Dark Sun Returns!

D&D has just announced that Dark Sun is coming back for 5E in 2027! Let’s look at the products they will release and what makes this campaign setting so awesome and unique!

My Favorite Setting Returns

At Gen Con 2026, the D&D team announced that Dark Sun will be back! The Season of Survival kicks off in February 2027 and will fill us with Dark Sun news until the products release near the end of the season in July, 2027.

You can find my full review in this video!

What is in the release? We get two books, a “Blood and Power gameplay expansion,” which likely has player and campaign-specific rules, and an “Edge of Oblivion setting expansion.”

We also get a Map Pack and something very curious: an alternate art version of the 2024 Player’s Handbook! I assume there will be a D&D Encounters season in stores and for download, and it appears there will be a partner program where a partner will continue to create material for Dark Sun 5E (call me!)

Mature-Rated?

This release is the first D&D setting to be a mature-rated setting and will be sold in shrink wrap. A graphically-violent preview video was shown. And, yeah, that’s violent. For sure not what I want, but hopefully others out there are excited by that. For me, D&D is a game best sold at a PG or G level and players then can use safety tools and make it what they want. I’ve never in all my years needed a violent D&D book. I also hear the two Book of Vile Darkness releases did not sell well after an initial wave of curiosity sales. So it goes.

What is Dark Sun?

If you aren’t familiar with the setting, I touch on it briefly in the video I mentioned above. I also have a series of blogs here discussing the unique and awesome qualities of the world. For me, Dark Sun has been special not just for the individual amazing qualities (an ecological apocalypse, a desert world, arcane magic defiling the world, mostly completely new monsters, very different species and classes, despotic tyrants) but primarily because the collective differences make this a refreshingly different experience. If a gaming group ever tires of the baseline D&D world and similar settings, Dark Sun provides a breath of fresh air and entirely new concepts and gameplay, breathing life back into a tired group.

Dark Sun and its world of Athas started way back in 1991, then had a second edition. We got a tiny version for 3E in Dragon magazine, and then finally a refreshed new edition for 4E in 2010. That 4E team did an amazing job of honoring the past of the setting and innovating based on the new edition. I will be eagerly hoping that the 5E team managed to do the same!

I’ve had incredible fun with Athas, running campaigns, playing countless hours, working on homebrew, and even leading the 4E organized play campaign, Ashes of Athas. You can still get those adventures, which are the longest campaign adventure series ever written for the setting!

Here’s to seeing a ton of people learning what makes the world of Athas special!