D&Ds Forgotten Post Apocalypse Video Game | Dark Sun: Shattered Lands Review 

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I had so much fun with this game, although I always need to avoid the temptations to make a full party of half giant gladiators

6:25 “Never ask a woman her age, a man his salary, or Tektuktitlay where all the cat women went.” ****ING GOLD! 😂

YES! Sorcerer Kings be praised I've been waiting for this baby, when I'm dust and bones out in the wastes of Athas I can atleast say "I got to watch the WilliamSRD Darksun series!" Also some "fun" Darksun facts. 1) Darksun was originally supposed to be an Artic setting, but the designers decided that it didn't show enough skin (Not a joke.) so they switched to the parched, leather bikini clad world we know and love. 2) Halflings live in some of the few jungles left and eat people, just straight up halfling cannibals. 3) Half-Giants alignment is completely random, mechanically you choose one of the axis and the other is randomly determined the next day, one day your lawful good, next day who knows? 4) Speaking of alignment when you're desperately thirsty your alignment, whatever it may be, is *ignored* and you will do *anything* to get a drink. Your alignment comes back after and you get to live with the consequences. 5) The starting level of all Darksun characters is level 5 (which in AD&D is nothing to sneeze at.) which a Githyanki raiding party figured out when they tried to invade Athas and royally got their shit rocked in by these mad-max, psionically powered madmen. 6) Relavent for Shattered Lands but of all the Sorcerer Kings Tectuktitlay is the weakest, and is the only one to prop himself is an actual god. I'll save more for part two, donate to your local templars!

Honestly post apocalyptic fantasy is soooooooo fucking underrated. Imagine the scenarios: gangs of raider wizards, knight’s wearing mad max style armour, mutant dragons, beholder gangs. So much you can do. Thanks for introducing this to me, instant subscription

Hasbro needs to fun an HD remaster immediately

There is an unlimited XP exploit: in the Elven caravan, one of the elves sends you on a quest. When you return, you choose the dialogue option that you finished his quest and you get the XP. But the dialogue option is never removed, so you can keep clicking on it over and over till you max out your level.

The two Dark Suns are my definition of a summer game, still remember the summer I got WoTR for my birthday, my first cRPG as a kid and worked through it with an English dictionary (at least until hitting one of the trademark game breaking bugs). Still, with the improved versions getting online I blast through them once every year.

That intro setup of a slave pen/arena with people to sidequest and places to explore but still with a hard confinement is great inspiration for a tabletop starting adventure. Periodically, like once a day or so, the party is forced to report for their next gladiator match but the rest of the time it's just life in the pits, surviving in captivity, and plotting escape. Lots of story ideas and piece-meal worldbuilding opportunities.

Dark Sun was such a great and really different D&D setting. I consider it the second part of the Weird trilogy of D&D second edition settings. Spelljammer being the first and Planescape coming shortly after. There was so much to like here that was different and unique. It was the first official setting to allow Thri-Kreen characters but it also had other new races(for the time) like Half-giants and Mules(which were super touch half dwarves). The other traditional races were all crazy as well. Halflings were savage cannibals, elves were tall nomads that ran fast, etc. You started at level 3 because this setting ate first level characters and had a system in place that encourages you to make several characters that could easily swap out of the one you were playing died. This was a brutal world.

The thing I loved the most about this game and remember clearly, was that Magic Missile sounds like a bomb going off when it hits. The humblest of level 1 spells making this huge explosion sound. It was so ridiculous. I loved it. 😂

Bro i did not expect a czepeku sponsorship for this video lol, wow thats insane to me.

Curious to hear your complaints about the graphics - I've always thought they nailed the Dark Sun look pretty well. The colours especially seem to capture the wild barbarian vibe of the Brom illustrations.

