Dark Sun/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • And the Fandom Rejoiced - Discovering that the 4e book changed little-to-nothing about the original setting, combined with the Continuity Reboot, came as a pleasant surprise to fans. While it hasn't been out very long, the expected Broken Base has failed to materialize.
  • Fanon Discontinuity:The true prehistory of the world was detailed in Dark Sun Revised edition. Many players just ignore the whole damn thing and continue on with Athas 1E. To wit:

    In the beginning, Athas was a paradisical water planet, populated by supergenius biotech using halflings. But then they did something wrong and some brown algae thing was spreading out of control and covering the planet. They did something to fix it, which made the blue sun turn yellow, and turned the water planet into Traditional Fantasy Planet. They then were mutated/transformed themselves into all the standard fantasy races because of it. But there was one mutated biotech halfling, Rajaat, who longed for the way things were, so he invented magic! (Up until this point magic did not exist, it was all psionics and super biotech).

    Rajaat then took a group of humans and taught them magic, telling them to wipe out all other sentient races but them. But it was all a trick--what he really wanted to do was kill all races but the halflings, restore them to their previous state, and then restore super halfling biotech world! (How Rajaat even remotely thought he would accomplish this by inventing defiler magic and unleashing a cadre of super-defilers is never explained).
    So the Cleansing Wars rage on for a while until the Champions of Rajaat figure out a screw job has been going on, and so instead of completing the genocides fully (some races have been wiped out though), they then seal Rajaat in a prison dimension and the mightest of them becomes the Dragon of Tyr while the rest become the Sorcerer Kings. By this point the world is the blasted wasteland of Athas that we all know and love. The End
    • The story changes in the Dragon magazine 3E revamp were also mostly ignored - it skipped forward several centuries, added a few new dragon-kings, and brought in the maedars (as a race of Emo Teens for some reason).
    • The very existence of the Mind Lords of the Last Sea is another piece of 2e Athas that many fans do not acknowledge.