D&D 5E (2014) DnDBeyond leaks Dark Sun?

[darjr]

If any y’all have learned anything about me here I am not cheap.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

If any y’all have learned anything about me here I am not cheap.

I would never accuse you of being cheap in the financial sense, I agree!

 

[gorice]

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.


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.

OK. I've explained that I'm neither able nor willing to get into the details of this with you ATM. I will say that the Greek origin of slavery (IIRC from Chios) was a traditional view, based on a throwaway line by a source whose name I forget. I will not defend it, and it is a distraction from the argument. I'm not here to score points.

Anyway: chattel slavery is, by definition, the buying and selling of human beings. The Romans and Greeks most certainly bought and sold human beings. I'm not sure what else there is to say; you haven't offered any concrete objections.

If you can't see the affinity between Dark Sun and something like the film Spartacus (slave markets, gladiatorial arenas, slaves revolting against a decadent plutocracy, and, most importantly, scantily clad warriors covered in sweat), I don't know what to say to you.

As for 'American exceptionalism', perhaps it was a poor choice of words. It remains true that the US does not have a monopoly on the history chattel slavery. I will add that, in my personal experience, American ideological hegemony is such that one does not have to be American to believe American historical narratives.

In any case, your proposed solution is unfortunately likely to be the correct one. I'm well aware of the various forms of human unfreedom; but it genuinely saddens me that so many people believe that chattel slavery cannot be treated in fiction because of its 'unique' association with the Atlantic slave trade and US history (incidentally, this also lets the Romans off the hook and puts wind in the sails of those spouting genuinely reactionary 'Western Civilisation' narratives, but that's another can of worms).

 

[humble minion]

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 have no problems believing that at all. In fact i think the overwhelming majority of evidence suggests that's exactly what they planned before the idea was nixed at the last minute by someone further up the food chain and they had to scramble to do a quick rewrite to file the serial numbers off.

The Dark Sun monsters in the Astral Menagerie book, and thri-kreen in the main book. The brief appearance of the 'Athasspace' map on DNDBeyond before it was hurriedly yanked and replaced with 'Doomspace' with no explanation stinks of the online team getting given the old map and someone forgetting to update them when plans changed late. And the description of Doomspace in the adventure basically reads as if someone was given the brief 'we've written an adventure in Athas but we can't use Athas and it's too late to rewrite, quick, come up with some quick background of an Athasy world that isn't Athas and hurry up about it, we go to print in 20 minutes'.

Given the various ... controversial ... editorial choices around Spelljammer, from the initial decision to go with the three-skinny-book format that absolutely nobody asked for, to the various hadozee issues, this does not strike me as a project that was managed very well by Wizards. Given the way everything else went, I have absolutely no problems believing that some bright spark in WotC's creative department thought it'd be a grand wink-and-nudge joke to drop Athas into a black hole in a Spelljammer adventure, before some perhaps more seasoned and grizzled head saw the almost-completed manuscript at the very last second and screamed 'WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING???'

I'd dearly love to be a fly on the wall at the Spelljammer project postmortem meeting, I have to admit...

 

[gorice]

Getting back on topic: I am 100% on board with the idea that there needs to be a sliver of hope for the setting to really work. If burning down the sorcerer kings isn't on the menu, count me out.

I think there's a grain of truth to the idea (mentioned somewhere upthread; sorry, Forgotten Poster) that apocalyptic fiction is stagnant and reactionary. It can be. In my experience, it definitely has those (excuse the language) valences. I think an ambiguous approach to the future of the post-apocalypse (rather than fatalistic doom-porn or problematic fantasies about burning everything down and starting with a clean slate) is essential to keeping it interesting.

 

[Azuresun]

Getting back on topic: I am 100% on board with the idea that there needs to be a sliver of hope for the setting to really work. If burning down the sorcerer kings isn't on the menu, count me out.

Agreed. Reading the 4e Dark Sun book, it hit that balance for me where the world is doomed enough for that Dark Souls or Dying Earth-esque "grandeur of ruin" atmosphere, where the scope of the devastation has a bleak majesty to it--but there is still hope. But you're going to have to do the hard work of realising that hope, you're going to make enemies from a lot of powerful being doing so, and it sure as hell isn't going to be easy.

