D&D 5E (2014) Dark Sun, problematic content, and 5E…

[humble minion]

I'm basically a DS originalist. That being the early boxed set prec prism Pentad.

Which basically destroyed the setting. If you redid Darksun you couldn't fit the metaphlot stuff in a new book anyway.

I actually like the DS backstory a lot, although it has a few weird bits and I understand why people don’t like it.

The problem was metaplot, not backstory - the Prism Pentad should have been something that the PCs got to play through, not something rushed through in a careful or fairly formulaic (well, except for the main-character polygamy, which was a daring choice for early-90s TSR…) novels. But instead, in the early DS modules you got to follow the Prism Pentax characters around and clean up the unimportant bits of the plot they couldn’t be bothered with.

And now you’re stuck with the DS backstory dilemma. If you cover all the Rajaat stuff in a new DS release, you’re spoiling the whole thing for players who might want to experience it for the first time. If you don’t, you’re chucking out vast chicks of the setting which many (not all) people love.

Which I why I keep waging my lonely ‘5e DS should be a 900 page mega campaign that redoes the Prism Pentad with PC heroes’ lobbying effort. Fighting the good fight here…

 

[GrimCo]

In what way is Dark Sun 18+? I may be forgetting details, but I don't remember anything in Dark Sun that is significantly--if at all--more for "mature audiences" than, say, a typical high school history class in which you learn all sorts of horrible things, and about the real world, no less.

It isn't. But, when you put 18+ label, you have more creative freedom to delve deeper into more controversial themes, more nuances and less clear good/evil. Also, you don't get parents bitching about what kind of materials companies "sell to kids". It's more about companies covering their posteriors first and foremost.

Or to put it another way, if you learn about colonialism, exploitation, slavery, abuse of power, genocide etc etc, in high school, what is within Dark Sun that is more mature than that? I can see 15+, but 18? (And don't D&D books say for 14+ or 15+? Isn't the intended audience high school or older?).

D&D books are 12+, so for kids in higher grades of elementary school. History presents those topics in clear cut way from current morality standpoint - those things are evil. DS doesn't really do that. It just presents some stuff as the fact of life, that's how things work in that setting.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

We have got three parts, the crunch (here we are going to include the monsters), the fluff/lore/background and the metaplot.

The metaplot isn't going to be touched in a long time. Maybe even we could see a reboot. The crunch only needs the ordinary work to update stats and changes acordings the feedback. We shouldn't worry more than with other settings. And the fluff or lore hasn't to be totally cancelled, only omiting certain details in the future update. Was there any complain in the 4th Ed?

The new idea I am suggesting is a little retouch in the cosmology. If the psionic powers allow time travel then we could say Athas has got different "astral realms" working like "afterlife". A domain would be like "videogame when you reachs the happy end", like a time-loop but where everything was fixed. Other astral domain would be the "bad ending" working like a "hell on earth". If sorcerer-kings and defilers weren't enough now add fiends (and infernal dragons).

Maybe the "brown-tide" couldn't be avoided because it was not an accident but sabotage, by evil elemental cultists (let's blame Tharizdum) allied with the "nature-benders"(the evil twins of the life-shapers).

If you worry Dark Sun could become the "pornstar" of Rule34 web or like this, that risk also happens with Baldurs Gate 3 or even cartoon shows for children.

My theory is we will see a new Dark Sun but without the region of Tyr. This could appear but this wouldn't be the main scenary. If WotC is going to design a "Athas-spin-off" then they will have to choose what to do with "new" elements like PC species or updated classes with special mechanics, for example the totemist shaman with incarnum soulmelds, or crusaders working like templars. But then this could happen in the end of the 5e when they can allow themself higher risks with experimental ideas.

If WotC wants to release a spiritual succesor then this may appear before as a new plane of Magic: the Gathering.

Would you wellcome a future sourcebook about "Hyrborean-punk" crunch but with almost nothing about the region of Tyr?

 

[tetrasodium]

I don't see anything there that would imply that the Sorcerer Kings would become "good" guys, getting rid of slavery and making the common folks' lot in life better by restoring civilization.

They have a stranglehold on power, and survival keeps a lot of potential enemies busy. I'm not seeing the incentive for them to change if Rajaat is out of the picture.

