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.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

Which is, @FitzTheRuke, really watered down.

I mean, you can look at it that way, I guess. Personally, I see them as simply two different ways to mechanically represent what amounts to essentially the same thing in the world's fiction - some people use a type of magic that harms the world. They do it because it offers them power and they ignore the consequences.

That important aspect of the fiction remains intact, and I would personally lean into it. And, I would think that there are NPCs who do it to a whole 'nuther level. In particular Sorcerer-Kings, of course.

 

[Kurotowa]

I was playing around with roughing out character stats using the new UA and looking over options for the Gladiator Fighter. Which got me thinking that the Thri-kreen will almost certainly get a reprint, and wondering what you could do with them in a Revised 5e context. So I present to you, the three sword thri-kreen!

Finesse build Fighter or Ranger Thri-kreen (the natural armor works great with that). Two-weapon Fighting Style and Dual Wielder. Dominant hands have a Rapier and Shield, secondary hands have a Shortsword and Scimitar. Attack sequence is Rapier, Shortsword (to trigger Light's extra attack), Scimitar (to benefit from Nick), Rapier (from Dual Wielder).

It's not a huge optimization or a brand new playstyle. But it's a small optimization, and a lot of style points. And style points matter, especially for a Gladiator. (Yes, I know people are already doing something similar with weapon juggling. I just hate weapon juggling with a burning passion.)

 

[SkidAce]

This is the entirety of how 4e handled Defiling and Preserving:

View attachment 415115
Everyone is a Preserver at all times unless you WANT extra power, and then you can Defile, instead.

Defiling, in 4e, was a straight up boost to your damage instead of a constant baseline of the game's expectations.

In 5e, it looks like it'll be a specific subclass of Sorcerers that Wizards and other arcane spellcasters won't interact with. They'll get bonuses from their subclass, like any character, with the ability to Defile for even more power.

And Preserving will just be another way to be a Druid with no cost to it, and instead it'll be the source of their subclass abilities compared to other druids.

There's literally no reason to believe they'll turn around and say "All -Wizards- and other Arcane Spellcasters Defile at all times with no power gain, but also you can choose to Preserve and it'll make your spells weaker." which is what the structure was in the original setting.

Which is, @FitzTheRuke, really watered down.

These core identifying pieces of Dark Sun are going to be used as general trappings for a couple of specific classes, and the setting will suffer for it. Like a Remake of an 80s movie where the plot is WILDLY DIFFERENT from the source material, the theme is hilariously off from the original intent, but the characters have the same name as the 80s material and the title is unchanged.

Like the 2014 Robocop remake which kept Alex Murphy, but ditched the whole personal question of his remaining humanity and memories in favor of having the cops make it a purely external question of imposed loss of humanity through programming. How the original's designs and over the top gore were meant to be an indictment of 1980s audiences desires for endless bloodbaths and gratuitous violence. Hell, Verhoeven had Murphy walk on Water and act as Christ-like as possible to highlight people's eagerness to pursue and absorb copaganda so long as the 'right' bad guys were being targeted. Instead Padilha tried to write a straight-faced film without satirical elements using the RoboCop character to oppose drones in warfare and policing and copaganda by having the Chief of Police working with the evil faceless megacorp. And where the original had the villain protected by a secret directive that was undermined by someone else saying "You're Fired" to remove his OmniCorp protections in RoboCop's programming, which reinforces the question of Murphy's humanity, in this one RoboCop just decides to override his programming through sheer personal will, proving that humanity is stronger than machine programming!

Is it a good movie? Gonna depend on your personal opinions and perspective. But to me? It's just not RoboCop. I had the same issues with RoboCop 2 and 3 which just bought into the core premise without any examination of the themes or identity of the original and just made movies which praise police and single quasi-divine figures of powerful personal nature.

Hell, RoboCop 2's plot centered on the fact that the only reason Murphy 'worked' rather than immediately committing suicide was his Catholic Upbringing, an invention of this movie to both fulfill Frank Miller's desire to continue to poke at his own religious trauma in his work and serve as a half-assed explanation of how and why they eventually use a death row inmate as the test subject for their new RoboCop design...

Anyway, yeah. I very much feel like they're gonna try to go with the least introspective version of Dark Sun they can. One which misses important themes and identifying characteristics while relying on the trappings to sell the fantasy.

Sorta like this image showing how much they tried to make Robert Burke look like Peter Weller:
View attachment 415118

The grime and detailing are gone. But the trappings are the same. And that'll be enough for some.

I hear you. But consider.

What if as you say, baseline arcane doesnt harm the world, and defiling does, giving more power.

Kinda telling statement that they ruined their world anyway.

 

[Remathilis]

Everyone is a Preserver at all times unless you WANT extra power, and then you can Defile, instead.

I mean, that's somewhat consistent with the original box set. The default wizard was the preserver and the defiler was a wizard with a faster XP track. From a rules perspective, the PHB wizard is a preserver and the defiler is the "cheat to get ahead" class.

