"The forest has no population centers, so whatever animals exist are likely the fiercest survivor's Athas has ever seen...." The halflings. The cannibal halflings live in the forest.
Not just any cannibals, but cannibals that use slings to shoot Agony Beetles at you from concealment. The beetle crawls up to the spine, injects a stinger, and just causes unbearable pain to its victim. All the victim can do is writhe in agony, while the halflings casually walk up....and eat you alive.
When I was first getting into D&D back in the 80s and 90s I remember the guy who worked at the games store told me that "Athas is a world where the climactic battle between good and evil was fought ages ago, and the bad guys won, and then they kept winning."
@@TheZenBullet The other option would be the victory of the first defiler Rajaat by commiting genocide of all the other peoples of Athas (including the sorcerer kings, which were his pawns during the process because they were deceived to think that humans were Rajaat chosen!), with the exception of the halflings, and using defiling magic to bring back the blue age in the process.
One thing I noticed from the Dark Sun campaigns and settings is that theres even an intergrated and working Trade system. Your party could start being caravan traders who move between the city states trading goods and developing their caravan more than just being a ragtag group of adventurers...c
A note on war: It's canon that on Athas, standard Bronze Age warfare objectives like sieging and sacking the cities is pointless. The actual city is too well defended for a normal army to make meaningful headway, and even if they did, they'd have to face the might of the city's Sorcerer King. And the attackers would *not* have the backing of their own city's Sorcerer-King, because no Sorcerer-King ever actually leaves his city for fear of making himself too tempting a target to rivals. So invaders just sweep over the fields and farms around a city, raid it for everything they can carry off, and burn, kill, or poison whatever they can't.
This was well thought out. I also appreciate that you acknowledge from the get-go how fucked up of a setting it is. Lotta folks forget that the average individual on Athas has class levels....i.e. there are no "commoners" just because of how brutal the world is.
Don’t forget that the dark sun book recommends you make 4 characters, and they all level up from whatever XP your main character gets…because the expectation is that you will run through them over the course of a short campaign lol
How did you make Dark Sun, the only good D&D setting, more based? Besides not mentioning cannibal halflings. Subversion, intrigue, hot-wars, mutually assured destruction. This already kick ass setting got turned up to 11. This is the stuff real cool stories are made of.
@@DungeonMasterpiece great video man, though a small correction, when you mention how the gods have abandoned the sorcerer kings, that's actually wrong since in the Dark Sun setting there were never any gods on Athas as it was the Primordials who won the Dawn War here (the Dawn War was basically a cosmic war between the gods and primordials to see who would rule each planet) and they left immediatly after leaving the world with no true divine intervention since its creation.
@@Caseyuptobat its not 4e fluff its part of the original Dark Sun setting, as it was meant to be a setting that never had actual gods, the only part of what i said that is taken from 4e is the part about the dawn war, which was only added to serve as a justification for why there are no gods (something which was unexplained in the original 2e version of the setting).
Interesting way of seeing the Mul as a demographic substitute for labor, though I will mention that the primary flaw here is that Mul are sterile, and therefore you need more humans and dwarves in order to make more. Half-Giants aren't and are even more specifically a result of magical breeding. (Muls are more just the result of forced breeding of slave humans and dwarves) and Half-Giants are also true-breeding, however they are considerably harder to control and sustain due to their immense size and strength. (In the original 2e setting, they had incredibly high physical stats that were primarily balanced not only from deficient mental scores, but also the fact that they required more food and water to survive, which was a significant downside in a setting like Dark Sun)
Great video :) I would make one small point: Athas has never had any gods of the type found in other DnD worlds. There were temples and people worshipping 'Gods' (Examples can be found in various Dark Sun materials, but one that comes to mind is the 'City by the Silt Sea' supplement where a Lion Headed god was 'worshipped'). Apparently the Dark Sun Prime Material plane does not have the correct access to the Outer Planes that would allow gods to exist. The Sorcerer Kings actually get their power to grant spells by some type of being that can draw elemental energy (I think it's called some type of 'nexus') from the Inner Planes. But since these beings are almost extinct (The nexuses), new Sorcerer Kings will NOT be able to grant spells.
Spelljammer said that the crystal sphere (SJ equivalent of a solar system) containing Athas has this giant shell around it that somehow also isolated it on a planar level and thus made it impossible for divine/infernal beings to interact with it. I forget how they justified the elemental planes still being accessible but it was a cool in game explanation for the rules being different on Athas.
@@KS-PNW The phlegethon that is experienced in Spelljammer is a property of the material plane, and doesn't describe the other aspects of the local extraplanar cosmology--in Athas's case it's connection to its unique Outer Planes of the Grey and the Black (Rajaat's prison realm), and the Elemental and Para-elemental Plans as locally experienced.
I would say that the gods decided on a quarentine on Athas since the discovery of defiling magic. Nobody wants to see defiling magic slowly but surely eroding their followers' planets!
@@pcontop The other summaries I've read all made it sound like Defiling magic was the default way arcane magic works (because of something inherent to the planet, perhaps the same factor that cuts off the outer planes) and preserving magic is a set of special techniques to avoid that, but interesting alternate notion
odd tid bit, IRL a fan wrote to Dragon Magazine and asked if it was possible for a Human and Dwarf to have an off spring. The official answer and reply* was that it was impossible. About a year (if I recall correctly) later TSR's Dark Sun hit the market with the half breed (human-dwarf) as a prominent (and playable) race. *for reference i believe it was "Zeb" Cook who asked TSR and then answered in the (Dragon) Magazine
Makes me wonder if a party of attempted to dedicated do gooders were to find something of value like a large previously unknown subterranean lake around some valuable resources and then pull out their Strongholds and Followers book. Begin to set up their own little fortress. Build it up to a new town and petty realm where such issues are addressed and use their gathering power to remove the nearest sorcerer king from their thrown. Absorb their lands to become a new official city state as well. And in continuing to pursue the goal of toppling the reigns of sorcerer kings while fostering a more lawful and prosperous nation perhaps draw the gods back to champion these instruments of change and work some miracles to begin healing the land.
