Dark Sun

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A campaign setting made for AD&D 2nd edition back in '90. There are 3e conversions approved by WotC, but they were never published as books or anything. WotC recently released an updated version for 4e

Setting

The game is set in the world of Athas, a dying planet. Once full of happiness and sunshine, the planet was drained of all resources during the long and rich history the creators came up with. There is no water, no minerals, and no hope: only cannibal halflings, a lot of sand and a dying sun. The world is so fucked up it makes Mad Max's setting look like a hippie paradise. Kinda looks like Barsoom on massive grimdark crack. The only few realms remaining are fascist police city-states rule by wizards (all of them retarded evil, except Hamanu, who is a pimp served only by the hottest females in Urik and each day in his life is an orgy) who are no longer human at all. Beyond civilized lands everything eats everything. The best weapon you can find is the femur of your party's cleric after being eaten by something that looked like a rock and the best armor is mostly the remains of a giant roach. There are no gnomes, orcs, kobolds, or furries because all of them where exterminated by some mean guys with psychic brains and magic hands. They were: The Champions of Rajaat.

Races

Most of the generic fantasy races were exterminated a long time ago, good riddance!
This means no gnomes! First reason why this setting is full of win and awesome.

• Halfling - Cannibals who live in the remaining strips of forest. Despite Denning's initial fuckup in The Verdant Passage, where he has the dragonfly riding midgets flinging spells hither and thither, no they cannot use arcane magic. Tries to retcon this in The Cerulean Storm but it doesn't quite work. MAJOR PLOT LOOPHOLE.
• Elf - No forests for them, ha! They are desert nomads, thieving and griefing all the time. Finally straight players could consider playing an elf.
• Dwarf - Almost typical dorfs, except taller, waaay more muscular, bald with Klingon-like head plates and are even more fixated on their stuff than the hairier, stuntier variety. So fixated, in fact, that if they died without completing the shit they were obsessing over, they came back from the dead as banshees (sentient zombies that looked like a dwarf without skin).
• Mul - Half-dorfs! Second reason why this setting is full of win and awesome! Bred for size and strength, but without the lack of agility of the typical stunty dorf, no slave was worth more than a Mul. Except a better Mul. Very prized as gladiators. Suck it, Russel Crowe.
• Half-giant - Big bad meanies, with a lolrandom alignment. Usually really fucking stupid, like you.
• Thri-kreen - Sentient mantis. Strange, scary folk. Like their elves raw. With four wickedly clawed arms, these guys can fuck shit up.
• Dray - Horribly deformed dragon-people. Basically a failed magic experiment. Created by Dregoth, the undead Dragon King.
• Aarakocra - Sentient birds, for those who don't want to play anything normal, but hate bugs or lizards.
• Human - Sentient halfling, only larger. Just like in real life, the race responsible for fucking up the planet.
• Pterran - Pterodactyl shamanistic retards that remind you of a certain cheesy villain from the X-men comic books.
• Ssurran - 2-legged sentient komodo dragons. Lives in the desert and loves them some lava. Very resistant towards heat and the Dark Sun, these guys enjoy worshiping Fire and Magma.

Classes

• Clerics - There are no real gods in the setting, so most clerics worship elements or quasi-elements. In a desert world, summoning water elementals will get you pussy until you realize that if you level up to much you become a true elemental too. Very nasty to be drunken alive for being a water elemental.

• Druids - Druids serve spirits of the land. They have a guarded lands that they are responsible to look after.
• Gladiators - You know. Like the movie. Also one of the most overpowered classes in the times of AD&D, a low level gladiator could be the personification of a certain Frank Frazzeta illustration entitled "The Destroyer".

• Dune Traders - lol that's actually a class? Was more one the role-playing side of things, could get loads of handy contacts and power within tradehouses. Took care of diplomacy, trading, and generally any situation that could be resolved without a weapon.
• Fighters - Not as good as a Gladiator in personal combat, but who is. Really excelled at attracting and leading armies at higher levels.
• Bards - Most bards sing songs and boost the other party members' rolls. Dark Sun bards will kill and poison you, and maybe fuck you. Maybe in that order, too.
• Paladins - lol nope. Honor and virtue fell by the wayside a long time ago on Athas, but what else would you expect from a planet this Darwinian?

• Templars - Replace Paladins, but more on the police side of things to the point they are like the Gestapo in Nazi occupied France. Worship the Sorcerer King who rules their city.

• Psionicists - Psionicists are considered accepted and normal in this setting. In fact, every PC is guaranteed to have at least one psionic power! OMGWTF! Think Jedis, kind of. Wanna move shit with your mind without casting a spell like some faggy ass wizard? Check. Mindrape? Check. Fucking Time Travel? Double Check.
• Rangers - Same old shit. Think Aragorn in the desert.

• Rogues - Pretty similar to the non-Athasian kind. Attracted a Patron at level 10, aka you work for me now bitch.
• Wizards - Two types exist in the setting, but everyone hates them both:
  • Defiler - Evil mages, who suck out the life force of things. When they level up enough, they usually have an allergic reaction called dragon metamorphosis.
  • Preserver - Mages who are not manly enough to steal life force, so they sacrifice efficiency to keep the stuff around them alive. Unfortunately for them, the commoners think all wizards are the same. When they grow up enough to be considered bad ass they turn into the manta ray like aliens from Abyss.

Sorcerer-Kings

Sorcerer Kings were the jerks with teh biggest cocks and deepest reservoirs of hatred (read:racists) for everything. Except halflings. Or was it humans. SPOILER! These were usually the big bad dudes that Dark Sun campaigns revolved around killing. Unfortunately, author Troy Denning killed off most of them in the series The Prism Pentad, thus giving the campaign setting nothing left to live for. TSR brought out a small post-novel supplement entitled "Beyond the Prism Pentad", which also included references to a product called "Dark Sun: A New Age" that was never released, to try and save what little scraps of the setting was left after Denning's royal buttfuck of it all. It didn't work. As a result TSR brought it out back and shot it while you cried in your mother's arms.

