The Burnt World of Athas

In today’s design repost, Rodney Thompson announces that development on Dark Sun 4e has finished. He talks of his love of the original setting, gives us some idea of what we can expect: A return to the pre-Prism Pentad days.

Another repost article from Richard Baker. This one talks about using Dragonborn in Dark Sun 4e, and the Athasian twist placed on the core race.

Like most of Rich’s articles, he talks about several different subjects in the original, and we’ve edited this down to just the DS content. You can find the original in the internet archives.

A repost of the DS4 design posts. Rich teases a bit about how the core PHB material will remain more relevant than in earlier DS editions.

Rich has a pattern of addressing several topics in his blog postings. We’ve elided the non-DS specific content from this one. The original can be found in the internet archive.

Another in our DS4 designer diary reposts, this one comes from Rich Baker.

Originally retrieved from archive.org

This is part of a series of reposted blog articles from designers of Dark Sun 4th edition. These articles have been scattered through various reorganizations on Wizards’ site, and are now hard to find, or have vanished completely. We are collecting them here with permission from the authors.

Today’s entry comes from Rich Baker, and was originally posted on a Wizards Community blog. It’s since been swallowed by the dunes, but the web archive can be seen here.

This is the first of a series of reposted blog articles from designers of Dark Sun 4th edition. These articles have been scattered through various reorganizations on Wizards’ site, and are now hard to find, or have vanished completely. We are collecting them here with permission from the authors.

This article was originally posted by Rodney Thompson, September 14, 2009. You can find the original here.

The history of Athas is long and often lost to the sands of time. Similarly, the history of the Dark Sun setting’s online presence is sometimes obscured. From the birth of the setting in 1991Dark Sun has had a continuous story.

In 2000, Dave Ries-Clark(Agantyr) released the Merchant’s Calendar, a small Windows based program to track the Dark Sun calendar.

Rather than give a general review of the supplement (which can be found in numerous places online), let’s go over what the Dark Sun centric player and DM would be interested and show that “Heroes of the Elemental Chaos” is worthy of being called a Dark Sun supplement even if it’s not advertised as such.

Death Mark author Robert J Schwalb answers questions about Dark Sun and his new book.

A review of Robert J. Schwalb’s first novel Death Mark

This article contains a series of plothooks for trader-related adventures to go along with the new release of Trade Lords. Enjoy! 

Jon // Oracle, jon[at]athas.org <p> Want to spice up your campaign? Want your players’ characters to feel the stinging heat of the crimson sun? Want your players to see Athas for more than endless dunes of sand? Want to show the gaming community that Dark Sun is unlike all other campaign settings? Good. Welcome to the club! </p><p>This article contains various tips and discusses issues to consider for both new and experienced GMs that want to run a Dark Sun campaign. </p>