@@override367 Well its a campaign story arc. Time to get out the Kingdoms & Warfare book. The stakes are beyond the party and hope has some steam rolling to do.
@cyotee doge Not sure which setting FR refers to but I would say that a campaign story arc like that doesn't obviate the setting of Dark Sun as a setting like that of Dark Sun is essential for such a good brings hope back story. You can't have a pull the world back from the brink story without a setting with a world on the brink.
I've always loved the concept for Dark Sun but never got a chance to play there. This video was really informative and just reinforced why I still want to explore the setting.
@@DungeonMasterpiece all good ideas. Would especially love to see Ravenloft or even Krynn (Dragonlance) covered this way, if you ever got around to them. Def subscribing 👍
Athas never had any gods at all , there were no good , neutral or evil gods ever that had anything to do with Athas . Athas was very unique in that aspect where countless other setting had their own gods yet Athas wasn't ruled by gods but by major elementals . Athas was cut off from the multiverse unlike all the other campaign settings where a player could go from Toril to the World of Greyhawk through a portal where as there is no way to go from Athas to Toril because the conduit to do so is not there and never existed . It's a very strange setting that does not follow the normal setting rules that every other setting follows and it's only access to basicly anything outside Athas is the elemental plains and the sub-elemental plains
@@DungeonMasterpiece Your welcome . Here's a very good site on the official lore plus added lore that fits the setting and has tons of information on just about everything Athas . athas.org/# One thing I always found fascinating about Athas is that all the races came from halflings that used the power of the sun to change themselves so human , elves , dwarves and all other humanoid races were once halflings that chose to change their form to adapt to the environment execpt for the thri-kreen and a few other such as the gith ( which were devolved gith yanki that somehow found a pathway to athas ) which evolved from a diffrent path . Out of every setting created it was the most unique of them all because it didn't fit the tradition type of setting that was the norm
@@MaximumOvercricket Athas was a desert planet located in a crystal sphere that was cut off from the rest of the Prime Material plane. Travel to and from the sphere was impossible by physical means and extremely difficult even by magic.[2] Cosmology The crystal sphere that contained Athas was not connected to any of the usual spelljamming routes out of Realmspace, Krynnspace, or Greyspace. Its location in the phlogiston was not documented in any book or chart. Some speculated that the crystal sphere was simply too distant from known space, so much so that traveling there would take several lifetimes.[3] The world's inaccessibility was the result of a property of its crystal sphere that rendered it impenetrable to spelljammers and almost completely cut off from other planes. The border of the Ethereal plane within the sphere was replaced by an environment known as "the Gray", which caused anyone in it to become lost and slowly weaken. It was extremely difficult to overcome by planar travel even by powerful spell such as teleport without error and plane shift, which had a risk of sending the caster into the Gray instead of the intended destination. Even the contact other plain spell had a chance of pulling the caster into the Gray. Athas was never connected to Raveloft.
@@williamlee7482 It definitely is or was at some point in time. The entire setting of Kalidnay is from when Ravenloft snatched up the city of Kalidnay. I know there was some strangeness in the transition from 2e to 3e when it came to licensing issues, so it's possible it was retconned out of existence at around that time.
I miss the Dark Sun, the real one before they nerfed D&D. Only setting of the time that required your party to start off at third level, otherwise you'd never live through it.
Wow. I watched a video about Dark Sun earlier which led me here, and now I'm fascinated by the idea of checking out other videos on your channel. Great video!
Awesome video about a lesser known aspect of an awesome dnd setting. I played a lot in this setting, just not using dnd mechanics, and my firends created characters that we remember fondly to this day.
My favorite DnD Setting. Good summation on geopolitics, some minor inaccurate statements (although in my DS campaigns, I also make resurrection very hard to come by). Come play Dark Sun at Origins or Gen Con - The Mindmage Ascendency awaits you!
"The gods turned their back on them" Not true. In the original 2E setting background, there just weren't any gods. In the 4E setting, it was the Elemental Primoridals that killed all the gods.
I loved this analysis. So well done! I just wish it were twice as long! Future video ? maybe a deeper dive on the dark Sun world? It's such a fan favorite that I think it deserves your well balanced analysis.
@@rakothyan Funny how one year later Russia is doing fine, still controlling all Russian speaking territories, growing economically, testing their missiles successfully and so on. The US, on the other hand, has suffered a humiliating defeat in Ukraine and is now being forced to lift sanctions on Venezuela to avoid recession, another bitter defeat. To make things worse their zionist overlords are pushing them into yet another war they can't win, which will likely cement their downfall. Their NATO servan... err, allies in western Europe are beyond f***ed. Prospects for stability are much better in Russia than in the US at this point. I wouldn't have children if I was stuck in 'Muricah, not just because it's gonna suck like Athas soon, but because I wouldn't wish any children, let alone my own, to grow up surrounded by ignorant narcissists, rednecks, zealots and Mexicans. Oh well, we won't have to feel bad for them for too much long, just look how badly they fared in Ukraine, everything else will follow that same path...
I know its been a month but its funny what you said about Gulg and Nibenay. My longest running darksun campaign was basically our murderhobos being Nibenian agents working to bring down Gulg. Fantastic geopolitical work
I was a Game Master for Dark Sun. It's an incredible, unique, and very rich universe. I loved it! Today, I have obsidian dice as a tribute to the world of Athas, which holds a special place in my dice collection!
I always found Dark Sun to be an interesting setting. There is a saying: In a famine a man has the right to slit another man's throat for a loaf of bread. Athas is the setting to run thought experiments around that notion. For us, industrialization and capitalism has so far been able to provide more and more resources. People can argue about wealth inequality, but at the end of the day that is like arguing while having enough to drink that someone else has enough for a swimming pool, while you've always had more to drink that the year before and you've got ice cubes in it now. Zero sum interactions, much less zero sum interactions over resources that are simply insufficient to share, is not a principle that governs the world we have known. In some respects I think Dark Sun is mostly a science fiction setting, in that science fiction really consists of imagining a world where something we take for granted has been changed and exploring the implications resulting from that change to how the world works. Fantasy usually takes the world as we know it and imagines something cool but doesn't explore the implications, as the cool thing exists as if by magic.
