Dungeons & Dragons Releases New Unearthed Arcana Subclasses, Strongly Hinting at Dark Sun

Wizards of the Coast has released four new D&D subclasses for playtesting, all of which have heavy thematic ties to the post-apocalyptic Dark Sun setting. The four subclasses, released as "Apocalyptic Subclasses," include the Circle of Preservation Druid, the Gladiator Fighter, the Defiled Sorcerer, and the Sorcerer-King Patron Warlock. Although not stated outright, the Gladiator and Sorcerer-King Patron are explicit nods to the Dark Sun setting, set in a ruined world ruled by Sorcerer-Kings where gladiatorial fights were common.

The Circle of Preservation Druid creates areas of preserved land that grants buffs to those who stand upon it. The Gladiator adds secondary Weapon Mastery properties to their attacks, with bonus abilities. Notably, the Gladiator uses Charisma as its secondary stat. The Defiled Sorcerer can expend its hit dice to amp up damage to its attacks and can also steal the life of its targets to deal additional damage. The Sorcerer-King Patron gains a number of abilities tying into tyranny and oppression, with the ability to cast Command as a Bonus Action without expending a spell slot, causing targets to gain the Frightened Condition, and forcing those who attack them to re-roll successful attacks.

The survey for the subclasses goes live on August 28th.

 

[JLowder]

I do have to wonder: this concept of fiction and gaming as value-adds to one another for Dark Sun specifically, was that part of the original concept or was it something that changed along the way?

The plan from the start with Dark Sun was for the RPG and fiction content to be related. Mary Kirchoff, then head of the Book Department, was part of the initial Dark Sun team along with Brom, Tim, and Troy, and she was instrumental to that coordinated vision. Mary sometimes gets left out or downplayed in the discussions about the origins of Dark Sun, but the project would not have been possible in the form it took without her. Books was no longer a sub-group of Games by the time Dark Sun got rolling. Books was a separate and hugely profitable division in its own right, and it was assumed with Dark Sun that the fiction would outsell the game material (for a fraction of the cost of creation and production, too), which it did with the Prism Pentad, certainly. Ben Riggs has posted numbers somewhere for the initial sales.

As for the coordination between products, Tim Brown and Troy Denning were part of the initial project vision team, and Troy worked as a designer/author on both the boxed set and the Prism Pentad novels, with Tim on the boxed set, as well. The coordination was built in, especially with Troy--though, in retrospect, it would have been better if we had more actively discussed how the initial books and the game content were going to interact. We might have avoided undermining the initial boxed set with the fiction that way.

As the design team expanded on the Games side, there was a lot less coordination between departments than might have been useful and less direct coordination between Books and Games. The crazy schedules we were working under were mainly to blame, at least initially. There just wasn't enough time in the day to go over everything. By late 1992, Mary had also left her position in Books, I had moved to satellite employee status, and the entire approach to interaction between the two departments (and the products) had changed with the new head of Books, with far fewer efforts to coordinate.

 

[Zardnaar]

Explains a lot.

Is it true towards the end there was no co-ordination or little quality control and they were using freelancers. Its how we got surfing druids on Athas. Cowabunga dude!!!

 

[JLowder]

Explains a lot.

Is it true towards the end there was no co-ordination or little quality control and they were using freelancers. Its how we got surfing druids on Athas. Cowabunga dude!!!

The head of Books after late 92 was not terribly interested in coordinating with Games, and at least some of the authors he brought in for the fiction were not gamers at all (and were not expected to become at least reasonably conversant in the games, as had been the norm before that with lines like the Realms and Ravenloft). Coordination for those fiction writers would have been difficult.

On the Games side, there were freelancers involved in Dark Sun projects fairly early (Allen Varney did Veiled Alliance in 1992), but later in the 90s more of the products were being done by freelancers, including boxed sets. That's kind of standard as game lines get longer. Staff departures (with the accompanying institutional/setting knowledge drain) were an issue. Most importantly, the growth in the number of game worlds/settings being created and supported, as management got more and more desperate for a huge hit after 1994 or 95 to save them from their increasingly dire financial problems, gobbled up some of the designers who had once been key internal Dark Sun team members. Rich Baker moved on to Birthright, for example. So looking to freelancers or junior designers inside the company became more likely.

 

[overgeeked]

Thread died down a little, so I guess I'll say some stuff I've been thinking about.

At some point early in the thread someone said something that I thought was really true: the release of new Dark Sun stuff can't actually take anything away from the old stuff, when you really think about it.
Some people are concerned because they don't see a good track record with how WotC/Hasbro has been handling older settings in the past, and as fans they naturally don't want to see stuff they like "ruined". This fear is all the more justified by the fact that Dark Sun is more explicitly in the realm of Dark Fantasy and the trend so far has been for defanging and smoothing the edge off older products, but Dark Sun shines the most thanks to its sharp edges. I share a lot of those concerns too because I'm a fan of the original Dark Sun setting, I'm a fan of darker shades of fantasy, and I think something weird must have happened with TTRPG circles for becoming so sensitive about so many random recurring topics in fiction, all while in movie and video games you see stuff like The Witcher (a setting where racism, sexism and oppression are totally systemic in society and the ambiguously moral "heroes" of the setting can't realistically do anything about it. Arguably less so than in Dark Sun!) and Games of Thrones (less racism, more rape and incest to make up for it) being highly popular with mainstream audiences.

