Heroes are measured by the foes they confront. The lands of Athas are overrun with desert predators, vicious tribes, inimical rulers, and people devoted to serving the causes of oppression and tyranny.

Raiders and Savages

In most of the world, civilization hangs by a thread. The city-states are reasonably secure, but within one or two days’ travel lies a wilderness stalked by hungry monsters and threatened by vicious raiders and savages. Marauding giants plunder the shores of the Sea of Silt. Hordes of gith, gnolls, tareks, and thri-kreen roam the barrens, searching for villages or outposts to assault. Monstrous humanoids aren’t the only raiders to threaten the desert people; many of the worst aggressors are motley assortments of humanoids united only by their desire for easy prey. The battle to defend civilization’s borders against the reavers of the wastelands never ends, and with each passing year, civilization loses a little more ground.

Oppressors

Each sorcerer-king is an evil tyrant who wields awesomely powerful defiling magic. Scores, sometimes hundreds, of templars serve each ruler. Most templars are ambitious, corrupt, and cruel. They exact brutal taxation from the city folk, ferret out forbidden practices such as reading or studying arcane magic, and stamp out sparks of rebellion.

Battling a sorcerer-king’s regime means fighting soldiers, elite guards, monsters, and the occasional spy or informant, all under the command of ruthless templars out to prove their loyalty to their master. Within a city-state’s walls, heroes who openly challenge the king’s templars will be overwhelmed; to survive, characters who strike down a templar must vanish into the populace quickly.

Only the greatest heroes could face a sorcerer-king in person and hope to triumph. Even then, they would have to contend with hundreds of elite bodyguards, cadres of fanatically loyal templars, and centuries’ worth of carefully prepared defenses. Sorcerer-kings give little thought to guarding themselves against disloyal subjects, trusting their templars to enforce civic order, but they fear their fellow monarchs and protect themselves accordingly. Any defense that can foil the attacks of another sorcerer-king can block those from lesser mortals as well.

Ancient Horrors

The distant corners of Athas harbor many dark secrets, including inhuman monsters worse than any murderous raider or cruel templar. Shadow giants and yuan-ti lurk in old palaces or strongholds far from the city-states, weaving dark spells that threaten anyone nearby. In caverns beneath the desert sands, the wormlike psurlons use their mind powers to dominate humans and kindred races.

In the absence of gods, Athas has become a place where elemental powers hold sway. The world is just as hostile to elementals as it is to the mortal races, but creatures such as archons, salamanders, and drakes haunt the vast deserts ringing the Tyr Region. Twisted beasts suffused with the elemental power of the desert roam unchecked, working their capricious will on the shape of the world.

Athas is a callous world in which many would-be heroes are motivated by self-interest and personal ambition. However, a few of the best rise above such attitudes and come to champion great causes.

First and foremost is the Veiled Alliance. In cities and villages throughout Athas, a secret society of arcane spellcasters (and a few others who share their interests) practices the forbidden arts. The Veiled Alliance rejects defiling, and all arcanists in the group are preservers. They avoid the quick and easy route to power, learning to cast spells with care and personal sacrifice to spare the world around them from the damage of arcane magic. The Veiled Alliance opposes defilers everywhere, in particular the sorcerer-kings and their templars. Alliance members work against the oppression of the regimes and safeguard knowledge that the tyrants’ agents try to eliminate or bury in templars’ vaults.

Another cause to which heroes might rally is that of supporting a benevolent patron or an ethical merchant house. This objective might lack the grandeur of fighting sorcery and oppression, but it remains a worthy goal. Some of the powerful entities on Athas are more benign than others, and heroes might help an idealistic noble reform a city’s power structure or assist a trading house against its unscrupulous rivals.

The end of slavery is another cause worth the battle. More than a few heroes join the struggle against slavers when someone dear to them is kidnapped or pressed into service—or, for that matter, when the heroes themselves are enslaved. In the citystates, slave traders are protected by their wealth and the patronage of the sorcerer-kings, but slave tribes and vengeful freelancers strike at slaver outposts and caravans in the desert wilds.