Great video! There is a curious aspect to the first game, it combines a bit of "epic scale" story (unite the different factions to resist against the sorcerer king army) with almost an "episode" style of story, with each village being sort of a self-contained story. You are quite right, as the defilers you came across often begin the main attraction. I still remember the first one, that bonus dungeon below the sewers, which was kind of a small horror story inside the game. Then a bit sense of scale, from that guy in the sewers to the latter ones, which feel more dangerous. Oh, one thing I almost forget, about taking a party from one game to another, it is doable, but not all stuff make it to the other game, meaning several items might vanish or be replaced by something else, still, taking a party might make a bit more easy, depending on what you get in the previous game, but starting a new one, isn't the end of the world. During character creation, you could give yourself absurd high stats, which made the game way too easy, which was hilarious given the idea, from what I understand, was that in the setting, due to all the apocalypses going on, that was the reason, the default characters had such high stats to compensate that player characters would die very easily. However, with high stats, you likely defeat everything very quickly... On the bugs aspect, I remember at least one, where you need some rocks to get a magical sword in a volcano, where I had to reload a save due to one rock vanish in thin air as I about to use it. But watch out in the second one, I just remember getting stuck in the second game due to a key which I could not find anywhere. I think I read somewhere, that the Psurlons would first appear here (I mean in the game, not even in the original setting, but I could be wrong) and then ported to other settings.

Wait, Who said Wake of the Ravager had better art? Oh, oh my dear. They lied to you. They tried to do a graphical upgrade and it somehow ends up looking worse... like.. blurrier. I am very fond of this game. When I recently streamed it, I named my Thi'keen Amy The Bug Lady only to feel the need to rename her by the ending to AMY MURDERHAND. As much as this might not be the grimdark gritty game it suggested, It gave me a bonzana of joy. The Druid of the Howling Mountain shouting down to the middle of a conversation taking place in the valley below got me good. I can only imagine being another person in that town hearing "I WILL TAKE CARE OF THE VILLAGE WHILE THEY'RE GONE" being an absolute "WTF" moment for them. The thing I would praise this game for most is the Storylet sort of idea, Each town's scenario is very different and a little campaign of it's own and almost completely independant of each other. Al-Qadim's Genie's Curse also does this but that's a bit more chained together then these two games.

Great video! I love that you talk about these old games and cover so many parts of them. I always enjoy your videos. Looking forward to the sequel!

I remember playing this one. It suuuuuuucked me right in. I spent so many times walking its labyrinth patterns in the desert, not knowing what I was meant to be doing and not caring cause it was too much fun.

I was obsessed with this game for a year

Respect for a fellow person who thinks Thri-Kreen are cool and need to be in every party they can be in.

Your reviews for this and Wake of the Ravager inspired me to pick up the Dark Sun boxed set. I'm already planning a multi-generational campaign about shepherding an Avangion into its final form so it can save the world. Thanks for the inspiration!

This is my favorite D&D game.

Rather than restart the game, you can always trade out your party members at any time. Remove them from party and generate a new character. When you remove a party member, they're put into a reserve pool, so you can always have them rejoin with their equipment and experience if need be.

Super cool Czepeku is sponsoring you! I've actually been using their maps for a while, at first the free versions they upload on Reddit, but I've subbed a few times for my DnD games on Roll20, really cool when an ad actually connects... Also the video caught me off guard, THE BIG MAN IS BACK, so happy to see the Quaaludes Man lives on.

Good review. That soundtrack is hilarious. I can imagine half-giant dancers doing jazz hands to those tracks between arena battles.

I actually really liked the Jazz music growing up with this game, that intro / character creation song is just awesome.

I've actually played this one, it is archaic but when I understood how the designers thought, the controls made so much sense and I got very immersed in the pixel graphics. I will say I don't mind the cartoony aesthetic, as grimdark is notoriously thought of being shades of grey/brown. Dark Sun can have beauty, it just usually will end up killing you.

Never played a DS campaign but I really loved the books. Very, very dark for D&D.

Shattered Lands is a game that could use some type of spiritual successor, for its time the combat feels pretty tactical though the cursor feels janky as hell. Also the main menu theme is so damn good

Nice to see you tackle this often overlooked game. This is oddly one of the few licensed D&D games I ever finished all the way to the end back in the day just due to a random chunk of free time / some strange celestial alignment (along with Eye of the Beholder and Dark Queen of Krynn for some reason) so I have fond memories of it, despite it's many glaring flaws.

