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Message: <blockquote data-quote="humble minion" data-source="post: 8054576" data-attributes="member: 5948">Dark Sun always had ... consistency issues when it came to gods in the canon.On one hand, you have in-world statements like the above, on the other hand, you have Badna, the 'god' that Abalach-Re claimed to get her powers from and which was widely worshipped in Raam, and on the OTHER other hand you canonically have temples of lost ancient gods in UnderTyr which retain some power (at least in the novels), and then on the other other other hand (four hands are ok in Dark Sun - thri-kreen, right?) you have Dregoth who's done a whole lot of planewalking in the Great Wheel, seen how gods work out there, and came back to Athas with ambitions of advancing to true deityhood himself.It's a bit of a mess really, and I think it's more of a result of TSRs slipshod development practices than any actual considered design or theological choices.  It's fairly well documented that in the 90s TSR would just farm projects out to different writers without providing them with a setting bible or even access to all of the currently in-print material, and would just publish whatever the hell came back with minimal concern for consistency.  Lynn Abbey's written a bit about it from when she was writing Rise And Fall of a Dragon King - it's pretty head-shaking, from a project management point of view.Anyway, long story short - if a hypothetical 5e DS tries to stick to every bit of 2e canon about how gods, spirits, elementals, etc work in Dark Sun, they're doomed to fail because all of the existing canon contradicts itself.  Better to take all the existing stuff as inspiration, come up with a synthesis that works as a framework to tell enjoyable stories in (theological consistency or thematics should come second to making a functional gameworld), and throw out the old stuff that doesn't fit (or write it off as in-world material from unreliable narrators)</blockquote>

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