Last but not least, heroes can strive to understand the injuries done to Athas and heal the dying world. Over many centuries, the true history of Athas has been buried by the tyrants and their allies. One could hardly find a more noble cause than piecing together the long-lost truth and searching for a way to slow or stop the desiccation of the world.

The DARK SUN campaign setting is as broad and inclusive as any other DUNGEONS & DRAGONS milieu. All the familiar adventure scenarios, such as “clean out the monster lair” or “search for treasure,” work as well on Athas as they do in any other world. Straightforward dungeon crawls, such as delving into Under-Tyr, exploring desert caverns where raiders lair, or venturing into the ruins of buried cities, are as vital. All that’s necessary to make such escapades feel like DARK SUN campaign adventures is to surround the characters and plots with Athasian trappings, such as the desert, slavery, or a reptilian monster mix.

This section discusses several Athasian adventure themes. The most important premise is that Athas is a world ruled by evil. Civilization has been subjugated by the sorcerer-kings. Much of the wilderness is overrun with brutal, pitiless raiders. No moral authority exists to which the player characters can defer—either they are the heroes of the game, or no one is.

The Desert

On Athas, the desert is ever-present, a magnificent and terrible environment. Every game set on Athas should, at some point, lead characters into the blistering wilderness beyond the city-states.

By day, the Athasian desert is a scorched wasteland; at night, it can get bitterly cold. A sea of sand, shifting and blowing, might be a common sight, but other versions of desert exist. Rocky badlands, scrubdotted hills, and featureless flats dominate certain areas. When the characters enter a new kind of terrain, take time to describe it. The first few times they encounter a desiccated salt flat or a stark fractured wasteland, you want them to hesitate for a moment to appreciate both its grandeur and its threat.

For instance, when the heroes first enter the waste, tell the players that they see white dunes like frozen waves, glowing beneath a merciless sun. An acrid, ashy odor clings to everything. The hot wind brings with it sand particles that sting exposed flesh and inflame the eyes. Except for the sigh or howl of the air currents, the desert is cloaked in a gravelike silence.

Athasian Ecology

The deserts of Athas are home to a mix of primitives and monstrosities unknown in other settings. In general, stock your adventures with whatever monsters you think offer your players a good challenge.

Reptilian and insectlike creatures play a bigger role on Athas than mammals do. Many beasts of burden, such as horses, camels, oxen, and elephants, have died out. Other domesticated and game animals, such as dogs, cats, cattle, pigs, sheep, antelope, and deer, are likewise absent from Athas. Goats survive, as do lions, hyenas, bats, and a few small rodents such as mice and desert rats. In place of fur-bearing mammals common on other worlds, Athasian beasts are scaled or chitin-covered. Crodlus, inixes, mekillots, and other large reptiles are common mounts or beasts of burden. Kanks and other giant insects serve the same purposes.

Certain aquatic monsters, such as aboleths and sharks, are not part of the Athasian ecology. Other normally sea-based creatures have adapted. Chuuls are at home on Athas, burrowing under the sands. They lose their swim speed and gain a burrow speed, but are otherwise the same. Other monsters appear on Athas with slight changes in form or new abilities. The DARK SUN Creature Catalog presents a number of themes you can use to adapt monsters to Athas.

Certain intelligent races found in other DUNGEONS & DRAGONS settings remain populous on Athas. Elves, dwarves, halflings, humans, and goliaths have spread across the world. Other groups were annihilated during the genocidal wars that raged thousands of years ago. Devas, gnomes, kobolds, ogres, kuotoas, and sahuagin can no longer be found on Athas. Other humanoids, such as dragonborn and eladrin, are limited to a handful of survivors. In their place, native races such as aarakocras, brohgs, gith, hejkins, and silt runners have settled the wastes. Finally, some peoples have adjusted to the burning sands, leaving behind old ways. Lizardfolk are known as ssurrans on Athas, and they’re a desert-dwelling, nomadic race. The world has not seen the brutal tread of orcs, but tareks—a race of savage, bestial warriors—are similar

Survival

For most creatures in the Athasian wilderness, surviving through any particular day is an accomplishment. In the city-states, day-to-day existence is not at issue for nonslaves, although the threat of treacherous death in civilized areas should not be discounted. Any hero who ventures into the desert must be concerned with necessities such as water and food.

