D&D 5E DnDBeyond leaks Dark Sun?

[R_J_K75]

No it was bad wrong fun. It punishes spellcasters to actually use the spelljammers to fly ships. It was way too silly. It was a cool idea poorly done and sold poorly for a variety of reasons.

I disagree. Sure the rules couldve been better but the spell casters got to fly the ship so theres that.

 

[Redwizard007]

I think DarkSun needs to be the Rogue One of settings.

Everyone and everything is doomed. No chance to fix things. How you deal with that is the campaign, in my opinion.

I think you missed the theme of Rogue One pretty dramatically. I wouldn't derail this thread on a tangent, but this all applies to DS as well as SW.

Evil empires, corrupt city-states, secret police, slavers and raiders, hostile environments and seemingly random destruction are all great tools for telling a story, but there needs to be some form of hope for motivation. That hope doesn't have to be campaign altering, but it must be present in some form. Without hope, what are you trying to accomplish?

Escaping slavery is one obvious hope in DS. Maybe to a slave tribe in the wastes. Maybe becoming valuable to a noble or Templar. Maybe just jetting off to another city or village. After that, naturally, comes rescuing those you left behind.

Finding safety is another obvious hope, and driver of DS campaigns. That could mean ripping down a SK and his templars to seize power for yourself, but it could just as easily be finding a hidden valley where your rain cleric can cause crops to grow. It could also be building a formidable mercenary company, or reclaiming ancient ruins or magic. Anything that gives you some degree of safety and security.

Banding together with like minded people is another easy one. The Veiled Alliance or theives guilds are obvious, but druids, clerics, merchant houses or even a cabal of enlightened nobles all provide extensive resources, contacts, a degree of safety and a pool of like minded allies.

Dark Sun isn't about changing THE world. It is about changing YOUR world. Small victories. More intimate scales. Everything is personal. That's why it is perfect for small parties and solo play.

 

[darjr]

I think you missed the theme of Rogue One pretty dramatically. I wouldn't derail this thread on a tangent, but this all applies to DS as well as SW.

Evil empires, corrupt city-states, secret police, slavers and raiders, hostile environments and seemingly random destruction are all great tools for telling a story, but there needs to be some form of hope for motivation. That hope doesn't have to be campaign altering, but it must be present in some form. Without hope, what are you trying to accomplish?

Escaping slavery is one obvious hope in DS. Maybe to a slave tribe in the wastes. Maybe becoming valuable to a noble or Templar. Maybe just jetting off to another city or village. After that, naturally, comes rescuing those you left behind.

Finding safety is another obvious hope, and driver of DS campaigns. That could mean ripping down a SK and his templars to seize power for yourself, but it could just as easily be finding a hidden valley where your rain cleric can cause crops to grow. It could also be building a formidable mercenary company, or reclaiming ancient ruins or magic. Anything that gives you some degree of safety and security.

Banding together with like minded people is another easy one. The Veiled Alliance or theives guilds are obvious, but druids, clerics, merchant houses or even a cabal of enlightened nobles all provide extensive resources, contacts, a degree of safety and a pool of like minded allies.

Dark Sun isn't about changing THE world. It is about changing YOUR world. Small victories. More intimate scales. Everything is personal. That's why it is perfect for small parties and solo play.

That’s exactly what I meant. In the end the players only know this is the way the world is. It’s only going to get worse. And personally they are doomed and know it. Probably everyone is. The struggle to do the right thing isn’t for any reward but because it’s the right thing to do.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

In light of the above... Dark Sun's slavery clearly owes much to the Roman model (especially as presented in Sword & Sandals movies, which are honestly a more important consideration here than actual history), and, to me, statements about the problematic nature of depicting this type of slavery smack of American exceptionalism.

I strongly disagree and you haven't answered any of my points about why it's the case, which I made at some length. Nor did you even accept the obvious ahistorical falsehood you put forwards re: the Greeks inventing chattel slavery! There's obviously no point repeating myself if you're going to dismiss it without actually arguing your case in the least, and not even accept a basic error on your own part.

I'm also not an American, so claiming I'm asserting "American exceptionalism", rings hilariously hollow.

In an effort to make this productive: how, if at all, is it possible to address slavery in front of an audience that contains Americans, without it degenerating into arguments like the above?

It is. I already explained how. Just move away from chattel models of slavery as the focus, and particularly don't echo the bizarre and specific elements that are associated with the slavery situation in the Americas. Note I say the Americas. You keep talking about "Americans", but it's obviously not true that this concern is limited to the United States of America. I mean people in the UK tore down a statue of a slaver and threw into the sea for goodness sake. We'd have got more if it wasn't for local governments taking them down pre-emptively or putting stuff around them or the like, and then the pandemic hitting. It's not a radical or even unusual opinion among anyone here to think they shouldn't be displayed as if they were figures worthy of respect. I don't want to get too much into that lest we talk politics, but my point is it's mistaken to paint this is as a uniquely American concern, and has seemingly caused you to make an error in talking about "American exceptionalism" (which is a misuse of the term anyway).

Anyway, point is, the solution is simple - focus on oppression and forms of slavery that aren't chattel slavery - brutal serfdom like Sparta or Japan or even Europe and Eurasia, actual face-the-facts serfdom. There's a long tradition in Europe, a very long tradition, of pretending serfs were just land-bound farmers, and that they had it fine. They weren't, and they didn't. They were slaves. They weren't chattel slaves, because they weren't owned by individuals (though in Russia it did get pretty close to that - in some cases arguably the serfs there were treated worse than say, Roman chattel slaves typically were). This was particularly evident in some societies - in Japan as a serf (I forget the exact word) you couldn't even travel off your lord's lands without a permit, let alone own land (or even really goods) beyond what he'd granted to you, and so on.

