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

[Zardnaar]

The original printing of the 5e PHB had some rather unflattering descriptions of half-orcs, and under the heading "The Mark of Gruumsh" said, among other things: "Half-orcs are not evil by nature, but evil does lurk within them, whether they embrace it or rebel against it."

There was also this gem in the section on alignment: "The evil deities who created other races, though, made those races to serve them. Those races have strong inborn tendencies that match the nature of their gods. Most orcs share the violent, savage nature of the orc god, Gruumsh, and are thus inclined toward evil. Even if an orc chooses a good alignment, it struggles against its innate tendencies for its entire life. (Even half-orcs feel the lingering pull of the god's influence.)"

This got changed at some point before 5.5e – I'm not sure when, to be honest. But it's pretty clear that the original intent of the 5e rules was that orcs, goblins, and so on were if not strictly speaking always evil, as close to it as doesn't matter, due to the influence of their creator gods.

That does make sense up to a point. Gods are cosmic forces of evil. Think of the worst humans but theyre always around and dont shoot themselves in a bunker. And have supernatural powers.

 

[Phantom_Miria]

Looking at these halflings I suspect a modern Athas might want to just swap to the more Giger-esque dinosaur-bone-armour halflings (still having them ride raptors etc.), and swap out "boil you in a pot" cannibalism (ugh) for something that evokes some horror (i.e. makes them seem tough and scary) without being an obvious racist trope, though to be honest given the sheer breadth of Western racism it's hard to immediately think of what that might be!

I think that last part is something worth thinking about. These ideas indeed used to be very widespread in society, and existed at various levels of intensity and even awareness by the people affected by them, just like fantasy tropes and fiction have been widespread since forever. At a certain point it becomes hard to tell whether you can say something was never influenced at all by their existence.

It's inevitable that a lot of tropes that make up fantasy, down from the foundation, couldn't have but co-existed and intermingled with racist ideas and backward ideas (to very various degrees) that were common in society at their time, just because they were all part of the zeitgeist that influenced everyone living in it. Pretty much all Sword & Sorcery is like that, because the very foundation for that was Conan and pulp stories from the 1920s and 1930s and, well... The public at the time apparently really liked the fairly obviously racist trope of the fair white maiden being threatened by a violent black man and saved by a daring white guy, and while I'm not American I understand that the underlining logic of this perceived sexual threat is also what was at the base of all the lynching that was common in the American South roughly at that same time.
Edgar Rice Burroughs is another massive influence, not just for pulp and fantasy, but all fiction in general, and the man was a very open supporter of the most extreme takes on eugenics. Still, without John Carter of Mars I think we have neither Superman nor Star Wars... Or Dark Sun itself, Barsoom being a primary inspiration for Athas.

On a much less blatant and more opaque note, there's the old polemic about Tolkien's Orcs, because while I'm certain that Tolkien had no ill intentions with what he made I think it's also fair to say that he thought of Orcs as the evil minions of destructive dark forces, and thus gave them traits that resembled the stereotypical image of a steppe nomad, one of the archetypal barbarian trope figures, commonly thought as a force of destruction for "civilized" people. This is a very ancient trope too, because enmity between settled cultures and nomads from the Eurasian Steppes goes back to antiquity. The Chinese historically fought confederations of steppe peoples for their entire history, but in the West the concept of the "barbarians from the steppes" eventually grew closer to one of the aspects of anti-Asian sentiments.
Tolkien wasn't anti-Asian, his work had no anti-Asian connotations, but through an indirect relation between ideas that was born from the cultural environment he lived in, he ended up making his Orcs kinda based off a visual and aesthetic trope that was in turn associated with hostile stereotypes of Asian peoples. I do think, though, that there is an important degree of separation between Tolkien's Orcs and racist sentiments against Asian people, which passes through the generic trope of the "barbarian".

In my opinion the degree of separation is what's important to consider between the fantasy tropes and the questionable influences they have likely inevitably been related to in the long history of fiction.
I'm pretty convinced that if you really start digging you'll eventually find that virtually all ideas in fantasy can ultimately be find to have some sort of relation to some other kind of idea from decades ago that nowadays is very unsavory. My impression is that the feeling in recent years from some people has been to expunge everything that sticks out, but this only ends in my opinion with feeling like sanitization of content mixed with it being ineffective, since you'll bonk one perceived bad trope away only to have 30 other very similar relatives standing around and being ignored. See the controversy on Orcs being inherently evil, them being turned increasingly nuanced, which I kinda like anyway, only to have Gnolls step in as the disposable, always evil stock of enemies to be slaughtered mindlessly.
Or how there was a whole discussion on bioessentialism a while ago, but while it's common sense to say that bioessentialism is unacceptable when discussing real people and anthropology, the argument loses its sense if one wants to fight the idea of bioessentialism in... A magical fantasy world where, unlike in our very own, there are multiple intelligent races of beings who are widely different mentally and physically. The point is that, first and foremost, racism is a factually wrong ideology, and humans on Earth are all just humans, "race" isn't even a proper scientific term that mean anything, let alone something you can try to slap universal traits on them. But in a world where there are Goliaths and Halflings I don't think you'd be promoting racism in real life by noting that the Goliaths should probably be inherently stronger than Halflings who weight a third or them (unless you wanna do game balance differently I guess).

