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.

 

[Flying Toaster]

Let me compare this to classic Ravenloft. Classic 2e Ravenloft clearly stacks the deck against good. Good magic and abilities are hampered, evil powers are rewarded. On paper, you would be an idiot to try to be a good person in Ravenloft, except for one thing: Powers Checks. Doing evil has a chance to corrupt you. Each corruption brings you a small boon but a bigger penalty and the ultimate endpoint for this is your character transformed into a monster and taken out of your hands. Thus, even if evil is more powerful than good, you play good if you don't want to end up an NPC dark lord.

Slightly off topic, but I can almost see some players in classic Ravenloft deciding to do a deliberate heel turn, for any number of reasons. Maybe their character knows the power of the “Dark Side” and craves it. Maybe they figure that if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Is it better to burn out than fade away? A player who is getting bored with the campaign might want to wind it up once and for all, in spectacular fashion. Conversely, a player who loved the campaign might consider having their character turned into an NPC villain to be a crowning achievement akin to a 100% platinum trophy:

“Dude... in the Ravenloft campaign, my necromancer got turned into a “Dark Lord” for being too edgy! It was metal.”

The general idea of using the rules to enforce any particular play style or approach to morality has become controversial because it obviously flies in the face of player agency. Some OSR fans scorn modern play styles, but ironically they actually share a focus on player agency which was probably not present at many tables back in the day, when DM power was king. EGG used the AD&D class and race rules to enforce his ideal fantasy archetypes, and the alignment system to keep player characters (and arguably the players themselves) in line. If people think alignment is too restrictive, 1E Oriental Adventures had an honor mechanic loosely based on the bushido warrior code and East Asian social class systems. Your honor score went up and down in accordance with your actions, and if it fell to zero the character was permanently removed from play. Note that honor was distinct from alignment, so you could play an evil character while maintaining a decent honor score.

This sort of thing is unfashionable today, and maybe for good reason. I do not expect the Coastal Wizards to put behavior mechanics in 5E Dark Sun, but it would be interesting if they did.

 

[pukunui]

Yeah the planet is big enough for there to be more dragons but Rajaat and his surviving champions are all located one teeny tiny corner of that planet.

 

[SableWyvern]

And to add another little wrinkle to the lore, in Verdant Passage we have Nok, the wise old halfling questgiver who sets up the main characters to kill Kalak, saying ‘there are many dragons in the world. Kalak of Tyr is not yet one of them’.

So given how small the Tyr region is in the context of Athas the planet, did Rajaat have other champions on other continents, running around exterminating, I dunno, kappas and wayangs? Or is this just TSR making up the lore on the fly again, wildly contradicting themselves, and the novel people not working in conjunction with the game people?

The original boxed set is quite vague an open-ended, leaving lots of space for GMs to make the setting their own.

Many of the basic details that are presented in the OBS are then contradicted by later material that locks things down. You can put this down to an unreliable narrator, but I think it's more a matter of people not really caring about those broad strokes if it got in the way of the vision that were putting down on paper as "canon".

The comments from Nok are perfectly in keeping with the information in OBS, but not some of the later material. Of course, Nok could also be an unreliable narrator.

Personally, there are a lot of choices made that I don't like, which is why I just stick with OBS + Ivory Triangle, and then do what I want from there. [One of the things I really dislike are the genocidal champions -- mostly because they seem to exist to answer the question, "Why are there no orcs and hobgoblins and kobolds and so forth?" and I don't think the question makes sense in the first place. Might as well ask why there are no klingons, jawas or Numenoreans. The answer, as far as I'm concerned, is because this is Dark Sun, not Star Trek, Star Wars, Middle Earth or the Forgotten Realms. That's just my little pet peeve though.]

 

[Echohawk]

Yeah the planet is big enough for there to be more dragons but Rajaat and his surviving champions are all located one teeny tiny corner of that planet.

What's that I hear? An extremely flimsy excuse to post a picture of the rare 2e Dark Sun cloth map next to the even rarer 4e Dark Sun cloth map?

 

[Flying Toaster]

Oh god yes. The first couple of years of Dark Sun releases were like the absolute platonic ideal of How Not To Build A Gameline. You have the novels overturning and obsoleting the entire setting almost immediately after it came out, and adventure modules where the PCs get to meekly follow in the footsteps of the awesome novel NPCs and do the boring sidequests that they couldn't be bothered with.

