D&D 5E WotC: Why Dark Sun Hasn't Been Revived

In an interview with YouTuber 'Bob the Worldbuilder', WotC's Kyle Brink explained why the classic Dark Sun setting has not yet seen light of day in the D&D 5E era.

I’ll be frank here, the Dark Sun setting is problematic in a lot of ways. And that’s the main reason we haven’t come back to it. We know it’s got a huge fan following and we have standards today that make it extraordinarily hard to be true to the source material and also meet our ethical and inclusion standards... We know there’s love out there for it and god we would love to make those people happy, and also we gotta be responsible.

You can listen to the clip here.

 

[Alzrius]

Dragon Kings Kickstarter by Tim Brown.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1084491323/dragon-kings

That Kickstarter closed several years ago. People who want the Dragon Kings World Book, which is system-neutral, can get it on DriveThruRPG now. There's also a Dragon Kings 5E Rules supplement, and I know there was a Pathfinder 1E rules book somewhere out there too.

Please note my use of affiliate links in this post.

 

[Maxperson]

Bad guys who can in any way be related to real world bad actions are a rapidly dying breed in WotC D&D.

Literally all of them can. Game bad guy murders someone. Real world bad guys murder people. Game bad guy kidnaps a woman and child. Real world bad guys do that, too. Embezzlement? Yep. A coup? Yep.

 

[Burnside]

The way they chased Eat the Rich out of DMs Guild certainly suggests that may be the case.

As one of the Eat the Rich writers who was there for that fiasco, I feel very confident that the issues with WotC doing Dark Sun are 100% slavery and eugenics, not climate change.

Also, for the record, I ended up publishing my Eat the Rich adventure on the guild as a stand-alone adventure without changing a word of it.

The issue with Dark Sun isn't that it portrays slavery as good. It's that it portrays it as a pervasive and more or less permanent cornerstone of every major civilization in the setting. The most common trope for starting a Dark Sun campaign is "we're slave gladiators."

"It's a fantasy game where we put on the hat of pretending to be oppressed slaves for a few hours - it's fun!" isn't going to play well in 2023. It's just not.

Whether you agree or disagree that slavery can be a major part of the setting, surely anybody can read the tea leaves and see that WotC has FAR more to lose than to gain by wading into something so likely to result in controversy. It would be another self-inflicted wound to the brand coming off a series of recent ones (hadozeegate, OGLgate). If I'm WotC, Dark Sun stays in the archives.

 

[gorice]

Dragon Kings Kickstarter by Tim Brown.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1084491323/dragon-kings

Yup, this is the one. It's on drivethrurpg now.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I feel very confident that the issues with WotC doing Dark Sun are 100% slavery and eugenics, not climate change.

I'm very skeptical of that, I must say, because it's completely possible to fix the the slavery and eugenics issues , but removing the climate change stuff would completely gut the setting, and climate change is weirdly a more contentious issue for media to discuss today than it was in the 1990s.

 

[halfling rogue]

I can't wait for WotC to release a campaign where all the conflict is hashed out in an Equity Training Session.

 

[Zaukrie]

I'll ask again, what's the upside here? A few million in profit? For that level of risk? Not worth it.

 

[Maxperson]

I would not expect to ever see Dark Sun in 1D&D whilst the current leadership are in charge.

They have had cultural sensitivity issues, but the "extraordinarily difficult" line he used rings pretty false to me. 4E already expurgated some of the riskiest stuff from Dark Sun, and 5E would really just need to get rid of the slavery entirely, which is easily done because, if anything, serfdom makes more sense in a lot of ways. That includes renaming Muls and changing their slave-centric background. If their approach to half-races remains 1D&D one, you don't make them a half-race, just make them their own thing. Once that's out of the way, in a very real way, Dark Sun is less problematic than a lot of other settings in "cultural sensitivity" terms.

But the problem you can't remove without just deleting what makes Dark Sun Dark Sun is anthropogenic climate change and the Sorcerer-Lords. And they're not problematic in a "cultural sensitivity" way, but those are certainly going to spark some controversy in this era (even when back in the 1990s, they did not).

Athas didn't suffer climate change in any way like what is happening on Earth. It suffered climate destruction via defiling magic. No different than if you made a setting where a nuclear war happened and the climate was desolate because of past radiation. It's simply a post-apocalyptic setting.

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

I'll ask again, what's the upside here? A few million in profit? For that level of risk? Not worth it.

It’s also their self-imposed sense of “responsibility” that they’re using to excuse not opening Athas up to DM’s Guild, just the fan content policy. Smothering it in responsibility.

 

[Burnside]

I'm very skeptical of that, I must say, because it's completely possible to fix the the slavery and eugenics issues , but removing the climate change stuff would completely gut the setting, and climate change is weirdly a more contentious issue for media to discuss today than it was in the 1990s.

Even if they somehow cut slavery and eugenics for the 5E version of Dark Sun, which imo would be a tall order, it wouldn't stop the hit pieces from coming.

'WOTC relaunches setting based on slavery and eugenics!"
"DYK? In the original Dark Sun, slave masters breed humans with dwarves to create a perfect race of sterile slave workers!"

It would be a disaster.

Also important to note that this risk would be taken in order to revive a setting that was NEVER financially successful for either TSR or WotC.

Climate change was directly mentioned as part of the marketing for Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden and nobody batted an eye (not that that adventure actually handled its climate change allegory well, but it was there).