D&D 5E WotC: Why Dark Sun Hasn't Been Revived

In an interview with YouTuber 'Bob the Worldbuilder', WotC's Kyle Brink explained why the classic Dark Sun setting has not yet seen light of day in the D&D 5E era.

I’ll be frank here, the Dark Sun setting is problematic in a lot of ways. And that’s the main reason we haven’t come back to it. We know it’s got a huge fan following and we have standards today that make it extraordinarily hard to be true to the source material and also meet our ethical and inclusion standards... We know there’s love out there for it and god we would love to make those people happy, and also we gotta be responsible.

You can listen to the clip here.

 

[Reynard]

All I'm going to say is that I get the history and I get WoTC is a business and doesn't want to get itself in trouble, but it's sad you can't make a game where you're fighting against slavery anymore.

It's not that "you can't." It's that WotC won't. Those things are different. Right or wrong, WotC has aligned itself with a particular point of view, one held by a lot of its new fans, and is publishing accordingly (not without missteps of course).

People that want things that WotC won't make should buy other settings and games from other companies, or dig into the massive wealth of fan material if they must just have that specific brand (the desire for which I admit to not understanding).

 

[squibbles]

Count me among those who think this is for the best. I don't need to see my favourite D&D setting dug up and turned into a mindless revenant.

Dark Sun is dead. Let a thousand weird planetary romance settings bloom.

As I've posted previously, I disagree with that sentiment.

However, I would be happy if a thousand weird planetary romance settings bloomed. For any of you looking for such settings, here are some I've encountered over the last several years*:

• Azag
• BX Mars
• Carcosa
• Cha'alt
• Dragon Kings (as previously mentioned)
• Hypertellurians
• Planet Eris
• Planet Psychon
• Savage Swords of Athanor
• Scourge of the Scornlords
• Swords and Super-Science of Xuhlan
• Vaults of Vaarn
• Warriors of the Red Planet
• And, of course, Tekumel and Skyrealms of Jorune, sorta fit this mold

*Disclaimer: some of these push the boundaries of good taste. Also, none of them quite their own brand of weird and sundry influences in the way that Dark Sun is.

@gorice perhaps you could share some additional planetary romance settings that might help fill that Dark Sun sized void.

That 100% makes sense.

Probably the only way to do Dark Sun would be with a big time jump. But change enough things that way, and the question is whether the Dark Sun brand will appeal to anyone at that point.

Better to just plow those energies into a new sand & sandals setting, I guess.

Yes, I could see a 'spiritual successor' to Dark Sun as being a good thing.

I also think there's a lot of cool things they could do with a time jump. I've proposed ideas for one in prior threads, so I'll just quote myself here:

Jump the setting forward to 50 years after 2e's Beyond the Prism Pentad:
All the books' main characters except maybe Sadira are dead from old age (because she makes an interesting alternate sorcerer queen). Dregoth laid to waste and occupied Raam; his dray are now everywhere. Balic is greatly diminished from internal conflict, but Andropinis is somehow influencing it from the black. Tectuctitlay's "son" Atzetuk is a powerful psychic who rules Draj. There's lots of religious strife between Lalali-Puy's proseletyzers, Dregoth's cultists, Atzetuk's moon priests, and others rightly suspicious of them. [...] the deep lore abut Rajaat and the blue age and so on and so forth needs to be vague and hidden. It's background fluff that ordinary people don't know anything about outside of rumors.

With all of that, they can have made dramatic IN SETTING changes to the social structure of Tyr, Raam, Balic, Draj, and Gulg, while describing Urik and Nibenay as cruel vestiges of the old order, and possibly treating Urik as a sealed off North Korea that doesn't substantially interact with the outside (that's how it's described in Beyond the Prism Pentad).

I don't think any of that would make it not Dark Sun--the planet's still dying of magical defilement, the desert is still deadly, the tablelands are still filled with OP psychic monsters and murderous water-stealing bandits, and the cities are still (mostly) run by cruel petty authoritarians.

 

[TheSword]

Classic case of WotC being damned if they do and damned if they dont. You have to remember that any setting that WotC invests time, resources and production schedule in, has to be better than expanding resources in a product that isn’t going to carry all that baggage. There are plenty of them out there.

