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.

 

[Zehnseiter]

My fighter got assassinated in the hotel armorless by a slaver's merc.
Next fighter was beat down by a Psionicist's mind controlled muls.
Then my replacement replacement rogue got TPKed with everyone else by boosted defiler spells.

Then we rerolled as morally grey jerks.

So you had a bad DM. Why blame the setting and not the DM ?
This can happen at every game table. Regardless of setting. Regardless of what RPG game you play.

You can in the end only judge a setting on what is written for it and not what you did with it. For the former the first official adventure was about overthrowing a a dictatorship and free a city and all the slaves in it. The latter is matter of the game table you play at.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

So defiling magic released green house gases into the air and slowly affected the climate? And debt is climate change? Really?

What you are describing is bad behavior. It's people disregarding what they are doing to the environment and future generations. That does not make what happened in Dark Sun climate change, though. It's just evil behavior.

Climate Change did not happen in Dark Sun. Cataclysmic defiling magic by evil people did.

Nope. If you destroy nearly all the plants on earth and heat up the ocean, then you have a lot more CO2 in the atmosphere... but as I said, loaded topic.

 

[nevin]

So you had a bad DM. Why blame the setting and not the DM ?
This can happen at every game table. Regardless of setting. Regardless of what RPG game you play.

I agree completely. I will note that IME the darker settings tend to attract more of these types of DM's. Unfortunately it doesn't help thier popularity.

 

[Maxperson]

Nope. If you destroy nearly all the plants on earth and heat up the ocean, then you have a lot more CO2 in the atmosphere...

Here. On Dark Sun air comes from psionic energy.

And before you look that up, I really have no idea where air on Dark Sun comes from, but it's clearly not from the plants that don't exist in great enough quantities.

 

[nevin]

HBO which made Game of Thrones is owned by Warner Brothers which is publicly traded. Game of Thrones had slavery, rape, and more. WotC is risk averse, not necessarily publicly traded companies.

WOTC just blew up magic the Gathering, started a huge fight over the OGL. Also the entire Game of Thrones fan base that Martin had built over the years got what they asked for and had been consuming as content. Like it or not DND mean's 12 to adult. Not anywhere close to the same thing.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Here. On Dark Sun air comes from psionic energy.

Enough wishful thinking might do it.

 

[Yaarel]

In 4e Dark Sun, even the Eladrin made sense.

Traditional DS has a Positive Material Plane (elemental balance and life) and a Negative Material Plane (imbalance and death). The Eladrin are the Elves from the last remnants of Positivity, here and there.

 

[nevin]

The big problem with settings like this is they gain a good sized following from people that like the fact that they are different. The minute everyone starts pushing for the setting to have all options then it's not different you might as well play Forgotten Realms, so why would the company put out a new campaign setting so everyone can do the same old things?

 

[Zehnseiter]

In 4e Dark Sun, even the Eladrin made sense.

Traditional DS has a Positive Material Plane (elemental balance and life) and a Negative Material Plane (imbalance and death). The Eladrin are the Elves from the last remnants of Positivity, here and there.

Very generally speaking you could drop almost anything into Dark Sun given that almost everything was somewhat mutated and differently looking. So basically anything goes. Just take it make it look stranger then usual an it fits just fine into the setting.

Just look at te description of for example humans in the original box. There you get the pretext and an easy explanation for it as GM.

 

[Minigiant]

I mean, you were there, but based on that I don't see how morally grey jerks wouldn't have also been beat down by mind controlled muls or boosted defiler spells. That's not really alignment based. The slaver thing could have been revenge for something you did as a good guy against slavery, but how did the slaver know it was you?

We worked for the slaver and templars. Or at least didn't anger them in their loopsided power struggles.

It might not be intended by at least more than 4 DMs thought that angering but not killing slaver's, Defilers, or templars puts you on the assassin and bounty hunter conga line.

 

[Yaarel]

The big problem with settings like this is they gain a good sized following from people that like the fact that they are different. The minute everyone starts pushing for the setting to have all options then it's not different you might as well play Forgotten Realms, so why would the company put out a new campaign setting so everyone can do the same old things?

Personally, I feel any setting can feature five or so player species, and even rewite any from scratch if a core species in the Players Handbook. Then give the DM brief advice if wanting to accommodate other species. Importantly, also supply a list of species that the intended setting doesnt cohere with. The DM might want one of these anyway, but it would probably be unique or peripheral in the setting.