So, instead of trying to go scorched earth on anything that might have had negative implications or has a bad history that can be tied to it, I think it's better to recognize whether a trope is effectively inescapably tied to racist ideas, and they're usually pretty easy to tell apart (the aforementioned '20s pulp and Burroughs, we've fortunately been capable of having Conan, Barsoom and Tarzan in the modern world without the nasty baggage), whether they're instead just historically related but can be disentangled from the baggage to make them harmless, or if they're just fine on their own.
"Cannibal tribals" has been historically something that has been used against real human cultures to denigrate them and justify harm against them, but the trope by itself isn't about any specific culture in particular, in fact it's always completely incorrect in how cannibalism is actually practiced in real human cultures, so when abstracted away from anything human and placed in a fantasy world it can be made to lose all of the harmful effects it had when it was actually against real human beings. You just have to not do anything as spectacularly stupid as replicating real human cultures in the fantasy environment and then play all the "savage" tropes straight, then you're just doing it on purpose.
I think it's perfectly possible to maintain the cannibalism of Halflings in Dark Sun without accidentally reinforcing any racist stereotype: the halflings don't look like any human culture but, like a lot of other peoples in Dark Sun, are a mix of many influences, including Giger visuals as you noted, and the cannibalism they practice isn't even properly cannibalism since they eat people of different races.
I'd even argue that the "boil you in a pot" trope is salvageable, but since that's already more heavy-handed I'd keep it only for straight up monsters and enemies, to reinforce that degree of separation from anything that could be possibly related to real human cultures. Halflings in general might not be humans, but still kinda look close enough for concern.

 

[ECMO3]

Wild tribes of tareks (Athasian orcs), lizardfork and thri-keen also could consider your PCs like their future food.

The last Darksun campaign I played in my PC (Halfling) and another PC (Thri-keen) spent most of the campaign debating in character whether elves or humans tasted better. The thri-keen preferred Elves, I preferred humans, but neither of us were picky. We were both willing to eat whomever we came across.

The Thri-Keen also regularly complained about Elves being so fast that it was difficult to catch them (they had like basically a bonus action dash ability in that campaign).

 

[Zardnaar]

The last Darksun campaign I played in my PC (Halfling) and another PC (Thri-keen) spent most of the campaign debating in character whether elves or humans tasted better. The thri-keen preferred Elves, I preferred humans, but neither of us were picky. We were both willing to eat whomever we came across.

The Thri-Keen also regularly complained about Elves being so fast that it was difficult to catch them (they had like basically a bonus action dash ability in that campaign).

Ive had Kreen Drool on PCs.

And Halfling and Kreen eating "leftovers". They didn't hunt sentient but after battles......

Meats back on the menu.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

You are adults and you can talk about meneater characters but I doubt parents wanted to listen the same comments when their children are playing D&D.

I agree the tareks may be reskinned orcs but I don't mind.

* Now I am thinking about an Athasian ghost with psionic powers who could travel to the past to warn about future events. Let's guess this was born and died in the blue age and then we shouldn't worry about the possible time paradoxes...

Other idea is the Athaspace has got a special nature because the psionic time-travelers altered the regional cosmology. The Athaspace we know is only one layer within the true Athaspace and this would be like the Grey (or let's call it Greymist) within a crystal sphere and within this Greymist there are a cluster of demiplanes.

If we could explain it comparing with a MMO the Athas from the novels is only one server, but there are other servers where the events can be different. Let's imagine for example a group of planar explores after returning to the material plane from the Greymist these discover dromites. What happened? These explorers are in an alternate with the PC species from 3.5 Expanded Psionic Handbook. Maybe this alternate Athas was conquered by a rogue faction of githyankis who allied with infernal dragons.

 

[Zardnaar]

You are adults and you can talk about meneater characters but I doubt parents wanted to listen the same comments when their children are playing D&D.

I agree the tareks may be reskinned orcs but I don't mind.

* Now I am thinking about an Athasian ghost with psionic powers who could travel to the past to warn about future events. Let's guess this was born and died in the blue age and then we shouldn't worry about the possible time paradoxes...

Other idea is the Athaspace has got a special nature because the psionic time-travelers altered the regional cosmology. The Athaspace we know is only one layer within the true Athaspace and this would be like the Grey (or let's call it Greymist) within a crystal sphere and within this Greymist there are a cluster of demiplanes.

If we could explain it comparing with a MMO the Athas from the novels is only one server, but there are other servers where the events can be different. Let's imagine for example a group of planar explores after returning to the material plane from the Greymist these discover dromites. What happened? These explorers are in an alternate with the PC species from 3.5 Expanded Psionic Handbook. Maybe this alternate Athas was conquered by a rogue faction of githyankis who allied with infernal dragons.

That was 3E DS. 2006 or so. Mostly 20+ years old.