So TSR responded to this by going apeshit. They produced settings that represented massive departures from what had gone on before. And they experimented with new mechanics and game structures the likes of which we really haven't seen since. It did not ultimately stem the tide - and before the next president would leave office TSR would be bankrupt and White Wolf would (temporarily) wear the crown as the largest RPG company. But all that is the future; right now we are in 1992 and TSR has just released Dragon Kings: the (self described) final piece of the company's Dark Sun gambit.
Dark Sun was a world that was blasted by magic to the point that it made Gamma World look like a nice place to be. Resources were scarce and everyone had mutant super powers because of all the radiation no reason. The conceit was that high level characters had fucked everything up with magic wars, and now the world was a post apocalyptic desert. And those high level characters are still around, and they rule the blasted dust that is the world and have turned themselves into psychic dragons because that's epic. That's right, this is 2nd Edition AD&D's attempt not only at the capstone for a new setting to pick up people who are "tired of Tolkien", it's also this edition's Epic Level Handbook (or D&D Joke Book, if you prefer). In keeping with the Dragon Theme, I will be drinking a mixture of Curacao and Orange Juice that is dark green like a dragon's scales.
The Foreword
Most AD&D Forewords are to one extent or another full of crazy, but they are also usually skippable because they generally just get filled with mad boasting or halfhearted thank-yous. The foreword to this book is different, because it tells you what the development plans are for Dark Sun. According to the foreword here, the Dragon Kings book was the final book in the original Dark Sun pitch (they pretentiously refer to the fact that the book is published as "The End of the Beginning"). That's interesting, because it gives you a fair amount of insight into what Dark Sun was supposed to be about. The whole "low-tech Gamma World plus people turning into Epic Dragons" was supposedly front and center for the whole thing. They also promise that from now on they are going to do nothing but shovelware for the line's foreseeable future.
They don't actually call it that, but they literally tell us to not hold our breath for maps of what lies beyond the Silt Sea because they can just crank out material covering the same area over and over again depicting one NPC after another. They call this "concentrated campaign development", but if you wanted to call it "procedurally generated shovelware", you wouldn't be wrong. Ultimately I think this philosophy right here is what doomed the company: just because you can write forty books about different slaver tribes and elven bandits and shit in the same general area doesn't mean that you should. Seems pretty clear that the more depth you write about the same topic, the less people will want to read it all. It's like Achilles catching the tortoise, only with your fanbase.
There's also the fapping to "epic" characters. Yes, they call these characters "epic". And 100% of the descriptions of things epic characters might want to do are things that spellcasters might do. There is zero description of what an epic Fighter might do or even acknowledgement that they might exist. This attitude is interesting, because of course this very unconscious prejudice ran as a deep current even through the WotC days and made game balance into a farce at high level. That's especially interesting as none of the people who worked on this book were still at WotC when 3rd edition dropped - they just helped create the culture that would continually repeat this same mistake.
Legends of Athas
The first few pages are filler. They are some stories that people in Athas tell each other. It starts with the story of a half giant who gets robbed by an elf because he can't find his way home while he isn't drunk. This has absolutely nothing to do high level play in general or dragon kings in particular. In fact, this "legend of Athas" could just as easily have been a "legend of Greyhawk" or even a "legend of Scotland" had the races been swapped around. The rest of the legends are similar. Not really sure what purpose this was supposed to serve (other than using up page count, which it does admirably).
Introduction
The Introduction is distinct from the Foreword in that... it's later in the book? I don't think that the author knew what "introduction" meant. In any case, now they come out and tell you that the purpose of the book is to get characters to 30th level in all classes and that while it is a Darksun book, it can also be used for ultra-high-levels in other campaign settings. It also promises more vehicles and also tie-ins to Battlesystem™. For those of you who don't remember, Battlesystem™ was a miniatures battle game that TSR tried to make people care about in the 80s. It tied in loosely with D&D, but was simplified so that you could play big battles with it. It was highly praised in sycophant circles, so I'm not sure that TSR really understood that no one really cared about it. Battlesystem™ comes in a long line of various people trying to make a D&D tie-in miniatures battle rules. From the original Chainmail on through the Miniatures Handbook, D&D has tried to get this right over and over again. Hell, K and I tried to make some at one point - it isn't easy.
