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.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I think we are seeing a lot of pitchfork sharpening going on here. We saw with the truly excellent Ravenloft update that people will reject anything that's different, and that it's impossible to not be different, since both the rules and society have changed.

Now, WotC did do a bad job with Spelljammer, but that was a weird one. The original setting was never popular, but over time it had grown into such mythic proportions that WotC felt trapped into pushing something out the door. All the ship combat rules demonstrated was that the D&D ruleset is incapable of supporting enjoyable ship combat (it wasn't fun in the original either). But once you say you are going to release something you are trapped into doing that even if you know it's rubbish.

 

[TheSword]

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.

Lovely to hear from you!

I was and still am a massive fan of the prism Pentad. Reading and listening to them many times over the years. It’s both a great story and it brought Dark Sun alive for me much more than the boxed set, and as I came to the setting with the revised edition I wasn’t affected as maybe some items were (I still went back and got all the older stuff too though!)

Thank you for your contributions to a great setting.

 

[Chaltab]

Now, WotC did do a bad job with Spelljammer, but that was a weird one. The original setting was never popular, but over time it had grown into such mythic proportions that WotC felt trapped into pushing something out the door. All the ship combat rules demonstrated was that the D&D ruleset is incapable of supporting enjoyable ship combat (it wasn't fun in the original either). But once you say you are going to release something you are trapped into doing that even if you know it's rubbish.

I feel like you're letting them off the hook way too easily. If the classic ship combat isn't fun then they should have looked to a game with well-liked ship combat for inspiration rather than just gutting the system. Light of Xaryxis could easily have been a seperate product and it might have been more fleshed out for it.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I feel like you're letting them off the hook way too easily. If the classic ship combat isn't fun then they should have looked to a game with well-liked ship combat for inspiration rather than just gutting the system.

well liked? I can’t think of anything that fits that description, and the only ones I’ve played that are enjoyable are FASA Star Trek and a couple of Star Wars based games, none of which are remotely transferable to D&D sailing ships in space. (And are several orders of magnitude more complicated than D&D).

Much as I like Traveller, it’s space combat is even less fun than Spelljammer.

Sometimes a cool concept simply cannot be turned into a fun party based game.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I think that's pretty unlikely. It's more likely in my opinion that a half-arsed Dark Sun book will just result in players laying the blame on, well, a lame modern adaptation being lame, and figuring out that the "legendary" Dark Sun stuff is just all in the older editions. Worst case scenario is a renewed interest in older material basically, rather than people thinking the whole setting was always lame because the latest product is lame.

I think that's optimistic, but if they do half-arse it, I hope you're right.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

I guess the true goals aren't really to sell more sourcebooks but the update is to recover brand-power and then these subfranchises would be used to sell other kind of products, for example LEGO: Spelljammer.

The update of old settings are wellcome but not all players liked to buy together three books together because the module should be only for the DM.

If I start a new campaing in Dark Sun I will not respect the "canon timeline" of the novels but maybe I miss too much the main characters and then these can appear like important nPCs or "guest artists"

Now I imagine something like "rolling strongholds". Do you remember the movie "Mortal Engines" or the videogame "Survival Machine", or "Sand"? These are like cruisers with wheels (and some robotic legs). Their fuel is a elemental-ooze like coal what can grow in desert areas without water, and it is not affected by defiling magic. This "coal-ooze" can grow and be farmed even in the Deathlands. The key is to use remote-controll constructs to gather this coal. Within these "rolling strongholds" there are rooms for orchards and greenhouses. How could survive the cleasing wars? They could travel to a pocket-universe or demiplane for a limited time. Then when they were detected by the champions of Rajaat and these traveled toward them then it was too late because they had disappeared. Do you know the videogame "the last oasis"?


And I miss a good "rogue gallery". For example I hate Tectuktitlay and I want him killed as soon as possible, I am sick his massive human sacrifices in industrial scale, but the queen-sorcerer Lalali-Puy, self-proclaimed the Oba, worries her domain to be enoughly green. She pretends to be benevolent. Could she follow Oronis' steps. She could but her actions to controll the spirits may be cruel.

Or Rajaat tries to travel the past to avoid be betrayed by his champions but this caused an unexpected secondary effect: the time-travel caused a rift in the space-time continium allowing the arrivals of invaders from the Vodoni empire (a faction from Spelljammer). The cleasing wars couldn't begin like before and even Rajaat had to choose new champions to fight against the invaders. The vodoni invasion failed because the rift also allowed the arrival of other groups who helped the defenders.