I really like the Dark Sun setting and especially the 1991 Dark Sun Boxed Set—though, sadly, I have never played using it. This is my attempt to rationalize the Dark Sun setting as it was originally described, while ignoring content that came later.
Fair warning: this post is LONG, pedantic, and anal retentive.
What I’m going to call the explored world of Athas is described in the Wanderer’s Journal thusly:
The Wanderer’s Journal is organized such that it covers the broad strokes of the explored world first—general information about society and terrain—and then moves to describing the details of the Tyr region—specific information with which the Wanderer has personal experience. The Wanderer presents the Tyr region as being broadly similar to the rest of the explored world and as having some level of interaction with other regions through trade and travel. The major roads on the Wanderer’s map lead off its edges to both north and south, indicating sustained connectivity. And, as he states:
The explored world around the Sea of Silt—as an interconnected region—has been retconned in subsequent products, making the Dark Sun setting a lot smaller. In the Revised Dark Sun Campaign Setting, the people of the Tyr region are generally ignorant of even the next closest set of cities. Terming Kurn and Eldaarich as lost city-states, it asserts: “few inhabitants of the Tyr Region know the names of the northern cities—let alone that they even exist. For most, rumors of cities to the north are just that […]” But, in the 1991 set, the Tyr region is not asserted to be insular or ignorant of its neighbors—as I have quoted above, the wanderer literally describes the whole explored world’s geography.
In the rest of this post, I’ll obsessively work out the land area, population, and geography of the explored world and discuss what it says about the Tyr region and 1991 Dark Sun campaign setting writ large.
So, returning to the Wanderer’s description of the explored world, it consists of:
So, how big is that?
Well, 1,000,000 square miles is about the area of Argentina (1,056,640 mi2) or Kazakhstan (1,042,400 mi2) and the Sea of Silt at 120,000 square miles is somewhere between the area of the Caspian Sea (143,000 mi2) and the Persian Gulf (97,000 mi2).
Taking the Persian Gulf as a starting point—since many of its surrounding landmasses are arid and since Dark Sun has always had some degree of Biblical near eastern theming—how much territory would Dark Sun’s explored world cover? About this much:
And, within that area, how much does the Tyr region cover? If we extrapolate from the Wanderer’s map, which has a 30-mile scale, the area contained within the Tyr region is about 100,000 mi2 (if you include the hinterlands bits but not the map border). The 4e maps use a 75-mile scale instead, giving them a roughly 590,000 mi2 area—but that’s updating the scale of the Tyr Region to accommodate that the explored world is gone from the setting. In 4th Edition, “Beyond the borderlands of [the Tyr Region] lie desolate wastes; some people believe that the Tyr Region is the last habitable area on Athas, and that all the people remaining in the world live in these lands” (Dark Sun Campaign Setting, p. 130).
Lame. From here, I’ll assume the 30-mile scale is correct.
If you overlay a 104,000 mi2 rectangle over the Persian Gulf, i.e. literally the US state of Colorado, it looks as pictured below. And this orientation feels to me like it corresponds pretty well to the Wanderers description of the explored world.
So, how many people live in that area? According to the Wanderer’s description of the Tablelands—which, as I take it, is not meant to include the Ringing Mountains, Forest Ridge, or Sea of Silt:
In the Tyr region alone, there are tens of thousands of square miles of plains, and I am sure that fewer than a million people live in that area—most of them in cities, villages, or other groups located near a good source of water. By and large, the plains are empty and wild, populated by untamed tribes and savage beasts. (The Wanderer’s Journal, p. 46)
So, almost 1 million inhabitants. That is nearly 10 people per square mile, which is on the low end of the widely used—and maligned—Medieval Demographics Made Easy essay (and generators based on it). I think that level of population density feels a bit high—but not unreasonable. For reference, the Arabian Peninsula (that’s Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait) had a population density of about 7.5 inhabitants per square mile IN THE YEAR 1950.
