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.

 

[humble minion]

Well the Star Wars sequels definitely didn’t help me stick with the IP. I was all set with the FFG Star Wars books and then Rian Johnson’s Last Jedi came out and woof, I’ve not bothered with the last one and I’ve not attempted to start a game. Andor was great though, if a little slow to get going.

In general though, reinventions/sequels etc can be good or bad on their own merits just like original properties. The possibility of them being bad shouldn't dissuade people from doing them, any more than the possibility of original work being bad should dissuade people from creating it.

 

[James Gasik]

Honestly, now i'm thinking harder about it, for me the mechanical issues of doing Dark Sun in 5th ed would heavily outweigh the 'problematic' thematic issues. They've already retconned Ravenloft to hell and back (har har) in every possible manner, and VRGtR seems to have been very well received on the whole by that (very large) portion of the WotC customer base for who 'Ravenloft' is defined by Curse of Strahd rather than the twenty plus year old 2nd/3rd ed material. The core went away, the individual domains were all turned upside down and inside out and completely rewritten with no regard whatsoever to previous lore, Ravenloft went through Planescape's pockets and stole portal keys, there's all of a sudden setting-wide cults venerating the Dark Powers (who all of a sudden have names), PCs can do whatever the hell they like without running the risk of powers checks, etc etc etc. They'd surely have no compunctions about doing a similar massive overhaul to Dark Sun. I could think of a dozen ways to resolve, retcon, or remove the 'problematic' setting elements that are MUCH less lore-intrusive than what was done to Ravenloft, and if I can, then I'm sure WotC has people on the creative side who can too.

But the mechanics .... hmmm. Even completely aside from the whole elephant-in-the-room issue of psionics, Dark Sun was explicitly written as a low-magic world, even in the context of a much lower-magic edition of D&D. It's hard to write a setting where arcane casters have to conceal their existence from angry mobs for an edition in which even 2/3 of barbarian subclasses have flashy magical abilities, at-will cantrips are all over the place, and the term 'arcane' no longer has any real meaning. It's hard to have a survivalist, water-lacking setting in an edition where wilderness survival is pretty much trivial and 'create water' is a widely accessible first level spell. It's hard to have specialised elemental clerics in a system where the existing clerical spell list contains spells of all elements, and there's no mechanism analogous to the 2e 'sphere' system for restricting that. Sure, you could throw back to 2e products like Domains of Dread and go through the spell list line by line and explain 'spell X produces 1/10 of the listed water' and 'spell Y is not available to air, fire, or earth clerics', but there is absolutely no way that WotC is going to spend a bunch of pages doing tedious paperwork like that, especially as the page count in their products seems to be shrinking year on year as it is.

Dark Sun is a setting about hard limits, about restricted choices and restricted resources. Limited magic, limited water, limited metal, limited freedom, limited options. This jibes extremely poorly with broader design philosophy of 5th ed. And no, this isn't a rant about how 5e players are spoiled and soft and lazy and dumb and all these kids should get off my lawn. I LIKE 5e. I have my issues with it, but on the whole it's probably my favourite edition. But as a system for telling the sort of stories that Dark Sun was designed for? It's not an easy fit. You either have to spend a load of page count rewriting the system to fit the setting, or you have to deal with a bunch of PCs whose capabilities just flat-out contradict a lot of the basic setting assumptions.

I was recently asked if you could run Dark Sun in 5e by my play group. This was my response (copied from our Discord):

[12:18]James:
hell no
[12:20 PM]James: The setting relies on fundamental assumptions that are pretty alien to 5e; a harsh wasteland where survival is difficult if not impossible, people running around with low quality equipment made of bone or stone due to meager supplies of copper or iron ore, arcane magic being actively dangerous to use, half-dwarves and half-giants created by forced breeding, slavery, cannibalistic halflings, and above all else, actual psionics.
[12:22 PM]James: sometimes a setting is a product of it's time; the 4e Dark Sun was a mess (ditto for 4e Eberron, a setting that was specifically designed with 3e rules in mind).
[12:23 PM]James: oh and 5e Eberron as well; how do you have a setting with a magitechnological industrial age where artificers make magical devices when your system barely supports magic items? lol

 

[squibbles]

I picked up Through Sunken Lands recently, and while it's definitely got that Bronze Age sword & sorcery vibe going, and a surprisingly detailed gazetteer (none of Flatland's other games have anything like it), I didn't, on first read, see anything where I could say "ah ha, this is faux Mesopotamia!"

I love that publication. The playbook character generation is so evocative of S&S vibes.

But there are a few things in the gazetteer that pretty much scream "I am copied from the Elric series"

 

[robus]

In general though, reinventions/sequels etc can be good or bad on their own merits just like original properties. The possibility of them being bad shouldn't dissuade people from doing them, any more than the possibility of original work being bad should dissuade people from creating it.

True, IMO Star Trek: Picard is awful, but ST: Strange New Worlds is wonderful. So I think it really takes an effort to be true to the themes, something GoT abandoned in the last few seasons (we bailed around S4 after too much torture porn and not enough story progress.).