You've got it backwards, although my "healed" typo could have given you the wrong impression. Look more closely at the specific words I used. Nobody on athas likes the current state of the world because it's a post apocapyptic hellscape and even further from the earlier ages than the world was when rajaat convinced his champions to make the world better by kicking off the cleansing wars.

The cleansing wars began because rajaat convinced his champions that it would bring athas back to an earlier age (blue? Green?). Somewhere along the line those champions saw what was happening and realized rajaat misled them, but rajaat was too powerful for them to stop or kill him even if they all worked together. In order to at least stop things and maybe get enough power to challenge rajaat it was decided to seal him temporarily.

Spoiler: decent enough ai summary of the seal

In the Dark Sun campaign setting, Rajaat is a powerful sorcerer who was originally benevolent but became corrupted by his own power and knowledge, ultimately leading to the destruction of the Green Age. He was eventually betrayed by his Champions and imprisoned, with his essence sealed within a place called "The Hollow" and his physical remains encased in a Black Sphere.
Here's a more detailed explanation:
Rajaat's Fall from Grace:
Rajaat, a Pyreen, initially sought to share his knowledge and improve the world. However, he became obsessed with power and began to see the world as flawed, leading him to develop the practice of defiling magic.
The Champions of Rajaat:
Rajaat created a group of powerful sorcerers known as the Champions of Rajaat, who aided him in his plans.
Betrayal and Imprisonment:
When Rajaat revealed his plan to destroy all humans and reshape the world, his Champions rebelled and ultimately imprisoned him.
The Hollow and the Black Sphere:
Rajaat's essence was sealed within "The Hollow," a deep part of the Black, while his physical remains were placed within the Black Sphere.
Borys the Dragon's Role:
Borys, one of the Champions, was transformed into a dragon to maintain Rajaat's prison.
Maintaining the Prison:
The Dragon, Borys, requires a constant supply of life energy to sustain the prison, which he achieves by requiring slaves from the city-states.
Rajaat's Legacy:
Even in his imprisonment, Rajaat's actions continue to shape the world of Athas, influencing the actions of the Sorcerer-Kings and the overall state of the world.

It was a temporary seal because they were not able to muster enough power to make it more permanent. Maintaining that seal requires thousands of human(oid) sacrifices every year or rajaat would no longer be sealed and could resume making things worse. The need to sacrifice so many human(oid)s every year results in a scenario where the sorcerer kings can't even consider if slavery and maintaining the current post apocapyptic state of athas is desirable or not.... And if the players go for the easy solution of killing a sk they are going to quickly wind up in the same boat of bad options that they just capsized. Without rajaat and the cleansing wars darksun goes from a horrible place with no easy solutions to a horrible place suffering under kick the dog evil

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

OK, I don't like the part of human sacrifices in great scale. It can be done by evil cells of cults but not when more people are killed than in a slasher movie. I want to play Mad Max or Conan the barbarian not "Fear & Hunger"

We don't need a return to the region of Tyr but data to create our own Hyrborean-punk setting.

What if Rajaat was corrupted by the Pristine Tower because this don't work too well?

What if there is a secret guild of rogue chronomancers who have created a demiplane within Athas to hide?

What if the Phyrexians tried to conquer Athas but they broke the wrong seal and then they appeared in the middle of the Tannari vs Yugoloth war? Or there is an alternate Athas where the angels and genies rebelled against the primal powers. Or some power is sending some fungus plage to Athas style "Last of Us"

* Now I wonder about the possibility of the creation of a new setting working like a "patchworld" like the "Battle-Planet" from the event "Secret Wars" by Marvel Comics. Then a clone of Mystara, Jackandor and Athas would be in the same wildspace.

The nazis and the cult of Kali are monsters but children can play videogames of LEGO: Indiana Jones, can't they?

 

[Maxperson]

You've got it backwards, although my "healed" typo could have given you the wrong impression. Look more closely at the specific words I used. Nobody on athas likes the current state of the world because it's a post apocapyptic hellscape and even further from the earlier ages than the world was when rajaat convinced his champions to make the world better by kicking off the cleansing wars.