But, if we accept the 10 person/mi2 population density, that is still a bit low to support the level of urbanization in the Tyr region. The 1991 Campaign Setting doesn’t list city populations, but the Wanderer does give the numbers of soldiers in several cities’ armies. They are gobsmackingly high: “Andropinis' personal army consists of ten thousand highly disciplined foot soldiers…” (p.67), “Hamanu can personally send more than ten thousand slave soldiers led by a thousand lance-carrying half-giants into battle.” (p. 75). For single city-states, standing armies of those sizes induce starvation—so these would necessarily be militia armies, like hoplites or republican legionaries, who fight (at most) for a campaign season and then go home to tend the harvest. Inter-city wars would probably be pretty indecisive—one set piece battle followed by a brief and, therefore, unsuccessful city siege during which the defender’s unwalled territory is pillaged. Though, on occasion, city sieges would be successful as was Hamanu’s siege of Yaramuke.
Ahem… population density, sorry…
The Revised Campaign Setting does give city population numbers (so we’ll have to tolerate it, for now).
Altogether, that’s 165,000 of the less than 1 million people in the region. That’s a very high urbanization rate for a Medieval society—medieval Europe was about 5% urbanized—but for an ancient one with a robust centralized bureaucracy (like Dark Sun’s templars) and sophisticated irrigation technology it’s not totally crazy. The Roman Empire at its peak had urbanization rates of 25% to 30%, while Spain in 1300, with a comparable population density of 10.9 people/mi2, had an urbanization rate of 12% (probably due to Andalusian technological sophistication). Finally, comparing to the world’s most famous city state, Athens had an estimated 20,000-40,000 residents in the 5th Century B.C.E.
In each of those historical cases, though, urban concentration was supported by a large pool of nearby agricultural clients. When Athens was the size I quoted above, it was being supported by 80,000 to 150,000 Attic farmers and still needed to import foodstuffs. But while some Dark Sun materials, like Beyond the Prism Pentad (p. 13), do mention city states as having client villages throughout their periphery, it’s nothing near the appropriate order of magnitude.
I’ll square this circle by making some assumptions about Athasian society and technology.
Perhaps—and there’s a certain romanticism to this—Athas’ surviving cities are ruins. They’re not abandoned like Bodach, Guistenal, Kalidnay, and Yaramuke, but they’re still the decaying remains of a better age. Their inhabitants’ ancestors built the pyramids, walls, and palaces but their present residents can no longer easily replicate that.
So, let’s extrapolate this to the rest of the explored world:
The Wanderer claims that “the land around Tyr is fairly typical of the regions bordering the Sea of Silt” (p. 67), that cities “respond to the rigors of barren Athas by organizing in the same general manner” (p. 12)—i.e. by being small, heavily agrarian, fortified shelters—and that “Every city is led by a king” (p. 12). The explored world of Athas, then, must contain many more cities and many more sorcerer kings than are described. That the Wanderer states, as a generality, sorcerer kings “may be addressed as "Magnate" in one place and "Vizier" in another…” (p. 12)—despite that none of the ones in the Tyr Region call themselves “Magnate”—clearly suggests this. So then, if the Tyr Region occupies ~100,000 mi2 of the ~1,000,000 mi2 that make up the explored world, there should be another ~60 ‘fortified shelter’ cities and ~60 defiling sorcerer kings in that sandbox…
Jeez.
Do they all have their own micro-sized cultural enclave? Wait… why do all the Tyr region’s cities have micro-sized cultural enclaves?
Yeah, yeah, sure, rule of cool. Fair enough…
But let’s speculate: The small size of the explored world relative to the probable surface area of the planet Athas, the purported absence of sapient life in the lands beyond it (though, oddly, the Wanderer notes that many large animals live in the Hinterlands), and the cultural diversity of the city-states suggest to me that the explored world’s inhabitants all MOVED THERE FROM SOMEWHERE ELSE. The Mesopotamian, Indian, Aztec, Central African, Cambodian, and Greek inflected cities of the Tyr Region—none of which are especially adapted to a Mad Max-esque wasteland—could well be descended from larger culture groups that immigrated there centuries ago when the rest of their world died. Maybe the cultural diversity of a whole planet has been condensed into an enclave the size of Kazakhstan.
Finally, one last piece of speculation I wasn’t sure where else to put:
I anticipate that the eastern side of the Sea of Silt has a somewhat more habitable climate than the Tyr Region. The placement of the Tablelands and Forest Ridge suggests that the west of the Ringing Mountains is its windward side. Clouds are blown against the Ringing Mountains’ western face, depositing rain on the Forest Ridge as they rise, and leaving the Tyr Region in the range’s rain shadow. If this is due to westerly atmospheric circulation (and Athas’ atmosphere works like Earth’s), then the same is true for the eastern range of the Ringing Mountains. Rainfall would be deposited on their western side too—within the Tablelands. Also, since westerly winds blow between 30- and 60-degrees latitude north and south, that places the explored world well beyond Athas’ equator, which suggests that the equatorial regions of Athas are even more hellish than the parts the Wanderer describes.