Dark Sun is heavily inspired by the early Bronze Age city states in Asia Minor I believe. Lack of iron, arid conditions (taken up to 11), and small enclaves ruled over by despotic priest kings. Slavery is the primary pillar of economy, along with limited agriculture, and life is extremely cheap.
Great video. Really useful for a sense of tone and what sort of challenges the players should face in this sort of setting. Also some great indirect tips in analysing other settings this way. More please
I found this video looking for information for a friends game, and I am now thoroughly enjoying all your videos on tips and tricks for DMs. Your Hexgrid video really has me inspired. Keep up the great videos.
@@DungeonMasterpiece Do it! It's the only published setting of D&D I ever ran a campaign in, and the reason I took a seat behind the DM screen. It took me 3 years to finally burn it to the ground, and it was great. All the thematic conflicts to exploit, the brutality. My DM tip: treat the land itself as a powerful, evil, twisted NPC actively trying to kill your players. Great content overall, good job!
Fun fact: The mountain chain that separates the Forest Ridge from the Tablelands is called the "Ringing Mountains" because they are so high up, over 20,000 foot peaks (including snowcaps), that everyone's ears pop from the pressure differential and start ringing when they try scaling them. Even so, the heroes in one of the only books made for that setting managed it, albeit with some difficulty. And to put the scarcity of metal on Athas into some additional perspective: the average longsword in D&D would cost an adventurer 15gp. On Athas, that same sword would cost about 250gp. Relatively speaking, of course; people pay with coins made of ceramic instead of metal, here. Yet another small factoid -- despite the lack of rivers and oceans for normal ships, ships do in fact exist in some quantity, supported mainly by great trading houses. These run through some device involving psychic or magic energy, allowing ships to hover above the Silt Sea and visit other cities. The city-state of Balic is the biggest one for this.
Yes. All the insights missing from most discussion... this should help DMs include the relationships and important social factors well, and it's concise! Good job.
Rajaat is the one to blame and the sorcerer kings were his champions but that's another story. "The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King" covers Hamanu's rise from simple farmer to "Troll Scorcher" to eternal ruler of the city-state of Urik. It's the best Dark Sun novel imo having read them all
Nice video about my favourite D&D scenario! Just to help for further content on Athas, the other city-states, besides Gulg and Nibenay, really have negligible access to timber, with few exceptions, but they are not that devoid of resources or political intrigue with their neighbours (or even internal strife, in the case of Raam!). The geopolitics of each city-state (including the other two, Kurn/New Kurn and Eldaarich, to the north of the Tablelands) would make a nice series of videos, if I can suggest.
I came from another video mentioning Dark Sun. Although I am a dummy and noob in the world of DnD the world is so fascinating. Please keep making videos such as these. Although I am an outsider to DnD i love the story man. Also freakin Metal.
Masterwork on your research. Absolutely love Dark Sun, it was always my favorite D&D. Playing the early DOS games still bring back much nostalgia. I really wish someone would create some games back in Athas.
sadly not going to happen. wotc state that the darksun setting was too "problematic" for current sensibilities. its a damn shame, as was pointed out in the video, the sorceror kings are perfect big bads. shame they are going to let all of it go to waste. its fans to keep its memory alive now :(
Did they change the lore at some point? Because various points you brought up don't align with what I read back in the day. Last time I checked, the problem of Athas regarding divine power wasn't that the gods had turned their back on the world, but that they never were able to access it in the first place (if I recall correctly, this is due to the Gray, some plane surrounding Athas that cuts it off from actual divine access). In fact, one of the villains of the setting (the undead Sorcerer King Dregoth) relentlessly pursues the plan to change the natural laws of the world to allow for actual godhood, and while it's up to the DM to let him succeed, the default outcome is that he's doomed to fail. As it is put in the source material, the conditions that allow for godhood "simply don't exist on Athas". However, this doesn't mean that divine magic doesn't exist in the setting (we have the clerics of the elements, the druids who serve the spirits of the land, and the Sorcerer Kings are able to provide their templars with divine magic which ironically they aren't able to access themselves); and this also includes the ability to cast resurrection magic - at least as long as you have unrestricted access to the spiritual sphere (which clerics didn't have in 2e, but druids and templars did).
The original material is kind of vague on the point of gods. The setting description is written as "The Wanderer's Journal", by an unreliable narrator (not as in lying, but as in someone who just doesn't know everything). It is clear that the ancients had *religion*, but the question of whether the gods actually existed, and to what degree they were powerful elementals (who can grant divine magic in the setting) is left open. Later material made it more clear-cut, with Defilers & Preservers adding "the Grey" as a layer mostly between the Prime and the Astral and Outer planes and blocking off divine magic, and with 4e bringing the Dawn War and its alternate ending as another explanation.
This was an awesome video. I love how you tied a discussion of demographics into this great campaign setting. I’d love to see you take on Dark Sun in further videos, there are a lot of points to be made about Athas and climate change on our own world, for example.
The original intent of Dark Sun was that (if the DM wanted to) players could change the setting for the better. The original set of Dark Sun novels were meant to illustrate how this could be done, but TSR made their events canon which kinda screwed this up, because they really wanted it to have a metaplot for some reason. If you are afraid the game would be too bleak to play you can always go the route of "look how fucked up this world is, let's be the ones to make it marginally better".
Hmm, why not embark upon campaigns to do the opposite? One of my early objectives in doing so would be seeding secret psionic cults training to think as a hive mind in efforts to drive the sky ray race raging insane
No gods also means no Divine magic, which means no access to the spell 'create water', cutting off an easy (though time consuming) way of slowly restoring nature.
Love your content. I have 35 years of DM experience but you still provide thoughtful insight. Props sir. What would a kingdom ran by necromancers be like? I would love to here your thoughts.