"Mad Max" and "Fist of the North Star" come to mind. The scope of the destruction is staggering, a lot of powerful people just want to either squabble over the scraps or create horrible new societies in their image, but the actual heroes are working to make things better--even if they don't get far in their own lifetimes, they're still going to try and lay foundations.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

suggests that's exactly what they planned before the idea was nixed at the last minute by someone further up the food chain and they had to scramble to do a quick rewrite to file the serial numbers off.

They could not have gotten all the print books redone in time. If this was really a last minute change, Spelljammer would have been delayed. The printed books already had "Doomspace" printed in them.

The Dark Sun monsters in the Astral Menagerie book, and thri-kreen in the main book.

Thr-Kreen are core 1E monsters, from the Monster Cards and Monster Manual 2. They're no more exclusive to Dark Sun than drow are to the Forgotten Realms. (And folks on these forums have tried to argue that drow are, indeed, something that should only belong to the Forgotten Realms, despite them debuting -- spoiler alert -- at the end of G3.)

And if WotC wants to visit a new hostile, John Carter-style world for an adventure, should they create entirely new monsters or just grab some from an established world?

Their presence automatically meaning "Dark Sun" is wishful thinking.

The brief appearance of the 'Athasspace' map on DNDBeyond before it was hurriedly yanked and replaced with 'Doomspace' with no explanation stinks of the online team getting given the old map and someone forgetting to update them when plans changed late.

Have you ever worked with an extended team? Someone's version always lags behind, and giving people temporary code names for items until a final version of a concept is worked out is standard operating procedure in the companies I've worked for.

One year ago: "It's not Athas, but it's Athas-like. Tell the artists that it's sort of Athas for their purposes, but don't do anything specifically Athas, like landmarks or flags."

Several months ago: "For crying out loud! You sent the temp map to D&D Beyond?"

If your Slack or Google Teams conversations don't look like this, I envy you, but this chain of events is not at all remarkable.

I have had to come down to the office in my pajamas on a Sunday morning and frantically argue with the production team on something I was working on because we -- as far back as 2008 -- had put something online that people were freaking out about that was supposed to have been fixed and I was trying to get it and the hard copy fixed before it went out the door in hours.

And why would D&D Beyond say anything? What possible explanation could they have said that the people who want to believe all this would have responded to?

And the description of Doomspace in the adventure basically reads as if someone was given the brief 'we've written an adventure in Athas but we can't use Athas and it's too late to rewrite, quick, come up with some quick background of an Athasy world that isn't Athas and hurry up about it, we go to print in 20 minutes'.

I sure hope no one sues the estate of Edgar Rice Burroughs for creating a desolate world with arenas and half-dressed heroes and villains battling weird creatures.

This is an old trope present in the original OD&D booklets, but largely ignored nowadays, since Barsoom isn't particularly popular after Gygax's generation.

Given the various ... controversial ... editorial choices around Spelljammer, from the initial decision to go with the three-skinny-book format that absolutely nobody asked for, to the various hadozee issues, this does not strike me as a project that was managed very well by Wizards. Given the way everything else went, I have absolutely no problems believing that some bright spark in WotC's creative department thought it'd be a grand wink-and-nudge joke to drop Athas into a black hole in a Spelljammer adventure, before some perhaps more seasoned and grizzled head saw the almost-completed manuscript at the very last second and screamed 'WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING???'

"I'm mad at WotC so I'm willing to believe the worst possible scenarios, even when it makes no business sense for WotC to have done so" shouldn't be a compelling argument to anyone.

Dark Sun is valuable IP. The fact that WotC keeps making attempt after attempt to get psionics to a place where the disparate crowd of Dark Sun fans want it demonstrates that.

The fact that someone at WotC also likes Dark Sun and, when asked about what sort of worlds should be in the Spelljammer adventure, trotted out some Dark Sun-style content, should also not be a shock.

They're eventually going to pick a version of psionics, grit their teeth about the hue and cry that it's not the same as in 2E, and publish Dark Sun. (Probably not until after 2024, though, since they have a lot of stuff to do between now and then.) In fact, Dark Sun is extremely likely to come in the multi-book format, so that the psionics rules can be purchased separately on D&D Beyond.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Agreed. Reading the 4e Dark Sun book, it hit that balance for me where the world is doomed enough for that Dark Souls or Dying Earth-esque "grandeur of ruin" atmosphere, where the scope of the devastation has a bleak majesty to it--but there is still hope. But you're going to have to do the hard work of realising that hope, you're going to make enemies from a lot of powerful being doing so, and it sure as hell isn't going to be easy.

