Obligatory Dark Sun Posting

As everyone knows by now, next years campaign setting is Dark Sun. I bought the original campaign setting a looong ass time ago, and promptly never used it. Ever. Really, the only two campaign settings that I claim to have played with any frequency are Eberron and Planescape. I owned Forgotten Realms, to be sure, but I think we only really used it as a kind of proxy for "Fantasy World Default" whenever we ran games that were not Planescape (which was basically whatever campaign that Bat Jew was running at the time).

Dark Sun was one of those things that I kinda-sorta wanted to run, but due to the style just didnt. It has art by Brom, which is a plus, and it had a lot of interesting and/or bizarre elements that made it really stand out from what I at the time perceived to be "traditional" fantasy. It strayed about as far from the norm as you could get, while somehow still labeling itself as Dungeons & Dragons. Things that I liked was the overall setting (a kind of desert post-apocalyptic world), magic draining the life from things, thri-kreen, psionics (most of all), and the bone/stone/wood equipment.

Was this good? I dont know: never used it, but I certainly did try.

At the time, I think I kept trying to shoehorn adventures that didnt really play to the setting. Nowadays, I've grown quite a bit and learned a lot, and I think I can properly handle it this time. My setting of choice is still Eberron, and I dont see that changing much, but Wizards did make Forgotten Realms a bit more palatable (even if I still havent used the books for anything except for drow, genasi, and swordmage). Frankly, Wizards have made a lot of things great in 4th Edition, setting a winning streak for everything they've released thus far. I see no reason why they wont succeed with this. It doesnt have to stand up to Eberron to be a winner, it just has to get me to use it once.