Nightmares of desert horrors trouble the dreams of the innocent while raiders grow ever bolder beyond the walls of the great city-state of Tyr. Children cry of midnight portents, and mercantile houses fear the disruption of their trade. Bandits and merchants chase rumors of a temple hidden in the desert, an ancient shrine to the primordial Ul-Athra said to safeguard a fragment of the artifact known as the Crown of Dust. Can the heroes recover a caravan lost in the wastes, repel the threat of vicious raiders, and win the relic from the perilous temple?

During the Green Age of Athas, civilization reached its zenith, and great structures were built above and below the surface of the earth. Today, lost ruins of that period lie across the Tablelands and beyond. Most of these crumbling structures are empty and worthless, but others have endured the ages, still guarding the secrets of ancient days.

Recently, gith nomads discovered the Face in the Stone, an old temple northeast of Tyr. Within the shrine, the gith found doors that bore runes referring to the relic of Ul-Athra, an entity also known as the Dust Kraken or the Mouths of Thirst. While trying to open the doors, the gith were attacked by creatures in the temple. The surviving nomads fled and made for the base of the raider lord Yarnath the Skull, hoping that he would reward their discovery. However, before the gith could reach Slither, Yarnath’s crawling citadel, a sandstorm caught them unprotected in the desert and slew them.

Later, Yarnath’s raiders found fragments of a journal among the nomads’ remains and pieced together what the gith had found, but the bandits did not know the location of the ruin. In addition, they found hints that the sandstorm that killed the gith was unnatural.

Intrigued, Yarnath became determined to find the Face in the Stone and its mysterious relic. He turned his attention to merchant caravans that passed through the area, hoping to force caravaneers to give up the location of the ruin. Unfortunately for the raider lord, so far everyone has been ignorant of the old temple.

Marauders of the Dune Sea is a Dungeons & Dragons adventure for five 2nd-level player characters. It can be played as a follow-up to the short adventure in the Dark Sun Campaign Setting. The characters should approach or reach 4th level by the end of the adventure.

Life in Athas is a harrowing experience. The land abounds with perilous hazards and deadly monsters. In spartan gladitorial arenas, contenders battle armored braxats and hardened muls that are intent on eviscerating them for the crowd’s pleasure. In the merciless wastes, belgoi draw adventurers to their doom with the alluring jingle of bells, or savage humanoid tribes of gith or halflings hunt travelers for pleasure, loot, and even food. And, in the Sea of Silt, giants guard their borders against any trespassers who manage to survive the constricting tentacles of the silt horrors.

The Dark Sun Creature Catalog contains nearly 200 monsters and hazards. It is your guide to building adventures and encounters in the Dark Sun setting. With this book, you can alter existing monsters using themes, add fantastic terrain to spice up an encounter area, or introduce nonplayer characters that can be either allies or enemies of the player characters. This book is meant to be used in conjunction with the Dark Sun Campaign Setting, which describes Athas in greater detail and discusses how to create characters and how to run a game in the setting.

Sand, rock, sun, burning heat – these are the only properties that Athas possesses in abundance. Every living creature in the world works constantly to obtain food and safeguard water. Hunters might go days without finding suitable prey, and herders must drive their flocks from place to place to find good grazing. Water is scarce in the known regions of Athas, and those who control life-giving wells or springs jealously guard access to such riches.

City dwellers enjoy more security than do nomads or villagers living in the deserts, but it takes legions of workers – most of them slaves – toiling in the fields to support a city’s population. Great and terrible sorcerer-kings rule the city-states, each a long-lived tyrant who crushes dissent. Rapacious nobles, corrupt templars, ruthless merchants, and legions of brutal soldiers profit from or support the sorcerer-kings’ reigns, while the common folk groan under unjust laws and harsh taxation. Slaves survive only as long as they can earn one more day’s worth of food and water with their backbreaking toil. For most people, life is a choice between struggling to survive in the wasted wilderness or trading freedom for the relative safety of the oppressive city-states.

This is Athas, a world of cruelty and tyranny. Yet it is also a place of savage beauty and barbaric splendor – a world of heroes.

Demons are the manifestation of malign chaos – the embodiment of vile perversion and elemental ruin. Even the weakest of these creatures are hideous to behold, their features the stuff of nightmares. The most powerful fiends are anathema to mortal sensibilities, their mere presence enough to drive other creatures to madness. As living engines of annihilation, demons have an innate desire to consume and destroy while causing as much pain as possible. Fear and mercy are unknown to their kind.

Peel away the veneer of virtue, civility, and charity, and each mortal race reveals a writhing core of corruption and rage. It is said that the progenitors of demonkind were not unlike the mortal races once, but their darkness grew within them until it warped them in body and soul. Now, a demon’s every thought is tainted by hatred and malice.

This book provides new insights into the history, life, and horror of these iconic monsters, bringing to life the information presented in one of the game’s most legendary works – the Demonomicon of Iggwilv. Be warned, however – the lore contained in these pages is perilous indeed.

The mighty Ironwall Mountains lie west of the Nentir Vale. Anyone who follows the old trade road southwest of the village of Winterhaven eventually arrives at the frontier village of Timbervale, in the shadow of this indomitable mountain range. The Ironwalls are impassable save for one deadly route: Stonefang Pass. The tunnel through Stonefang Mountain offered safe passage to all friends of the dwarven Glintshield clan, until the dwarves mysteriously disappeared. Stories claim that the clan fell to infighting and that the dwarves slaughtered one another in a terrible civil war.

After years of isolation, the dwarves of the Glintshield clan have reappeared. The clan is trying to return to its ancestral holdings and reopen the way through the mountains. The dwarves had begun rebuilding the citadel that guards the far entrance of the pass when their blood enemies, the Severed Eyes orcs, attacked them. Those dwarves who were not killed or captured fled into the pass, a deadly tunnel through the mountain, and sealed it shut behind them. They now seek brave souls to defeat the orcs, promising the wealth of kings to any heroes willing to help them.

Yet this is only half the story. Unknown to all but members of the Shadowed Chain, a secret cult among the Glintshield clan, Stonefang Pass is not named for the mountain it pierces, but rather for the terrible being entombed beneath the mountain by ancient dwarves: an earth titan. The civil war that nearly caused the clan’s ruin started over the theft of an item intended to bind the titan. The cultists had hoped to return the item to the binding site when the pass was made safe, but fate intervened. Some of the cult members stayed behind for this purpose when the rest of the clan fled through the dark, but the orcs followed the cultists and hindered their efforts. Now the titan stirs, causing earthquakes to shake the mountain.