Dark Sun! Dungeons & Dragons’ very own Australia gets its horrible and deadly creatures (1992). As with most of the Compendiums, Tom Baxa and Mark Nelson deliver the interior art. Nelson’s fine here, generally, but I think Baxa’s style is far better suited to the setting.

So, my thing with Dark Sun is that I really enjoy the setting, and reading about it and thinking about it, but I don’t particularly want to play it. It’s just a vibe mismatch, no greater criticism, but you should probably have that firmly in mind when I say I absolutely love like, every single monster in this book. It is maybe the most successful appendix in a lot of ways. For starters, it solidifies the notion that everything in Athas is trying to kill you. Even the simplest acts required for basic survival are fraught with danger—that snake monster on the cover, for instance, lives in cisterns and purifies the water, but also kills and eats anything that stops for a drink. So, you know, don’t get thirsty on this desert world. This one does a much better of presenting the “Dark Sun version of X” than Spelljammer or Ravenloft (where is like, oh, look, a Kender Vampire). Flip through this thing you get just as much a sense of life on Athas as you do from the box set. That’s pretty solid work.

Easley cover, doing well again with the selection of creatures. We have an Athasian sloth, a cistern fiend and a so-ut (aka rampager). Even these three do a good job of selling Athas as a place of yawning, hungry maws.