I just discovered these games and was looking for a review specifically of them only to find you uploaded this 7 hours ago. Great timing lol.

I *loved* this game as a kid! Super underrated, IMO

I LOVED this game when I was a kid. I knew nothing about D&D, the lore of this game, the history, what awell made character was, any of that but I just loved this game as its own thing. I remember playing in the arena for hours trying to see how long I could survive in the arena, and I used to rely heavily on the mind control spells to get me through battles

You really nailed how dissonant the music and the setting were. I really enjoyed the dancing edits.

I loved the Dark Sun world so much as a kid, as well as the Defiler/Preserver dichotomy (that blew my tiny mind). I never played this game, but it could be why post-apoc still appeals to me as a game setting.

Interestingly "the Grey" appears to also have taken some kind of physical form in spell jammer. The crystal sphere (OG Spelljammers solar systems) containing Athas and it's moons is completely encased in a grey shell. Basically a cannon reason for why defilers haven't spread elsewhere, although it was implied a few might have escaped somehow..

If they made a darksun game now they would have a massive audiance

I forgot about the second Darksun game entirely. I like the setting of Dark Sun and it's Psionics bent always makes me wish other DnD settings adapted into CRPGs had included the Psion class. Even to this day I hoped against sense, practicality, and Larian being very clear what wouldn't be in their BG3, that we'd at least get the Aberrant Mind Sorcerer. Mind you, I was raised on Wizardry and Psionic style abilities just being part of a fantasy world. I get a lot of people find it too sci-fi for fantasy. I love it, though, so I love Dark Sun. Thank you for another lovely video.

First video I've seen from you and I'm already hooked. Love the pace, the little tidbits of backstory just to get everyone up to speed. Though it a bit distracting with the audio quality going up and down, mostly due to the hand held mic sections, along with it shifting left and right.

I wish Hasbro or whoever is managing the D&D license would go the Games Workshop route and let anyone take a crack at making a D&D video game set in any of their official campaigns. Sure, like 80% of the games would be crap, but I think it would be far preferable to the D&D games drought we've had for the last 20 years.

Love your content! Keep up the great work

LOVE me some Dark Sun! Glad to see some content on these games, since I never got to play them myself. Thanks for the entertaining breakdown!

Just wanted to say I'm loving your channel overall right now. Interesting topics, well presented, balanced reviews that highlight the good and bad of each game, and you're doing the hard work of playing old esoteric and unapproachable games that many modern users just bounce off of. You're doing a great job, thanks for what you're doing!

There really isn't enough coverage for these old Gold Box games on RU-vid, so I'm glad you're forcing yourself to go through them (you're right; I'm definitely one of those people who will never, _ever_ touch these due to quality of life issues, lol). Playability-wise, they're whatever nowadays in 2023, but _content-wise,_ they're always fascinating. Good luck with the next one!

I just wanna say that I think you’re doing awesome work. Thanks for making the videos you make.

Dude dark sun as an actual setting was awesome

I played through this one at least a couple of times soon after it came out and quite enjoyed it. My friends and I had a Dark Sun D&D campaign for a little while as well, and of course I had a human preserver character with the long-term plan of having him dual class to psionicist and then become an avangion, but of course we didn't play nearly long enough for that to happen. While I remember much of what you showed from this game, I know I played Wake of the Ravager as well, but barely remember anything from it. I know I was never able to complete it since I ran into some bug near the end that prevented me from progressing to the next screen. Thanks for the video and I look forward to the Wake of the Ravager one!

I played this game to completion so many times, this is the first game I did every single thing i thought possible, I fought every fight talked to every person, collected every treasure, played as different races and classes. I've been waiting for a video on it I thought about making my own even.

I wish this game came with a scenario editor. Fan made stuff would have given this game a lot of legs. The engine and design made this game half RPG half adventure game. I remember the sequel being very buggy and a huge problem. This one is just super comfy to me. Also shoutout to Gerald Brom for giving DS its look. Very iconic.