It also comes clean that they intend to make you care about various special Psionic stuff. They have Psionic Enchantment and a special Psionic organization called unoriginally "The Order". Taking up space in the introduction to tell you that they are going to tell you about those things is frankly pretty sad and fairly drink worthy. There's just no amount of build-up you can do to a group of NPCs called "The Order" whose mission statement is "beat up powerful psychics who don't pay membership dues" to make it sound exciting. It's a hackneyed concept.
Psionic Enchantments aren't what they sound like at all. While you'd think that they might be enchantments on things that were done with Psionics instead of Magic, you'd be totally wrong. For some reason, the book has decided to name 10th level spells "Psionic Enchantments" and has locked them away from everyone who isn't an epic level caster who is also a psionicist. There's a meandering and nonsensical explanation, but really it seems to go down to the raw idea that only people who are already cheating their ass off to get massive power should have even more power dumped on them so that all the other PCs feel small in the pants. In addition, there is also a straight-up 4e-style "epic destiny" you can get if you're a 20th level Psionicist/Spellcaster. You spend the next 10 levels turning into a super dragon while the rest of the party... doesn't. You can really see why the 4e authors thought of Darksun when they looked at their Epic Destiny rules. Of course, 4e still sucks and couldn't deliver anything a tenth as interesting as the meandering diatribes in this book. It makes me sad just to have written that.
Anyway, the introduction takes time out of its day to tell you how to do the funky 2nd edition experience point accounting and also tells you why there are several things that the canonical NPC Dragon Kings do and have done that you can't do even as a character who has already taken a giant dump on anything remotely resembling game balance by being a maxed out psionicist/caster who has access to special dragon advancements and epic level spells that no one else gets because Fuck You. I should point out that by this time I have run out of orange juice and rather than continue with themed drinkery I am simply going to be taking a sip of bourbon every time WTF. It's also interesting to note the under 2nd edition AD&D rules, one of the most confusing sections is Dual Classing. And while this book dedicates a fair amount of page space in the introduction to how you might use Dual Classing to get Psionicist and Preserver each up to 20th level, it doesn't answer any of the questions you might have about this (like whether you're allowed to advance one up to 7, advance the other up to 8 and then switch back to the first or whether you have to crawl all the way up to 20th as a single classed character and only then switch to the second). Also bonus points for having the book act like people use the racial level limit rules, which as far as I know no one ever did in 2nd edition - especially not in Dark Sun.
Warriors
In 2nd edition AD&D, classes were categorized into "warriors", "rogues", "wizards", and "priests". Dark Sun also had a fifth category "psionicists". Every class was nominally a variant on one of the four (five) basic classes. But since there actually wasn't a "basic class" template for any of these theoretical bases, in practice this was largely toothless nomenclature. It wasn't really important that Fighter was a subset of Warrior, save for the general rule that you couldn't multiclass within a category (although even then there were exceptions).
The first chapter about getting over 20th level is based around the "warrior" class group. Dark Sun had an extra Warrior class, which was Gladiator. This is not to be confused with the Gladiator Kit that you could take if you were a Fighter. 2nd edition was full of stuff like that, because there was no editorial control and different writers and developers were often as not sending in their work by mail without ever speaking to or hearing of each other. Incompatible parallel development wasn't just a rare and regrettable happenstance: it was the norm.
Now the chapter begins with a half-page story in italics, because it was the 90s and that was just how things worked then. It fills up page space and sets the mood for a chapter. Nothing wrong with that. Well, except for the fact that extended chunks of italics are hard to read and they should really just use a slightly different font. But that's just typography nitpicking, I normally wouldn't even call attention to this bit except that this is the flavor story for the epic level fighters section. It is a story about a warrior whose wizard overlord wants him to fight to the death against his brother, which he doesn't want to do. So he bribes another wizard into conducting an elaborate ruse involving illusions to keep his brother alive, but eventually his wizard overlord uses different magic to get to the bottom of things and he ends up killing his brother anyway. This is really quite emblematic about the lack of give-a-fuck the authors pay fighters and the degree to which fighters can't have nice things. Not only is everyone who ever does anything remotely cool in the fighter story a wizard, but the fighter lead-in to the epic level fighter rules has no epicness in the slightest and ends up being a wizard bitch no matter what he does.
