Boy, I hope not. Smashing oligarchs who are destroying the planet for their selfish gain would be a great look for D&D in 2026.
It would be but on a "Corporate-ness/Rank Cowardice" level from 1-10, where "No effs given" is 1, and 10 is "We will never knowingly offend, disturb or cause any kind of thought to occur via content/art", I would say WotC overall is at a 7 (up a ton from say, 20 years ago) and D&D specifically from WotC has been even higher at like an 8 in recent years.
All IMHO, YMMV, disclaimer disclaimer of course.
So I would be genuinely astonished if the new and somehow more corporate-sounding way D&D is organised and managed were bolder and braver than WotC had been lately. Happily astonished for sure.
I really do expect that if we get Dark Sun in 2026 it will be absolutely not just "neutered" but basically genericized and actively un-DS-ish even on basic themes. People will defend it no matter how bad it is, let's be real. It could have insulting things written about every other version of Dark Sun as the entire foreword and say "You must read the entire book in light of how trash previous versions were" and people would be like "Well it's just the foreword, it's not really relevant! You can't judge the entire book based on that!"! And every change, no matter how awful, someone will be trying find precedent for and and defending or say "Well I prefer it this way! Not every book is for nostalgia-heads!" or the like. I hope I'm wrong. I suspect they just won't do Dark Sun even if they have it written, and instead we'll have a suspiciously long gap and then just a generic psionics-themed splatbook in like, the back half of 2026 or early 2027.
(I can't think of any company that is a 1 or 10 note, maybe the scale is too wide!)
