Athas, the World of Dark Sun

The world of Dark Sun is a place of desolation; it is a realm of wastes and of wasting, where magic has already killed the planet and continues to be used as a tool of subjugation by the tyrannical sorcerer-kings who rule it from its bustling city-states. The sun is red and low, its belly bloated by the poisonous touch of an ancient arcane caster, Rajaat, The First Sorcerer, and it is in his tradition that these sorcerer-kings, once Rajaat's own genocidal champions, rule the land with their tainting defiler's touch.

The sagging stomach of the scarlet sun has long since burnt nearly all of the greens and the blue from the surface of the desert-world called Athas. By day, it dominates the cloudless skies and rains its scorching, crimson ruin down upon the people and the beasts below. The sun may indeed be darker now, but make no mistake - it is no less oppressive.

Because of the heat and the corrupting wars of the past, Athas is a place of lost histories, incredible mystery, and abounding scarcity. Entire ages have been forgotten, there are solitary palaces built upon the bones of cities with names that no one has ever even known, it seems, and anything of any real value is jealously guarded by disgustingly rich men and women and their slave-armies.

The Athasian nights are cold and unforgiving, as desert evenings tend to be. The world's two moons, Ral and Guthay, always stand high in the sky, both proud and quiet; though they can be seen astride the fattish sun during the day, they're only free to scour the dunes with their frigid attentions after it has gone to rest.