Listen to the Rain

Well, this is a surprise. Twenty-five years after it was originally supposed to be published, Secrets of the Dead Lands has been released by Athas.org, along with a companion adventure called The Emissary.

This is one of those lost books that got tossed around as an impossible treasure in discussions about Dark Sun for decades. Some people had gotten draft copies, but since it was the 90s they never made it onto the internet and if you weren't one of those people there was no way to read it. Some of those people posted in the Sages of Dark Sun Facebook group and that's where I heard about it, plus the Terrors of the Dead Lands monster book existing for years without a book actually describing the place all these horrible things came from made it obvious there was some source they were drawing from. Well, maybe it was in the service of securing eventual permission to publish the whole thing, since Athas.org has some kind of limited license to use Dark Sun IP, and in the end, it worked. More books for Dark Sun is never a bad thing.

I've briefly poked through it and what most stands out is the use of the term "bugdead"--the Dead Lands are thousands of square miles of lifeless obsidian plains half ruled over by undead wizards-lords and their legions of terror and half by countless insectile monstrosities (including some living ones!), and each half is locked into an endless war against the other. It's very "the whole world has gone to hell," which is quintessential Dark Sun.

It also got me to work on my homebrew Dark Sun conversion to the same system I used for Warlords of the Mushroom Kingdom for the first time in over a year, so hey!