Development
TSR released the second edition of Battlesystem in 1989 and, in 1990, began pre-production on a new campaign setting that would use this edition in gameplay. The working title of this setting was "War World."
Contributors to this project at its beginnings included Rich Baker, Gerald Brom, Tim Brown, Troy Denning, Mary Kirchoff, and Steve Winter. With the exception of Denning and Kirchoff, design veterans such as David "Zeb" Cook declined to join the conceptual team for "War World" (later on, Cook would write the first two adventure modules: Freedom and Road to Urik). The majority of project members were freshmen to TSR, though not necessarily to the industry (Winter having worked at GDW).
Steve Winter's inspiration drew partly from DEN comics by Richard Corben and the fiction of Clark Ashton Smith. Winter also suggested the idea of a desert landscape.
The team envisioned a post-apocalyptic world full of exotic monsters and no hallmark fantasy creatures whatsoever. TSR worried about this concept, wondering how to market a product that lacked any familiar elements. Eventually, elves, dwarves, and dragons returned but in warped variations of their standard AD&D 2nd Edition counterparts. The designers actually credit this reversion as a pivotal change that launched the project in a new direction.
By the time the name "Dark Sun" replaced "War World," Battlesystem integration was still considered important; and mass-combat statistics accompanied early modules. However, poor sales for Battlesystem soon stopped any further inclusion in Dark Sun products.
Tie-in with the Complete Psionics Handbook proved more successful, but designers regretted the extra time involved in attaching these rules to practically every living thing in the campaign world.
The Dark Sun setting drew much of its appeal from artist Brom's imagery: "I pretty much designed the look and feel of the Dark Sun campaign. I was doing paintings before they were even writing about the setting. I'd do a painting or a sketch, and the designers wrote those characters and ideas into the story. I was very involved in the development process."
Read more about this topic: Dark Sun
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