should be encouraged that player characters be aware of how important food, water, and other supplies in-setting. However, they should be only aware of this as a story point rather than a constant mechanical threat. Otherwise, they have "just enough" to get by unless they're devoting a good chunk of their adventuring money to supplies and that's their choice. Generally, it's fine to say, "you start the game with sand beetles having eaten all your rations and the water gone bad. You're on quarter rations and your lips are already cracking." You need to find fresh supplies soon." Just expect that to be the focus of the story if you do.

10:] Athasians are ruthless not stupid

    Post-Apocalypse settings frequently emphasize that humans are the real monsters versus zombies, disease, or giant monsters. This is true and there's going to be a lot of really awful people in Athas ranging from the Templars who destroy thousands to the local slave owner at the bazaar. Betrayal should be something that PCs fear when trusting strangers and sometimes even allies can turn on you (for coin or threat). Still, it can be very easy to overemphasize the dark side of Dark Sun.

    Athas culture has managed to survive in horrible conditions and that does means that people have learned to cooperate. There's no such thing as a free lunch in Athas and people have little enough to share but that doesn't mean that everyone is out to screw you. Indeed, I strongly emphasize when player characters get attacked by bandits or betrayed that it's very often because it's a choice between life or death for them. Except when it's by slavers. Fuck those guys.

11:] Emphasize how WRONG the setting is

    One thing to make clear when describing the world is that defiling has royally screwed this planet up. This should be in every landscape one encounters and every vista. The oceans have been turned from water into silt, the Sun is a black orange color, and both the remaining plant as well as animal life is horrendously mutated. The familiar made foreign is also something to consider as you can use ruins of ancient dwarven holds, petrified elven forests, and other ruined more traditional fantasy to show how far the world has fallen. 

    The fact metal is more precious than gold is not just a stylistic choice but a sign that something had made this world resource poor. Doing this in big and subtle ways will help your players immersion. After all, if a merchant prince serves you a bunch of snakes and insects, it's not a Temple of Doom scene but a wonderful feast. You can also take any of Dungeons and Dragons many monsters and make them a unique terrible encounter. The last bulette in the world may be an undead creature more terrifying to locals than a dragon.

12:] Don't be afraid to reward players but not too generously 

    Athas is a horrible, desperate, dying world. It's also a place where you can have a massive amount of fun. However, it should be the kind of place that rewards Sword and Sorcery antiheroes when they decide to walk on the wild side. Even if you're a heroic hero who heroes, nothing says you can't make a little money in the process. When Conan the Barbarian robbed the Tower of the Serpent in the 1982 movie, he and his friends got months of carousing out of it. If your player characters are of the unusual NG side, they could also use that money to free slaves or feed starving families. 

    One thing to emphasize, though, is that there's no banks in Athas and storing your money with the local nobility or merchant princes has its own risks. Player characters may be hopping from score to score but there shouldn't be bags of holding containing vast treasure hordes or an armory of magical items (even bone ones). Players should be living from month to month or uncomfortably aware their coin is under the floorboards of their inn. Just remember if you DO have thieves rob them, they should have a chance to get it back.

13:] Religion and the D&D cosmology is weird in Athas but exploitable

    The gods are dead, the Sorcerer Kings are able to grant magic, and the Elemental Priests as well as Druids are the only true priests. However, that doesn't have to be the case. Athas is the perfect setting for warlocks making pacts with unimaginable things in the Dark, shamans gaining power from worshiping giant monsters, and family gods that may or may not exist as idols in every household. I'm inclined to think that Templars should be clerics and evil paladins instead of Warlocks but that's just because I enjoy the thematic element. Depending on where clerical magic comes from in the setting, you can also grant it to a large number of groups beyond the traditional 2E ones. If it is based on belief then Repentant Templars might be able to continue harnessing their power after turning on their Sorcerer Kings or their masters are killed.

    Athas is the kind of setting that should probably avoid having much contact with the Great Wheel or Spelljammer setting but you can certainly include Fiends and Deva as leftovers from the kingdoms of the gods long ago. Also, you could do a plot where a Sorcerer King or Defiler Archwizard may open a portal to another world in hopes of continuing their ravaging of life for power. Take advantage of this and you might well have an Elemental Knight or a paladin worshiping a god long dead that he carries the memory of on.