D&D 5E (2024) When are we getting announcements for 2026 books?

like Mul-breeding or obsession with slavery
Lol those were exactly what I was talking about. Glad to hear they are minor and lose-able.

Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of things I like about Dark Sun, even the original. It's lessons are more relevant now than ever. There's just some edge-lord stuff that I don't need in this day and age
 

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Lol those were exactly what I was talking about. Glad to hear they are minor and lose-able.

Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of things I like about Dark Sun, even the original. It's lessons are more relevant now than ever. There's just some edge-lord stuff that I don't need in this day and age
Agreed. Dark Sun can keep many of the same themes but remove a lot of the edgelord crap. I know it's heresy, but Ravenloft 5e did that well in the "removing all the grimdark without removing the horror" elements.
 

Not for nothing, but the upcoming FR book just included a whole genie themed paladin subclass; they could easily reprint that in a Dark Sun book and bam, you got paladins.

I could also see templars being a paladin subclass as much as a warlock one.
Templars definitely seem like a Paladin subclass to me in a 5E context. Probably the only Paladin subclass (though yeah maybe genie-based ones also work so long as the Templars are out to get them).

I don't think Dark Sun works as Dark Sun unless you do lock out some options though. Hopefully if they don't half-ass the hell out of this and just do "Dark Sun: Don't Offend The Billionaires Edition", but any kind of real Dark Sun (the defining features of that being "Wake up gladiator, we've got a sorcerer-king to kill" and "powerful people ruined the world from greed and lust for power") should probably list the subclasses which make sense for the setting, before the immediate and inevitable disclaimer that obviously DMs can allow what they like in their actual game. Also they need to keep "No Clerics" as the default (again actual tables can do what they want). It's actually easier with 5E as it's insanely easier to heal up.
 

Lol those were exactly what I was talking about. Glad to hear they are minor and lose-able.

Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of things I like about Dark Sun, even the original. It's lessons are more relevant now than ever. There's just some edge-lord stuff that I don't need in this day and age
Oh for sure!

There's some pointless stuff (primarily the above). Just make the city-states incredibly oppressive and like serfdom and/or indentured servitude and like wildly unfair working conditions/horrible deals the norm instead of slavery (YA novels and anime are full of this stuff, I note). I feel like actually you can say more, and with more relevance without slavery because slavery, to many people, is so absolute a wrong, that it simplifies things and distances them. Whereas indentured servitude, serfdom and so on are like 90% as wrong, but our culture doesn't engage with them in the same way - and exploring them (especially as the 21st century goes on I daresay...) could be very cool.

I also like that, in Dark Sun, the Templars are bad guys. Templars should always be bad guys, lol
Yes though I think it's fine if they're playable, they always were. And the "rogue Templar" is a reasonable concept, esp. if they have a small metaphysical thing which explains why you keep your powers (basically the movie Equilibrium lol).
 

Templars definitely seem like a Paladin subclass to me in a 5E context. Probably the only Paladin subclass (though yeah maybe genie-based ones also work so long as the Templars are out to get them).

I don't think Dark Sun works as Dark Sun unless you do lock out some options though. Hopefully if they don't half-ass the hell out of this and just do "Dark Sun: Don't Offend The Billionaires Edition", but any kind of real Dark Sun (the defining features of that being "Wake up gladiator, we've got a sorcerer-king to kill" and "powerful people ruined the world from greed and lust for power") should probably list the subclasses which make sense for the setting, before the immediate and inevitable disclaimer that obviously DMs can allow what they like in their actual game. Also they need to keep "No Clerics" as the default (again actual tables can do what they want). It's actually easier with 5E as it's insanely easier to heal up.
I think a good question would be "what is the most 'punk' Hasbro has been recently?"


I think the darkest Hasbro has ever got in my lifetime is probably GI Joe: Renegade. Would a tone like that be possible and appropriate for Dark Sun?
 

I think the darkest Hasbro has ever got in my lifetime is probably GI Joe: Renegade. Would a tone like that be possible and appropriate for Dark Sun?
I'm not familiar with it sadly.

I suspect there are edgier/punkier MtG settings than that but I'm also not an expert on MtG.

That said, BG3 is considerably more "punk" and "risky" (and risque) than that I daresay.
I think a good question would be "what is the most 'punk' Hasbro has been recently?"
Yeah which is a much bigger problem with Dark Sun than anything else about Dark Sun - WotC's own desperate quest for blandness and safety (not at all costs, but at a lot of costs). Honestly BG3 remains a huge outlier and slightly amazing they let a game with quite so much BDSM-adjacent full-on Githyanki-shagging and so on get made using the D&D brand. I kind of wonder if part of the reason Mearls etc. didn't get selected to be got rid of is that, despite it making $100m+ for WotC, it theoretically "risked the brand".

Esp. as alt-right trolls absolutely did try and do a hatchet-job on it late pre-release (like the two weeks running up to release), tried to make it "the bestiality game for woke perverts" as I believe one awful YouTuber referred to it. The problem was, it was so obviously good and so immediately successful that the huge number of hatchet-job YouTubers started losing all their subscribers, getting 100:1 thumbs down : thumbs up ratios on their videos, getting cussed out on social media for being losers and liars by their own viewers, and so on, so within literally 24 hours of BG3's release, almost every hatchet-job video got deleted by its own creator, people were denying they'd ever made those videos, deleting the social media posts promoting them, and so on. There was clearly an organised campaign against it in at least the sense that some awful alt-right/Nazi Discord had organised it, but it was utterly repulsed. Never has an army fled at there mere sight of the enemy and changed into civilian clothes and pretended they'd never been a soldier so fast lol.
 

Oh for sure!

There's some pointless stuff (primarily the above). Just make the city-states incredibly oppressive and like serfdom and/or indentured servitude and like wildly unfair working conditions/horrible deals the norm instead of slavery (YA novels and anime are full of this stuff, I note). I feel like actually you can say more, and with more relevance without slavery because slavery, to many people, is so absolute a wrong, that it simplifies things and distances them. Whereas indentured servitude, serfdom and so on are like 90% as wrong, but our culture doesn't engage with them in the same way - and exploring them (especially as the 21st century goes on I daresay...) could be very cool.


Yes though I think it's fine if they're playable, they always were. And the "rogue Templar" is a reasonable concept, esp. if they have a small metaphysical thing which explains why you keep your powers (basically the movie Equilibrium lol).
I think we are the same page, and your reasoning is adroit.
 

If anyone wants my take on a rebooted dark sun, I think the most interesting way to do it is to take a world used to intense resource scarcity and then drop a big resource there and watch them tear themselves apart.

What do you think would happen to Athas, a world without metal, if a 50 square foot cube of adamantium suddenly appeared in the geographic center of the tablelands?
 

If anyone wants my take on a rebooted dark sun, I think the most interesting way to do it is to take a world used to intense resource scarcity and then drop a big resource there and watch them tear themselves apart.

What do you think would happen to Athas, a world without metal, if a 50 square foot cube of adamantium suddenly appeared in the geographic center of the tablelands?
I'm with you...fascinating idea, and great for a campaign.

My mind did jump straight to "nothing would happen, they don't have the tools to exploit it: though...
 

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