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Message: <blockquote data-quote="squibbles" data-source="post: 8429855" data-attributes="member: 6937590">Even if they do make that the 5e background fluff of Dark Sun--which I agree is not terribly appealing--the setup is flexible enough that the setting themes could still largely work.In Dark Sun, it isn't really important WHY arcane magic defiles, just that it does. The defiling downside of Dark Sun's arcane magic can be a consequence of decisions made by a specific lore figure (the prism pentad backstory), a result of Athas's being damaged relative to the baseline D&D cosmology (the first world retcon you have described), or mostly unexplained (the setting's original premise). At bottom, what matters is the incentives that defiling creates in wizards--defilers get selfish short term payoffs from destroying a shared common resource--so much so that they perpetrate an existential global tragedy of the commons. Even if Athas started out as a dragon-less, god-less, isolated dimension--its defilers can still be jerk-asses who desiccated the world's biosphere, burned out the sun, and created a hobbesian hellscape.Also, the "echoes of the original inhabitants of the First World, which are deeply metaphysically connected to the substance of the material plane itself" in this setup ARE high level defilers like the sorcerer kings. Anyone who goes far enough into defiling becomes a dragon (as [USER=6879661]@TheSword[/USER] mentioned in respect to Black Sands, this is not limited to sorcerer kings). That setup has weird metaphysical implications. I'm not sure why, but to me it suggests a gnosticism and body-horror vibe--which I don't hate. And there are interesting directions in which that could be taken.But, ultimately, retconning the Dark Sun setting to have a first world backstory could very easily go wrong and AT BEST would make the setting interestingly different, not qualitatively better. So, hopefully, it doesn't happen.In my ideal version of the setting, no one relevant to PCs will ever know the answers to the setting's cosmological questions.</blockquote>

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