A 5E Dark Sun would almost certainly have a ray of hope in it, if only because Mork Borg has swallowed the market for "the world is doomed, let's go as dark as we want," along with a lot of the creative energy for it.

I'm also not sure folks in Renton listening on the news to people in neighboring communities die of heat stroke in the summer as areas that never needed cooling are suddenly hitting extreme temperatures will want to do a setting about environmental collapse where the bottom line is "there's nothing you can do; you're doomed." The published D&D settings have all* been about heroic fantasy. Giving up and lying down has never been part of the TSR/WotC brand for the game.

* There are arguments to be made about Ravenloft, but even then, "how the heck do we escape this place" has been in, as I recall, every version of the Ravenloft core over the decades.

 

[Parmandur]

They could not have gotten all the print books redone in time. If this was really a last minute change, Spelljammer would have been delayed. The printed books already had "Doomspace" printed in them.


Thr-Kreen are core 1E monsters, from the Monster Cards and Monster Manual 2. They're no more exclusive to Dark Sun than drow are to the Forgotten Realms. (And folks on these forums have tried to argue that drow are, indeed, something that should only belong to the Forgotten Realms, despite them debuting -- spoiler alert -- at the end of G3.)

And if WotC wants to visit a new hostile, John Carter-style world for an adventure, should they create entirely new monsters or just grab some from an established world?

Their presence automatically meaning "Dark Sun" is wishful thinking.

Have you ever worked with an extended team? Someone's version always lags behind, and giving people temporary code names for items until a final version of a concept is worked out is standard operating procedure in the companies I've worked for.

One year ago: "It's not Athas, but it's Athas-like. Tell the artists that it's sort of Athas for their purposes, but don't do anything specifically Athas, like landmarks or flags."

Several months ago: "For crying out loud? You sent the temp map to D&D Beyond?"

If your Slack or Google Teams conversations don't look like this, I envy you, but this chain of events is not at all remarkable.

I have had to come down to the office in my pajamas on a Sunday morning and frantically argue with the production team on something I was working on because we -- as far back as 2008 -- had put something online that people were freaking out about that was supposed to have been fixed and I was trying to get it and the hard copy fixed before it went out the door in hours.

And why would D&D Beyond say anything? What possible explanation could they have said that the people who want to believe all this would have responded to?

I sure hope no one sues the estate of Edgar Rice Burroughs for creating a desolate world with arenas and half-dressed heroes and villains battling weird creatures.

This is an old trope present in the original OD&D booklets, but largely ignored nowadays, since Barsoom isn't particularly popular after Gygax's generation.

"I'm mad at WotC so I'm willing to believe the worst possible scenarios, even when it makes no business sense for WotC to have done so" shouldn't be a compelling argument to anyone.

Dark Sun is valuable IP. The fact that WotC keeps making attempt after attempt to get psionics to a place where the disparate crowd of Dark Sun fans want it demonstrates that.

The fact that someone at WotC also likes Dark Sun and, when asked about what sort of worlds should be in the Spelljammer adventure, trotted out some Dark Sun-style content, should also not be a shock.

They're eventually going to pick a version of psionics, grit their teeth about the hue and cry that it's not the same as in 2E, and publish Dark Sun. (Probably not until after 2024, though, since they have a lot of stuff to do between now and then.) In fact, Dark Sun is extremely likely to come in the multi-book format, so that the psionics rules can be purchased separately on D&D Beyond.

The Thri-Kreen doesn't say much, but the Defiler in the Bestisry is...interesting.

You are right in terms of that is where they ended up, but the lines of evidence thst this was going to be Athaspace are pretty apparent in the text, particularly with the Athaspace graphic thst was publishes. The books go to the printer about two months before the store release, based on UA history and statements by Crawford (particularly around Ravbica). I don't thinknit was "last second," bit sometime between when Beyond was given their graphic and ~July they changed their mind and scratched off some serial numbers. But the Athas content of "Doomspace" is very high, bothn2E and 4E elements ("Doomspace" was an area where the Primordials had won the Dawn War, apparently).

 

[Redwizard007]

The Thri-Kreen doesn't say much, but the Defiler in the Bestisry is...interesting.

For sure. I never got into spelljammer, but I believe the kreen were always a part of that setting. Looking back, I should have loved the swash buckling in space but it never really grabbed me the way Dark Sun, Dragon Lance or Ravenloft did.

The defiler, however, is straight up Dark Sun. No other way to see it.