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

[Paul Farquhar]

As I said like 2 years ago in this thread. WotC is going to avoid doing anything that could be perceived as "problematic".

And that is to put a political interpretation on fashion. WotC are going to avoid doing anything that is unfashionable. Because their job is to sell things in the here and now.

 

[Ulorian - Agent of Chaos]

Expand your media diet. It's 100% true. The rest of the world looks at the US like a bunch of loonies.

Cool your jets. You misread the post you're responding to.

 

[Mark Hope]

We've had characters own slaves twice in my games. In my last campaign set in Tyr, one player was playing a templar who owned slaves. It was interesting to see the in-character justifications the player came up with to make it even palatable. The consequences of this lasted all campaign long as the templar had to come to terms with what it meant, especially in a post-slavery society. I feel this was a successful use of the topic in-play. I don't recall it ever coming up before then in a good half-dozen other campaign.

It came up in my current campaign, too, although less successfully. The characters were helping out a minor noble in Nibenay and suggested he buy some slaves and free them, and headed off to the slave market. Unfortunately - unbeknownst to the players - this was the opening session of Marauders of Nibenay and a magical cataclysm was about to fall upon the city. So they did actually select and iirc even hand over the gold to purchase a couple of slaves (after telepathically informing them of what was going to happen) before an earthquake swallowed half the slave market and acid rain killed the trapped survivors, but we were unable to explore the deeper nuances of the situation, sadly.

 

[tetrasodium]

I guess PCs are allowed to buy slaves when the intention is to free them, this means to pay their rescue.

In the region of Tyr there is no slavery, only convicts convicted of crimes such as tax evasion. (Disclaimer, I was kidding)

Here the true key is not about somebody may feel offended but we have to remember the duty of respecting the human dignity. This is what separates us from fanatics and psychopaths. And let's recover the coherence because if we talk about the past then we can't tell sins from a side and forgeting wrong actions by others. That would be a double standards, like to use two different sticks to measure.

I suspect Hasbro is more interested into visual merchandising (posters, shirts, figures) of Dark Sun than selling more sourcebooks.

My theory is Dark Sun can be "updated" but the region of Tyr will be "almost cancelled". This means we only see some pages about the city-states and the monster stats of the sorcerer-kings but the rest will be crunch that could be used in your homemade setting

And it is not only the metaplot but the great effort for its special artistic style. I listened the artist Brom stopped working with TSR because he only did Dark Sun.

If I may feel unconfortable about slavery in my game is when serial abuses are happening in front of the character but the risks are too high to be stopped by the potential heroes. If abuses are showed in the story then the characters should enjoy enough opportunities to save the day. If the DM "punishes" the players who try to save innocents then here we can talk about somebody may feel unconfortable.

* Now I am imagining Rajaat like a dark lord whose domain is like Athas in the blue age. The trick is only halflings are wellcome, and almost always he is caged within a magic prison. One day each moon cycle he is free but he uses her temporal freedom to try to terminate the no-halflings and even those "tainted-blood" haflings.

I'm the first episode of pg13 rebel moon series there is a fascist evil empire sporting a barely modified version of the dress uniforms to a well known real world nation and slavery is treated so casually that an alien tries to buy one of the main characters from a second without even bothering to find out if it's even an option.
Dark Sun is probably more problematic simply because of the moral criteria black rock or black stone uses when voting for who to put on the board of directors for various companies than anything a potential customer might feel or say

 

[Faolyn]

Stereotype much??? This guy destroying modern art this week does not look like an angry grog to me:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/climate-activist-throws-bright-pink-paint-on-glass-covering-picasso-painting-in-montreal-180986865/

While I am at it I will point out that I am not a boomer, but factually most boomers (aka grogs) grew up using far less resources and doing less harm to the environment than young people today. When boomers were children people in America dried their clothes with wind and solar power, they drank out of bottles that were recycled, they did not use grocery bags and bottles made of oil byproducts or wear clothing made of oil byproducts.

They used plastic all over the place. They just didn't have plastic bottles and bags. And they used plenty of toxic chemicals and materials as well (lead, asbestos, coal, DDT--which they even sprayed on kids), threw trash all over the place, and so on, all of which caused horrific pollution that it took later generations to fix.

 

[billd91]

They used plastic all over the place. They just didn't have plastic bottles and bags. And they used plenty of toxic chemicals and materials as well (lead, asbestos, coal, DDT--which they even sprayed on kids), threw trash all over the place, and so on, all of which caused horrific pollution that it took later generations to fix.

