D&D 5E DnDBeyond leaks Dark Sun?

[Yaarel]

Sadly, I think very dark with tiny points of light is kinda out of fashion.

Optimism and radical empathy are starting to become favored over postmodern cynicism with young people. They don’t just want to use fiction to critique systems of oppression, they want to use it to imagine new alternatives.

In my eyes, that is what D&D "worldbuilding" is all about: exploring difficulties, and imagining better ways.

In that light, I could see a modern Dark Sun incorporating elements of solarpunk, perhaps turning the Tyr into an independent commune where through cooperation and judicial use of preservation magic, the free people have managed to revitalize the local ecosystem and become self-sufficient. This could serve as a home base for PCs who fight the servants of the Sorcerer Kings, liberate oppressed people, and spread their preservation efforts across Athas.

Sign me up!

I want some of the city-states to be mago-techno-topias. Still experimental, but idealistic.

There should still be other city-states that are tyrannical.

But hope in Dark Sun is ok by me.

 

[Charlaquin]

I am ok with that. In my eyes, that is what "worldbuilding" is all about: exploring difficulties, and imagining better ways.


Sign me up!

I want some of the city-states to be mago-techno-topias. Still experimental, but idealistic.

There should still be other city-states that are tyrannical.

But hope in Dark Sun is ok by me.

I do kind of like the idea of bringing a dash of solarpunk into Dark Sun, but like @Ruin Explorer I prefer the focus being on figuring out how to fix the world’s problems, rather than implementing solutions that have already been found.

 

[Yaarel]

I do kind of like the idea of bringing a dash of solarpunk into Dark Sun, but like @Ruin Explorer I prefer the focus being on figuring out how to fix the world’s problems, rather than implementing solutions that have already been found.

Yeah, I am a fan of the players having agency in the story! The DM supplies the setting, but the choices that the player characters make create the story.

 

[ersatzphil]

I want some of the city-states to be mago-techno-topias. Still experimental, but idealistic.

I mean, we already have Kurn and Oronis.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I want some of the city-states to be mago-techno-topias. Still experimental, but idealistic.

I think as soon as you do that, you change the setting from "Revolt against the evil overlords who are destroying the world with their greed and lust for power!", to "pick the bunch of wacky weirdos you want to be on team weirdo with, and go bash the heads of the bad weirdos", which is a totally valid setting, but it's just not Dark Sun. It's actually kind of akin to a post-apocalyptic Planescape - i.e. philosophers with clubs.

You could, if you felt like it, probably reframe all of Dark Sun as like, city-states which were each a "take" on a Planescape Faction's ideals/philosophies (some of which are very empowering, some of which are deeply oppressive), and like go from there (with the general Dark Sun setting as a backdrop). Great now I accidentally found a way to mash-up Planescape and Dark Sun lol. I did not mean to do that!

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I mean, we already have Kurn and Oronis.

Not in the original boxed-set we don't!

Kurn/Oronis is a ghastly thing added in the Revised boxed set, that totally recontextualizes the setting (as I referred to above), and is a great example of how TSR would have an actually-visionary writer create a wonderful strongly-themed setting, then get a bunch of frankly, less talented, less imaginative writers to come in and do most of the material for it after that. Both Planescape and Dark Sun sadly experienced this, Planescape had Zeb Cook, who then I believe left TSR (so I guess they can't be totally blamed), and Dark Sun had Troy Denning and Timothy B. Brown, who were replaced with Bill Slaviscek for the Revised version, who had distinctly different, and frankly far more mainstream and boring ideas. Though I will say at least Bill isn't responsible for the Prism Pentad, one of the worst things D&D has ever had written for it. I guess Denning suffered from what so many adventure writers and the like have suffered from - an inability to "leave it to the players", a need to play out their version of "the story". Hell maybe Kurn/Oronis were introduced in them in which case Bill is off the hook, but the revised set is still dire.

 

[Yaarel]

I think as soon as you do that, you change the setting from "Revolt against the evil overlords who are destroying the world with their greed and lust for power!", to "pick the bunch of wacky weirdos you want to be on team weirdo with, and go bash the heads of the bad weirdos", which is a totally valid setting, but it's just not Dark Sun. It's actually kind of akin to a post-apocalyptic Planescape - i.e. philosophers with clubs.

I consider apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic to be an intellectually lazy genre.

In my eyes, it is for people that fear the real world changing in front of their eyes, and that cant imagine what life will be like as technologies and societies accelerate. So the story is just to destroy everything, using violence and coercion, to revert to a "good ole days" that never were.

