Dragon’s Crown (1993) bills itself as the epic-level finale of the original arc of Dark Sun adventures. There are some things that immediately differentiate this one from the previous installments. For starters, its still a folder/box, but the flip-books are gone. I believe they pop up now and then after this point, but the line is no longer built with them exclusively. Second, there’s a lot of recycled art. The Brom cover appeared on the front of Dragon Magazine 185, all the booklet covers feature Brom art from other publications, Baxa’s portraits for the pre-gens are from the previous adventures. Baxa’s other interiors are all new, but damn.

It also isn’t the finale of anything. That’s a bold lie of the marketing copy — this is entirely unconnected to the events of the previous scenarios and introduces it’s own, self-contained problem for epic-level characters. So there was this order of master psionicists and one of them kicked the butts of all the others because he decided psionics are actually what’s wrong with Athas, so he go an ancient artifact called the Psionatrix and is using it to suppress psionic ability in everyone except himself and his acolytes. Enter the (now psionics-less) players to go break the Psionatrix.

This thing sprawls across three plot-heavy books. Nearly everything, including the overland travel, is an event. It’s maybe the most event heavy event crawl I’ve encountered? Way worse than any Ravenloft adventure I’ve seen.

Hilariously, I bought this back in the day, based mostly on the cover. Problem was, my group hated psionics, so there weren’t any psionic-heavy characters, so they didn’t care when someone turned off the world’s psionics. That was pretty much it for my brief run at Dark Sun.