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Okay, by this point I have almost certainly lost all of you. But I have 100% talked myself into the idea that what I want from future Dark Sun publications is a book about the eastern shore of the Sea of Silt—new cites, new sorcerer kings, new borrowed cultures, and a status quo that is not in any way hidebound to the lore of the Tyr Region. Its timeline could start from Kalak’s death, the end of the Prism Pentad, well before, well after, or be completely different—each gaming group would decide for themselves and any new lore would be timeline agnostic.
Tell me what you think. Thanks for reading.
Fair warning: this post is LONG, pedantic, and anal retentive.
What I’m going to call the explored world of Athas is described in the Wanderer’s Journal thusly:
"Athas, or at least the explored portion, consists of about one million square miles of desert. In its center, covering an area of about 120,000 square miles, is a vast, dust-filled basin that I call the Sea of Silt. […] Surrounding this dry sea is a band of Tablelands, ranging from as much as 400 miles wide to as little as 50. The Tablelands consist of many types of terrain: golden dunes, stony barrens, dust sinks, white salt flats, rocky badlands, and plains of yellow-green scrub-brush. This is where civilization—if you can call it that—still lingers. […]
The Tablelands are encircled by the various ranges of the Ringing Mountains. These ranges all run north and south. To the east and west of the Sea of Silt, the mountains form solid walls separating the tablelands from the unknown regions beyond. To the north and south of the dusty sea, they form a series of parallel ribs. The deep valleys between the ridges lead away from central Athas like a series of long (and hazardous) corridors.
In every direction, beyond the mountains lie the Hinterlands. We have little knowledge of what abides there. Many men have set out to explore the depths of this unknown region, but I have never met one who returned." (The Wanderer’s Journal, p. 3-4)
The Wanderer’s Journal is organized such that it covers the broad strokes of the explored world first—general information about society and terrain—and then moves to describing the details of the Tyr region—specific information with which the Wanderer has personal experience. The Wanderer presents the Tyr region as being broadly similar to the rest of the explored world and as having some level of interaction with other regions through trade and travel. The major roads on the Wanderer’s map lead off its edges to both north and south, indicating sustained connectivity. And, as he states:
"The Tyr region lies on the western shore of the Sea of Silt. Judging by what I have heard from other explorers and travelers, the land around Tyr is fairly typical of the regions bordering the Sea of Silt, with about half of its entire area taken up by Tablelands." (The Wanderer’s Journal, p. 67)
The explored world around the Sea of Silt—as an interconnected region—has been retconned in subsequent products, making the Dark Sun setting a lot smaller. In the Revised Dark Sun Campaign Setting, the people of the Tyr region are generally ignorant of even the next closest set of cities. Terming Kurn and Eldaarich as lost city-states, it asserts: “few inhabitants of the Tyr Region know the names of the northern cities—let alone that they even exist. For most, rumors of cities to the north are just that […]” But, in the 1991 set, the Tyr region is not asserted to be insular or ignorant of its neighbors—as I have quoted above, the wanderer literally describes the whole explored world’s geography.
In the rest of this post, I’ll obsessively work out the land area, population, and geography of the explored world and discuss what it says about the Tyr region and 1991 Dark Sun campaign setting writ large.
So, returning to the Wanderer’s description of the explored world, it consists of:
- A million square miles of desert.
- With the Sea of Silt in the middle.
- With the Tyr region on the sea’s western shore.
- Bounded east and west by the Ringing Mountains.
- Bounded north and south by ribbed valleys of the Ringing Mountains.
- With everything around it being unpeopled Hinterlands from which no travelers are known (by the Wanderer) to have returned. Note that the parts of the explored world which are NOT the Hinterlands are implied by comparison to have some degree of sapient habitation.
So, how big is that?
Well, 1,000,000 square miles is about the area of Argentina (1,056,640 mi2) or Kazakhstan (1,042,400 mi2) and the Sea of Silt at 120,000 square miles is somewhere between the area of the Caspian Sea (143,000 mi2) and the Persian Gulf (97,000 mi2).