WotC has been lambasted (rightly in some cases) for not modernizing it’s editorial approach - we can’t then blame them when they become risk averse when it comes to edgy products. The changes they would need to make would no doubt be attacked by many die hard fans… so who would they be making it for?

This is a case of the gods punishing us by answering our prayers. It’s not cowardice. It’s a sensible decision about where to apply resources when they own dozens of worlds and I’m sure have even more new ideas.

At this point the 5e mechanical rules for Dark Sun, and adventures are probably best produced by third parties that don’t have the reputation to worry about. For whom any publicity might outweigh negativity.

We need a good gladiator class, some form of viable psionic system (Cough cough @Steampunkette ’s Paranormal Power), defiling and preserving and some monsters. All of that can be covered by the Creative Commons.

I’d rather know that WotC isn’t going to make Dark Sun. Then I can stop waiting for it and make my own version.

 

[MichaelSomething]

"I know writers who use subtext; and they're all cowards!"

Often the writer/creator intends to depict a thing as bad but ends up promoting the bad thing.
Like Starship Troopers the Movie was satire, a warning of militarism and fascim in society. The military used to show it to recruits.
Unless the creater used very obvious signposts with "this thing is really bad", which is considered bad writing, even using caricatures of bad guys will promote their evil ideas to some people instead of warning them for it. I mean, there are even people, that argue that Thanks was right for God's sake!

 

[ChaosOS]

Something I didn't see skimming the first half dozen pages - we know there's people within the orbit that are interested. Ajit George, the lead on Journeys through the Radiant Citadel (y'know, the book WotC put out to show they could be inclusive) has repeatedly stated he'd love to do Dark Sun

 

[Warpiglet-7]

Well maybe they were telling the truth; they messed with OGL to protect us.

Here is to being protected. Boy I feel better.

 

[pemerton]

I have a hard time imagining what else about Dark Sun might be an issue.

The 4e version has some pretty flagrant racism.

 

[humble minion]

Honestly, now i'm thinking harder about it, for me the mechanical issues of doing Dark Sun in 5th ed would heavily outweigh the 'problematic' thematic issues. They've already retconned Ravenloft to hell and back (har har) in every possible manner, and VRGtR seems to have been very well received on the whole by that (very large) portion of the WotC customer base for who 'Ravenloft' is defined by Curse of Strahd rather than the twenty plus year old 2nd/3rd ed material. The core went away, the individual domains were all turned upside down and inside out and completely rewritten with no regard whatsoever to previous lore, Ravenloft went through Planescape's pockets and stole portal keys, there's all of a sudden setting-wide cults venerating the Dark Powers (who all of a sudden have names), PCs can do whatever the hell they like without running the risk of powers checks, etc etc etc. They'd surely have no compunctions about doing a similar massive overhaul to Dark Sun. I could think of a dozen ways to resolve, retcon, or remove the 'problematic' setting elements that are MUCH less lore-intrusive than what was done to Ravenloft, and if I can, then I'm sure WotC has people on the creative side who can too.

But the mechanics .... hmmm. Even completely aside from the whole elephant-in-the-room issue of psionics, Dark Sun was explicitly written as a low-magic world, even in the context of a much lower-magic edition of D&D. It's hard to write a setting where arcane casters have to conceal their existence from angry mobs for an edition in which even 2/3 of barbarian subclasses have flashy magical abilities, at-will cantrips are all over the place, and the term 'arcane' no longer has any real meaning. It's hard to have a survivalist, water-lacking setting in an edition where wilderness survival is pretty much trivial and 'create water' is a widely accessible first level spell. It's hard to have specialised elemental clerics in a system where the existing clerical spell list contains spells of all elements, and there's no mechanism analogous to the 2e 'sphere' system for restricting that. Sure, you could throw back to 2e products like Domains of Dread and go through the spell list line by line and explain 'spell X produces 1/10 of the listed water' and 'spell Y is not available to air, fire, or earth clerics', but there is absolutely no way that WotC is going to spend a bunch of pages doing tedious paperwork like that, especially as the page count in their products seems to be shrinking year on year as it is.

