In short, Athas is a horrible, deadly place, and only the strongest survive on the world of the Dark Sun. Slavery is commonplace, gladiatorial bloodsport is ubiquitous, and slave gladiators are prized commodities used as symbols of prestige and power among the noble houses. Reading is outlawed for the common people, only legal for the nobility, and death is the punishment for illegal literacy. Wizards must hide their activities and disguise their powers as psionics since the vast majority of people see no distinction between the dangerously irresponsible Defilers who actually caused the ecological destruction, carelessly siphoning as much energy from the land as they can to fuel their magic regardless of the destruction it would cause, and the responsible magic-users called Preservers who have learned to use magic without doing harm to the environment, only taking just as much energy as is needed to power their magic. As a result, wizards are feared and hated for their destruction of the land, and the wanton overuse of magic that caused the ecological collapse that has rendered almost the planet a vast desert. powerful enough spells can even effect nearby animals and cause them pain as their lifeforce is drained away to fuel the magic. Magic-use draws its power directly from the lifeforce of the land itself drawing too much energy reduces any plants around a spellcasting wizard to grey ash, and the land itself to infertile dust in which nothing can grow. (The Third Edition Expanded Psionics Handbook was largely built off of Dark Sun, though it made no open mention of the setting.) Psionics has replaced the common fantasy role of magic on Athas, with psionicists taking the usual place of wizards in fantasy society. It was one of the first settings to incorporate the psionics rules to a large extent - to the point where all Player Characters and potentially any intelligent creature on Athas has at least a psionic wild talent. Horses are long extinct such that no one even remembers them, and common mounts are instead such things as the giant ant-like kanks, the scaled and beaked ostrich-like lizard crodlu, and the huge howdah-carrying inix lizards. Even normal everyday flora and fauna have been twisted into deadly, grotesque mockeries of themselves Athasian bears are gigantic clawed monstrosities with an insect-like carapace, and dangerous mobile carnivorous plant life dots the landscape.
There are no actual gods, and most of the standard fantasy races players might expect to find are either extinct or drastically different from their normal forms one of the common player character races is the Thri-Kreen - four-armed humanoid insect mantis men. Metal is extremely rare, requiring weapons to be made of less durable alternatives like bone, wood and obsidian ( with game mechanics for their breakage during combat), and a small, pathetic iron mine that wouldn't be considered even slightly worthwhile on another world is instead here a priceless resource that has made the city-state that owns it rich, with wars having been fought over its possession. Most of the setting's land mass is made up of desert. The setting of Dark Sun is Athas, a once-beautiful fantasy world turned into a post-apocalyptic wasteland by centuries of corrupt magic and genocidal warfare.
After the end of Second Edition D&D, a group of fans kept Dark Sun alive using the Third Edition rules until an official set was published in Dragon, which was followed by a standard Fourth Edition version in 2010. There were two editions of Dark Sun, the second advancing the timeline a few years, inserting a bit of hope along with a whole lot of new troubles and detailing a larger portion of the world. Originally conceived as the default setting for a miniatures based wargame, the setting survived as a regular D&D world even after the minis game failed. Dark Sun is a Campaign Setting mostly for the second and fourth editions of Dungeons & Dragons (although some material for 3.5 was published in Dragon magazine).
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