In yet another part of my survey of TSR's "campaign settings," I'm wondering if anyone ever played a Dark Sun game, and if so, what was it like?
Dark Sun came out when I was in 10th grade. It looked brutal and decidedly non-Tolkien, two things that were a huge plus for me. Half the art (Brom's stuff) was very good by the standard of contemporary RPG art; the other half (Baxa's stuff) made me want to go blind. The maps for Dark Sun were fantastic.
But I only ended up playing half a session: I ran the (terrible) module included in the box-set, A Little Knowledge, and at one point the players ended up killing a bunch of children, and then taking their bodies back to the village to say, "Marauders attacked your kids - we drove them off, but not before the kids were all slaughtered horribly. We've returned their bodies to you and will humbly accept whatever reward you can offer." This frustrated me terribly and I pretty much gave up at that point. It would turn out to be the last time I GM'd for about 10 years.
But among other things, it didn't really hit all the bases of playing in Dark Sun. Did anyone else have any better luck?