I know nothing of Dark Sun, tbh but it does sound like a thematic minefield

 

[MichaelSomething]

After the thrashing WOTC got from the old schoolers over Thac0 the Clown, they have learned the old school mantra of treading carefully, and not engaging in needlessly risky situations. Therefore, they won't make more Dark Sun.

I do think opening it up to the DM's Guild would be a good move.

 

[overgeeked]

As I've posted previously, I disagree with that sentiment.

However, I would be happy if a thousand weird planetary romance settings bloomed. For any of you looking for such settings, here are some I've encountered over the last several years*:

• Azag
• BX Mars
• Carcosa
• Cha'alt
• Dragon Kings (as previously mentioned)
• Hypertellurians
• Planet Eris
• Planet Psychon
• Savage Swords of Athanor
• Scourge of the Scornlords
• Swords and Super-Science of Xuhlan
• Vaults of Vaarn
• Warriors of the Red Planet
• And, of course, Tekumel and Skyrealms of Jorune, sorta fit this mold

*Disclaimer: some of these push the boundaries of good taste. Also, none of them quite their own brand of weird and sundry influences in the way that Dark Sun is.

@gorice perhaps you could share some additional planetary romance settings that might help fill that Dark Sun sized void.


Yes, I could see a 'spiritual successor' to Dark Sun as being a good thing.

I also think there's a lot of cool things they could do with a time jump. I've proposed ideas for one in prior threads, so I'll just quote myself here:

With all of that, they can have made dramatic IN SETTING changes to the social structure of Tyr, Raam, Balic, Draj, and Gulg, while describing Urik and Nibenay as cruel vestiges of the old order, and possibly treating Urik as a sealed off North Korea that doesn't substantially interact with the outside (that's how it's described in Beyond the Prism Pentad).

I don't think any of that would make it not Dark Sun--the planet's still dying of magical defilement, the desert is still deadly, the tablelands are still filled with OP psychic monsters and murderous water-stealing bandits, and the cities are still (mostly) run by cruel petty authoritarians.

It’s kinda wild how close you can get to pitch perfect Dark Sun with just the Dungeon Crawl Classics core and some select imports from Mutant Crawl Classics and a few related zines.

 

[Scribe]

After the thrashing WOTC got from the old schoolers over Thac0 the Clown, they have learned the old school mantra of treading carefully, and not engaging in needlessly risky situations. Therefore, they won't make more Dark Sun.

Yes yes...Thac0 /glances at Spelljammer.

 

[billd91]

All I'm going to say is that I get the history and I get WoTC is a business and doesn't want to get itself in trouble, but it's sad you can't make a game where you're fighting against slavery anymore.

Maybe? But I can see the point @I'm A Banana is making. For people still fighting the downside of slavery's legacy, having it come up in RPGs, even if intended to allow for players to vicariously oppose slavery through their PCs, may be hitting a little too close to home. Their trauma really isn't everyone else's playground.

 

[GreyLord]

Something else not mentioned. They just did Dark Sun in 4e. I know, I know, that was a while ago...

But it was longer since WotC had touched Greyhawk, Raveloft, Spelljamer and Dragonlance as full on campaign settings.

Planescape is probably incoming, and there are other older Campaign settings not yet revived that probably should be on the thicket prior to Dark Sun being revived...

But...who knows.

 

[gorice]

As I've posted previously, I disagree with that sentiment.

However, I would be happy if a thousand weird planetary romance settings bloomed. For any of you looking for such settings, here are some I've encountered over the last several years*:

• Azag
• BX Mars
• Carcosa
• Cha'alt
• Dragon Kings (as previously mentioned)
• Hypertellurians
• Planet Eris
• Planet Psychon
• Savage Swords of Athanor
• Scourge of the Scornlords
• Swords and Super-Science of Xuhlan
• Vaults of Vaarn
• Warriors of the Red Planet
• And, of course, Tekumel and Skyrealms of Jorune, sorta fit this mold

*Disclaimer: some of these push the boundaries of good taste. Also, none of them quite their own brand of weird and sundry influences in the way that Dark Sun is.

@gorice perhaps you could share some additional planetary romance settings that might help fill that Dark Sun sized void.


Yes, I could see a 'spiritual successor' to Dark Sun as being a good thing.

I also think there's a lot of cool things they could do with a time jump. I've proposed ideas for one in prior threads, so I'll just quote myself here:

With all of that, they can have made dramatic IN SETTING changes to the social structure of Tyr, Raam, Balic, Draj, and Gulg, while describing Urik and Nibenay as cruel vestiges of the old order, and possibly treating Urik as a sealed off North Korea that doesn't substantially interact with the outside (that's how it's described in Beyond the Prism Pentad).

I don't think any of that would make it not Dark Sun--the planet's still dying of magical defilement, the desert is still deadly, the tablelands are still filled with OP psychic monsters and murderous water-stealing bandits, and the cities are still (mostly) run by cruel petty authoritarians.

That's a cool list! Off the top of my head, the only games/settings I can think of that might scratch the same itch are The Electrum Archive (more of a Morrowind homage, but Morrowind was a Dark Sun homage, so w/e) and Ultraviolet Grasslands.