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.

 

[Zardnaar]

I'm not saying they didn't call out the genocides. I'm saying that when your choice is "several outrightly genocidal warlord tyrants who have zero compunctions about slaughtering thousands of innocents on the regular" or "outright extermination of essentially all life", the former becomes the morally superior option.

We should not intentionally construct fantastical narratives where "outrightly genocidal warlord tyrant who has zero compunctions about slaughtering thousands of innocents on the regular" is the morally superior option.

To be clear I'm not a fan of the Darksun metaplot or the later stuff eg revised set.

It wasn't explicit that the SKs were morally superior. They were dupes.

Its a bit more nuanced a couple at least had paths to redemption. 2 kinda made it.

I don't like what the novels did to the setting but by D&D nicely standards theyre decent.
The Pavek ones by Lynn Abbey are legit some of the best D&D novels.

4E gets a dlbad rap for bad adventures the DS ones are terrible lol. Outside dungeon magazines goid adventures are few and far between 86-94. Dragonlabce ones are notoriously bad so are Spelljammer.

And all the setting had metaplot heavy shaking events that often destroyed the appeal of the original boxed sets.

 

[humble minion]

That's fair. My hope is that the fight with Borys would be so taxing the party was on their last legs and finding that Rajaat had withered is a welcome anti-climax. They've done the hard part, finishing off the monster that began the cleansing wars is the victory lap. But it's definitely something you'd have to thread the needle with.

Yep. Your resolution is actually really nicely poetic in a lot of ways and I do like it. The devil would be in the buildup though. If the PCs are fighting Borys - why are they doing it? How much do they know about Rajaat at this time? Have they decided to fight Borys on the assumption that Rajaat can't be worse, or have they done it in the full knowledge that even if they win, they'll quickly have to finght Rajaat immediately after (that latter course of action would demonstrate ... no shortage of self-confidence, if nothing else!)

From vague memory, in the novels the main characters got duped by Rajaat's servants (the shadow giants and Rajaat's loyalists sorcerer-kings Sasha and Wyan) into proceeding down the path of freeing Rajaat, but by the time they fought Borys they knew the truth. I don't really remember why they ended up doing it (I suspect it was a combination of 'they're all impulsive meatheads on both sides' and 'it was scripted to happen' because Cerulean Storm is unfortunately not a very well-written book and character motivations went out the window a bit) - but PCs can't be relied on to make that same decision if they're in the full knowledge of the facts. And if they're not, then they probably have very little reason to kill helpless Rajaat at all once Borys is dead.

Exactly. It's a choice between "the worst, most genocidal dictators in human history collectively" or "Aliens will literally exterminate all life on the Earth, yes, even deep-ocean life."

When people like Stalin are the better option, when pragmatism says "well, we can let the genocide slide this time", it weakens the message that these people are absolute monsters.

If I'm retconning it all for a modern-day reinvention of the Prism Pentad in adventure form, then I'm going to probably rule that when Borys and the sorcerer-kings overthrew Rajaat and discovered that they couldn't kill him, they got the reason wrong. They assumed because they were the most powerful remaining creatures in the world and they couldn't kill him, the conclusion was that he couldn't be killed. They were wrong. He couldn't be killed by them. The sorcerer-kings are, after all, Rajaat's creations. He made them, his magic infuses them, their power is his. They were able to turn against him, but they couldn't unmake the power that created them. So they locked him up, and established themselves as tyrants, and spent centuries reinforcing the bars of his prison with the souls of innocents and claiming justification for their deeds.

You cannot defeat tyranny with tyranny; you cannot defeat Rajaat with his own power. Rajaat can be defeated (it wouldn't be EASY of course) by other powers than his - preserving magic, druidic or elemental magic, etc. The sorcerer-kings in their arrogance never considered this, and if Borys ever contemplated the possibility in his centuries of brooding and research above Rajaat's prison-coffin, then the little bit of Rajaat that lurked behind his eyes would subtly turn his thoughts aside.

The immortal genocidal dictators cling to power in order to contain Rajaat, but in reality all their wards and protections around his prison only serve to keep out those who could actually finish the job. And Rajaat's power inside them will not let them realise this. The people on top change, but the system remains the same. You can't defeat evil with more evil. You can't overthrow evil by collaborating it, and using its weapons. You need others, outside the ossified brutal established power structures, to truly make change that lasts.

Thematically, this works better for me. You need to offer the PCs a third choice, other than siding with Rajaat or siding with the sorcerer-kings. The novel canon was a mess (despite Lynn Abbey's valiant attempts to clean it up later), and the canonical solution was a deus ex machina that just wouldn't work in game.

 

[overgeeked]

The narrative landed on a conceptual level. I’m suggesting making the mechanics reflect the narrative so as to make it land on a visceral level. Make players feel it as well as read about it.