Demography would be the big geopop issue. Burning through the living Rob's ones ability to get more corpses, but corpses offer tons of low skill labor that never get sick or tired. In a commodity based economy, this would be very successful. In a service based economy where intelectual creativity is important, this is toxic. So it's a question of growing fast and cheap with a low ceiling or growing slower with a higher ceiling for economic success.
Even though this is somewhat sad to say: the situation on Athas mirrors our current time: 1. Many of my friends feel that the world is getting less safe and hopeful to bring our kids into, and 2. Many of the rich and powerful feel that it would be better to replace humans with artificial constructs and robots to fuel their destruction of the environment.
Dark Sun was unique in another way you didn't mention. While gods didn't exist and magic killed life by its very nature, everyone on the planet was psionically active in some way (there might have been a species that wasn't, I'm not sure). This translated to every character and NPC having one or more psionic powers, with the aristocracy having a significantly better mastery of their mind due to having been schooled from an early age.
Great video! Looking forward to checking out more material on your channel. Furthermore, the fact that you were talking about Russian History is kind of eery in hindsight.
Old school caster hate. Spelljammer was rather successful at hiding its CH before play began, but Dark Sun absolutely reveled in it. The creators just rolled around in it.
Tell me if I'm wrong: Half-giants are those belonging to a designed race (in AD&D2Ed the players were also rewarded by the rules with XPs for behaving and shifting their allignaments in the same way of a given leader to imitate) while the Muls were accidental results of putting long enough in close contact, like in the slave pits, humans with dwarves, a result that gave birth to that hybrid that a mastermind can use better than the Half-giants for many tasks firstly because of Muls' lower water consumption (Half-giants consumed 4 times than humans, Muls about the same but with some dwarven-like advantage).
"The forest has no population centers, so whatever animals exist are likely the fiercest survivor's Athas has ever seen...."
The halflings. The cannibal halflings live in the forest.
Yup,
Halflings are the fiercest thing on Athas.
No. Fucking. Fear. Absolutely bloodlusted 24/7
Not just any cannibals, but cannibals that use slings to shoot Agony Beetles at you from concealment. The beetle crawls up to the spine, injects a stinger, and just causes unbearable pain to its victim. All the victim can do is writhe in agony, while the halflings casually walk up....and eat you alive.
the halflings of the Forest Ridge are the fiercest animals Athas has ever seen
When I was first getting into D&D back in the 80s and 90s I remember the guy who worked at the games store told me that "Athas is a world where the climactic battle between good and evil was fought ages ago, and the bad guys won, and then they kept winning."
If only it was that hopeful.
@@LionlordEbonfire no that was the OG pitch, what if Sauron won?
@@TheZenBullet I said nothing about Sauron. It is worst then the bad guys won and kept winning. Search for the Dark Sun history and see what I mean.
@@TheZenBullet The other option would be the victory of the first defiler Rajaat by commiting genocide of all the other peoples of Athas (including the sorcerer kings, which were his pawns during the process because they were deceived to think that humans were Rajaat chosen!), with the exception of the halflings, and using defiling magic to bring back the blue age in the process.
@@TheZenBullet Might just be my particular history but Sauron-winning makes me think of the Midnight setting
Dark Sun, the setting so metal, that's there's almost none left
Excuse me while I go get a towel so I can clean up the drink I just spit out of my mouth. 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
You're welcome
You just won D&D...
One thing I noticed from the Dark Sun campaigns and settings is that theres even an intergrated and working Trade system. Your party could start being caravan traders who move between the city states trading goods and developing their caravan more than just being a ragtag group of adventurers...c
There was even a trader class. An actual class for being the caravan guy/gal.
This was a fantastic video. I would love to see more based around Dark Sun. Or maybe something involving Eberron.
A note on war: It's canon that on Athas, standard Bronze Age warfare objectives like sieging and sacking the cities is pointless. The actual city is too well defended for a normal army to make meaningful headway, and even if they did, they'd have to face the might of the city's Sorcerer King. And the attackers would *not* have the backing of their own city's Sorcerer-King, because no Sorcerer-King ever actually leaves his city for fear of making himself too tempting a target to rivals. So invaders just sweep over the fields and farms around a city, raid it for everything they can carry off, and burn, kill, or poison whatever they can't.
This is not entire correct. Sorcer-Kings have many times in the past left their city states for war. Huumanu or Urik is a prime example.
@@davidholdren967 Also Giustenal getting sacked was a combined effort of many SKs
@@TheZenBullet And not exactly a Sack, but remember Kalidnay.
This was well thought out. I also appreciate that you acknowledge from the get-go how fucked up of a setting it is. Lotta folks forget that the average individual on Athas has class levels....i.e. there are no "commoners" just because of how brutal the world is.
Don’t forget that the dark sun book recommends you make 4 characters, and they all level up from whatever XP your main character gets…because the expectation is that you will run through them over the course of a short campaign lol
How did you make Dark Sun, the only good D&D setting, more based?
Besides not mentioning cannibal halflings.
Subversion, intrigue, hot-wars, mutually assured destruction. This already kick ass setting got turned up to 11. This is the stuff real cool stories are made of.
Cannibal halflings in the forest? I did mention them. They are the Fortnite battle royale hahah
About the halflings... he did mention the fiercest creatures on the planet...
@@DungeonMasterpiece great video man, though a small correction, when you mention how the gods have abandoned the sorcerer kings, that's actually wrong since in the Dark Sun setting there were never any gods on Athas as it was the Primordials who won the Dawn War here (the Dawn War was basically a cosmic war between the gods and primordials to see who would rule each planet) and they left immediatly after leaving the world with no true divine intervention since its creation.
@@marcialhd We ignore the 4e fluff
@@Caseyuptobat its not 4e fluff its part of the original Dark Sun setting, as it was meant to be a setting that never had actual gods, the only part of what i said that is taken from 4e is the part about the dawn war, which was only added to serve as a justification for why there are no gods (something which was unexplained in the original 2e version of the setting).
