Only One D&D Setting Brings Gladiator to Your Campaign the Right Way

Gladiator II — the long-awaited follow-up to Ridley Scott’s epic, Best Picture-winning original film that debuted in 2000 — opened in theaters this weekend, which may give audiences a taste for more stories of arena fighters dreaming of freedom. Upon its release, Gladiator captured audiences’ attention with the soaring, grand scale of Maximus’ Decimus Meridius story, as he is betrayed, enslaved, and forced to fight in gladiatorial combat. That scale also applied to the intense, elaborate battles occurring in the arena, in which Maximus and his fellow gladiators had to contend with man and beast to survive, and perhaps spit in the eye of those who did them whatever injustice landed them in the arena in the first place.

Those with experience playing or running Dungeons & Dragons campaigns may think the elaborate battles in the arena during Gladiator and Gladiator II would work as great set pieces in a D&D game. They would be correct, and there’s only one campaign setting to do it.

Now, you might stop me here and say, “Only one? Can’t I drop an arena into my Forgotten Realms or Eberron campaign and go from there?” And if you are a coward, then yes, you can go that route.

But if you want the full Gladiator experience, you go to Athas.

What Is Dark Sun?

Athas is the world of the Dark Sun Campaign Setting, which debuted in 1991 as a new addition to TSR’s line of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons products. Dark Sun stands out from other Dungeons & Dragons campaign settings because it isn’t another high fantasy world like Forgotten Realms or Dragonlance. Instead, it draws on post-apocalyptic and swords and sorcery fiction. Athas is a barren landscape where familiar races aren’t what fans expect and life is harsh enough that most species have developed psychic powers as a survival mechanism. It’s a setting bearing less in common with The Lord of the Rings than with Dune.

[Related: Gladiator II: Explaining the Real Roman History Behind the Film]

But those aren’t the only inspirations. When I spoke to Dark Sun co-creator Tim Brown in 2021 for a 30th anniversary Dark Sun retrospective, he mentioned how Dark Sun began coming together after he watched the 1960 film Spartacus, in which the title character (played by Kirk Douglas) leads a slave rebellion during The Third Servile War, also known as the Gladiator War, that threatened the Roman Empire in first century BC. 

Brown wanted players to be able to stage events like The Third Servile War using Dungeons & Dragons rules. That’s why the first Dark Sun product, the Dark Sun Boxed Set, introduced the Gladiator class. While similar in playstyle to the Fighter class, Gladiators are trained for arena combat, which gives them proficiency with all weapons, allows them to specialize in multiple weapons, and makes them harder to hit.

What Does Dark Sun Have To Do With Gladiator?

The introduction of the Gladiator class alone isn’t what makes Dark Sun the ideal setting for a Gladiator-inspired campaign, but how the same themes of Gladiator‘s stories are infused into Dark Sun‘s world. Gladiator and Gladiator II are stories about enslaved warriors attempting to fight against a corrupt ruler with absolute power. Dark Sun presents players with a similar world — the largest population centers on Athas are its seven city-states, each ruled by a different tyrannical Sorcerer-King. Each city has an arena where gladiatorial contests occur, which are profitable for the owner of prized fighters and quite deadly for the unlucky slaves sometimes used to shore up numbers for larger melees. The arena holds a slightly different position of relevance in the context of each city-state’s distinct culture. However, it is mostly used to entertain citizens and punish anyone challenging the Sorcerer-Kings’ rule.

The gladiator is essential to the Dark Sun setting, and it shows both in the adventure modules released for the game and in novels that tell the overarching story of Athas’ greatest heroes. In the Dark Sun novel The Verdant Passage — the first installment of The Prism Pentad series, written by Dark Sun co-creator Troy Denning — a group of co-conspirators that include the gladiator duo Rikus and Neeva conspire to overthrow Kalak, the Sorcerer-King of the city-state of Tyr, who plans to turn a major gladiator fight into a powerful arcane ritual by draining the life out of the arena’s audience. At the story’s climax, Rikus hurls an enchanted wooden spear from the arena floor. It impales Kalak, doing the unthinkable by killing a Sorcerer-King in a scene that could serve as a climax to any gladiator movie.

Dark Sun Is the Perfect Setting for Gladiator Campaigns

It turns out that the players of a Dark Sun campaign are present when all of this happens. The campaign setting’s first published adventure module, Freedom, begins with the player characters being captured and forced to participate in the arena event that Kalak plans to turn into a sacrifice. They’re in the arena when Rikus throws his spear and they play through the subsequent unrest. The sequel adventures continue to intertwine with The Prism Pentad novels as both groups of heroes try to navigate the challenges to Tyr’s newfound freedom. 

But a Dark Sun campaign doesn’t have to follow the published adventure modules and novels. As mentioned, there are seven city-states in Athas. Every one of them has an arena and a despot in need of overthrowing. Between those original sourcebooks and later revisions (especially the Fourth Edition Dark Sun books), all available digitally, Dungeon Masters will find plenty of information and inspiration for staging grand fights in the arena, which perhaps turn into rebellions. If you come out of a Gladiator II screening this weekend ready to challenge a would-be emperor, gather some friends around a table and enter the arenas of Athas.