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That's all fair, but after giving a fair hearing to these arguments and knowing the topic, I'm still not sure which ethnic group the Dark Sun Athasian would be parodying, and thus who would be the victim and target of the stereotype here. The trope of the "tribal cannibal" has an unpleasant...

I don't think I'm following here. If the "Games Workshop went away from it" line is about their Pygmies then it wasn't the early '90s but the mid '80s, Warhammer Pygmies were shockingly racist even by the '80s standards because if you dare google them up you'll see they look like something that...

I think that last part is something worth thinking about. These ideas indeed used to be very widespread in society, and existed at various levels of intensity and even awareness by the people affected by them, just like fantasy tropes and fiction have been widespread since forever. At a certain...

Yeah, I think the origin of the name owes a lot more to the animal, to signal "hybrid of two different animals that's sexually sterile", and that's how the Sorcerer-Kings thought them as. The insensitivity built from the name is part of the point. 4e also changed this slightly, opening to the...

Yeah, and I think the original material was pretty open about the whole deal being a violence that the Sorcerer-Kings did to them, by creating them through force-breeding humans and dwarves. Muls, with the framing the setting has, pretty much make for the ideal hero character who starts a slave...

I probably did come off as dismissive there, so I hope I can explain myself more clearly here. I've read the rules, I'm not here to rant about "agendas" and "ideology" here because that stuff's dumb, but I think that if I believe that there are criticism of the setting that are inaccurate, then...

And even the "racist stereotypes" are only an issue because some people are utterly determined to see racist stereotypes where there's absolutely nothing, so you might as well skip that part since you can't help people from seeing the ghosts they want to chase.

I don't really think that's kind of a problem, actually. You can't control what players will ultimately do when they run their games, whether they'll play as the good guys and follow the "intended" reading of the game, or use homebrew instead of official material, or just decide to play as...

This. I feel this is one of the best takes I've seen in this thread so far. It sums up well enough the problem people have with the idea of a Dark Sun book that would be mishandled or possibly excessively sanitized for corporate or otherwise spurious reasons, said in a way that's possibly better...

I think that's pretty unlikely. It's more likely in my opinion that a half-arsed Dark Sun book will just result in players laying the blame on, well, a lame modern adaptation being lame, and figuring out that the "legendary" Dark Sun stuff is just all in the older editions. Worst case scenario...

Thread died down a little, so I guess I'll say some stuff I've been thinking about. At some point early in the thread someone said something that I thought was really true: the release of new Dark Sun stuff can't actually take anything away from the old stuff, when you really think about it...

Yes and no. "Woke" is one of those internet buzzwords that mean everything and nothing depending on whoever is using it, and thus it's borderline useless in a conversation except sending different meanings to people who understand what that word means differently. So, Dark Sun was obviously...

I don't recall 4e Dark Sun giving everyone pants. The art probably never hit as hard as Brom's stuff but, well, nothing does and nothing will, and there's still plenty of muscled barbarians and alluring sorcerers in 4e art for Dark Sun as far as I know.

Well, you're not saying stuff should be sanitized, but when a large number of people comes together and keep making a problem out of things that are ultimately up to how people like to play games themselves and how creatives like to make the settings they want, and they frame it in such a way...

On the other hand, I really don't think that stigmatizing dark fiction will do any good in countering the current dystopian trends. In fact, if anything sanitizing fiction and making it impossible for people to write and do what they want is pretty on brand for the dystopian era, so maybe if you...