The cleansing wars began because rajaat convinced his champions that it would bring athas back to an earlier age (blue? Green?). Somewhere along the line those champions saw what was happening and realized rajaat misled them, but rajaat was too powerful for them to stop or kill him even if they all worked together. In order to at least stop things and maybe get enough power to challenge rajaat it was decided to seal him temporarily.

Spoiler: decent enough ai summary of the seal

In the Dark Sun campaign setting, Rajaat is a powerful sorcerer who was originally benevolent but became corrupted by his own power and knowledge, ultimately leading to the destruction of the Green Age. He was eventually betrayed by his Champions and imprisoned, with his essence sealed within a place called "The Hollow" and his physical remains encased in a Black Sphere.
Here's a more detailed explanation:

It was a temporary seal because they were not able to muster enough power to make it more permanent. Maintaining that seal requires thousands of human(oid) sacrifices every year or rajaat would no longer be sealed and could resume making things worse. The need to sacrifice so many human(oid)s every year results in a scenario where the sorcerer kings can't even consider if slavery and maintaining the current post apocapyptic state of athas is desirable or not.... And if the players go for the easy solution of killing a sk they are going to quickly wind up in the same boat of bad options that they just capsized. Without rajaat and the cleansing wars darksun goes from a horrible place with no easy solutions to a horrible place suffering under kick the dog evil

Slavery isn't necessary for that, though. If the sorcerer kings weren't into slavery themselves, they could easily just set up a random lottery system and if your number comes up, off to the afterlife you go. Even better, the sorcerer king could make bucks by allowing folks to buy out of their selection for 1000 ceramic pieces. That would keep the wealthy/nobility happy and only poor folks would be sacrificed.

These aren't nice people and I think slavery fits their desire.

As for why they betrayed Rajaat, they could retcon that to he did something bad that they didn't like, or they just wanted to be free of him, or... It doesn't have to be a cleansing war or loss of Rajaat.

 

[tetrasodium]

Quite the tube Goldbergian deck chair shuffling.. why on earth? You make it sound like there was a journal entry∆ from a doctor observing one of unit 731's procedures on a log is described

OK, I don't like the part of human sacrifices in great scale. It can be done by evil cells of cults but not when more people are killed than in a slasher movie. I want to play Mad Max or Conan the barbarian not "Fear & Hunger"

Treat it like black leaf, have you ever engaged in them at your table? I've run lots of games set in darksun and the closest it's ever come to coming up is someone finding out "no it's not that simple, do something to improve things slightly or slowly rather than setting a goal of quickly making it worse ". Regardless of if the lowest members of society know why, it's not like the scale allows for much secrecy with regards to where so many disappear to or why, PCs only need to brush up against someone mildly informed to know enough that bringing players up to speed enough is a fairly low dc.... Oh yeah there's an outpost of gith(yanki?) featured in blackspine mountains in think it was, they were trapped when the sphere was sealed and currently stuck.

Ironically I've seen lots of players no murder torture and occasionally even sacrifice NPCs totally unpressured just for the sake of expedience and rarely does anyone at the table even try to stop it

We don't need a return to the region of Tyr but data to create our own Hyrborean-punk setting.

What if Rajaat was corrupted by the Pristine Tower because this don't work too well?

What if there is a secret guild of rogue chronomancers who have created a demiplane within Athas to hide?

What if the Phyrexians tried to conquer Athas but they broke the wrong seal and then they appeared in the middle of the Tannari vs Yugoloth war? Or there is an alternate Athas where the angels and genies rebelled against the primal powers. Or some power is sending some fungus plage to Athas style "Last of Us"

* Now I wonder about the possibility of the creation of a new setting working like a "patchworld" like the "Battle-Planet" from the event "Secret Wars" by Marvel Comics. Then a clone of Mystara, Jackandor and Athas would be in the same wildspace.

The nazis and the cult of Kali are monsters but children can play videogames of LEGO: Indiana Jones, can't they?

View attachment 410146

That bolded bit shows the problem with crystal clarity because it crashes into so so many parts of what makes darksun into darksun.

Firstly you have the easy part about demiplanes and such. Athas is not like eberron where it is an unspecified maybe distant hard to find maybe encrypted maybe shielded by the ring of siberyis, instead it's a straight sealed sphere with super minimal planar cosmology. The whole concept is effectively "what if instead of what it is athas was changed to be what it already is but a lot of other more stripped and replaced with fragile plot armor".

