D&D 5E (2024) Unconfirmed Dark Sun World Book

[Mecheon]

So if genocide, imperialism, slavery, body horror, cannibalism, etc, should be removed from Dark Sun because children can't handle them then how come Doctor Who is/was so popular when it has all of those?

You are the first person to make this argument ever so uh. You tell us? Because it sure isn't a serious argument anyone's actually. Used.

The problems people bring up are just two: 'jungle-living anthropomorphageous halflings is veering way too hard to be cannibal pygmies' and just about everything to do with half-dwarves. Folks don't have a problem with thri-kreen eating folks because 8 ft mantis people don't exactly map directly onto a real world thing that's resulted in villages being hunted down and burnt

No, it was manufactured by a very particular demographic on Twitter.

Let's be brutally honest here. The first people who came out with the 'Dark Sun could be problematic" thing was WotC

This was before they published actual problematic stuff with how Spelljammer went

 

[Parmandur]

This was before they published actual problematic stuff with how Spelljammer went

Well, technically the statement everyone patched on to was from about half a year after the Spelljammer kerfuffle, which is important context for why Kyle Brinks was probably gun shy about the very idea.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

My own theory is WotC doesn't want to sell DS sourcebooks but Hasbro wants DS to be a multigenre franchise for young adults, specially videogames.

The intention is an updated of the crunch but the metaplot will keep untouched. I have said it some times in the past. At least it should be unlocked in DMGuild.

 

[Charlaquin]

But @Xamnam gave an even better metric, using Mass Effect, although Renegade arguably just means edgelord, not necessarily evil. (If being sarcastic is evil, a whole lot of people are in a whole lot of trouble.)

Mass Effect is pretty much choosing between being Kirk or Picard.

I’m late to this discussion, but Mass Effect was incredibly inconsistent in how they wrote Renegade Shepard. Sometimes Renegade Shep was a no-nonsense, “get the job done at any cost” pragmatist. Sometimes they were a loose canon who said and did wildly out of pocket stuff for no discernible reason. Sometimes they were an outright human-supremacist xenophobe. Sometimes they were a narcissist actively abusing the power of their military rank and/or specter status for personal gratification.

Paragon Shep was consistently the “do it right, not quick” hero who tried to see the best in people and work together with a diverse team, but Renegade Shep didn’t seem to have a clear concept other than being unlike Paragon Shep. That, combined with the mechanics having been designed to reward picking one path and sticking to it, and punish trying to use a mix of Paragon and Renegade made it so that the Renegade path was much less tonally cohesive than Paragon.

 

[Charlaquin]

As far as I can tell, WotC views the borderline between acceptable slavery themes versus unacceptable taboo:

the moment player characters can own slaves.

This participation in the system of slavery would include purchase, capture, or encountering "happy willing" slaves. It relates to immersion in historical slavery.

Any setting where slavery is too societally prevalent, where roleplayers can own slaves, becomes a defacto WotC official public endorsement of slavery.

This is why I suspect e24 will completely eliminate slavery from Dark Sun. The earlier slavery theme was too central, too prevalent, too normalized. Any future possibility of slavery, no matter how indirect, would likely revert to the earlier full-on slavery immersion. So there wont be any.

I agree that’s probably the line, but not that they’ll remove it from the setting entirely. It just won’t be so central to the basic functions of society. Much like in FR, you may have slaver enemies to fight, but their slave taking and trading activities will probably be kept vague and implied to be illicit. The sorcerer kings might be known to own slaves, and slaves might be known to be forced to fight in the arenas, but the average citizens of the city-states will consider slavery distasteful and take pride in not having to rely on slave labor.

 

[Charlaquin]

This is exactly where I am with both Dark Sun and the AD&D 2nd edition Ravenloft material. It's why I'm not too upset about changes made to Ravenloft or the idea of changes to Dark Sun. I'm one of those weird people who thinks you can respect the original IP and still make changes. Maybe it won't be a product for me, but that's okay. I can live with that. As far as I'm concerned, Dark Sun had its chance in the 1990s...and again with 4th edition. I wouldn't be upset if it just sat dormant for a thousand years.

Yeah, I accepted a while back that I’m more in love with the concept of Dark Sun than the actual game. A lot of the things I think of as core to the setting’s identity aren’t really consistent with what was actually written, they’re basically head canon I dreamed up while reading the 4e Dark Sun books.

 

[Necropolitan]

Nice straw man.

It's not. Also fallacy fallacy.

The problems people bring up are just two: 'jungle-living anthropomorphageous halflings is veering way too hard to be cannibal pygmies' and just about everything to do with half-dwarves. Folks don't have a problem with thri-kreen eating folks because 8 ft mantis people don't exactly map directly onto a real world thing that's resulted in villages being hunted down and burnt

We've had multiple people in this thread demanding that the stuff that makes Dark Sun dark that isn't those two things be removed.

I agree that’s probably the line, but not that they’ll remove it from the setting entirely. It just won’t be so central to the basic functions of society. Much like in FR, you may have slaver enemies to fight, but their slave taking and trading activities will probably be kept vague and implied to be illicit. The sorcerer kings might be known to own slaves, and slaves might be known to be forced to fight in the arenas, but the average citizens of the city-states will consider slavery distasteful and take pride in not having to rely on slave labor.

The evils of dehumanization/reduction of people to property/things is one of the main themes of Dark Sun.

In the books the Sorcerer Kings were able to get as far as they did because the free citizens could point to slaves as being worse-off than them and when the slaves were consumed the wider society didn't notice.

The point of Dark Sun is to be darker than mainstream D&D and present a world where injustice is the norm as opposed to the more hopeful main settings.

 

[Charlaquin]

The evils of dehumanization/reduction of people to property/things is one of the main themes of Dark Sun.

In the books the Sorcerer Kings were able to get as far as they did because the free citizens could point to slaves as being worse-off than them and when the slaves were consumed the wider society didn't notice.

The point of Dark Sun is to be darker than mainstream D&D and present a world where injustice is the norm as opposed to the more hopeful main settings.

You seem to be under the impression that I don’t already know that. You may have missed that I’m making a prediction about how I think a 5e take on Dark Sun will most likely be presented, not describing how I personally think it should be presented.

 

[Necropolitan]

You seem to be under the impression that I don’t already know that. You may have missed that I’m making a prediction about how I think a 5e take on Dark Sun will most likely be presented, not describing how I personally think it should be presented.

So what?

I'm pointing out why that would be a bad thing that completely goes against the spirit and themes of the setting.

 

[Charlaquin]

You've mislocated the problem. It's like you keep tripping over your undone laces, and you think the problem is with the pavement (sidewalk I guess you'd say in the US, the "pavement" being what we call the "road").

I’m sure it varies by state, but generally we also call the road the road, or sometimes the street. Pavement can refer to the concrete of the sidewalk or to the asphalt of the road/street, but in either case it refers to the material said thing is made from.