The first book of the Prism Pentad, this tie-in novel to TSR’s Dungeons & Dragons setting Dark Sun was written by Troy Denning.  I read this book a long, long time ago, when it was still fairly new and I was reading a bunch of D&D books in the wake of devouring the first few Dragonlance trilogies. After a rather disappointing revisit to the first Dragonlance novel a couple years ago, I was a bit gun shy about reading this one.  Also, the Dark Sun setting has become a bit of a hot-button issue among various terminally online factions lately, which is always tiresome.

To my very pleasant surprise, Denning’s writing is much better than my jaded brain was expecting.  Yes, absolutely, it’s full of purple prose, but as an aficionado of the Pulps, that’s hardly a black mark for this reader.  The characters are mostly solid, even if I didn’t especially invest in any of them.  Rikus, the enslaved gladiator, is probably the most interesting one.  His partner Neeva has potential that isn’t really realized in this novel.  Sadira the half-elf sorceress has some interesting elements to her story, but I never much cared about her as a character.  I think we’re supposed to also invest in Agis, but for several reasons, I did not.  He is, perhaps, the most traditional “hero” in the story, but very much in that 1950s Hollywood or 1970s made-for-TV movie sort of way.  I’ll get to what I mean later.

The book is set in the Dungeons & Dragons setting of Dark Sun.  This was an attempt to break out of their ultra-Tolkien/Mallory-esque settings like Greyhawk or the super generic and bland Forgotten Realms.  The visuals alone, much of it spearheaded by the paintings of artist Brom, set the stage for something…different. Dark Sun got weird.  It turned a lot of assumptions on their head.  It went very Mad Max meets A Princess of Mars, with Sword & Sorcery vibe.  It’s a post-apocalyptic, desert landscape, where ancient dragon-wizards (or wizard-dragons) drained the world of its life force by unchecked use of magic. Civilization broke down, nature broke down, the whole danged world broke down.  And now folks are battling for the scraps, and for their “humanity.”  The setting has some very dark, very ugly subjects and themes.  It does not always handle those with a great deal of tact or sensitivity.

I’ll give Denning credit for doing a better job navigating some complex issues than I was expecting.  However, there are still some things that were iffy.  This is where Agis comes in.  Like so many characters in stories about the American Civil War, Agis is an enslaver who’s “not like other boys.”  He doesn’t actively abuse those he enslaves, so thinks he’s somehow ethical.  Now, Denning doesn’t go Lost Cause here (like Burroughs did with his John Carter of Mars as well as his Carson of Venus books, just as one example).  He doesn’t, as so many Hollywood writers in the 1940s & 50s (and later…) did, absolve Agis simply by saying, “he was born into the system and didn’t know better.”  Agis himself tries to claim this, as does another character, but they are called out.  Agis still ends up being largely let off the hook, but at least his hypocrisy and faux “good guy” stuff is, for a short time, not allowed to stand.  I was surprised by that.  I say all that to make it clear that while we can read the book today and say, “this wasn’t handled well,” or whatever, for the early 90s, this was actually better than a lot of other media.  You can debate whether Dungeons & Dragons was the place for this sort of subject to be examined, or if TSR had any business using enslavement in their setting.  I’m not really interested in that debate, nor do I feel qualified to get in the trenches and fight.  I think that adults could use some of these awful ideas responsibly to explore interesting stories and have some serious conversations.  In fact, I think they can make for some pretty fantastic gaming under the right circumstances and with everyone onboard.  Is that how it was used, or likely would be in the future?  I don’t know you or your table.

OK.  Yes.  I got sidetracked there.  As I said at the beginning, there is an ongoing debate (being generous in referring to it as such) about Dark Sun.  I find the setting more bold and exciting, at least in part because of its rougher edges, than most stuff put out by TSR, and certainly more than things put out by Wizards of the Coast after they acquired the former company.  As far as this specific novel, I think it’s mostly handled well to moderately well.  As with other books being produced by TSR at the time, and in spite of the harsher nature of the Dark Sun setting, there is a sanitized feeling to everything.  People complain about Wizards of the Coast being too “safe” or “today’s misappropriated-by-the right-wing media’s buzzword they use to describe anything they don’t like.”  I was calling TSR the Disney of gaming in the 90s.  This ain’t new.  D&D is a big corporate property owned by a company trying to sell product to the largest swath of people it can.  Thus, their stuff is generally going to be as bland and palatable as possible (see: Forgotten Realms, the CBS primetime of Fantasy).  If you read a non-TSR novel from the same year with essentially the same subject matter and genre, that hypothetical novel would be like watching something on HBO, and this book would be like watching something on one of the big three (sorry, I still don’t really count FOX as a real network) network channels.  Adult themes? sure.  But anything too strong or extreme or particularly challenging to 18 to 35 year old white males?  No.

Again, I found myself pleasantly surprised while reading through this book.  It’s not going down as one of the great adventure novels.  It’s not the best book I’ve read this year.  But it was really enjoyable.  And it did remind me of why Dark Sun was the setting that kept almost luring me into playing D&D, even though I’ve always kinda hated D&D (or had a love/hate relationship with it, I guess).  I’m giving serious thought to reading the remaining four books in the Prism Pentad that this novel kicks off.  And shhh…I may have the POD of the AD&D 2nd Ed version of Dark Sun on order as I type this, with some thoughts about how to mix it into a game of Dungeon Crawl Classics, or Basic Role-Playing.  Shhhh. 

A side note, only of possible interest to those who’ve read or will go on to read some of my fiction: Brom’s paintings of the gladiator Neeva were the visual inspiration for the character Baal, who features heavily in my Conquest of the Sphere stories. Another reason, I suspect, that Dark Sun has long been a setting I have a bit more fondness for than some others produced by the same company. And I really do like Brom’s artwork.

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