This is meant to be one of those situations that’s funny for the wrong reason.
You see, I do not play D&D. Never have. Now I’m old and stubborn, so I won’t play it to keep my record intact.
So I saw lots of their products on the shelves over the years. One that stood out was the Dark Sun setting.
Here is where it gets weird. I built a picture in my head of what I thought the setting was based on adverts, some hearsay, and an active imagination. The name alone made me think the world was in perpetual sunlight, but the sun was dying. Hence, the yellow or red tint to all the art.
The only way my imagination made that work was a Dyson Sphere. That is a shell built around a star, with all the livable land on the inside. In this case the sphere was natural/made by the all powerful gods at the beginning of time. How deep the land goes is unknown.
This universe is old. The sun is much larger, heating the surface to a desert, evaporated most open bodies of water, and has changed color from white to yellow/red in hue.
What is left are tribes of barbarians fighting for what is left, sailing the salt flats on wheeled sailing “ships”. Or riding around on tamed critters of all kinds that are NOT horses, raiding and pillaging walled towns or a handful of actual cities around sources of water. A lot like Princess of Mars or the Tarnsman of Gor. Knights, dragons, and castles are out. Mad max killers, crazy desert war bands, and cannibals are in.
Metal is nearly gone, so everything is bone, hides, stone, and hard wood from the few big plants that still grow. No, I don’t know where the metal went.
So, I own the Dark Sun supplement books as PDFs now. Man, I was a bit off.
Yet, I can’t say that my imagined setting wasn’t better.
I’m posting this as a fun lark. I’m also curious if anybody else had a similar thing happen when you bought a product, only to find out it’s way different.