Taking the Persian Gulf as a starting point—since many of its surrounding landmasses are arid and since Dark Sun has always had some degree of Biblical near eastern theming—how much territory would Dark Sun’s explored world cover? About this much:
And, within that area, how much does the Tyr region cover? If we extrapolate from the Wanderer’s map, which has a 30-mile scale, the area contained within the Tyr region is about 100,000 mi2 (if you include the hinterlands bits but not the map border). The 4e maps use a 75-mile scale instead, giving them a roughly 590,000 mi2 area—but that’s updating the scale of the Tyr Region to accommodate that the explored world is gone from the setting. In 4th Edition, “Beyond the borderlands of [the Tyr Region] lie desolate wastes; some people believe that the Tyr Region is the last habitable area on Athas, and that all the people remaining in the world live in these lands” (Dark Sun Campaign Setting, p. 130).
Lame. From here, I’ll assume the 30-mile scale is correct.
If you overlay a 104,000 mi2 rectangle over the Persian Gulf, i.e. literally the US state of Colorado, it looks as pictured below. And this orientation feels to me like it corresponds pretty well to the Wanderers description of the explored world.
So, how many people live in that area? According to the Wanderer’s description of the Tablelands—which, as I take it, is not meant to include the Ringing Mountains, Forest Ridge, or Sea of Silt:
In the Tyr region alone, there are tens of thousands of square miles of plains, and I am sure that fewer than a million people live in that area—most of them in cities, villages, or other groups located near a good source of water. By and large, the plains are empty and wild, populated by untamed tribes and savage beasts. (The Wanderer’s Journal, p. 46)
So, almost 1 million inhabitants. That is nearly 10 people per square mile, which is on the low end of the widely used—and maligned—Medieval Demographics Made Easy essay (and generators based on it). I think that level of population density feels a bit high—but not unreasonable. For reference, the Arabian Peninsula (that’s Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait) had a population density of about 7.5 inhabitants per square mile IN THE YEAR 1950.
But, if we accept the 10 person/mi2 population density, that is still a bit low to support the level of urbanization in the Tyr region. The 1991 Campaign Setting doesn’t list city populations, but the Wanderer does give the numbers of soldiers in several cities’ armies. They are gobsmackingly high: “Andropinis' personal army consists of ten thousand highly disciplined foot soldiers…” (p.67), “Hamanu can personally send more than ten thousand slave soldiers led by a thousand lance-carrying half-giants into battle.” (p. 75). For single city-states, standing armies of those sizes induce starvation—so these would necessarily be militia armies, like hoplites or republican legionaries, who fight (at most) for a campaign season and then go home to tend the harvest. Inter-city wars would probably be pretty indecisive—one set piece battle followed by a brief and, therefore, unsuccessful city siege during which the defender’s unwalled territory is pillaged. Though, on occasion, city sieges would be successful as was Hamanu’s siege of Yaramuke.
Ahem… population density, sorry…
The Revised Campaign Setting does give city population numbers (so we’ll have to tolerate it, for now).
Tyr: 15,000
Urik: 30,000
Raam: 40,000
Draj: 15,000
Nibenay: 25,000
Gulg: 12,000
Balic: 28,000
Altogether, that’s 165,000 of the less than 1 million people in the region. That’s a very high urbanization rate for a Medieval society—medieval Europe was about 5% urbanized—but for an ancient one with a robust centralized bureaucracy (like Dark Sun’s templars) and sophisticated irrigation technology it’s not totally crazy. The Roman Empire at its peak had urbanization rates of 25% to 30%, while Spain in 1300, with a comparable population density of 10.9 people/mi2, had an urbanization rate of 12% (probably due to Andalusian technological sophistication). Finally, comparing to the world’s most famous city state, Athens had an estimated 20,000-40,000 residents in the 5th Century B.C.E.
In each of those historical cases, though, urban concentration was supported by a large pool of nearby agricultural clients. When Athens was the size I quoted above, it was being supported by 80,000 to 150,000 Attic farmers and still needed to import foodstuffs. But while some Dark Sun materials, like Beyond the Prism Pentad (p. 13), do mention city states as having client villages throughout their periphery, it’s nothing near the appropriate order of magnitude.
I’ll square this circle by making some assumptions about Athasian society and technology.
- There are indeed many client villages serving the cities of the Tyr region—not enough to agriculturally support them, but still quite a few. These people are incredibly insecure; the city states tax their food production but provide minimal security, so raids and famines always affect them first. Declines in city population can be offset by intermittently abducting people from this periphery.
