We are where we are with D&D because 1980s D&D culture left huge monuments to itself in text. If 2020s D&D culture doesn't leave equally huge monuments, the reaction to D&D's traditionally colonialist attitudes will be little more than a footnote in the history of the game. Twitter rage counts for nothing; Twitter has no memory.
When the center shifts, and it ceases to be profitable to market progressive ideals, the disclaimers on DMsGuild.com will vanish quietly, and all we will be left with are the picked-over digital remains of a 5th Edition D&D that studiously avoided or excised all controversial topics.
If oneD&D is to course-correct D&D culture, what it needs is a protest-literature stance on these topics. It needs to
shout about slavery being evil, and indeed the right that all sapient creatures have to respect and fair treatment, regardless of their cultural, physical, or sexual differences.
And it can't do that through avoidance.
oneD&D Dark Sun might not change the world, but it
could change D&D -- if the community is prepared to let it.
It is a post-apocalyptic world, and that apocalypse was social as well as environmental. It is a worst-case scenario, but that's ideal for a game of heroic adventure. The classic setting's mistake is in assuming that the worst-case scenario changes the nature of heroism.
It does not.
(For what it is worth, neither active nor passive complicity in the social apocalypse has ever been presented to me at table as a Dark Sun campaign expectation, from the '90s on, and I would personally always have walked away from such a table if it was.)
Protest literature isn't clean or easy. It's controversial, and it hurts enemies and allies both. It is supposed to be impossible to ignore; it is a call to action. If we want D&D culture to change permanently, we have to make permanent changes to D&D culture.
If you don't care about D&D changing, then by all means, remove all reference to painful social issues.
But if you do? Get out there and publish compatible material that exposes slavery for the evil that it is. Insist Wizards do the same. You'll be in good company;
A1 Slave Pits of the Undercity was published in 1980 and republished in 1986 and 2013, with a sequel released in 2000, and spoiler alert:
it does not include rules for playing the slavers.
Could Darksun be rewritten without these problematic elements? Sure, it could. As has been mentioned before, using the model of serfdom or even better (IMO) the corporate town* where all resources are controlled by the sorcerer kings and the templars and the workers have to push themselves to edge of their endurance in order to afford the necessities of life. Before anyone suggests that this is the same as slavery, it isn't. Not in any moral sense of the word. Chattel slavery is different, from a moral and ethical perspective.
You made some good points about Dark Sun's unacceptable casual disregard for morality, but you're just doing the same thing here. Holding up serfdom and the 'company store' as 'non-problematic' alternatives to slavery, fictional or otherwise, is disgusting. Please check your rhetoric.
- I had one player who kept trying to play a cannibal. I felt a deep feeling of disgust for that character that then became a feeling of disgust for the player.
God, do I rue the day when edgelord scientists discovered cannibalism as the latest in envelop-pushing disgustingness. And when it broke the 90's era containment in RPGs and novels, spilling over into 00's comics and 10-20's movies. There were three movies out last year that use cannibalisms as an allegory for relationships. Three! THREE.
I do not understand this position, or the vehemence of the response, in context. I had thought the characterization of sapient cannibalism as savage or taboo to be just another Euro-Christian colonialist artifact. When we die, we are meat. What am I missing?
