AD&D Dark Sun Online: Crimson Sands

An early MMORPG, this romp through TSR’s blasted alt-fantasy Dark Sun AD&D campaign setting of Athas was built atop the shoulders of the earlier singleplayer game Dark Sun: Wake of the Ravager in terms of the engine and interface, offering a similar experience, only more so. Multiplayer parties adventured through new scorched desert areas in pursuit of new ceramic treasures, rewards for similar fetch and extermination quests as in the earlier games. The quests were automatically generated to ease the load on the support staff scriptors, who threw new scheduled role-playing events into the realm daily as #NPCs to challenge and stump players.

A great deal of the interactivity rested on elaborate MUD-style conversational conventions (speaking to those within earshot, privately confiding, announcing to the whole server), attempting to limit “out of character” (OOC) chatter as deleterious to whatever suspension of disbelief was a prerequisite for group role-playing in this strange new graphical online forum. Nonetheless, many later staples of MMORPG social conventions could be found emerging here, from the formation of player guilds to forbidding “PVP” (player vs. player) combat in certain “safe” areas, among them the newbie launch pad of Caravan Way in the city-state of Tyr.