Over the centuries, as with Roman slavery, things got looser and looser and looser and serfs stopped being slaves, then they just became poorly-treated tenant farmers, then eventually free people, and so on.

Indentured servitude, especially debt-bondage, especially if the Sorcerer-Kings and their states help usher people into it, also works. As does penal slavery which combines well with oppressive governments like the Sorcerer-Kings (and has been all over the world for centuries and still is in much of the world now).

You've got loads of options. Just steer clear of chattel slavery (which means a kind of unrestricted private ownership of slaves), multigenerational slavery and slave breeding particularly.

Sorry, but my own experencie has taught me to untrust certain sources. You can show yours, but others can tell the opposite. We shouldn't forget the radical depopulation in Ireland by Cromwell. If the lives by those Ireshmen had been good, then we should have seen a demographic increase. I have see too many example of History and fiction being used for propaganda. Cromwell might be perfect as source of inspiration for a dark-lord in Ravenloft.

This isn't really a reasonable response to my point.

You pushed an actual honest-to-god conspiracy theory. There are no fact that back you up. News24 is a grotesque tabloid channel that offers no sources, whereas that Wikipedia article is extremely well-sourced and based in fact. You'll notice that 2015 New24 article has:

A) No sources.

and

B) No author.

No-one was willing to put their name on that conspiracy-theory tripe. You're posting the equivalent of "Aliens kidnapped Elvis!" and claiming it as fact.

What I think may have happened here is a translation error. Someone has confused indentured servitude and chattel slavery - you see in your article where it says (and yes, people, this is in a supposedly serious news article, I'm not paraphrasing):

But, where are our public (and PRIVATE) schools???? Where are the history books? Why is it so seldom discussed?

It's not discussed because it never happened. The transportation of Irish people in indentured servitude absolutely did happen, albeit in smaller numbers than the article suggests (indeed the article also suddenly throws in something that happened to African chattel slaves as if it happened to Irish indentured servants, I note). And if you read actual history books, regarding indentured servitude, as I said, you'll see the "WASPs" as you put transported far more of "their own" (i.e. other White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) in indentured servitude than the did Irish people.

As for Cromwell, well obviously he was a monster re: Ireland, but that's discussed in the link I sent you to Wikipedia, and it's well-sourced fact there, not semi-literate fiction as it is on News24.

Translation and comprehension errors of this magnitude have happened before. A British author wrote an lengthy work about how in the after 1830, contrary to common belief, we still used to execute people for being gay. Except, problem is, we didn't. She'd tried to do her own research and had misunderstood a bit of legal terminology, and ignored people who tried to set her straight until she finally got demolished by a professor in an interview on Radio 3 just before the book came out:

Naomi Wolf admits blunder over Victorians and sodomy executions

Death sentences in 1800s were hardly ever carried out, despite claim in author’s book Outrages

www.theguardian.com

Finally, you say:

I have see too many example of History and fiction being used for propaganda.

Yes, exactly. That's what you're doing. You pushing fiction as history, because you read some poorly-written propaganda on a South African tabloid news site, and you believed it unquestioningly.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Given all the other extant lines of evidence, it seems to me that this reinforces the idea that "Doomspace" was slated to be "Athaspace" until very late in development. So I don't see a Dark Dun product coming soon, but more evidence of a reflected Dark Sun cameo in Spelljammer.

I find it extremely hard to believe they would turn Athas' sun into a black hole, which is the driver for the whole plot in the Spelljammer adventure.

 

[Parmandur]

I find it extremely hard to believe they would turn Athas' sun into a black hole, which is the driver for the whole plot in the Spelljammer adventure.

Honestly, that could potentially be part of the serial numbers being filed off. While it is a striking element in the writeup of the Wildspace system, it doesn't directly impact the story action in the outer system, away from the probable reskinned Athas as well.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I find it extremely hard to believe they would turn Athas' sun into a black hole, which is the driver for the whole plot in the Spelljammer adventure.

I mean we have @darjr in this thread basically arguing for an understanding of Athas as a totally doomed setting where you only do the right thing because it's right, which whilst obviously not in the least true of 2E Athas (indeed quite the contrary), does represent the sort of cheap and loud idea (sorry @darjr but I do find it cheap, loud and lazy, as a change to an existing setting) that a lot of mediocre writers get sucked into, think it's an incredible concept (and let's remember, Rogue One is not a well-written film on any level - it's beautiful for sure, but poorly-written, whether it's dialogue, plot, pacing or whatever).

So I think it's easy to believe one of the many mediocre hacks ("not all WotC writers..." sure, sure, but some of them) at WotC thought it great idea, maybe the best idea he'd ever had, and then finally someone a bit higher up the chain read it and went "OH BALLS NO!!!".

 

[teitan]

I disagree. Sure the rules couldve been better but the spell casters got to fly the ship so theres that.

It ate spell slots. It was awful and inaccessible to low level characters. Bad wrong fun.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Honestly, that could potentially be part of the serial numbers being filed off. While it is a striking element in the writeup of the Wildspace system, it doesn't directly impact the story action in the outer system, away from the probable reskinned Athas as well.

Isn't the goal of the villains to restart their sun?

 

[Parmandur]

Isn't the goal of the villains to restart their sun?

Nope, that's a different Wildspace system, the other one detailed in the campaign, that still has a working Sun due tonevil Space Wlf magic. The players go to "Doomspace" to find some fierce fighters who might be willing to fight the evil Space Elf Empire. The black hole is evocstive distant scenery.