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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Staffan" data-source="post: 9670843" data-attributes="member: 907">I think this is an issue where things are changing. For example, Paizo got a lot of feedback from their customers that they were uncomfortable with depictions of slavery in-game, even when slavery was depicted as unambiguously bad. As a result they have decided not to focus on that anymore – it's not like Cheliax has stopped the practice, but Paizo won't turn the camera onto that region anymore. So there are clearly a number of people for whom slavery is a highly sensitive issue and who don't want to deal with it in their elfgames, much like others don't want sexual assault to be a thing that happens in the games (which I think is also a reason why half-orcs are if not gone, shoved aside in a corner somewhere).As a white dude living in Sweden, this is really not my fight to take sides in. Some people like having game worlds where things are basically good and players can feel good about doing small-scale stuff and defending the status quo – nothing wrong with that. Others like having game worlds where things are bleeped up and the PCs are the ones who can set things right. And Dark Sun definitely needs to be in the latter category.The issue there is that if you're going to do that, then that facet of the setting by necessity becomes the dominant one. And that reduces the ability to do other things, like exploring Dark Sun's history, or dealing with a local tribe, or journeying beyond the Hinterlands to the Jagged Cliffs and the Kreen Empire below them.But I think you're right that the slavery issue isn't the only thing keeping Dark Sun off the shelves – as you say, there's plenty of slavery to go around in D&D. But in the other cases you list, it's mostly something happening "over there". It's being done by monsters, or "savages" (and that's also a term that has some issues, but that's for another time), or evil cultists. But in Dark Sun, it's front and center. The 2e version had a class who had a class feature to sentence freemen to slavery. The intro adventure in the original boxed set started the PCs off as slaves, and the first published adventure throws them into slavery in the opening act. So it's a bigger issue than in most other settings, and this combined with how different Dark Sun is from other worlds (no gods, psionics, different playable species even if they have the same names, defiling, etc.) means that doing a 5e Dark Sun would be spending a lot of effort to make something that would have a significant chance of either (a) blowing up in their faces because of sensitivity issues, (b) alienating the fan base because it's untrue to the old version, or (c) both. And in light of that, it makes perfect sense for Wizards to spend their efforts elsewhere.</blockquote>

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