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

[Scribe]

Well with what kids can consume these days on their phones Darksun is a nothing burger lol.

Isn't that the tragic truth.

 

[ECMO3]

Wait, do I understand that academic sources should not address problematic content? That history books should talk about racism or eugenics or you know, actual history? Surely I'm misunderstanding what you were saying.

I was trying to say the opposite. To clarify -

My position: "In a historical book or textbook no [it is not a problem]. In an official publication of an RPG yes [it is a problem]."

Poor wording on my part.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

I have learnt to untrust those experts because they can say a different thing if somebody pays enough.

We shouldn't worry too much about those potentially problematic details when they can simply be omitted. We shouldn't suffer troubles about the crunch. About the lore we only need a chapter telling about the sorcerer-kings, the description of the region of Tyr and the city-states.
Other option could be a mash-up setting, mixing two or more, for example Dragonlance and Dark Sun. Here you could start from zero but with enough creative freedom to add a lot of new elements.
If you choose the right words you could publish a Dark Sun book for children. I say it seriously.

And we have to choose about what happened in the "land-within-the-wind", the "Athasian Feywild" that was also afected by the defilers. Maybe when the cleasing war started a lot of people was warned thanks "seers" and populations were evacuated. The champions of Rajaat allowed this because it helped their goals. They didn't mind if they don't return. But most of times it was trap.. they evacuated population went toward a zone ruled by infernal dragons.. or lord fiends. The failure is when a zone is too populate with good-aligment then something like a planar shaterring happen, creating a no-so-infernal domain. Several infernal dragons accepted this unforeseen setback because they wanted power and wealth, and they could rule if they avoided innecessary cruelty. After they notices ruling subtetely from the shadows like a criptocrazy wasn't a bad option because the Damocles' sword was for others.

* I don't like the human sacrifices in the city-state of Draj. D&D has got a lot of evil cults but rarely on such a massive scale, which could even lead to a demographic crisis.
Eldraarich maybe is too "exaggerated". If the city-state is too isolated the lack of genetic diversity could cause serious troubles in the health. This could be fixed with some reincarnation spells. Other retcon I would add is the mad sorcerer-king Daskinor would dare to use a mind-control parasite with the slaves.

The ruins of Yaramuke can be really "post-apocaliptic" and maybe the best place where fugitive slaves could start from zero, if you can survive predators and raiders, with more mutants than undead.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Who are these experts with the ability to tell us what is and isn't problematic?

Good manners and respect for others should have been taught by your parents.

But the issue with slavery is that young people do not want stories about slavery as part of their entertainment. For Gygax, the concept of slavery was distant. It happened to others, who he did not identify with. These days, people are aware that slavery can happen to anyone, and therefore is not a fun thing to think about.

It wouldn't be wrong to include stories about slavery in a modern Dark Sun. It just wouldn't sell.

 

[Maxperson]

Good manners and respect for others should have been taught by your parents.

But the issue with slavery is that young people do not want stories about slavery as part of their entertainment. For Gygax, the concept of slavery was distant. It happened to others, who he did not identify with. These days, people are aware that slavery can happen to anyone, and therefore is not a fun thing to think about.

It wouldn't be wrong to include stories about slavery in a modern Dark Sun. It just wouldn't sell.

I don't know that you can make that conclusion. Post apocalyptic media is very popular with young folks these days, so a post apocalyptic setting with slaves to be freed and tyrants to be overthrown might very well appeal to them.

 

[QuentinGeorge]

But the issue with slavery is that young people do not want stories about slavery as part of their entertainment. For Gygax, the concept of slavery was distant. It happened to others, who he did not identify with. These days, people are aware that slavery can happen to anyone, and therefore is not a fun thing to think about.

It wouldn't be wrong to include stories about slavery in a modern Dark Sun. It just wouldn't sell.

 

[tetrasodium]

.

1990s Darksun at worst is PG rated if it was a movie. BG3 had worse content in it so I don't think one can claim Darksun that bad now if BG3 acceptable.

You're never going to make 100% people happy.