An entire adventure could be built around surviving the rigors of Athas. Perhaps the heroes pursue a criminal into the wastes, or follow an ancient map that hints at treasure. Several days into the trip, the heroes discover that their supplies have been spoiled or are missing. The real adventure begins when they realize they’re within days of death and help is a long way away. Players whose characters emerge from this “survival adventure” gain a new appreciation for the uniquely challenging nature of the DARK SUN setting

Slavery

Slavery is a brutish, ubiquitous reality on Athas. Anyone might become a slave. Teams of slaves carry noble palanquins through the streets; slave auctions attract crowds in busy marketplaces; caravans bring in coffles of roped slaves. On Athas, adventurers witness slaves and chattel owners all around them.

A character might come to legally own slaves without intending to. Triumphing over a noble or a dune trader could leave the heroes responsible for their vanquished foe’s slaves. They might confront the realities of slavery when they discover that a friend or a relative has been taken by slavers. A character might even fall into slavery, perhaps as a result of the machinations of an enemy noble or a templar.

Slavery and Alignment

Keeping slaves is not compatible with a good alignment, but doing so does not necessarily make a character evil. Most slave owners are unaligned. Overseers who treat their slaves brutally are definitely engaging in evil acts that should outrage good characters. The question is whether anything can reasonably be done about the situation. Given how commonplace slavery is on Athas, good characters can’t reasonably attempt to free every slave they meet, nor should they recklessly challenge slave owners who are too powerful to overcome. Good characters should be anguished by the abundance of human misery in civilized areas, however, and they should be dedicated to aiding however they can short of attempting suicidal actions.

Psionics

All living creatures on Athas have some minor ability to affect the world with their minds. Most folk fail to tap into these abilities, experiencing déjà vu or random flashes of insight at best. Every so often, a person naturally develops the capacity to close a door from a distance or bring a small object to hand. More than a few natives, however, display strong mental aptitude. Psions, wild talents, and other psionic creatures, individuals, and institutions can be encountered on a daily basis.

On the streets of a typical city-state, a character might observe:

• A dowser using her wild talent to locate a good site for a new well.
• A stately noble keeping dust and grim from his fine slippers and elaborate hems by levitating a few inches above the street.
• The impressive facade of an academy where influential people can pay to be educated in the Way.

To showcase the importance of psionics in the world, include psionic monsters in adventures. Instead of using an archer as an artillery monster, use a telekineticist who delivers bolts of force. Organized fighting groups could include empaths who heal, or telepaths who fight as controllers. Adventures might include story elements based on noncombat psionic talents. For example, a villain could have the ability to command lackeys using long-distance telepathy

Arcane magic

Although Athasians are accustomed to the Way, they are hostile to arcane power. They consider casting an arcane spell to be an evil act. On Athas magic is evil or, at least, the favorite tool of evil manipulators. You should make sure that the player of an arcane character understands the constant and ruinous temptation of arcane magic. Every now and then, remind the player of the defiling option. This suggestion can be particularly telling when an important attack is at hand, such as when a character uses a daily power. Whether a character gives in to the temptation of defiling or not, people who discover that he or she is an arcanist usually assume the worst. As a result, all spellcasters must be careful about whom they confide in. Blasting enemies with spectacular spells in a populated area is certain to be met with cries of “Spell maker!” and “Defiler!” At least one witness will report the character to the templars unless the spellcaster convincingly claims to be a psion, conceals the spellcasting, or eliminates all witnesses.