Ok they eat other intelligent beings. But since all humanoid life on athas descended from them its still probably cannibalism unless you want to argue neanderthals weren't human.
D&D General Dark Sun as a Hopepunk Setting
- Thread starter Steampunkette
- Start date
Paul Farquhar
Legend
I suspect that if I ran a Dark Sun game with cannibal halfling as a player option, I would get a 100% halfling party.
AdmundfortGeographer
Getting lost in fantasy maps
I may be misremembering, but I though that it was not explicit the Blue Age halfling ancestors used themselves as raw material to create the new species, or if the new species were life-shaped out of the ocean material everything else that was life-shaped.
mamba
Legend
presenting evil as evil is a neutral stance… having the characters oppose an oppressive system that is built on slavery is not really a problem, DS did that in 2e already
if you need to ‘both sides’ slavery so you can feel better about playing a slave master in Dark Sun then maybe you should stay away from the setting…
Rainbow Scissors
Achaewomenid
Perhaps you may know people who need that. That is neither what I have said nor what I need.
It's more that I feel that a setting book should present setting information rather than spending page count on explaining why the way people may have been using the setting before does not fit the views of the person hired to present a 5e version of the setting.
It is my view that, if the person writing the book feels the need to apologize for writing the book, then maybe they shouldn't write the book. By the same token, if the person is using page count to tell me what is badwrongfun but also simultaneously making money on selling me something that they feel I shouldn't be playing... I guess it kinda feels like buying drugs from a substance abuse counselor and then needing to have a meeting with them about it the next day
Rainbow Scissors
Achaewomenid
As you mentioned, not every protagonist neatly fits into whatever D&D deems good and evil.
I feel that a setting book should present the setting.
Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
I have to agree. I don't need a setting book to present a moral stance on the material. That's up to me and my players, and I trust us to do it.
Rainbow Scissors
Achaewomenid
Agreed.
That being said, a small foreword (by "small," I mean maybe a paragraph) mentioning that some changes were made to the setting to better suit modern tastes in gaming or the occasional boxed text to better cover contentious content in a respectful way is something that I would likely be okay with. If you can cut it down to something akin to the quick blurbs at the beginning of a movie to tell me that I might be disturbed by occasional nudity or someone smoking, that's how I would prefer it to be done.
The whole Hopepunk idea presented is cool. I would likely play it.
I also think there's a place for a D&D that allows Dark Sun to still be Dark Sun.
If the updated version of the setting is written to allow it, both of those things could even exist within the same product. The Hopepunk outlook sounds like it could be a pretty cool adventure path to present an engaging way to approach the setting.
Ahhh, I see. You can't comprehend a book in which slavery is described as an evil that isn't an apology for having slavery in the setting.
Interesting. But also a skill issue.
And you don't want moral judgement passed on your "Less than Moral" characters... Again, Skissue. If you make a character who is motivated by power/greed/revenge/whatever it'd be really pathetic if they were treated no differently than the shiningly altruistic hero they could be. No, they should be looked on with a complicated mix of disdain for their willingness to engage in evil and admiration for their ultimate goal and ability to achieve it.
Anything less really just cheapens the concept of playing a character who isn't heroic. Like why would you even bother to be an antihero if you're not going to have people hate your methods but grudgingly accept your success?
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