That's a good point and we have a historical comparison to show as much

Spoiler: hot coffee was SUPER controversial

• The House of Representatives voted to support a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigation into Rockstar Games, the game's developer, regarding the Hot Coffee content. This vote signaled strong congressional concern about the hidden content and its implications for game ratings and consumer protection.
• Senate Focus: Senator Hillary Clinton, along with other senators, took a strong stance against the content and proposed legislation, like the Family Entertainment Protection Act, to address concerns about violent and sexually explicit video games and the sale of such games to minors.

Meanwhile bg3 had clips from the romance options in marketing promotional videos and I found a 2 hour 7 minute compilation of the romance options

 

[humble minion]

I don't know that you can make that conclusion. Post apocalyptic media is very popular with young folks these days, so a post apocalyptic setting with slaves to be freed and tyrants to be overthrown might very well appeal to them.

Maybe.

Obviously the difference is between most post-apocalyptic media and a D&D supplement is agency. In a film or book or whatever, the creator can ensure that the main characters stay on the right side of the slavery moral line. In D&D, they can't.

I've said it before, but the second-most-obvious Dark Sun slavery plot (other than 'the PCs have been captured by slavers!') is 'the PCs have to rescue a loved one or other plot-important person who has been captured by slavers'. One of the very obvious solutions to this RPing scenario is to simply plunder a dungeon somewhere and use the proceeds to buy the individual concerned out of slavery.

No WotC product, I can guarantee, will EVER list how much it costs to buy a slave. Special circumstances or not. Just the same way as giving something a stat block means people will try to kill it, as soon as you put a price on something it becomes treasure, and some PCs will try to sell it. WotC will not do ANYTHING to even vaguely support PCs setting themselves up as slave traders, and no, sticking a 'don't do this, slavery is bad mmkay?' disclaimer in a sidebar will not change that.

But that makes slavery stories hard to tell, and slavery-centric settings hard to write.

This doesn't mean that you can't do Dark Sun, of course. WotC dealt with the problematic parts of Dragonlance (gully dwarves, draconians creepily lusting for human women, the morality of the Cataclysm) by writing the setting as an adventure, and then arranging the adventure in a way that they could just flat-out not talk about the old awkward bits of the lore because the adventure did not relate to those facets of the setting. Similarly, the xenocidal Inhuman Wars, and the faux-Chinese Shou were just quietly ignored in 5e Spelljammer rather than any attempt being made to modernise or update them. A similar solution could be possible in Dark Sun. Have the bad guy a rogue defiler or an ancient kaisharga or Dregoth or an evil psionicist, a crazed elemental spirit, or psurlon coven or something, set the adventure in a small free village somewhere rather than one of the big cities, or else do a minor retcon to set the thing in someplace like Urik and make all slaves the property of Hamanu whose Law protects and covets them because they're his property. There's ways you could do it. It'd require a big divergence from the old lore, but with Ravenloft and Dragonlance WotC has certainly proven entirely willing to do that.

Having said all that ... I think WotCs current opinions on Dark Sun are probably heavily influenced by the youtube video series that came out a few years back now and was discussed heavily on here, with African-Americans talking about D&D lore from an African-American point of view. The thrust of those (if i'm remembering and paraphrasing correctly) was that slavery as a subject shouldn't be addressed at all in game because it cannot be addressed wiith the maturity and complexity it deserved. Now, I'm neither American, African, NOR African-American, so I don't know how widely those opinions are agreed with among that community, but at the end of the day WotC is an American company with the majority of its customer base in America. Even though the historical inspirations for Dark Sun's slavery model/system are clearly more based on ancient civilisations rather than the Antebellum USA, they'll likely be cautious of stepping incorrectly on the matter, and this is a subject that provides almost unlimited scope for stepping one SOMEONE's sensitive points.