Dark Sun is a setting about hard limits, about restricted choices and restricted resources. Limited magic, limited water, limited metal, limited freedom, limited options. This jibes extremely poorly with broader design philosophy of 5th ed. And no, this isn't a rant about how 5e players are spoiled and soft and lazy and dumb and all these kids should get off my lawn. I LIKE 5e. I have my issues with it, but on the whole it's probably my favourite edition. But as a system for telling the sort of stories that Dark Sun was designed for? It's not an easy fit. You either have to spend a load of page count rewriting the system to fit the setting, or you have to deal with a bunch of PCs whose capabilities just flat-out contradict a lot of the basic setting assumptions.

 

[ChaosOS]

As someone who is currently procrastinating on prepping for my weekly Dark Sun game, I honestly think it's the other kind of inclusivity that is a barrier to 5e Dark Sun - mechanical inclusivity. Themes like climate change, slavery, and the general tyranny of the setting are tricky but workable if you don't let Chris Perkins try to freehand it. By contrast, 5e's continued war against survival challenges (ironically, the 1D&D background changes gets rid of one of the worst offenders with the Outlander background feature), the proliferation of playable races ancestries species, and the complications around psionics are all reasons why Dark Sun is a mechanical challenge to implement. A good team of writers can in the span of a setting book handle the setting's problematic elements (e.g. not setting up PCs to be slavers). A team is going to have way more issues fixing the mechanical ones.

(Looks like the poster above me reached the same conclusion as I was typing this up. For the record, I use Savage Worlds which works WAY better out of the box)

 

[Micah Sweet]

Honestly, now i'm thinking harder about it, for me the mechanical issues of doing Dark Sun in 5th ed would heavily outweigh the 'problematic' thematic issues. They've already retconned Ravenloft to hell and back (har har) in every possible manner, and VRGtR seems to have been very well received on the whole by that (very large) portion of the WotC customer base for who 'Ravenloft' is defined by Curse of Strahd rather than the twenty plus year old 2nd/3rd ed material. The core went away, the individual domains were all turned upside down and inside out and completely rewritten with no regard whatsoever to previous lore, Ravenloft went through Planescape's pockets and stole portal keys, there's all of a sudden setting-wide cults venerating the Dark Powers (who all of a sudden have names) etc etc etc. They'd surely have no compunctions about doing a similar massive overhaul to Dark Sun. I could think of a dozen ways to resolve, retcon, or remove the 'problematic' setting elements that are MUCH less lore-intrusive than what was done to Ravenloft, and if I can, then I'm sure WotC has people on the creative side who can too.

But the mechanics .... hmmm. Even completely aside from the whole elephant-in-the-room issue of psionics, Dark Sun was explicitly written as a low-magic world, even in the context of a much lower-magic edition of D&D. It's hard to write a setting where arcane casters have to conceal their existence from angry mobs for an edition in which even 2/3 of barbarian subclasses have flashy magical abilities, at-will cantrips are all over the place, and the term 'arcane' no longer has any real meaning. It's hard to have a survivalist, water-lacking setting in an edition where wilderness survival is pretty much trivial and 'create water' is a widely accessible first level spell. It's hard to have specialised elemental clerics in a system where the existing clerical spell list contains spells of all elements, and there's no mechanism analogous to the 2e 'sphere' system for restricting that. Sure, you could throw back to 2e products like Domains of Dread and go through the spell list line by line and explain 'spell X produces 1/10 of the listed water' and 'spell Y is not available to air, fire, or earth clerics', but there is absolutely no way that WotC is going to spend a bunch of pages doing tedious paperwork like that, especially as the page count in their products seems to be shrinking year on year as it is.

Dark Sun is a setting about hard limits, about restricted choices and restricted resources. Limited magic, limited water, limited metal, limited freedom, limited options. This jibes extremely poorly with broader design philosophy of 5th ed. And no, this isn't a rant about how 5e players are spoiled and soft and lazy and dumb and all these kids should get off my lawn. I LIKE 5e. I have my issues with it, but on the whole it's probably my favourite edition. But as a system for telling the sort of stories that Dark Sun was designed for? It's not an easy fit. You either have to spend a load of page count rewriting the system to fit the setting, or you have to deal with a bunch of PCs whose capabilities just flat-out contradict a lot of the basic setting assumptions.

If I were making a Dark Sun-like campaign setting, I'd use Level Up as a base. Much better for dealing with the kind of survival-based limitations Dark Sun wants, and their character creation system is better suited to the variety the setting offers.

I'm actually going to start looking into this...