I have no idea what they were thinking, and I continually dredge every word that Ben Riggs etc write about TSR-era D&D in the hope of getting some scraps of insight into the thought processes involved in the design decisions there, but no luck so far. My best guess is that the big novel metaplot was an attempt to repeat the lightning-in-a-bottle runaway popularity of the Dragonlance Chronicles, with the setting updated for a more 90s set of mores and concerns - less capital-G&E Good and Evil, more environmentalism, shades of grey, and polyamory. I mean, Tanis and co left THEIR campaign setting turned upside down after the novels were finished too, but people still loved them. I suspect that TSR were consciously aiming to make Sadira, Rikus etc just as iconic as Raistlin and the like had been in the previous decade. You even had - spoiler alert! - Agis getting betrayed and murdered by his long-time friend/ambiguous partner Tithian mid-series, in a near mirroring of the death of Sturm Brightblade.

Of course, the Dragonlance game modules at least let you PLAY as Tanis, Raistlin, Sturm etc and save the world personally, rather than following them around and cleaning out their chamberpots, so the parallel admittedly isn't perfect...

Sometimes I think 90’s TSR was a novels-and-CRPGs company with a legacy sideline in TTRPGs, somewhat like the way the Marvel and DC comics lines are now arguably just IP mines providing grist for the cinematic universe mills. Or the way car companies used to make a few “halo cars” like muscle cars or hot hatchbacks to please the enthusiasts, while the real business was making profitable “appliances” for the masses who just needed a daily driver.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

The original boxed set is quite vague an open-ended, leaving lots of space for GMs to make the setting their own.

That was how things were generally done in those days. And why people who remember those days don't agree - they all created their own versions of the setting, and assumed everyone else's version was the same, as they had no way of knowing otherwise.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

As soon as you say there is only one of something, or it must be rare, everyone wants to make use of a special exception. This applies to writers as much as players. It's why every second Dark Sun adventure seems to have a portal to another world or visitors from elsewhere or whatever, despite the fact that Athas is meant to be cut off from the rest of the D&D cosmology.

That's more to do with the way campaigns were run back then. If the DM bought an adventure, they would drop it into their ongoing campaign. And if the adventure required a different setting, you transported the PCs to that setting (and generally home again once the adventure was complete).

 

[Staffan]

Or is this just TSR making up the lore on the fly again, wildly contradicting themselves, and the novel people not working in conjunction with the game people?

TSR couldn't even keep lore straight within a single novel pentalogy. In The Verdant Passage we definitely see the halfling Nok and his assistants use preserving magic – it's presented as drawing power from nearby plants and all. We also see Nok go after Sadira in The Amber Enchantress, again using both preserving magic and a newly-made Cane of Nok, using an obsidian sphere to let him power some magic using his own life force.

Then, in either The Obsidian Oracle or The Cerulean Storm, we're told that Rajaat wouldn't use halflings as champions because they couldn't use sorcery (meaning arcane magic). The person told this even asks "But we've seen halflings do it!" and is told "No, that was clerical magic" (despite it clearly not being that).

 

[pukunui]

As an aside, I'm curious to know how many people in this thread are unfamiliar with the unique format that Dark Sun adventures came in:

 

[Paul Farquhar]

On Hope vs. Grimdark: In Game of Thrones, trying to do the right right thing and make the world better often, rather than just failing, actually made things worse for people. Perhaps more apropos to early D&D, Elric had this happen to him a lot. In D&D, this takes the form of "gotcha" decisions, were the DM gives the players no good choices, and it generally considered bad form.

Now, when Dark Sun was originally written, settings were just described as is, without giving much consideration as to how they would be used in play. However, the biggest inspiration for Dark Sun is clearly John Carter of Mars, which pushes the genre into Planetary Romance rather than Swords and Sorcery. Carter is certainly a more heroic figure than Conan.

Now, if the players are going to be good guys, how will they react to templars and defilers joining the party? I suspect the outcome will be an outbreak of PvP. I would be inclined (assuming a heroic game) to make these monsters to be fought, not something you can play as. I would have defiling as something PCs can choose to do though - even heroes can be tempted by expediency.


As an aside, does anyone else suspect that the biggest initial backlash against Nu-Dark Sun will be focused on the Art?