Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
Alternatives for religious diversity and many other things are in the DMG, as I've said several times. You should be working with your DM when you make your character anyway.
Ok, let's take the argument back to DS.I care about religious inclusivity in D&D core rules. I said what I said.
I also care about the focal topic of this thread:
How do you want 5e to do Dark Sun?
The discussion about religious inclusivity arose because of the following question.
Are the core rules of the Players Handbook flexible enough and customizable enough to use for a setting that is different from Forgotten Realms?
For many, the answer is, No.
Some forumers argued that a 5e Dark Sun needs a setting book that rewrites the Players Handbook with the flavor and options that are appropriate for the Dark Sun setting.
Dark Sun lacks gods, but has religions.
Officially, Dark Sun has at least three religions.
• A kind of monism that reveres each of the four elements as sacred.
• A kind of animism that reveres nature spirits, with an ethical ideal to preserve plant life and thereby all life.
• A kind of divine-king worship analogous to worshiping Caesar or worshiping Pharaoh.
The Players Handbook Cleric can more inclusively offer various religious possibilities, so the Cleric is already suitable for other kinds of settings. Xanathars mentions Clerics of a "cosmic force", which would include substantive elementalism, but also concepts, such as an ideal. Additionally, it is worth mentioning animism, ancestor reverence, and other forms of human religiosity.
Maybe i am missing something as I've been a DM for the past 20+ years: does the PHB do something that excludes Monotheism or (more importantly to me) Atheism? The DMG clearly discuss alternate religions, so it seems pretty inclusive to me. What do you feel the PHB does to over-rule the DMG?By the way, I know reallife people who worship some of these gods that the Cleric class mentions in the Players Handbook.
So, to claim that "theyre not real" is factually false. They are reallife religions.
Moreover, the same polytheistic god can go by any number of names, so whether a particular name is historical or idiosyncratic is moot. The polytheism itself is the prohibition.
Yup. Explorer's Guide to Athas on the DMs Guild would get the job done. I'd be happy with a good third party option if WotC pulled the trigger.After reading this thread, I think it's clear that Dark Sun would not go over well with WotC. They would need to "FIX" it all for being too offensive.
I think it's best left untouched. It's perfect the way it is. A 5e conversion document is all that is needed.
Let WotC focus on Dragonlance or something like that.
Sadly, I agree.After reading this thread, I think it's clear that Dark Sun would not go over well with WotC. They would need to "FIX" it all for being too offensive.
I think it's best left untouched.
I mean, hardly?There are too many people who would rush for the social media flamethrowers because of the evils, rather than wrap their head around the Starting Conditions or discern the potential 'drive Evil back' campaign stories available.
This is why my preference is a separate PHB; unless you're going the 4e route, you are cutting or rewriting 50% or more of the PHB.
When 2e released Dark Sun, the PHB had 6 races and 9 classes. The classes were simpler and had related features, which is why removing paladin for munchk I mean gladiator was easy, as was removing the bards half-caster ability.
5e is a different beast. There are 9 races and 12 classes now, with each class being more mechanically complex and harder to rip apart and resew cleanly. Depending on how much of a purist you are, we could be talking of a lot of class bans and rewrites, on top of new subclasses to replace those that aren't allowed (and to give classes more than one subclass option per class). Lather rinse and repeat for races, backgrounds, equipment, magic, psionics, etc. You could fill a whole book just in changes to the PCs and never discuss anything else!
That leaves two options: a "true" DS experience needs it's own compatible core rules books to be a clean break from all the stuff that isn't allowed or a 4e style setting guide that tries to refluff and reuse as much of the stuff in the PHB as possible. Because any supplement that says "ignore most of the core rules and everything that came after" ain't gonna cut it.