 

[nevin]

Personally, I feel any setting can feature five or so player species, and even rewite any from scratch if a core species in the Players Handbook. Then give the DM brief advice if wanting to accommodate other species. Importantly, also supply a list of species that the intended setting doesnt cohere with. The DM might want one of these anyway, but it would probably be unique or peripheral in the setting.

but that's old school where we let the DM control the game, according to thier players and thier game. A lot of the people who are arguing want WOTC to tell them it's ok to tell the DM's they can do anything and the DM's are just supposed to accept it because they are just referee's.

For the record I'm on your side. If people would stop demanding everything be what they want and just play the stuff they like I think they'd find they have a lot more options. Instead they scream and attack and everything just becomes "safe and boring".

 

[Maxperson]

We worked for the slaver and templars. Or at least didn't anger them in their loopsided power struggles.

It might not be intended by at least more than 4 DMs thought that angering but not killing slaver's, Defilers, or templars puts you on the assassin and bounty hunter conga line.

Again, you were there, not me. I can only guess at things you have much better insight into. One possibility, though, is age. In 1991 I was much, MUCH younger and we(the groups I played with) did things as DMs and had things done to us as players that we would never do now and thought nothing much of it. The viewpoints of people in their teens and 20's much different than people in their 30's to 50's.

 

[Yaarel]

but that's old school where we let the DM control the game, according to thier players and thier game. A lot of the people who are arguing want WOTC to tell them it's ok to tell the DM's they can do anything and the DM's are just supposed to accept it because they are just referee's.

For the record I'm on your side. If people would stop demanding everything be what they want and just play the stuff they like I think they'd find they have a lot more options. Instead they scream and attack and everything just becomes "safe and boring".

From my point of view, worldbuilding is more like sculpture. D&D has so many options, that what a DM removes from the default is as important to setting flavor as what one adds.

A helpful way to decide on species is the 5-folk band. Which species corresponds to which trope depends one which aspects of a species one chooses to emphasize.

A straightforward arrangement for Dark Sun might be the following.

Jock folk: Human
Rebel folk: Dwarf (Mul)
Strong folk: Giant
Heart folk: Elf
Smart folk: Thri-kreen

Other species can and do exist, but these five are the defining majority, who establish the flavor and context of the setting.


(I mean "folks" in the sense of a one-syllable gender-neutral replacement for the "five-man band". But when applying the tropes to species, this meaning of folk might be less clear. Note, the smart folk doesnt necessarily mean higher Intelligence. It mean cerebral themes, possibly including less emotional, inventive, perceptive, calculating, shrewd, strategic, telepathic, or so on. There are many ways the build the trope of a "smart folk".)

 

[Doctor Futurity]

WotC should just license Dark Sun out to Goodman Games and let them retool it as part of their "Reincarnated Classics" line. I think Goodman Games is the right company to thread this sort of setting into something the fans would like while maybe avoiding the crossfire of contemporary cultural taboos that pervade modern thought.

 

[Imaro]

So you had a bad DM. Why blame the setting and not the DM ?
This can happen at every game table. Regardless of setting. Regardless of what RPG game you play.

You can in the end only judge a setting on what is written for it and not what you did with it. For the former the first official adventure was about overthrowing a a dictatorship and free a city and all the slaves in it. The latter is matter of the game table you play at.

Refresh my memory... were Templars allowed as a PC class?

 

[AnotherGuy]

I was never fortunate to play Dark Sun but from the little I read through the years about the setting I absolutely loved what I heard - with its harsh environment, sadistic overlords, dangerous psychic powers and strange playable races. It was borne before the other oppressive setting, Midnight.
I'm at an age, as are my players, to do it justice and I'll likely pick up a setting book and perhaps a module at some point and add it to my very long to-do list.

 

[billd91]

Refresh my memory... were Templars allowed as a PC class?

They sure were. They had to be neutral or evil and they had life and death authority over slaves.

 

[Zehnseiter]

They sure were. They had to be neutral or evil and they had life and death authority over slaves.

Correct. But they also were already seen as problematic back then and got removed from the class roster in the Expanded and Revised Campaign Setting box.

 

[Imaro]

Correct. But they also were already seen as problematic back then and got removed from the class roster in the Expanded and Revised Campaign Setting box.

Actually they were accidentally omitted from the revised set and available on the WotC site at the time.