Running your own Dark Sun adventure can be a pain whether you're looking to play 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th or 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder or any other system. The amount of information on the internet about the setting isn't exactly plentiful, as a majority of it came into existence in an era where there was no internet to archive things. Handfuls of these PDFs exist online but it's hard to tell where to find them, how to link them together or even what they're about. Thankfully, I've spent a long time compiling all of the available Dark Sun official content and their synopses, what editions they were meant for and several notes about them to make your search for official Dark Sun material a little bit easier.

Let's start with the basics. Dark Sun was published by TSR, Inc., in 1991 for the 2nd Edition Dungeons and Dragons® game. It garnered a cult following and an avid fanbase demanded its return in later editions. 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons saw a re-release of some Dark Sun material, though many weren't happy with it as it varied greatly from the original content and was set within a time after the events of the 2nd Edition Dark Sun, which many thought was the best timeline.

See, Dark Sun started out with the best of intentions. It was meant to be a setting that pushed boundaries. Much of the setting was written simply based off of artwork put together by Gerald Brom for TSR and the creators wanted the setting to differentiate itself. But in its efforts to promote the series, several novels were created to flesh out the setting. Long story made short - the promotion efforts sort of flip flopped as the games became the promotion for the novels and the quality of later adventures floundered a bit as they heavily followed the metaplot found within the novels and some even required reading the novels to understand the characters in the module.

Many hoped to see a reboot of the setting for 4th edition so that these adventures could have been recreated without the burden of promoting the novels and not have all the strings attached. So you can understand the disappointment of many when the 4th Edition materials were published with the events taking place after the novels and 2nd Edition adventure books.

That's not to say that the 4th Edition materials don't have merit! If you haven't played Dark Sun before you might not even notice the difference. The disappointment in the materials variation was mostly from fans who wanted to play the newer edition of the game with some nostalgia from the early days of Dark Sun - when it was a fresh setting with endless opportunities and excitement.

In general, the fanbase shares some opinions on the quality of the modules that I think is mostly spot-on, having read them myself and played many of them. If you're playing for a different edition than they were written for, they will require some adaptation but luckily they're not too insanely hard to adapt. That's something I'll cover in a later article, though.

So let's dive into the official published materials that are available to you to play or to adapt for your 5e Dark Sun game, starting with the 4th Edition Dark Sun Adventures.

Click the cover image to find a downloadable version of the module.