Most/all Sorcerer-kings were/are in various stages of Dragon metamorphosis, i.e. turning into a Dragon, you idiot, as a result of their addiction to Defiling. "Real" dragons don't exist on Athas, and only the most powerful Wizard/Psionicists with the help of handy forbidden lore could start on this journey to REAL ULTIMATE POWER. Side effects include deepening of voice, a bad case of scaly skin, and the desire to FUCKING KILL EVERYTHING. Which gave rise to the stupidest Dark Sun rule ever, via the rulebook Dragonkings, where a 25th level Dragon, if you were lucky/good enough to make it that far and survive a series of spells that had an outright chance to kill you, WAS COMPLETELY TAKEN OVER BY THE DM UNTIL LEVEL 30. How fun is that shit. The reasoning being the Dragon entered a period of Animalistic Rage, aka what happens to your bitch of a girlfriend once a month. And of course only the DM could properly portray that shit, moron. Go sit on the couch and shut up.

Originally, just one of the Dragon-Kings was an actual dragon. Fighting him was detailed in what was generally agreed to be the single hardest module ever made, The Valley of Dust and Fire. Don't try it, the weather'll kill you before you get thirty miles from the place, not to mention that the module pretty much specifically states that the players should not be able to kill the dragon; it details it's stats and even says that if players are using the "Dragon Kings" supplement and are level 21+, they might mechanically be able to best it in combat, however, the dragon has prepared so many fucking escape-routes (including several teleporters that could be used at-will) that even if you were capable of doing so, the Dragon would escape the instant it realized it risked loosing. Wonder how those "Prism Pentad" dipshits managed it... Especially since not a single one of them were even level 20 (their stats are given in "Beyond the Prism Pentad") , much less a full 5-man party of level 21+ characters.

To expand their use as a plot device, each Sorcerer-King/Queen ruled a City-State. Or should I say, ruled a City-State until they were slain by Denning like it was a bodily function. qq

• Abalach-re - The queen bitch of the City-State of Raam, this paranoid schizo cunt makes your gf look like a saint by comparison. Dead.
• Andropinis - He had egg shaped nostrils. He wore a toga and ruled over the Greek inspired City-State of Balic. Also prolly had a lot of anal sex and orgies. Effectively dead.
• Hamanu - Mr. Lionface. Not one of the original 13 Champions, he was the ruler of Urik and a blatant homage to Hammurabi. Not dead.
• Kalak - You know your old, shriveled, power hungry grandfather? That's this guy. Ruler of Tyr before his plan to get jacked up quick on dragonsauce was discovered and foiled by a bunch of meddling kids and one talking dog. Dead.
• Lalali-Puy - Every time I see this name I think of a lolli-pop in a pussy. The hottest and most totally fuckable Sorcerer-Queen, and ruler of the barely civilized Jungle-Town of Gulg. Not dead.
• Nibenay - Called the Shadow King. Either he really, really hated people and being seen, or he was too stupid to cast a simple glamour to NOT MAKE HIM LOOK LIKE A DRAGON around his superstitious subjects. Ruler of the largest City-State of the same name, which was locked in a perpetual war with Gulg for some crazy strong blue balls. Or blue wood. Whatever. Not dead.
• Tectuktitlay - He's a ladykiller, he'll rip your heart out and throw it down the fucking ziggurat. Bird like in appearance, he was the Aztec inspired ruler of Drag. Drek. Er, Draj. Got his head cracked open like a thousand year old egg. Dead.
• Oronis - Former Sorcerer-King of Kurn. Kinda. Oronis is a special case. He started to feel bad about... you know exterminating all the lizard-men, and, with Hamanu, managed to put the brakes on the whole "morph into a dragon through genocide" thing... and go the other direction. Dude's an avangion now, and just in time to avoid getting ganked by Denning. Not dead.
• Daskinor - Kim Jong Il's Dark Sun doppelganger. Ruler of Eldaarich, this paranoid asshat omnipotent and benevolent God King keeps his city on permanent lockdown safe and protected from all the evils of Athas. Unlike Kim Jong Il, not dead.
• Dregoth - The undead dragon sorcerer-king, ruler of Giustenal. This dude got ganked by a bunch of the other sorcerer-kings for having waaaay to big a cock a couple thousand years ago, but his loyal Templars brought him back as a Lich, and he's just been chilling underground unbeknownst to every else, for quite some time now.

Of course all the Sorcerer-Kings that did live past the shitty Prism Pentad were totally fucking ruined by the slew of no talent bullshit authors that completely assraped what was left of the Dark Sun setting.

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Using a psionic crystal as a portal to show up through a manhole cover in present day New York City? Are you fucking kidding me? Well that doesn't sound that bad. If you want something close to the "original vision" or "essential feel" of Dark Sun, get the 3.5 update from the link below, skip the Gith and other newfangled sentient races from other planes, read the fluff from "Earth, Air, Fire and Water", "The Veiled Alliance", "The Will and the Way" and the old AD&D Dark Sun Core book (and, if you're going epic, "Dragon Kings") and play through the old DOS game "Dark Sun: Shattered Lands". Then just play it in what the DS 3.5 update calls the "Brown Age".

External links

Darksun Wiki - a wiki almost as empty as this one HERESY!*BLAM*
Athas.org - conversion for 3.5, scheduled to be complete just after 5e comes out. Sweet shit, it's actually finished!