Secondly is the fact that it already has someone who tried using time travel as an easy fix.

Spoiler

66th King's Age (-9.569 to -9.549)​

• Wind's Defiance (-9.659): Mareet, ruler of Saragar, is visited by a time-traveler from the future. He tells the king an appending doom to Athas before disappearing. Obsessed with the warning, Mareet orders his most powerful psionicists to breach the time stream and determine the nature of the warning. They are later joined by a third psionicist.

The GM can literally point to and say "that could be [you guys/bob], now do you want to realize in time or make new characters? I believe that it even resulted in one city not falling as hard as the others but managing to still be a pretty awful place in other ways

∆ I came across it printed somewhere many years ago helping a med student friend study.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

There is a serious difference between telling villains killed a lot of people of the past, or they are killing "off-screen" and PCs are watching abuses in front of them and they can't stop it, or the risk is too high, almost a trap by the DMs. You are free to add the dread emperor from the book of vile darkness, a villains who goes acompanied by chained children. If the dread emperor is too powerful for the PCs then it is not fair, and this is worse if the players are underage teenages who shouldn't face those moral dilemmas that may break the fun and good vibes

In your Call of Chulthu game your evil cult can sacrifice innocents but in D&D if this is happening in front of the PCs then these are going to kick-everyone's ass. WotC can't publish an adventure where the PCs have to choose between allowing a serious abuse happening in front of them or take the risk of getting into too much trouble that is too serious for them to handle.

The canon says there was at least a time-travel who tried to save the past. Nobody said that perhaps others also tried it but at least one of them did achieve some success. Or maybe the time-travelers caused accidentally some change and this is the reason because the pristine work doesn't work so well. Of course WotC should work to explain how the chronomancers and other time-travelers could alter the cosmology of the D&D multiverse. WotC will have to choose if alternate timelines will be canon in D&D cosmology and this could affect all the settings.

In 5e WotC doesn't need to tell too much about the region of Tyr, a map and a little about the city-states. Maybe we don't need ever monster-stats for each sorcerer-king.

My bet is for a new Magic: the Gathering plane like Kaladesh/Avishkar but more biopunk and psitek, a Hyrbirean-punk look. The cataclysm was caused by the Phyrexian invasion. When these tried to open new planar gates "accidentally" broke a seal that blocked the planar travel toward the Athaspace. They arrived to a zone in the opposite global side of the region of Tyr, but they could build a camp because Phyrexians don't need ordinary food and water. They sent explorers to the rest of the world and someone found the region of Tyr, but also they were discovered. The phyrexians tried to open new planar gates from their base in Athas but this time the answer was "summoning" hostile hordes of fiends and elementals and this was the reason of the failure of the invasion of Athas.

 

[humble minion]

Secondly is the fact that it already has someone who tried using time travel as an easy fix

I vaguely recall canonically that this was already PCs in a pre written adventure? From Windriders of the Last Sea maybe? But I might be misremembering (and frankly, everything about Windriders is largely best ignored…)

 

[Hussar]

I'd say it's about feelings and consensus since "twee" doesn't have a concrete description based on both its use in this discussion and it definition.

According to Merriam-Webster

"twee

adjective​

ˈtwē

Synonyms of twee
chiefly British
: affectedly or excessively dainty, delicate, cute, or quaint"


"Twee" is by definition an opinion. But hey who cares about differing opinions

Sigh.

That's not the point.

It's not about differing opinions though, is it? It's about using a term that in no way actually applies, to describe something. The only reason the word is being used is because it's vaguely negative in the mind of the user so, it's a justification of "this is something I don't like, but, I can't just say, "I don't like it" because everyone will just ignore me, so, I'll use a vague, poorly applied word in order to make it sound like my opinion carries any actual weight."

I mean, I can call Mortal Kombat (to use an example from the thread) "twee" but that doesn't make it so. If you honestly think that the any of the first ten images in the PHB actually fall under the rubric of "twee" using your definition of "excessively dainty", then, by all means, let's see your examples. Otherwise, it's far more productive to actually stick to things approximating facts and stop trying to present personal feelings as anything other than just personal preferences.