Sure, but that’s antithetical to WotC’s design of 5E. Choosing to be weaker isn’t a thing they’d design. Preserving magic as baseline with defiling magic getting a bonus is a more viable design. You get the exact same visceral feel.

 

[Zardnaar]

Yep. Your resolution is actually really nicely poetic in a lot of ways and I do like it. The devil would be in the buildup though. If the PCs are fighting Borys - why are they doing it? How much do they know about Rajaat at this time? Have they decided to fight Borys on the assumption that Rajaat can't be worse, or have they done it in the full knowledge that even if they win, they'll quickly have to finght Rajaat immediately after (that latter course of action would demonstrate ... no shortage of self-confidence, if nothing else!)

From vague memory, in the novels the main characters got duped by Rajaat's servants (the shadow giants and Rajaat's loyalists sorcerer-kings Sasha and Wyan) into proceeding down the path of freeing Rajaat, but by the time they fought Borys they knew the truth. I don't really remember why they ended up doing it (I suspect it was a combination of 'they're all impulsive meatheads on both sides' and 'it was scripted to happen' because Cerulean Storm is unfortunately not a very well-written book and character motivations went out the window a bit) - but PCs can't be relied on to make that same decision if they're in the full knowledge of the facts. And if they're not, then they probably have very little reason to kill helpless Rajaat at all once Borys is dead.


If I'm retconning it all for a modern-day reinvention of the Prism Pentad in adventure form, then I'm going to probably rule that when Borys and the sorcerer-kings overthrew Rajaat and discovered that they couldn't kill him, they got the reason wrong. They assumed because they were the most powerful remaining creatures in the world and they couldn't kill him, the conclusion was that he couldn't be killed. They were wrong. He couldn't be killed by them. The sorcerer-kings are, after all, Rajaat's creations. He made him, his magic infuses them, their power is his. They were able to turn against him, but they couldn't unmake the power that created them. So they locked him up, and established themselves as tyrants, and spent centuries reinforcing the bars of his prison with the souls of innocents and claiming justification for their deeds.

You cannot defeat tyranny with tyranny; you cannot defeat Rajaat with his own power. Rajaat can be defeated (it would't be EASY of course) by other powers than his - preserving magic, druidic or elemental magic, etc. The sorcerer-kings in their arrogance never considered this, and if Borys ever contemplated the possibility in his centuries of brooding and research above Rajaat's prison-coffin, then the little bit of Rajaat that lurked behind his eyes would subtly turn his thoughts aside.

The immortal genocidal dictators cling to power in order to contain Rajaat, but in reality all their wards and protections around his prison only serve to keep out those who could actually finish the job. And Rajaat's power inside them will not let them realise this. The people on top change, but the system remains the same. You can't defeat evil with more evil. You can't overthrow evil by collaborating it, and using its weapons. You need others, outside the ossified brutal established power structures, to truly make change that lasts.

Thematically, this works better for me. You need to offer the PCs a third choice, other than siding with Rajaat or siding with the sorcerer-kings. The novel canon was a mess (despite Lynn Abbey's valiant attempts to clean it up later), and the canonical solution just wouldn't work in game.

Go back to the original boxed set. No genocide, no Rahaat not retcon required.

Those who like the metaplot can use it. Those who don't no big deal. No ham fisted retcons or rewrites required.

Big thene of original DS. Ancient past was mysterious.

 

[overgeeked]

The downside to being a defiler was … having to be a defiler. But doing the maths for how much plant life you annihilated every time you cast a spell was a pain, and the responsibility for enforcing the in-world logical consequences for defiling fell to the individual DM with obviously variable results.

What math? There was a chart by level and terrain type.

 

[Zardnaar]

What math? There was a chart by level and terrain type.

It was a pain defiling on already defiled terrain.
It expanded the original defined circle.

There's a few restore the land type spells at levels PCs might actually reach.

 

[overgeeked]

Pre-Cerulean Storm, there was a nice balance-of-terror/mutually-assured-destruciton dynamic between the sorcerer-kings that I actually appreciate.

All of them watched Borys become a dragon, all of them watched him run wild with agonised murderous insanity for a hundred years in the process. Nobody wants to go through that - Kalak's aborted ritual and Nibenay's arcane researches are all about speeding the transformation through mass human sacrifice, or trying to find away of remaining sane and in control during the metamorphosis. At the same time, nobody wants anyone else to become a dragon, because if they cause as much damage as Borys did, then it's quite possible it tips Athas across the line from 'awful and inhospitable harshness' to 'completely dead planet of sterile ruck and dust'. When Dregoth tried, all the other Tyr Valley sorcerer-kings joined together to kill him. And everyone reluctantly agrees that a dragon is needed because it's the only way to keep Rajaat imprisoned - Borys is NECESSARY, so what happens if another dragon arises and frenzies, and Borys is hurt or killed in trying to put it down?

