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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Phantom_Miria" data-source="post: 9749471" data-attributes="member: 7053811">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.</blockquote>

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