I think you would have been right if the default PHB wizard was the defiler and the preserver required X2 (or some additional amount) more xp to gain a levels, but that's not what was happening.

Defiling, in 4e, was a straight up boost to your damage instead of a constant baseline of the game's expectations.

Well, considering D&D stopped using separate XP tracks, there isn't a whole lot of ways to show defiling as attractive while keeping preserving as viable. You could impose penalties on preservers (less spells, weaker magic, penalty to hit/saves) and treat defiling as normal, but that doesn't make the moral choice "do I harm the world to gain an edge?" But makes it "do I choose to suck to not be evil?"

In 5e, it looks like it'll be a specific subclass of Sorcerers that Wizards and other arcane spellcasters won't interact with. They'll get bonuses from their subclass, like any character, with the ability to Defile for even more power.

That we've seen. As I pointed out, I am sure feats will play a role in this, as can specific spells (for example a spell that gets an additional upcast if you choose to defile with it). We're good falling into the "PDK and dragon" trap of assuming we have all the parts rather than just a specific piece of puzzle.

And Preserving will just be another way to be a Druid with no cost to it, and instead it'll be the source of their subclass abilities compared to other druids.

We are seeing what a preserver druid looks like, not the whole of preserving. I pointed out (and you casually dismissed) the idea that what the druid is trying to do is actively reverse the damage rather than minimize (regular casters) or maximize (defilers) the harm. That's basically what Dark Sun was: druid magic attempts to PRESERVE, arcane magic defilers a little or a lot.

There's literally no reason to believe they'll turn around and say "All -Wizards- and other Arcane Spellcasters Defile at all times with no power gain, but also you can choose to Preserve and it'll make your spells weaker." which is what the structure was in the original setting

But it wasn't. It said "do you want to be a normal wizard and preserve, or do you want to be a supercharged wizard with fast xp chart and defile?"

 

[Remathilis]

More I look at the Circle of Preservation Druid, it's overpowered. No concentration always-on temp hit points to your whole party every round is just Twilight Cleric's mistake. Always injuring emanation with no concentration is just a better spirit guardians. This is just too much, at low levels in particular. Reduce the temp hit points, or make it healing, and get rid of the damaging effect later, and the subclass is fine.

Would it be Dark Sun if it wasn't op as hell?

 

[Parmandur]

WFRP 1e?

That was the OG parody. The whole point of Warhammer, Fantasy or 40k, is that it is a campy parody.

 

[Charlaquin]

It's going to be a tad jarring that the most evil beings on the planet apparently draw a line at something.

"I can excuse genocide but I draw the line at slavery!"

It doesn’t have to be a matter of them drawing a line; it might just be that slavery, in the way that we tend to think of it today, isn’t practical in that world. The kind of mass industrialized chattel slavery seen in the pre-civil war US was not what slavery has looked like at pretty much any other place or time in history. Mostly because it’s usually not economically viable, and the US south just happened to have a particular confluence of factors making it so in that particular time and place. Human beings require a lot of resources to keep alive, healthy, and fit enough to do significant physical labor. So, in a setting like Dark Sun, where resources in general and water in particular are exceptionally scarce, and the land is minimally fertile, owning people may be something that is just never worthwhile. For the average landowner, the maintenance cost of an enslaved person is just too great compared to the value that can potentially be extracted from the labor they perform. And for the ultrawealthy like the sorcerer-kings, they have the scale economy to benefit from an enslaved labor force, but they also don’t need it because they gain that value for free from tithes, taxes, etc. They might at most have some personal indentured servants.

 

[Weiley31]

Hell, RoboCop 2's plot centered on the fact that the only reason Murphy 'worked' rather than immediately committing suicide was his Catholic Upbringing, an invention of this movie to both fulfill Frank Miller's desire to continue to poke at his own religious trauma in his work and serve as a half-assed explanation of how and why they eventually use a death row inmate

Hmm, that probably explains why the main antagonist for Murphy in Robocop 2 was literally named Cain.

 

[Parmandur]

So the supposed sticking point holding back Dark Sun returning is how central slavery is to the world and much of the narrative. One solution some have given which I agree with is to center the PCs are being opposed to the practice. In my opinion, there is no way to do this with the Sorcerer-King Warlock. Time will tell.

Fiend pact Warlocks are not necessarily in league woth the Devil, nor Grwat Old One Warlocks with Cthulu, they just have a connection that gives them power. If 5E Dark Sun has a no-takesie-backsie rule (which is explicitly laid out as such in the new PHB and DMG in ramegards to Warlocks and clerics)...a rogue good guy Templar Warlock makes perfect sense as someone leading the charge against the Sorcerer Kings.

 

[Demetrios1453]

Would it be Dark Sun if it wasn't op as hell?

I wonder if they'll still have 5d4 for stats.