As a 21st level warrior, you get 3 hit points. I don't know if you get boosts to your THAC0 or improved saving throws, it isn't mentioned. Every level past 20th, you get 3 hit points. That's it. Feel the epicness! Gladiators get an extra special ability at 25th level which reduces their AC by 1. It goes down by 1 more at 30th level. I am not making that up. In addition, you have the power to raise and train military units with a month of downtime. But these military units are given Battlesystem™ numbers and not D&D stats. I really can't evaluate the followers you get for being an epic level Fighter, because I have no idea what getting a d20+10 "stands" means. I mean, it is fairly clear that in going in level it is easy to get an army raised that is more than twice as big as the army another character gets, and it's equally obvious that the numbers rolled for the power of said unit are also so random that it is quite possible for one character's one level worth of army to rolfstomp another character's 3 levels worth of soldiers. But what specifically they are capable of I can't tell, because I don't have the old Battlesystem™ book and the names and numbers don't mean anything to me.
After explaining the follower generation, there is a half page tirade about how as the DM you might want to simply ignore all that and give the player whatever troops you feel like having them get (including no troops). So the primary ability of epic warriors is that the DM may choose to allow them to roll dice and get an army. Or you know, not. It's 2nd edition. There is also a page and a half about different things you can do with followers, but there aren't any rules here. You can set your troops to working construction, but they "might" not be happy about it. All MTP. Warriors don't deserve to get actual rules to interact with.
The chapter is rounded out by some stuff that really has nothing to do with the warrior classes per se. The first is a bit about how under certain circumstances armies will send forward champions to settle things in personal combat - with the army of the loser (generally) departing the field in an orderly withdrawal. There is a list of different groups who have armies in Dark Sun and some ideas of whether they might submit, accept, or renege upon challenges. The rules for using Psionics in Battlesystem™ are inexplicably here, despite the fact that Psionicists get their own chapter later on. There are several pages of Battlesystem™ troop lists, and some vehicle rules that are incoherent and split between AD&D and Battlesystem™ writeups. I think I need to finish my bourbon glass and do a small tribute to how batshit and ass backwards many rules are in AD&D:
Aaaargh! I can't believe I just flashed on the madness that is the AD&D 2nd edition initiative rules. They are so... not good. I will say that while the rules are madness and despair, the vehicles themselves are pretty inspired. People in Dark Sun go to war in bone gliders, wagons with sails, and the hollowed out reanimated corpses of giant beetles.Dragon Kings, Warrior Chapter, Vehicle Rules wrote:When in melee with those outside the chariot, the driver and combatants are considered on higher ground (-1 bonus to initiative rolls).
Wizards
The first heading of this chapter is literally "Wizards Most Powerful", and they do not shy away from fapping to the might of high level wizards. This chapter tells you that as a 20th level Wizard you have to either stop gaining experience and go fuck off or progress into a prestige class to turn into either a Dragon or an Avangion. Note that the second option requires that you also be a 20th level Psionicist and has attribute requirements. The authors also helpfully remind you that these level combinations are not possible for any character except a human or halfelf because of level limits. The authors apparently think that it is perfectly alright to get to 20th level and then be told that one character can keep getting more powerful and the other characters can't. The weird thing is that even in 1992 this kind of bullshit was regarded disdainfully by most of the RPG community. The whole thing comes off as deeply out of touch with what passed for modern game design even then.
The Dragons and Avangions have their own XP charts in them. I think it probably should be mentioned at this point that the descriptions of XP costs are incomplete both in this chapter and in the introduction, and they don't seem to match up exactly in any case. As far as I can tell, you're supposed to set your experience points to zero upon hitting 20th level, then get 500,000 XP to advance to "Dragon Level 1" (which is sometimes called 21st level and sometimes called 1st level), at which point you reset your XP to zero again and then you get to Dragon level 2 when you get 400,000 more XP. But there are other interpretations available. What's clear is that the XP accounting is stupidly obtuse even by AD&D standards.