To some degree apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic are little more than a luddite wetdream.

I prefer hope an ingenuity.

You could, if you felt like it, probably reframe all of Dark Sun as like, city-states which were each a "take" on a Planescape Faction's ideals/philosophies (some of which are very empowering, some of which are deeply oppressive), and like go from there (with the general Dark Sun setting as a backdrop). Great now I accidentally found a way to mash-up Planescape and Dark Sun lol. I did not mean to do that!

I feel an important aspect of Dark Sun is the independence of each city-state.

Each one has its own way of doing things.

Some cities can be "advanced".

It can even be a great setting where higher tier characters are founding a new city.

 

[Yaarel]

Technically, Dark Sun has real points of light − where the areas of "positive material plane" still exist.

Meanwhile, there are means, especially when collaborating psionic, primal, elemental divine, and preserver arcane, to expand this positivity and even seed positivity within desolate "negative material plane".

It is possible to rebuild and even terraform Athas-Fyreen.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

To some degree apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic are little more than a luddite wetdream.

That seems ironically extremely narrow-minded. Apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic, and post-post-apocalyptic fiction can encompass almost limitless things, from Mad Max to Hunger Games to Station Eleven to the later two Annihilation books (and indeed much of Jeff Vandermeer's oeuvre generally) to Judge Dredd to JG Ballard's The Drowned World to The Triffids to Dawn of the Dead to Pacific Rim to Escape from New York to Invasion of the Body Snatchers to Apocalypso to Planet of the Apes to... I could literally go on all day.

If you consider that all that "intellectually lazy", I say to you sir, is it you who is being intellectually lazy < finger guns > by making such a sweeping and foolhardy statement! BOOM GOTCHA I say not entirely seriously

But more seriously you could not be more wrong lol, and it's easy to see, I can just keep listing apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic and post-post-apocalyptic stuff all day. It seems to me like you're thinking of a narrow survivalist-oriented subgenre which is basically Fallout to Mad Max and everything in-between. But even there stuff like Fallout 2 rejects the survivalist luddite "Men can be real men again!" thing, and so do the later Mad Maxes, Fury Road for example having Furiosa come from a utopian society which flourished after the apocalypse. Even the seminal texts of survivalist post-apocalyptic stuff often question their own basis - I Am Legend/The Omega Man being the most obvious example, and sheesh, A Boy and His Dog examines who deeply messed up the whole thing can be - and those are both from the '70s! In fact The Road sort of questions whether it's even worth surviving.

Also, objecting to post-apocalyptic (or rather post-post-apocalyptic) settings and wanting to change Dark Sun is like, objecting to Kitchen Sink settings and wanting to change the Forgotten Realms, or objecting to cars, and wanting to remove them from Mad Max lol.

 

[Yaarel]

That seems ironically extremely narrow-minded. Apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic, and post-post-apocalyptic fiction can encompass almost limitless things, from Mad Max to Hunger Games to Station Eleven to the later two Annihilation books (and indeed much of Jeff Vandermeer's oeuvre generally) to Judge Dredd to JG Ballard's The Drowned World to The Triffids to Dawn of the Dead to Pacific Rim to Escape from New York to Invasion of the Body Snatchers to Apocalypso to Planet of the Apes to... I could literally go on all day.

LOL! None of these examples really dissuade my impression about luddite apocalypticism.

Maybe Pacific Rim is ok, but it has elements of hopeful technotopia.

If you consider that all that "intellectually lazy", I say to you sir, is it you who is being intellectually lazy, by making such a sweeping and foolhardy statement! BOOM GOTCHA I say not entirely seriously

Heh. Maybe more examples might help?

I ended up loving the recent Brave New World tv series. According to the novel a dystopia, but the series subversively presents it as mostly appealing despite serious problems.

In the end of the series, they destroy the city. The characters languish in the boring mundaneness that they are now stuck with.

Fallout to Mad Max and everything in-between.

Yup. Yup. Still not helping.

Also, objecting to post-apocalyptic (or rather post-post-apocalyptic) settings and wanting to change Dark Sun is like, objecting to Kitchen Sink settings and wanting to change the Forgotten Realms, or objecting to cars, and wanting to remove them from Mad Max lol.

Dystopias are frightening reallife possibilities.

I enjoy a Dark Sun setting where different isolated cities can explore both technotopian and dystopian possibilities.



(Because each city has its own culture, in some ways drawing inspiration from reallife cultures, I hope no reallife culture inadvertently gets demonized when contrasting fictional cultures.)