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Message: <blockquote data-quote="humble minion" data-source="post: 8030845" data-attributes="member: 5948">I love love loooove Dark Sun, and i agree with the above poster that the existence of slavery in the setting is less problematic because it's portrayed as an unambiguous evil to be opposed.However...... one possible issue with Dark Sun is that all the big evil overlords, the sorcerer-kings, the genocidal horrors who destroyed the world and created a dried-up slave-driven dystopia, are fairly heavily influenced by real-world cultures.  Gulg is clearly sub-Saharan Africa, Balic is ancient Greece/Rome, Draj borrows heavily from the Aztecs and Mayans, Raam is Indian, Urik and Nibenay etc take a lot from ancient Mesopotamian cultures.Notice what's missing there?  A western-based culture.  Now the DS creators have been on record for a loooong time (ie, for decades) that the intention was to get away from the default quasi-medieval D&D setting assumptions and create a world that used a broader array of influences, and mostly to draw those influences from the ancient world rather than the medieval time period.  So I certainly don't think anyone can really claim there's any malice here.  But in the modern day, to have an array of horrible environment-destroying slavery-promoting tyrannical overlords and they're all based on long-dead and predominately non-white cultures and not a single one of them manages to critique or reflect the various horrible environment-destroying slavery-promoting tyrannical systems that white western Europeans have managed to run in the last 500 years?  Might raise some eyebrows.Like I said, I looove Dark Sun, but i think that's something they'd probably tweak, if they had their time again.  If I was writing 5e DS (hire me, WotC!), I'd probably do that by having the book set post-Kalak, like the 4e DS book was, but having post-Kalak Tyr borrow heavily from the Reconstruction-era US south, with the slaves nominally freed but all sorts of prejudices, terrorism, murder, unjust laws and law enforcement etc against ex-slaves who try to use their new freedom by people seeking to preserve the privileges and economic power they had under the old order.</blockquote>

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