Shattered Swords and Badass Bears: My 1st Dark Sun Experience Part 1 of 2

I was playing Dungeons and Dragons with my buddies from the UP Hobbygamers’ Circle one Saturday afternoon. We were using the Dark Sun campaign setting, and although the actual supplement doesn’t come out till August, our DM, BJ, skillfully cooked something up out of our current material. We played the events of “The Verdant Passage” using characters based on the book (expect for one, we were five players and there were only four protagonists). Almost none of us, save the DM, has ever read the book, so still felt like we can do whatever the hell we want at the same time were still able to somewhat follow the events written.

Anyway, we had a lot of fun playing, and it was my first time playing in Dark Sun, and I immediately fell in love in it. The whole post-apocalyptic, “gnomes/orcs/trolls/etc are extinct”, godless setting just fascinated me. Whenever I play D&D, it’s always in some Tolkien ripoff fantasy land, changing the geography to make it “different”. There’s Forgotten Realms, where there are more gods than there are beads on a rosary, and there’s Eberron, where they simply upped the tech level to add trains and airships. To me, these two settings still felt like they were just expansion packs of fantasy gaming.

Let me give you a description. The world is called Athas, and civilization is scattered around an desert area the size of Texas, because it’s the only part that’s livable. There are nine city states, each ruled by a megalomaniac sorcerer-king, who want nothing more than to become a full dragon (oh yeah, almost no dragons here… almost). Each city is guarded by a group of special police called templars who gain their arcane power from said megalomaniac. Brutal, gut-wrenching gladiatoral matches are just part of their daily lives, elves are freakishly tall, dwarves are bald, using magic is illegal unless you are a templar, metal is rare, forcing you to use obsidian or bone which are prone to breakage, halflings will try to eat you, and oh, anything will try kill you. Even a cactus.

As I said I loved the whole “The World Is Dying” scenario, but not because I’m some destructive maniac wanting to blow up the world. Well, maybe. But what I truly appreciated was the very fact that you wake up every morning already makes you awesome.

There was one defining moment where I really felt the awesomeness of Dark Sun. Dring our game, we were attacked by a bear. Being ignorant, I simply thought it’ll just claw around and try to maul us.

It then threw a mind blast. It fuckin’ attacked our minds.

I was stunned for a second before I said what needs to be said, “Holy shit! It can do that?! It’s a bear!”

I’ll leave it at that for now. Next post I’ll go more into the setting, and explain why living there actually teaches an important life lesson.