Interesting way of seeing the Mul as a demographic substitute for labor, though I will mention that the primary flaw here is that Mul are sterile, and therefore you need more humans and dwarves in order to make more. Half-Giants aren't and are even more specifically a result of magical breeding. (Muls are more just the result of forced breeding of slave humans and dwarves) and Half-Giants are also true-breeding, however they are considerably harder to control and sustain due to their immense size and strength. (In the original 2e setting, they had incredibly high physical stats that were primarily balanced not only from deficient mental scores, but also the fact that they required more food and water to survive, which was a significant downside in a setting like Dark Sun)
well there was a rumor about feemal mul also...
Great video :) I would make one small point: Athas has never had any gods of the type found in other DnD worlds. There were temples and people worshipping 'Gods' (Examples can be found in various Dark Sun materials, but one that comes to mind is the 'City by the Silt Sea' supplement where a Lion Headed god was 'worshipped'). Apparently the Dark Sun Prime Material plane does not have the correct access to the Outer Planes that would allow gods to exist. The Sorcerer Kings actually get their power to grant spells by some type of being that can draw elemental energy (I think it's called some type of 'nexus') from the Inner Planes. But since these beings are almost extinct (The nexuses), new Sorcerer Kings will NOT be able to grant spells.
Spelljammer said that the crystal sphere (SJ equivalent of a solar system) containing Athas has this giant shell around it that somehow also isolated it on a planar level and thus made it impossible for divine/infernal beings to interact with it. I forget how they justified the elemental planes still being accessible but it was a cool in game explanation for the rules being different on Athas.
@@KS-PNW The phlegethon that is experienced in Spelljammer is a property of the material plane, and doesn't describe the other aspects of the local extraplanar cosmology--in Athas's case it's connection to its unique Outer Planes of the Grey and the Black (Rajaat's prison realm), and the Elemental and Para-elemental Plans as locally experienced.
I would say that the gods decided on a quarentine on Athas since the discovery of defiling magic. Nobody wants to see defiling magic slowly but surely eroding their followers' planets!
Yep. Didnt know the lore. Jees.
Bro, again, go do some research before your produce videos
@@pcontop The other summaries I've read all made it sound like Defiling magic was the default way arcane magic works (because of something inherent to the planet, perhaps the same factor that cuts off the outer planes) and preserving magic is a set of special techniques to avoid that, but interesting alternate notion
I always pronounced Mul as Mule, since they are designed for labor and are sterile.
Ooh! I like that
Iirc, Mule is an in lore slur against them for that very reason.
@@dankrue2549 Extra Ironic, since no-one alive on Athas (except the Sorcerer-Kings, and maybe some Pyreen) has ever seen an actual Mule.
odd tid bit, IRL a fan wrote to Dragon Magazine and asked if it was possible for a Human and Dwarf to have an off spring. The official answer and reply* was that it was impossible. About a year (if I recall correctly) later TSR's Dark Sun hit the market with the half breed (human-dwarf) as a prominent (and playable) race.
*for reference i believe it was "Zeb" Cook who asked TSR and then answered in the (Dragon) Magazine
Always assumed the word was mule and just printed incorrectly
After Planescape, this is my favorite Setting from D&D.
Love your content! Greetings from a fan of Argentina.
Gotta add Birthright to that. One of the best settings ever
Jugando 2da con amigues nunca pude jugar Athas. La gente jugaba 1 combate y no quería volver ahí XD
I was so looking forward to this and man did you deliver!
Awesome top shelf video loved every bit of it and plan to watch it again later
Thank you
It's comments like these that keep me delivering! Glad you enjoyed it!
Makes me wonder if a party of attempted to dedicated do gooders were to find something of value like a large previously unknown subterranean lake around some valuable resources and then pull out their Strongholds and Followers book. Begin to set up their own little fortress. Build it up to a new town and petty realm where such issues are addressed and use their gathering power to remove the nearest sorcerer king from their thrown. Absorb their lands to become a new official city state as well. And in continuing to pursue the goal of toppling the reigns of sorcerer kings while fostering a more lawful and prosperous nation perhaps draw the gods back to champion these instruments of change and work some miracles to begin healing the land.
that's a hell of a campaign story arc!
Hilariously, I think the only thing the sorcerer kings would ever team up to do is to crush anyone who found a way to bring hope to the world
@@override367 Well its a campaign story arc. Time to get out the Kingdoms & Warfare book. The stakes are beyond the party and hope has some steam rolling to do.
@cyotee doge Not sure which setting FR refers to but I would say that a campaign story arc like that doesn't obviate the setting of Dark Sun as a setting like that of Dark Sun is essential for such a good brings hope back story. You can't have a pull the world back from the brink story without a setting with a world on the brink.
@cyotee doge Well you need a rock bottom starting point for the players to climb up from.
I've always loved the concept for Dark Sun but never got a chance to play there. This video was really informative and just reinforced why I still want to explore the setting.
This is some of my favorite type of content; I would love to see it with other settings
Stick around! I plan to do a whole series of them. Next up is grayhawk, I'll probably do the civil War of Skyrim after that
@@DungeonMasterpiece all good ideas. Would especially love to see Ravenloft or even Krynn (Dragonlance) covered this way, if you ever got around to them.
Def subscribing 👍
Athas never had any gods at all , there were no good , neutral or evil gods ever that had anything to do with Athas .
Athas was very unique in that aspect where countless other setting had their own gods yet Athas wasn't ruled by gods but by major elementals .
Athas was cut off from the multiverse unlike all the other campaign settings where a player could go from Toril to the World of Greyhawk through a portal where as there is no way to go from Athas to Toril because the conduit to do so is not there and never existed .
It's a very strange setting that does not follow the normal setting rules that every other setting follows and it's only access to basicly anything outside Athas is the elemental plains and the sub-elemental plains
yeah, that was an oversight i missed. Thanks for commenting though!
@@DungeonMasterpiece Your welcome .