Dragons get a completely incomprehensible progression of things. They get 10d4 of extra hit points at level 21 (+20 hit points because they are required to have a high Constitution and they add the bonus on every die), then 5 more d4s at level 22, then "only" 3d4s at level 23, but by level 30 they are getting 5d4s again. Remember that warriors were supposed to be happy getting 3 actual hit points per level, while the Epic spellcaster gets forty five. The book doesn't even pretend this is remotely balanced. The drawback is that you have to make system shock checks or die before going up a level. The description of the Dragon change is full of unintentional comedy (your mass "doubles to 350 pounds", thus apparently all pre-transformation dragon wizards weighed 175 pounds), but you also get THAC0 improvements and shit specifically: by level 30 your THAC0 is -3, which I think is explicitly better than the epic level Fighters. You know, just to rub their noses in it.
Super duper props go to the "animalistic period". The idea is that when your character achieves 25th level, he goes insane and rampages around doing (frankly pretty good) Godzilla impersonation. The DM is encouraged to take control of your character away and give it back when they've reached 30th level. I have no fucking idea how this is supposed to work, because even with Dark Sun's "character tree" concept (you have four characters in your stable, and switch back and forth), your dragon is still never going to pick up 5.6 million XP while not being played. I think it's basically even more power gaming by the back door. You get 1.6 million XP and then you say "fuck it, let's just time jump until I'm at the level cap".
As a Preserver, you transform into an Avangion. It's described like a Seraph, but the art doesn't really match and looks like this:
Anyway, your transformation into one causes you to get all kinds of awesome in your own way. This highlights some of the crazy that is the 2nd edition system. See, being an Avangion doesn't give you a bonus to your Armor Class, it sets your armor class to a number. What happens when you have a magic item that sets your AC to a different number (like the Bracers of Armor that you definitely have by the time this is even up for consideration)? No one knows. Also, as an Avangion you "will certainly attract followers", though it does not say how many or under what conditions. The book straight up tells you that being one makes you the most powerful Good character, not only in the party - but the entire history of the world.
Then we get the 10th level spells Psionic Enchantments. These have crazy mechanics attached to them. They also have large amounts of "ah, fuckit" in them. By which I mean that it literally tells you that the DM may or may not decide that a creature killed by the secondary effects of 10th level Defiler spells cannot be brought back by resurrection. I think that's a fairly important rules question, and these so-called "rules" raise this question but do not answer it! Also it takes an entire page to tell you that the author has thought long and hard about how Wishes interact with 10th level spells, and he has decided to not make a final decision and pass the buck to the DM of your campaign. The author also points out that he hasn't decided what to replace material components of spells that refer to things that don't exist in Dark Sun with. And there's a rant about how each Wizard player needs to determine what their personal magic smells like. That last part is exceptional in its weirdness, because it actually goes on for several pages and has charts you can roll on in case you can't decide whether your spells should leave the smell of burnt rubber in peoples' noses or a salty taste in their mouths.
Priests
Clerics in Athas were weird. First of all, they were better than you. Everyone in Dark Sun gets boned one way or another (Fighters can't find metal equipment, Wizards have to do the whole Defiling/Preserving thing), except Clerics. Clerics have to choose an Elemental patron, but that patron is an ambivalent column of fire or something and doesn't actually care what you do. So it may not surprise that Clerics get a sweet (if very weird) deal in the epic rules in this book.
One of the first things you note in this is that in 2nd edition AD&D, Cleric spells only went up to 7th level, while Mage spells went up to 9th. But Psionic Enchantments still cap out at 10th level either way. So while the Dragon character only has one level of Psionic Enchantments, the Cleric has three. Your spells aren't really much better or worse, but the way AD&D does spells per day means that as an epic Cleric you have just a fuck lot more of these things.
When you get to 20th level as a Cleric you have two choices for advancement. Either you go for the Warrior option where you gain 2 hit points a level and continue taking levels of Cleric 21-30 (only you get actual increases to your magical powers and spend less XP to level than a Fighter because Fighters Can't Have Nice Things); or you go for the Wizard option where you take 20 levels of Cleric and 20 levels of Psionicist and then you start taking levels of super sayan and get giant piles of hit dice and massive powers and shit. The second option is a little weird for Clerics, because your elemental form has duration limits before you turn back into a human. Either way you get various weird bonuses like the ability to summon elementals once per day like the spell you automatically learned fifteen levels ago because you're a Cleric.