Good video, you are passionate but also mercifully breif and have a lot of funny asides. Subscribed

YESSSS!!!! I got my Windows 98 machine running a few weeks ago, and while it's mostly for industrial purposes, the first thing I installed was Dark Sun Shattered Lands. Too bad it's too hot in the garage to play through. Have to wait until fall. :)

Ah yes, DnD but not Mid. Tectuktitlay is a hero and should be regarded as such.

Excellent, good video, looking forwards to seeing you play the sequel as well.

I played and loved this game, when it was new(ish).

Easily my favorite setting in the series

Great timing, I just played most of the way through this. I ran into a bug in the final or penultimate dungeon, so I haven't finished it yet, but I was very happy how well a lot of the game has held up. I really recommend it as sort path crpgs could have gone down but didn't, plus Athos as a setting is a just really cool for people who like grim dark and/or environmentalism.

I hope this doesn’t offend you, because I think your content is great and you have an awesome voice. Just please, PLEASE hold your mic in front of your face and keep it there, the constant volume changes make this a really difficult watch for me

I loved these games in the 90s.

Warriors of the eternal sun has the best dnd soundtrack that i can think of. So addictive.

This was my first real intro into DND. No wonder a lot of the high fantasy stuff doesnt work for me. Ive gone to DCC and a few other OSRs for my fun. Always trying to run Dark Sun.

Dark Sun should be explores more. Id love a modern crpg of this setting.

DORK SON MY FAVE ❤

Ahh, one of those games I always watch from a far but never play.

Game: You inhabit a godless wasteland of doom Music: *Leisure Suit Larry approaches the casino*

Let's take a moment to remember all the Magic Erasers and Antibacterial Wipes lost in the Cleansing Wars.

I love this game so much. Played it like three times all the way through before I started anything else. So thank you for reminding me. Alas I have to say, the last battle? The one you had such problems with? Yeah, I died once in my first playthrough and after that I had *THE* winning strategy: Wall of Stone from my preserver or cleric thereby forcing all those enemies to attack me through a bottleneck without being able to use arrows or spells against me. Worked like a charm every single time. ^^

I like these games but I still find it annoying that for some reason you can't have Athasian Minstrels aka the setting's version of Bards in your party. It was less annoying not being able to use Bards in the Goldbox games because they were based on 1st edition AD&D where becoming a Bard was very difficult and took a long time (You had to have high stats and earn several levels as a Fighter then class change to a thief and earn more levels then class change again to become a Bard) but the Dark Suns games are based on 2nd edition where Bard was a starting class so I see no reason not to include it as an option.

I remember Shattered Lands. Made it through the game with a giant and a few web spells - even the final battle! Sleep and prismatic spray were also great at the lower levels...

Having worked my way through these games back in the day when you had to enter codes from the game manual to exit into the sewers, I absolutely love them and their very unique music score. Sure they are probably a bit light on the absolutely soul crushing setting but I find that to not be a deal breaker, the bugs in WoTR though are absolutely terrible. Be sure to save often on separate save files or you will be starting again a lot!

There are things that you did that if you had done them differently would have made that last battle even harder... let that sink in.

I've played through Shattered Lands 3 times, but never made it all the way through Wake of the Ravager due to a combination of bugs and the downgraded graphics (yeah, I'd say the original has far better graphics than the sequel) making my eyes bleed. I personally felt it captured the intended atmosphere pretty well, most problems have multiple ways to approach/solve them and you're given a lot of freedom in which order you tackle the world as presented to you (or even how much of it you skip). I also appreciated the final battle feeling like going up against an actual army (Knights of the Chalice pulled that off really well too), though if you abused the character creation feature of being able to just manually max out every stat it'll lose a lot of its edge.

God I miss this campaign setting. They really pushed this in the 80s and 90s. Had a really intense but fun campaign here

Raistlin, angst-y? Eh, I always got the impression that he was on pretty good terms with evil from the start. Now, Tanis, that there was a whole box full of wangst.