They're all basically staring at each other with fingers on the big red 'dragon' button. None of them can renounce it for fear of the others. If anyone presses, there's small chance that they win big and a large chance they die, but guaranteed all of Athas loses. The old modules tend to write the sorcerer-kings as cacklingly eeeevil Snidely Whiplashes, but I think this dynamic works better. It allows them to be, in their own minds, just a bunch of clear-eyed pragmatists Making Hard Choices (TM), a bunch of ancient immortal semi-draconic Kissingers who self-justify their fear and ambition and casual contempt for the value of life by with the claim that they are the only ones smart enough truly see and understand the Big Picture (TM).

I always thought it would be cool to do proper domain-level play with the players being the sorcerer-kings. Something like D&D would not work, though. Definitely a lighter system that’s flexible enough to handle high-level weirdness and centuries of preparations. Maybe something like Dune.

 

[Charlaquin]

Sure, but that’s antithetical to WotC’s design of 5E. Choosing to be weaker isn’t a thing they’d design. Preserving magic as baseline with defiling magic getting a bonus is a more viable design.

Like I said, I recognize there’s no world in which WotC would take the approach I’m describing.

You get the exact same visceral feel.

This is very much not true. Anchoring is a very real, very impactful psychological effect. For an easy example of it in action, consider the incredibly unpopular exhaustion penalty in the World of Warcraft open beta and the incredibly popular well-rested bonus in the final release. They were exactly the same mechanic. But when you anchor the player’s baseline expectations as the lower of the two stat sets and increase from there, it feels like getting rewarded, whereas if you anchor their baseline expectations as the higher set and decrease from there, it feels like being punished. Likewise, refraining from the bonus to defiling feels easier and less punitive than choosing to hold back from your baseline to preserve, even if the actual numerical difference is identical.

Now, as you observe, conventional wisdom suggests that the former would be the “better” design, because more players would like that feel more. But, for what I would want out of Dark Sun, it would be the worse choice. Because I want preserving to feel bad to do.

 

[overgeeked]

Like I said, I recognize there’s no world in which WotC would take the approach I’m describing.

This is very much not true. Anchoring is a very real, very impactful psychological effect. For an easy example of it in action, consider the incredibly unpopular exhaustion penalty in the World of Warcraft open beta and the incredibly popular well-rested bonus in the final release. They were exactly the same mechanic. But when you anchor the player’s baseline expectations as the lower of the two stat sets and increase from there, it feels like getting rewarded, whereas if you anchor their baseline expectations as the higher set and decrease from there, it feels like being punished. Likewise, refraining from the bonus to defiling feels easier and less punitive than choosing to hold back from your baseline to preserve, even if the actual numerical difference is identical.

Now, as you observe, conventional wisdom suggests that the former would be the “better” design, because more players would like that feel more. But, for what I would want out of Dark Sun, it would be the worse choice. Because I want preserving to feel bad to do.

That example proves my point.

The beta rest mechanic felt like a punishment, which it was, so players hated it.

The release rest mechanic felt like a bonus, which is was, so players loved it.

Now imagine you had the option to not get that bonus.

To most gamers that would feel like a stupid, punishing choice. Of course they'll choose the bonus, they'd be dumb not to. So it will feel bad, wrong, and stupid to opt out of the bonus. Not choosing the bonus feels like a punishment, which it is.

Same end result, the player feels bad for preserving only the mechanic is framed as a bonus.

Not getting the carrot feels like a stick as long as you know the carrot is right there.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

If the setting is too linked to the big bad guys then it is a wrong design because it is too linked to the metaplot, like in Dragonlance.

If the PCs can't kill the sorcerer-kings because this has to happen according the metaplot and the novels then we haven't enough creative freedom. Here the metaplot isn't a source of inspiration but like a straitjacket.

I can accept genocide and mass human sacrifices happened in the past but I don't like the idea of lots of sentient creatures being sacrificed because a sorcerer-king is sick. (yes, I talk about Tectuktitlay, lord of Draj). And the sorcerer-kings should worry not only for the food and water but the possible demographic crisis if population doesn't enjoy a minimal welfare/level of confort. The population needs faith and hope in a better future, at least in the afterlife, and fear to be punished in an infernal plane.

I can understand the metaplot could be frozen if fandom may dislike the possible changes, but I dislike the idea we are losing some secrets that could be told later.

I suspect WotC a lot of crunch (metalic weapons, spells and magic items) being banned in DS setting because they are by metal, arcane or divine magic.

* Other point is a possible spin-off. Acording the Orrery of Nibenay (from "Marauders of Nibenay") the Athaspace has got several celestial bodies. This could explain the reason we could add or "recover" other PC species.

Maybe an Athasian gnome is a hej-kin whose reincarnation spell didn't work the way was expected and then the community chose to send him to infitralte in the surface pretending to be a dwarf. Really it was a recesive mutation because the Athasian gnomes were the ancestors of the hej-kin.