As for the other stuff - as I said before, I'm not American. I'm aware that climate change is a politically heated topic (everywhere, but particularly over there), but if any media, movie, book, etc has ever found itself cancelled or in serious hot water because it includes climate change themes, I'm not aware of it. Is this a thing that actually happens, in real life? Are there any actual examples? Because it honestly appears, from the outside, that concerns over how these themes would be received in a modern DS product seem to be cowering from entirely hypothetical pushback. And expecially given WotCs target audience for D&D skews quite young, which is a demographic more likely to take climate change seriously as an issue.

 

[Umbran]

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.

Mod Note:
This thread is about Dark Sun, not the state of the real world today. How about we bring it back around to the actual topic, please and thanks.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Maybe.

Obviously the difference is between most post-apocalyptic media and a D&D supplement is agency. In a film or book or whatever, the creator can ensure that the main characters stay on the right side of the slavery moral line. In D&D, they can't.

I've said it before, but the second-most-obvious Dark Sun slavery plot (other than 'the PCs have been captured by slavers!') is 'the PCs have to rescue a loved one or other plot-important person who has been captured by slavers'. One of the very obvious solutions to this RPing scenario is to simply plunder a dungeon somewhere and use the proceeds to buy the individual concerned out of slavery.

No WotC product, I can guarantee, will EVER list how much it costs to buy a slave. Special circumstances or not. Just the same way as giving something a stat block means people will try to kill it, as soon as you put a price on something it becomes treasure, and some PCs will try to sell it. WotC will not do ANYTHING to even vaguely support PCs setting themselves up as slave traders, and no, sticking a 'don't do this, slavery is bad mmkay?' disclaimer in a sidebar will not change that.

But that makes slavery stories hard to tell, and slavery-centric settings hard to write.

This doesn't mean that you can't do Dark Sun, of course. WotC dealt with the problematic parts of Dragonlance (gully dwarves, draconians creepily lusting for human women, the morality of the Cataclysm) by writing the setting as an adventure, and then arranging the adventure in a way that they could just flat-out not talk about the old awkward bits of the lore because the adventure did not relate to those facets of the setting. Similarly, the xenocidal Inhuman Wars, and the faux-Chinese Shou were just quietly ignored in 5e Spelljammer rather than any attempt being made to modernise or update them. A similar solution could be possible in Dark Sun. Have the bad guy a rogue defiler or an ancient kaisharga or Dregoth or an evil psionicist, a crazed elemental spirit, or psurlon coven or something, set the adventure in a small free village somewhere rather than one of the big cities, or else do a minor retcon to set the thing in someplace like Urik and make all slaves the property of Hamanu whose Law protects and covets them because they're his property. There's ways you could do it. It'd require a big divergence from the old lore, but with Ravenloft and Dragonlance WotC has certainly proven entirely willing to do that.

Having said all that ... I think WotCs current opinions on Dark Sun are probably heavily influenced by the youtube video series that came out a few years back now and was discussed heavily on here, with African-Americans talking about D&D lore from an African-American point of view. The thrust of those (if i'm remembering and paraphrasing correctly) was that slavery as a subject shouldn't be addressed at all in game because it cannot be addressed wiith the maturity and complexity it deserved. Now, I'm neither American, African, NOR African-American, so I don't know how widely those opinions are agreed with among that community, but at the end of the day WotC is an American company with the majority of its customer base in America. Even though the historical inspirations for Dark Sun's slavery model/system are clearly more based on ancient civilisations rather than the Antebellum USA, they'll likely be cautious of stepping incorrectly on the matter, and this is a subject that provides almost unlimited scope for stepping one SOMEONE's sensitive points.

As for the other stuff - as I said before, I'm not American. I'm aware that climate change is a politically heated topic (everywhere, but particularly over there), but if any media, movie, book, etc has ever found itself cancelled or in serious hot water because it includes climate change themes, I'm not aware of it. Is this a thing that actually happens, in real life? Are there any actual examples? Because it honestly appears, from the outside, that concerns over how these themes would be received in a modern DS product seem to be cowering from entirely hypothetical pushback. And expecially given WotCs target audience for D&D skews quite young, which is a demographic more likely to take climate change seriously as an issue.

This is excellent support for my, "stop hoping for 1st party content for Hasbro-owned D&D settings and just do your own thing" stance.