Thanks for any help!
Do the primordials and the gods not like each other for a specific reason? Also, did the primordials defeat the gods and send them "away" somehow from Athas? I thought I read something like that, but maybe that's not right.
Thanks for you help!
The Dark Sun setting indeed asumes that in the Dawn War, the Primordials were victorious over the Gods instead of the opposite as with other settings.
What this entails though is dependant upon your own campaign. In most settings, it is assumed that the primordials are bound, dead, imprisoned, weakened, or on the most rarest of occasions, free and active. Most of them do not work individually. You could choose to invert this, making the gods the same way, and thus giving a few players the opportunity to utilise divine powered classes. Alternatively, the gods could be completely dead, banished or otherwise blocked off from Athas, unable to interact with the world at all. The search for divine power, its influence in the world, the views the Sorcerer Kings could have of it, and the will of the Primordials to snuff it out, control it, or utilse it for whatever ends could make a compelling three tier campaign idea for a Dark Sun game.
Hope this helps. Happy Gaming
Gods and primordials represent the opposing concepts of order and chaos, thoughts and physicality, preservation and creation/destruction. These opposing concepts must exist in some kind of balance for Reality itself to persist. In other (4e) D&D worlds, the gods 'won' the Dawn War, but they did not destroy most of the primordials, merely imprisoned them, thus allowing the world to go on existing in a state somewhere between eternal stasis and endless change. On Athas, however, the primordials won and either completely annihilated the gods or drove them outside Reality for all time. Thus, Athas' Reality is unstable. It is slowly disintegrating, sliding towards entropy. One side of the equation has been reduced to zero, and the other side is slowly running down to balance it. On Athas, the arrow of time runs only downhill, towards inevitable oblivion.
In other worlds, using arcane magic merely taps into the endless cycle of leftover creative energy that moves easily between the planes, constantly renewed by the interplay between order and chaos (in a sense, the Dawn, the Creation, never really ended, as the interaction that gave birth to the world still goes on). You cast a spell, changing local reality to conform to your will, and the magic is absorbed back into the world around you with no long-term consequences. Reality is a closed and self-renewing system. On Athas, however, magic is a scarce and non-renewable resource, because the creative cycle that should power it no longer functions and used magic seeps away into the Void outside of Creation (perhaps in a futile search for the exiled gods?). The only way to harvest the creative energy necessary to effect change in the world is to take it from other lifeforms nearby, or to steal it from the Sun itself. Both the Sun and living beings are creations of the interplay between the gods and the primordials, thus they contain the last echoes of the Dawn and are therefore sources of creative energy. In both cases, the eventual effect of having that energy tapped for magic is the same: accelerated aging and death.
(Incidentally, if the gods and primordials in other worlds ever got around to waging their 'Dusk War', those worlds too would end up like Athas, no matter who actually won. Those worlds' survival depends on the fact that the Dawn War never really ended, but just became a very long 'cold war'.)
Primordials and Gods have a similar mythological arrangement to each other than the historical Greek Titans and Gods, except D&D's Gods are not the children or creations of the Primordials.