- The land around each city is very intensively farmed. Each city is served by sophisticated irrigation systems, can dig deep wells, and is highly competent at storing its surplus water and grain. Athas’ precious iron is used to make plows, and the fields are tilled with the muscle power of Erdlu or Kanks as well as human beings. Incidentally, these movable goods increase the payoff of successful raids.
- Even with all this, though, the cities of Athas are primarily fortified shelters—and not centers of specialized goods production. Most of the people who live in the cities are agricultural workers and people who own, administer, or maintain agricultural infrastructure. They move about the fields by day but retreat into the city walls at dusk or during raids as, for example, in Balic where “hungry giants raid semi-weekly” (p. 12). Proportionately few urbanites are the artisans and traders described by the Wanderer; they are present but only as a powerful minority.
Perhaps—and there’s a certain romanticism to this—Athas’ surviving cities are ruins. They’re not abandoned like Bodach, Guistenal, Kalidnay, and Yaramuke, but they’re still the decaying remains of a better age. Their inhabitants’ ancestors built the pyramids, walls, and palaces but their present residents can no longer easily replicate that.
So, let’s extrapolate this to the rest of the explored world:
The Wanderer claims that “the land around Tyr is fairly typical of the regions bordering the Sea of Silt” (p. 67), that cities “respond to the rigors of barren Athas by organizing in the same general manner” (p. 12)—i.e. by being small, heavily agrarian, fortified shelters—and that “Every city is led by a king” (p. 12). The explored world of Athas, then, must contain many more cities and many more sorcerer kings than are described. That the Wanderer states, as a generality, sorcerer kings “may be addressed as "Magnate" in one place and "Vizier" in another…” (p. 12)—despite that none of the ones in the Tyr Region call themselves “Magnate”—clearly suggests this. So then, if the Tyr Region occupies ~100,000 mi2 of the ~1,000,000 mi2 that make up the explored world, there should be another ~60 ‘fortified shelter’ cities and ~60 defiling sorcerer kings in that sandbox…
Jeez.
Do they all have their own micro-sized cultural enclave? Wait… why do all the Tyr region’s cities have micro-sized cultural enclaves?
Yeah, yeah, sure, rule of cool. Fair enough…
But let’s speculate: The small size of the explored world relative to the probable surface area of the planet Athas, the purported absence of sapient life in the lands beyond it (though, oddly, the Wanderer notes that many large animals live in the Hinterlands), and the cultural diversity of the city-states suggest to me that the explored world’s inhabitants all MOVED THERE FROM SOMEWHERE ELSE. The Mesopotamian, Indian, Aztec, Central African, Cambodian, and Greek inflected cities of the Tyr Region—none of which are especially adapted to a Mad Max-esque wasteland—could well be descended from larger culture groups that immigrated there centuries ago when the rest of their world died. Maybe the cultural diversity of a whole planet has been condensed into an enclave the size of Kazakhstan.
Finally, one last piece of speculation I wasn’t sure where else to put:
I anticipate that the eastern side of the Sea of Silt has a somewhat more habitable climate than the Tyr Region. The placement of the Tablelands and Forest Ridge suggests that the west of the Ringing Mountains is its windward side. Clouds are blown against the Ringing Mountains’ western face, depositing rain on the Forest Ridge as they rise, and leaving the Tyr Region in the range’s rain shadow. If this is due to westerly atmospheric circulation (and Athas’ atmosphere works like Earth’s), then the same is true for the eastern range of the Ringing Mountains. Rainfall would be deposited on their western side too—within the Tablelands. Also, since westerly winds blow between 30- and 60-degrees latitude north and south, that places the explored world well beyond Athas’ equator, which suggests that the equatorial regions of Athas are even more hellish than the parts the Wanderer describes.
-----
Okay, by this point I have almost certainly lost all of you. But I have 100% talked myself into the idea that what I want from future Dark Sun publications is a book about the eastern shore of the Sea of Silt—new cites, new sorcerer kings, new borrowed cultures, and a status quo that is not in any way hidebound to the lore of the Tyr Region. Its timeline could start from Kalak’s death, the end of the Prism Pentad, well before, well after, or be completely different—each gaming group would decide for themselves and any new lore would be timeline agnostic.
Tell me what you think. Thanks for reading.
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