Here's a very good site on the official lore plus added lore that fits the setting and has tons of information on just about everything Athas .
athas.org/#
One thing I always found fascinating about Athas is that all the races came from halflings that used the power of the sun to change themselves so human , elves , dwarves and all other humanoid races were once halflings that chose to change their form to adapt to the environment execpt for the thri-kreen and a few other such as the gith ( which were devolved gith yanki that somehow found a pathway to athas ) which evolved from a diffrent path .
Out of every setting created it was the most unique of them all because it didn't fit the tradition type of setting that was the norm
I feel like I remember Athas once being connected solely to Ravenloft, before being closed out even from there.
@@MaximumOvercricket Athas was a desert planet located in a crystal sphere that was cut off from the rest of the Prime Material plane. Travel to and from the sphere was impossible by physical means and extremely difficult even by magic.[2]
Cosmology
The crystal sphere that contained Athas was not connected to any of the usual spelljamming routes out of Realmspace, Krynnspace, or Greyspace. Its location in the phlogiston was not documented in any book or chart. Some speculated that the crystal sphere was simply too distant from known space, so much so that traveling there would take several lifetimes.[3]
The world's inaccessibility was the result of a property of its crystal sphere that rendered it impenetrable to spelljammers and almost completely cut off from other planes. The border of the Ethereal plane within the sphere was replaced by an environment known as "the Gray", which caused anyone in it to become lost and slowly weaken. It was extremely difficult to overcome by planar travel even by powerful spell such as teleport without error and plane shift, which had a risk of sending the caster into the Gray instead of the intended destination. Even the contact other plain spell had a chance of pulling the caster into the Gray.
Athas was never connected to Raveloft.
@@williamlee7482 It definitely is or was at some point in time. The entire setting of Kalidnay is from when Ravenloft snatched up the city of Kalidnay.
I know there was some strangeness in the transition from 2e to 3e when it came to licensing issues, so it's possible it was retconned out of existence at around that time.
I miss the Dark Sun, the real one before they nerfed D&D. Only setting of the time that required your party to start off at third level, otherwise you'd never live through it.
Wow. I watched a video about Dark Sun earlier which led me here, and now I'm fascinated by the idea of checking out other videos on your channel. Great video!
Awesome video about a lesser known aspect of an awesome dnd setting. I played a lot in this setting, just not using dnd mechanics, and my firends created characters that we remember fondly to this day.
I just discovered your channel thanks to someone sharing this video on a Facebook group. It's all fantastic material, please keep on posting!
I'd love to see more on Dark Sun
Ill be taking some of these idea and applying them to my table.
Hell yeah, brother!
My favorite DnD Setting. Good summation on geopolitics, some minor inaccurate statements (although in my DS campaigns, I also make resurrection very hard to come by).
Come play Dark Sun at Origins or Gen Con - The Mindmage Ascendency awaits you!
"The gods turned their back on them" Not true. In the original 2E setting background, there just weren't any gods. In the 4E setting, it was the Elemental Primoridals that killed all the gods.
Fascinating stuff, I love all the DnD settings, but this is one I don't know a whole lot about!
Dark Sun always made me think of Hobbes's Leviathan.
So it made you think of real life?
Awesome breakdown! I love the geopolitical breakdown, definitely gives me inspiration. Keep up the great work! MORE DUNGEON MASTERPIECE!!!
I loved this analysis. So well done! I just wish it were twice as long! Future video ? maybe a deeper dive on the dark Sun world? It's such a fan favorite that I think it deserves your well balanced analysis.
Absolutely love how you used Russia to describe the horrific living conditions of Dark Sun
ahahaha they're gonna collapse again
@@demilembias2527 U.S not to far behind
@@demilembias2527 Russia will outsurvive most of the Western countries.
@@rakothyan Funny how one year later Russia is doing fine, still controlling all Russian speaking territories, growing economically, testing their missiles successfully and so on. The US, on the other hand, has suffered a humiliating defeat in Ukraine and is now being forced to lift sanctions on Venezuela to avoid recession, another bitter defeat. To make things worse their zionist overlords are pushing them into yet another war they can't win, which will likely cement their downfall. Their NATO servan... err, allies in western Europe are beyond f***ed.
Prospects for stability are much better in Russia than in the US at this point. I wouldn't have children if I was stuck in 'Muricah, not just because it's gonna suck like Athas soon, but because I wouldn't wish any children, let alone my own, to grow up surrounded by ignorant narcissists, rednecks, zealots and Mexicans. Oh well, we won't have to feel bad for them for too much long, just look how badly they fared in Ukraine, everything else will follow that same path...
@@demilembias2527 britbongistani talking about someone else collapsing, lmao
Idk, the Sorcerer Kings sound just like CEOs... wait a moment is our world doomed as well?!?
I know its been a month but its funny what you said about Gulg and Nibenay. My longest running darksun campaign was basically our murderhobos being Nibenian agents working to bring down Gulg.
Fantastic geopolitical work
I was a Game Master for Dark Sun. It's an incredible, unique, and very rich universe. I loved it! Today, I have obsidian dice as a tribute to the world of Athas, which holds a special place in my dice collection!
I always found Dark Sun to be an interesting setting. There is a saying: In a famine a man has the right to slit another man's throat for a loaf of bread. Athas is the setting to run thought experiments around that notion. For us, industrialization and capitalism has so far been able to provide more and more resources. People can argue about wealth inequality, but at the end of the day that is like arguing while having enough to drink that someone else has enough for a swimming pool, while you've always had more to drink that the year before and you've got ice cubes in it now. Zero sum interactions, much less zero sum interactions over resources that are simply insufficient to share, is not a principle that governs the world we have known. In some respects I think Dark Sun is mostly a science fiction setting, in that science fiction really consists of imagining a world where something we take for granted has been changed and exploring the implications resulting from that change to how the world works. Fantasy usually takes the world as we know it and imagines something cool but doesn't explore the implications, as the cool thing exists as if by magic.