Dark Sun also had an extra priest variant class called the Templar. These guys channeled power through the Dragon Kings, and the book is very explicit that even if you become a Dragon King yourself you don't get to anoint your own Templars even though you're already skullfucking game balance and characters of that level are also already given the ability to train up followers in short periods of time. Mostly because "Fuck You", but there is a round about explanation about lightning elementals or something. The big reveal here is that in the Dark Sun plotline, a major Dragon King gets ganked, and now all the Templars who were channeling power by worshipping him don't get spells. Sucks to be them! Also, Templars are capped at 20th level. The big reveal for the epic rules for the Templar class are that if you are a Templar you don't get to play in the epic sandbox. At all. And fuck you for wanting to play a Dark Sun specific character class in a Dark Sun specific high level adventures book.
Druids in Dark Sun were weird. I know everything in Dark Sun is weird, but these might have been the weirdest. Druids get to have a special affinity for a specific patch of ground. And then they get to stay in it. It's not really compatible with play Dungeons & Dragons. The whole character class is based around not going on adventures. The 21st+ level Druid class is pretty insulting. It takes half a million XP to level, and each level just gives you a minor ability. Most of these abilities look like they could have been 3rd or 4th level spells. But you weren't going to play a Druid in Dark Sun, because playing in Dark Sun involves actually going on adventures, which Dark Sun Druids do not do.
The book has slightly different rules for casting Cleric spells of 8-10th level than casting Defiler spells of 10th level, but not different enough to matter. And the chapter is wrapped up with several pages ranting about AD&D's planar connection system. In case you need a refresher:
At levels 21+, Rogues get 2 hit points a level and their THAC0 doesn't move. However, they also get "illusionist spells" and get them at an accelerated rate, and by 9 levels into Epic Rogue they are casting 7th level spells like Simulacrum and Shadow Walk.
The Rogue in AD&D was two classes: Thief and Bard. The latter was already a spellcaster, and the bonus spellcasting you get for being an epic Rogue totally stacks with the spellcasting you get for being a Bard. As an Epic Thief, in addition to getting the spellcasting, your Dexterity score increases at one per level in epic until it hits 21.
The Epic Thief also gets a new set of Thief Abilities to make up for the fact that their basic Thief Abilities are presumably all maxed out long ago. These new epic abilities vary from overtly magical ("detect illusion" which lets you see through illusions like you had True Sight with a small failure chance) to laughably mundane ("bribe official" which "lets" you change the attitude of bureaucrats who reacted poorly to you by offering bribes - something which I am pretty sure anyone can do without even having an ability to that effect). In fact, many of these epic skills don't make any sense until you realize that there is an optional rule where you can trade the thief skills off the normal list for skills off the epic list one for one. And some of the more mundane ones would actually be tolerably useful at low level, so whatever. And that's the whole chapter - it's just a few pages long.
Psionicists
The Psionicist chapter is about the Psionicist class after 20th level. You keep getting Psionic abilities and power points, and you get 2 hit points a level. Nothing really interesting there. In order to round out the chapter, the author launches into a tirade about the unoriginally named order called "The Order" who have a bunch of high level psionicists and want to dick with high level characters. And that's it.
Really, if you hit 20th level as a Psionicist, you should probably dual class into a spellcasting class and then turn into a something whatsit. The "more levels of psionicist" section doesn't seem thought out.
Appendices
It wouldn't be an AD&D book without appendices! It has some monsters, it has some extra spells (a 2nd level spell that postpones having to sleep, a 6th level spell that is slightly better than Haste, and stuff like that). It also has the epic level spells. And new psionic powers, some of which you can only select if you're over 20th level (which makes them very much like the 10th level spells for Wizards in concept, but because it's 2nd edition AD&D, they work completely differently). And some high level monster writeups. There is a monster writeup for the Avangion, despite the fact that there explicitly aren't any Avangions in the universe and never have been any Avangions in the universe and if the players met a hypothetical future Avangion he would probably be one of them and even if he wasn't he'd be on their side. But it gets a monster writeup anyway, because we need to fill up page space.
-Username17
Just look at the logo how it is missing the "2nd Edition" like all early (prior to 1995) 2nd edition materials.