But regardless of that, here's the thing: if Dark Sun for 5e comes out and it's everything people have been dreading for, it's everything bad people thought it would be and maybe something worse...
It'd be just a newer release that happens to be really lame. Nothing more.

The older stuff that made the setting iconic and popular enough to remain a talking point for years and years after having no official release will remain untouched in the older editions they're from. Older fans will shun the new material while newcomers might buy it only to find a mediocre product, then either forget about it or look deeper into the IP and run back into the cool stuff from the original editions. There are several really good summaries for the Dark Sun setting that are on Youtube and have hundreds of thousands of views, it's not like the stuff is hard to find. None of that stuff is going away, and if anything it might get a boost.

If Dark Sun for 5e comes out and it's absolutely terrible it doesn't matter, it's just gonna be memory holed within a couple years while the iconic stuff remains what will be thought of as "Dark Sun".
If, on the other hand, Dark Sun for 5e comes out and it's as good as it can realistically be then we get something that probably still won't compare with the breakthrough that was the original, but like with 4e it might offer new ideas and new concepts to work with.

My concern is that WotC will spoil the setting for a new generation of players. They can’t take away the old books and lore, but they can poison the well. Release such a lackluster or mediocre product that current 5E players just ignore it. But, as long as Dark Sun is opened to the DM’s Guild, I’ll be happy.

 

[overgeeked]

Yes, I worked in the Book Department from 1988 to 1994 and was at one time series editor for both the Ravenloft and Realms fiction lines. I was also the go-to for RPG–fiction crossover projects, which was one reason why I got recruited to the Dark Sun team early on, immediately after Mary Kirchoff, Tim Brown, Troy Denning, and Brom had fleshed out the initial goals and creative vision. I was the editor for the first five Dark Sun novels, the Prism Pentad, and might have continued as primary Dark Sun fiction editor had the Book Department not moved away from designating series editors in late 1992/1993.

Dark Sun as a whole was a deliberate attempt to present game material, fiction, art, and graphic design with a coherent creative vision from the release of the first product. The idea was the fiction and games would be complementary, but not compulsary. To link them too tightly would have severely limited the potential fiction sales, which were assumed (correctly) from the start to have a much higher ceiling than the RPG sales. You could read the fiction without playing the game. You could play the game without reading the fiction. If you did both, the product lines had creative and aesthetic through-lines, but they stood alone just fine. The goal was not to force customers to buy everything.

Mistakes were still made--the Dark Sun novels and the metaplot probably should not have undermined the initial boxed set, for example. Not a shock, as the company and the individuals working on the various lines (even the products within the lines) were still learning how to coordinate these kinds of things. But the goal, at least for the creative teams putting the Dark Sun products together, was not to manipulate the readers and players. The continuity was more a reward for the superfans than a goad for those who were buying only the games or only the fiction.

Metaplot is neither good nor bad inherently. It all depends on how (and why, which shapes the "how") it's implemented.

In larger terms, the success of the fiction lines at TSR, with the novels selling to many more people than were buying the world-focused game material, meant the company had an interest in aligning the game products with the fiction. If someone read a Ravenloft novel and wanted to try out the RPG, it made sense to have the game material welcome them with the same Strahd they read about in Vampire of the Mists or to provide Realms players with the stats for the characters from the fiction so they could meet (or fight) Elminster or Drizzt, which explains Realms supplements such as Hall of Heroes. This wasn't always easy to pull off, and there were many missteps, but that was the idea. It's a way to use the success of the fiction to potentially grow the audience for the game and make the game more friendly for the newly RPG curious poking their heads into the game store for the first time after reading the novels.

A significant number of fans for any IP want tight continuity, and this was a growing and common sentiment in the 1980s and 1990s, especially in the US TTRPG market. They want all releases across all media to tie together and to be consistent. That's still the case for some fans. You see it throughout the internet in wikis and all kinds of other manifestations of continuity-themed lore bibles.

While some fans still want tight continuity, the overall lack of tight IP continuity being implemented by WotC now makes sense in the current market. The RPG as a game concept (you tell your own story around the table, even playing in shared worlds) is more widely understood and media audiences are more sophisticated and accepting of variations between media. It was a different market in 1990. Some design giants, such as Greg Stafford, started in the earliest years of RPGs from the notion that "your Glorantha will vary" for every individual group or player, but he was way ahead of the market as a whole. Not a shock with Greg.

Thank you for the response and the work on Dark Sun. It’s one of my favorite settings TSR ever did.