YES!!! Been eagerly waiting for this video, and it delivers! Regarding the soundtrack, one thing about the second game (Wake of the Ravager) is that its soundtrack came in the game's CD, as CD tracks, which allowed them to have a somewhat better audio quality, or at least be less MIDI-esque. They're largely the same songs, but with instrumentation they sound a lot more like a hard rock that fits the setting well rather than the first game's jazzy tunes. Well, except for the halfling village theme, which is bizarrely just some generic fantasy music that clashes completely with the rest of the game's music.

My favorite campaign setting, and I'm kinda sad but also relieved that modern WOTC hasn't touched it. They would sand down all the grit.

Very memorable game. I even remember the *name* of the defiler in the sewers, Dagolar. I liked the sidequests in this, even though the game was overall one of the easiest cRPGs I played.

Jazzy style of the soundtrack fits nicely cuz of the reason Timothy B. Brown, one of the two designers behind Dark Sun, is a prog rock musician and enthusiast.

Ive been waiting for this one!

Hey William! Want to like & comment but I actually won't be watching the video - yet! Your coverage of these games inspired Me to pick up the Dark Sun duo set off Steam for real cheapskiis. I'm having a blast in the early Arena area after getting wiped hard and having to come back with a better party build. If\when I finish the game I'll be sure to come back and check this out! I just wanted you to know you've inspired Me to check out these cool games ^w^

The setting reminds me a bit of Tyranny, with it being set after the bad guys won. Actually, I never finished Tyranny. I need to do that. If you play it, a tip: don’t attempt to find a “good” ending, at least not your first time thru. I’m not saying something like that doesn’t exist,it may depending on your outlook, just that this isn’t the sort of game where finding a good ending is what you’re meant to be doing.

So were there mechanics for preservers to defile?

I killed everyone in the barracks after the initial battle. Took me a few tries to get it done but its pretty awesome.

Not forgotten. Certainly adored. Great game! :)

I saw Dark Sun campaign stuff in stores decades ago, but I never knew much about it. I only just learned about it very recently, and what amazed me the most is how influential it appears to have been. For example, you can see parts of it in the Elder Scrolls games, notably Morrowind. Then again, it could be that Dark Sun and these other games are based on the same fantasy literature sources - I am not familiar enough with them to know for sure. Some of those very early fantasy and science fiction writers were amazingly creative, far more so that the mostly derivative stuff that people have written since 1980.

There had been ideas for psionics in D&D previously, at most a little rules annex that was easy to overlook. But in Dark Sun they wanted to really show off their new ideas for psionics. Everyone has a chance of being psionic. The wildlife and flora of Athas is also psionic so your leather barbarian with a bone sword can have a mental duel with a plant. Everyone starts around level 3 just from growing up on Athas. Metal is rare, a metal sword is a huge treasure and metal armour practically unheard of. People use stone arrowheads, bone daggers, clubs and hide armour. You roll attributes differently, so everyone has a higher average on their attributes. Even a wizard could probably press their own weight. There was a mechanic where water depravation would make your character temporarily Evil. Everyone will do the most effed-up things if it stands between them and water.

I am so curious what that thing at 29:17 is about. Can someone pleeeease tell meeee

Yes! Love your videos

Really interested to see you play the second game

the on canera segments made this video even better

"Mantis Gwen" - I love it!

I loved this game, truly a hidden gem.

Ah Dark sun. Loved this as a kid. This game gave me a love of the grimdark and rat girls.

6:37 Note the eyds pyramid on the left side. Looks like something out of the dystopian world we currently inhabit!

I wish someone could do a modern Dark Sun RPG and not fuck it up

This channel is a real hidden Gem

Dark Sun kept me from burning out in Mideaval English fantasy-style D&D back in the day. Still one of my favorite settings, even if tsr paid a dollar more for every basic Dark Sun set than they got.

Do you have any interest in covering the d&d sega genesis game, Warriors of the eternal sun, it's quite a short game but I feel it deservers it's own for the music alone. I remember being blown away by it when I was younger.

The jazzy dancing edits are perfect.

I've never heard anyone pronounce it "wivv-erns" before, have I been saying it wrong my whole life as "why-verns" ?

omg that dragonlance ref got me

Fun Sun, the best TSR D&D setting