Dark Sun is heavily inspired by the early Bronze Age city states in Asia Minor I believe. Lack of iron, arid conditions (taken up to 11), and small enclaves ruled over by despotic priest kings. Slavery is the primary pillar of economy, along with limited agriculture, and life is extremely cheap.
Great video. Really useful for a sense of tone and what sort of challenges the players should face in this sort of setting. Also some great indirect tips in analysing other settings this way. More please
I found this video looking for information for a friends game, and I am now thoroughly enjoying all your videos on tips and tricks for DMs. Your Hexgrid video really has me inspired. Keep up the great videos.
Good summary, hoss! For those who want something like a gonzo Dark Sun with sandworms and blasters, allow me to recommend Cha'alt.
This is such an amazingly specific topic for a video. Love it. Dark Sun is a fantastic setting.
I was already interested in this setting and you just made it sound absolutely awesome! 👍
Great breakdown. This makes me want to break out ny box set and maybe actually use this setting!
Lol one day I'll actually run a game in it
@@DungeonMasterpiece lol I've been telling myself that since the mid 90s . Someday..
@@DungeonMasterpiece Do it! It's the only published setting of D&D I ever ran a campaign in, and the reason I took a seat behind the DM screen. It took me 3 years to finally burn it to the ground, and it was great. All the thematic conflicts to exploit, the brutality. My DM tip: treat the land itself as a powerful, evil, twisted NPC actively trying to kill your players.
Great content overall, good job!
This is why I love dnd settings the world building
I love this setting so much...
It's great, isn't it?
Same. The novels still hold a spot in my heart. I play alot of 5e and my DnD wet dream is to play in a true to form adaptation for DS in 5e.
This and the Forgotten Realms geopolitics video are my favorite, more settings! Dragonlance next?
Or maybe Eberron?
I think I'm doing greyhawk next, but I still haven't figured out the next ones
This is fuckin awesome, man. Would love to see you take a look at the Primeval Thule setting.
Awesome. Dark Sun was always one of my favorite settings, and you encapsulated it perfectly.
Really like your stuff and how you approach from an academic angle.
I'm already well versed in this topic myself, but could you try to do the Geopolitics of Mystara, or the Known World as it used to be called?
Fun fact: The mountain chain that separates the Forest Ridge from the Tablelands is called the "Ringing Mountains" because they are so high up, over 20,000 foot peaks (including snowcaps), that everyone's ears pop from the pressure differential and start ringing when they try scaling them. Even so, the heroes in one of the only books made for that setting managed it, albeit with some difficulty.
And to put the scarcity of metal on Athas into some additional perspective: the average longsword in D&D would cost an adventurer 15gp. On Athas, that same sword would cost about 250gp. Relatively speaking, of course; people pay with coins made of ceramic instead of metal, here.
Yet another small factoid -- despite the lack of rivers and oceans for normal ships, ships do in fact exist in some quantity, supported mainly by great trading houses. These run through some device involving psychic or magic energy, allowing ships to hover above the Silt Sea and visit other cities. The city-state of Balic is the biggest one for this.
Thank you for doing this, an overview on geopolitics gives me inspiration for running my games and build my campaign.
Yes. All the insights missing from most discussion... this should help DMs include the relationships and important social factors well, and it's concise! Good job.
Consice is key, for me. I feel like I could compress a matt Colville 45 min video into 5 and a half min. Lol.
Rajaat is the one to blame and the sorcerer kings were his champions but that's another story. "The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King" covers Hamanu's rise from simple farmer to "Troll Scorcher" to eternal ruler of the city-state of Urik. It's the best Dark Sun novel imo having read them all
Can I go there on holiday?
The whole place is a beach. Why not!? 😂
I loved me some darksun since wake of the ravager and you laid it out perfectly... rekindled my fandom for darksun. Great video!
As a dnd player with a degree in geography I love your perspective
My favourite D&D setting. Fun to do art for :)
i subbed in the first minute, this was excellent. love finding a new channel with a ton of quality content
I saw a few videos from your channel, and I noticed everytime the things became more and more interesting the video ends... maybe it's just me....
Could you please elaborate a vid about magic fueled societies and acces to magical healing and resurrection
Nice video about my favourite D&D scenario! Just to help for further content on Athas, the other city-states, besides Gulg and Nibenay, really have negligible access to timber, with few exceptions, but they are not that devoid of resources or political intrigue with their neighbours (or even internal strife, in the case of Raam!). The geopolitics of each city-state (including the other two, Kurn/New Kurn and Eldaarich, to the north of the Tablelands) would make a nice series of videos, if I can suggest.
Just how you came on frame, oooof… earned a subscriber that was amazing🎉🎉
I came from another video mentioning Dark Sun. Although I am a dummy and noob in the world of DnD the world is so fascinating. Please keep making videos such as these. Although I am an outsider to DnD i love the story man.
Also freakin Metal.
Welcome to the club! I'll be making more!
Nice video. Athas will always be my favorite TSR setting
Masterwork on your research. Absolutely love Dark Sun, it was always my favorite D&D. Playing the early DOS games still bring back much nostalgia. I really wish someone would create some games back in Athas.
I'd love to if wotc would publish something with the ip for the DMs Guild lic.
sadly not going to happen. wotc state that the darksun setting was too "problematic" for current sensibilities. its a damn shame, as was pointed out in the video, the sorceror kings are perfect big bads. shame they are going to let all of it go to waste. its fans to keep its memory alive now :(
just watched the hex crawl video and now this? youre going to be huge, i can tell.
Maybe one day!
Did they change the lore at some point? Because various points you brought up don't align with what I read back in the day.
Last time I checked, the problem of Athas regarding divine power wasn't that the gods had turned their back on the world, but that they never were able to access it in the first place (if I recall correctly, this is due to the Gray, some plane surrounding Athas that cuts it off from actual divine access). In fact, one of the villains of the setting (the undead Sorcerer King Dregoth) relentlessly pursues the plan to change the natural laws of the world to allow for actual godhood, and while it's up to the DM to let him succeed, the default outcome is that he's doomed to fail. As it is put in the source material, the conditions that allow for godhood "simply don't exist on Athas".