Moreover, when the corporations fully shifted over to plastic bottles instead of glass returnables, it was largely when Boomers were the generation in control of those decisions. Boomers drinking out of returnables as kids doesn't really absolve them of the responsibility of the higher profitability decisions made later in life when they had more of their hands on the levers of capitalism. Their parents may have been the generations (Greatest and Silent) to start to embrace suburban life, plastics, synthetic fibers, and labor/time saving appliances like dryers, but Boomers - as the largest consumer culture demographic ever before seen by corporate America - definitely had its impact.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

The part I find difficult to understand is the criteria for establishing that something is potentially problematic because it lends itself to a lot of subjectivity.

Let's imagine for example the sorcerer-kings have used magic transgenic engineering to create a variant of yellow musk creeper working like a mind-control plant parasite. The convicts are punished to suffer a special implant. At least they don't get old but untile the end of the punishment they obey orders like they were suffering a "suggestion" spell. This could be published in DMGuild like a new PC plantouched specie... but would WotC dare to publish anything like this?

Or a player asking to play with a psiforgerd, when these can't be in the urban zones because oficially no psiforged can be free, only to be owned by the sorcerer-kings.

Other idea is the sorcerer-kings did in the past a very dark ritual, enoughly evil to be equivalent the creation of the demiplane of the dread because Strahd's fault. After other thing happen and to try to fix the "cerulean storm" there is a new event causing something like a "retcon" of Athas.

Or the killed sorcerer-kings were chosen by the Dark Powers to become new dark lords but Vecna's machinations interfered. And here the surprise is this Vecna is not a divine lich but an evil celestial creating an army of "fallen angels" against the fiends who want to conquer his domains.

 

[ECMO3]

They used plastic all over the place. They just didn't have plastic bottles and bags. And they used plenty of toxic chemicals and materials as well (lead, asbestos, coal, DDT--which they even sprayed on kids), threw trash all over the place, and so on, all of which caused horrific pollution that it took later generations to fix.

No they didn't. Boomers were children in the 40s, 50s and 60s. Plastic use was not nearly as widespread, it wasn't until the mid 70s that the first commercial plastic bottles came out and it was not until the mid 80s that plastic bottles were starting to be used on a scale comparable to glass in the USA and they did not have plastic in many goods. TVs, in the homes that had them, where in wooden cases and there was almost no plastic on automobiles

In terms of hard numbers, in 1960 there were 390 short tons of plastic waste produced in the USA, less than 1 ounce of plastic per person. In 2021 there was 42,000,000 short tons of plastic waste produced, over 250 lbs per person .... and we have twice as many people.

They did throw out trash everywhere, but it was mostly paper trash which is biodegradable and we did not have a huge plastic Island floating in the Pacific Ocean.

While they burned coal for energy, they used FAR LESS energy overall and burned less coal than generations that followed, including the current one. Coal use has been in decline for quite a while now and yet the US still burned 513 short tons in 2022, compared with 415 short tons in 1960. If you look beyond coal at all fossil fuels in 1960 Americans generated about 48 exajoules of energy from fossil fuels and in 2024 about 100 exojoules, roughly twice as much.

Pollutants were in widespread use, including the things you mention, and not as heavily regulated. But these cause mostly localized effects and the environmental effects, on a global scale, are not nearly as significant as those being caused by later generations.

It is simply not comparable, the current generation is doing far, far more harm to the global environment than previous generations did and not only are they destroying the planet, they actually know they are destroying it, unlike previous generations.

 

[The Firebird]

No they didn't. Boomers were children in the 40s, 50s and 60s. Plastic use was not nearly as widespread, it wasn't until the mid 70s that the first commercial plastic bottles came out and it was not until the mid 80s that plastic bottles were starting to be used on a scale comparable to glass in the USA and they did not have plastic in many goods. TVs, in the houses that had them, where in wooden cases and there was almost no plastic on automobiles

In terms of hard numbers, in 1960 there were 390 short tons of plastic waste produced in the USA, less than 1 ounce of plastic per person. In 2021 there was 42,000,000 short tons of plastic waste produced, over 250 lbs per person.

They did throw out trash everywhere, but it was mostly paper trash which is biodegradable and we did not have a huge plastic Island floating in the Pacific Ocean.

While they also burned coal for energy, they used FAR LESS energy overall and less coal than generations that followed, including the current one. Coal use has been in decline for quite a while now and yet the US still burned 513 Metric tons in 2022, compared with 415 metric tons in 1960.

Pollutants were in widespread use, including the things you mention. But these cause mostly localized effects and the environmental effects, on a global scale, are not nearly as significant as those being caused by later generations, again including the current one.

You're right on a lot of counts. I want to add though, that despite the increase in energy use, CO2 emissions per capita in the US is about 50% below its peak, which was in the 70s. Its now about the same as in the 1960s and, surprisingly, the 1920s. But that is just a part of the story, and it reflects broad scale improvements in technology more so than changes to individual choices.

 

[Scribe]

It is simply not comparable, the current generation is doing far, far more harm to the global environment than previous generations did.

Sounds like a good basis for a setting.