 

[overgeeked]

Yes, I worked in the Book Department from 1988 to 1994 and was at one time series editor for both the Ravenloft and Realms fiction lines. I was also the go-to for RPG–fiction crossover projects, which was one reason why I got recruited to the Dark Sun team early on, immediately after Mary Kirchoff, Tim Brown, Troy Denning, and Brom had fleshed out the initial goals and creative vision. I was the editor for the first five Dark Sun novels, the Prism Pentad, and might have continued as primary Dark Sun fiction editor had the Book Department not moved away from designating series editors in late 1992/1993.

This is maybe too long ago or too inside baseball, but I do have a question about the setting, if you don't mind.

I'm curious if the events of the Verdant Passage were ever mapped to the in-world calendar. Like the killing of Kalak happened on this specific day, the journey to the halfling forest started on this day and took so many days, etc.

I don't know why but it's always been fun to look at maps and retrace the characters' travels.

 

[Zardnaar]

The head of Books after late 92 was not terribly interested in coordinating with Games, and at least some of the authors he brought in for the fiction were not gamers at all (and were not expected to become at least reasonably conversant in the games, as had been the norm before that with lines like the Realms and Ravenloft). Coordination for those fiction writers would have been difficult.

On the Games side, there were freelancers involved in Dark Sun projects fairly early (Allen Varney did Veiled Alliance in 1992), but later in the 90s more of the products were being done by freelancers, including boxed sets. That's kind of standard as game lines get longer. Staff departures (with the accompanying institutional/setting knowledge drain) were an issue. Most importantly, the growth in the number of game worlds/settings being created and supported, as management got more and more desperate for a huge hit after 1994 or 95 to save them from their increasingly dire financial problems, gobbled up some of the designers who had once been key internal Dark Sun team members. Rich Baker moved on to Birthright, for example. So looking to freelancers or junior designers inside the company became more likely.

Cheers. I read an interview once with a contributervto Mindlordsvof the Last Sea.

Its been a while though.

 

[JLowder]

This is maybe too long ago or too inside baseball, but I do have a question about the setting, if you don't mind.

I'm curious if the events of the Verdant Passage were ever mapped to the in-world calendar. Like the killing of Kalak happened on this specific day, the journey to the halfling forest started on this day and took so many days, etc.

I don't know why but it's always been fun to look at maps and retrace the characters' travels.

I don't recall working from a calendar or having to create one in editing because of obvious inconsistencies. If those detailed notes existed, Troy would have been the one to put them together for his own use. I had already edited his novels Waterdeep, Dragonwall, and Parched Sea, and with the first two we'd spent a lot of time discussing the "travel math." So he and I had worked together enough by the time we started on the Prism Pentad that I trusted him to do the research up front. He was the reference person for the world as it was being developed for the boxed set and had become very good about hammering out those time and distance details for his fiction during the writing process without my assistance.

 

[Staffan]

This is maybe too long ago or too inside baseball, but I do have a question about the setting, if you don't mind.

I'm curious if the events of the Verdant Passage were ever mapped to the in-world calendar. Like the killing of Kalak happened on this specific day, the journey to the halfling forest started on this day and took so many days, etc.

I don't know why but it's always been fun to look at maps and retrace the characters' travels.

I'm not aware of it being tied to specific days, but the various novels and adventures are set in different specific years with a timeline given in Beyond the Prism Pentad.

 

[Dire Bare]

The plan from the start with Dark Sun was for the RPG and fiction content to be related. Mary Kirchoff, then head of the Book Department, was part of the initial Dark Sun team along with Brom, Tim, and Troy, and she was instrumental to that coordinated vision. Mary sometimes gets left out or downplayed in the discussions about the origins of Dark Sun, but the project would not have been possible in the form it took without her. Books was no longer a sub-group of Games by the time Dark Sun got rolling. Books was a separate and hugely profitable division in its own right, and it was assumed with Dark Sun that the fiction would outsell the game material (for a fraction of the cost of creation and production, too), which it did with the Prism Pentad, certainly. Ben Riggs has posted numbers somewhere for the initial sales.

As for the coordination between products, Tim Brown and Troy Denning were part of the initial project vision team, and Troy worked as a designer/author on both the boxed set and the Prism Pentad novels, with Tim on the boxed set, as well. The coordination was built in, especially with Troy--though, in retrospect, it would have been better if we had more actively discussed how the initial books and the game content were going to interact. We might have avoided undermining the initial boxed set with the fiction that way.

As the design team expanded on the Games side, there was a lot less coordination between departments than might have been useful and less direct coordination between Books and Games. The crazy schedules we were working under were mainly to blame, at least initially. There just wasn't enough time in the day to go over everything. By late 1992, Mary had also left her position in Books, I had moved to satellite employee status, and the entire approach to interaction between the two departments (and the products) had changed with the new head of Books, with far fewer efforts to coordinate.

It's interesting to hear about the ebb and flow of managerial styles from the TSR days, and I can't help but compare them to the ebb and flow at WotC today, as they return to a franchise model for D&D. It seems the wheel turns and what once was will be again . . . both good and bad!

I do feel that despite the restrictions and difficulties you all labored under back in the day, you managed to put out some AMAZING gaming content and worldbuilding! Same with WotC today, the current team does wonders despite being hampered by the c-suite . . .