However, this doesn't mean that divine magic doesn't exist in the setting (we have the clerics of the elements, the druids who serve the spirits of the land, and the Sorcerer Kings are able to provide their templars with divine magic which ironically they aren't able to access themselves); and this also includes the ability to cast resurrection magic - at least as long as you have unrestricted access to the spiritual sphere (which clerics didn't have in 2e, but druids and templars did).
The original material is kind of vague on the point of gods. The setting description is written as "The Wanderer's Journal", by an unreliable narrator (not as in lying, but as in someone who just doesn't know everything). It is clear that the ancients had *religion*, but the question of whether the gods actually existed, and to what degree they were powerful elementals (who can grant divine magic in the setting) is left open. Later material made it more clear-cut, with Defilers & Preservers adding "the Grey" as a layer mostly between the Prime and the Astral and Outer planes and blocking off divine magic, and with 4e bringing the Dawn War and its alternate ending as another explanation.
As a geography teacher, I love this sort of stuff. Thanks!
It was intense! I never see before an geopolitical analisys about athas!
Great content! I love Dark Sun!
Minor nitpick: At 5:43 the title says "Acopolypse Demography". Its either a misspelling, or some term I don't know.
Amazing analysis for DMs and players alike. Thank you!
This was an awesome video. I love how you tied a discussion of demographics into this great campaign setting. I’d love to see you take on Dark Sun in further videos, there are a lot of points to be made about Athas and climate change on our own world, for example.
Dark Suns Shattered Lands was one of my first RPGs in DOS, fun times!
Just found your channel, this is fantastic. Subbed.
Im just getting in to DnD i so loving the law behind everything.
I can't wait to make my caracter 👍
My favorite setting that I can never seem to get myself motivated to run because of its brutality. There is even more hope in Call of Cthulhu.
The original intent of Dark Sun was that (if the DM wanted to) players could change the setting for the better. The original set of Dark Sun novels were meant to illustrate how this could be done, but TSR made their events canon which kinda screwed this up, because they really wanted it to have a metaplot for some reason. If you are afraid the game would be too bleak to play you can always go the route of "look how fucked up this world is, let's be the ones to make it marginally better".
Hmm, why not embark upon campaigns to do the opposite? One of my early objectives in doing so would be seeding secret psionic cults training to think as a hive mind in efforts to drive the sky ray race raging insane
Man, I would love to see you break down the kingdoms in Harn. Do a whole series, we could call you Harn de Blij :D
The Dark Sun & Wake of The Ravager games are available on GOG, and are well worth the price.
No gods also means no Divine magic, which means no access to the spell 'create water', cutting off an easy (though time consuming) way of slowly restoring nature.
If I recall correctly, Tyr's iron mines still have some, *some* mind you, iron ore ledt. So there is still a bit of metalworking
Love your content. I have 35 years of DM experience but you still provide thoughtful insight. Props sir. What would a kingdom ran by necromancers be like? I would love to here your thoughts.
Demography would be the big geopop issue. Burning through the living Rob's ones ability to get more corpses, but corpses offer tons of low skill labor that never get sick or tired.
In a commodity based economy, this would be very successful. In a service based economy where intelectual creativity is important, this is toxic. So it's a question of growing fast and cheap with a low ceiling or growing slower with a higher ceiling for economic success.
Thank you so much for putting Celsius. Would have had to paused the video haha. Really loving this series
I'm glad!!
I had these Mull, in a Spelljammer...
That was a pretty crazy campaign.
Excellent video
Would love to see assessments of Eberron and the world of Numinera
I'll get to them eventually! I plan on doing many many fantasy worlds
@@DungeonMasterpiece looking forward to them.
Even though this is somewhat sad to say: the situation on Athas mirrors our current time:
1. Many of my friends feel that the world is getting less safe and hopeful to bring our kids into, and
2. Many of the rich and powerful feel that it would be better to replace humans with artificial constructs and robots to fuel their destruction of the environment.
Thanks Ryan.
Oh! You have already done this!
Will be interesting a hipotesis about how look's Athas Shadowfell & the Feywild, geopoltics, etc..
Dark Sun was unique in another way you didn't mention. While gods didn't exist and magic killed life by its very nature, everyone on the planet was psionically active in some way (there might have been a species that wasn't, I'm not sure). This translated to every character and NPC having one or more psionic powers, with the aristocracy having a significantly better mastery of their mind due to having been schooled from an early age.
We definitely need another Dark Sun Computer Game! And if some politics get mixed in, so be it. ;)
And halflings are actually the oldest race. My favorite Dark Sun content was the tribe of one book series.
Nerding out 💪 love it my dude.
You craving some DARK SUN Savagery? Check out this brutal blog NOW!
www.bluegoblingames.com/blog
after hearing kyle brink say "dark sun" was problematic i had to know more and this didn't disappoint!
Me and my friend always wondered how well a monk would survive in dark sun
Wow your opening described my time station in the Middle East perfectly
Great video! Looking forward to checking out more material on your channel. Furthermore, the fact that you were talking about Russian History is kind of eery in hindsight.
This video is absolutely fantastic
Old school caster hate. Spelljammer was rather successful at hiding its CH before play began, but Dark Sun absolutely reveled in it. The creators just rolled around in it.
Tell me if I'm wrong: Half-giants are those belonging to a designed race (in AD&D2Ed the players were also rewarded by the rules with XPs for behaving and shifting their allignaments in the same way of a given leader to imitate) while the Muls were accidental results of putting long enough in close contact, like in the slave pits, humans with dwarves, a result that gave birth to that hybrid that a mastermind can use better than the Half-giants for many tasks firstly because of Muls' lower water consumption (Half-giants consumed 4 times than humans, Muls about the same but with some dwarven-like advantage).
I would love to see a Geopolitical video on Birthright
I'll get there eventually!!! I'll prolly do ebberon and krynn before I get there, but I will eventually get to it!