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.

 

[overgeeked]

Again, this is the 5E version of the setting, not the 4E or 2E one. There was a whole week on ENWorld when people melted down over WotC's declaration.

A 5E Athas could be one where salvation is possible, but the details are never specified, beyond a super-vague prophecy.

I think if they do a Dark Sun revisit it would have to be about bringing hope to a desperate and dying world. Roll the timeline back to when Kalak is still alive and let the PCs be the big damn heroes of the setting. Nothing worse in an RPG than all the big stuff being done by NPCs. But again, people would see the negative stuff and focus on that and scream and yell about how the negative stuff shouldn't exist in the setting. Never mind that if it didn't, the setting would be a utopia with nothing for the PCs to do.

Of course you can't stop stupid people from saying or doing stupid things, nor is anyone saying this is somehow uniquely a problem. But this isn't about whether you or I care, it's really about whether WotC would care, because the thread is quite literally about why they aren't touching the setting.

And we're talking about why they aren't touching it. Because a lot of ill-informed and don't-care-to-be-informed people would raise a stink.

And given the setting's potential to create a dumpster fire of bad press, I can honestly see why they would avoid it.

Right. That's what I'm saying. They'd have to deal with uninformed people freaking out about it so not worth the trouble.

You even noted that the loud voices are more amplified in a smaller niche hobby.

Yes, but there's nothing requiring those voices be uniformed. Some of those loud voices in the niche hobby just might be well-informed. But there I go being an optimist again. I really should see a doctor about that.

Besides, I'm seeing you're happy they're not touching it, in which case you can personally break out the champagne.

Ish? I'm eager for more Dark Sun art, modules, text, lore, etc as I absolutely love the setting. But I know that WotC, especially in its current iteration and dealing with the...environment...we live in, would step on every single possible social landmine that existed. So that would be bad. Plus they'd gut the setting to try to avoid that very problem, which is also bad. So half the problem is WotC being inept. The other half of the problem is people being generally terrible. Only one of those is likely to change in the next 1000 years.

 

[Charlaquin]

Beggars my mind that Wotc can't find a way to responsibly re-invent for the modern day a setting where the main bad guys were explicitly written to be brutal law enforcement serving corrupt genocidal authoritarians, people despoiling the environment for personal gain, and slavers.

Same, but it goes to show that they don’t really care about the actual messaging of their content, all they care about is avoiding controversy. Dark Sun is thematically straight-up woke, it’s just tonally edgy and that alone is enough to make WotC scared they’ll get “canceled” (inasmuch as a giant corporation can even meaningfully be “cancelled”).

 

[Charlaquin]

What a weird stance. The slavers are the bad guys. You are supposed to stab them in the face. That feels almost shockingly non-controversial.

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

As a setting about the perils and consequences of climate change, it feels extremely modern.

Current WotC has proven pretty consistently theme-blind. It’s likely they don’t even recognize the positive messaging in the setting’s themes. They just see “edgy grimdark setting with slavery, Twitter will get mad if we publish it.”

 

[Charlaquin]

Possibly the history of genocide by the still-alive perpetrators. (Yeah, they are all bad guys, except for the one in Kurn who is being better now)

Maybe the hinted at forced breeding?

I mean… There’s what you change to update it to modern sensibilities. Make him still a bad guy, and make the hybrid species explicitly created by magic.

 

[Charlaquin]

I can why they are not making the world. A lot of people are looking to be offended over something, and they could find it there somewhere between the cannibalism, slavery, and destruction of nature for personal power.

All things the PCs fight against.

 

[cbwjm]

This is actually good news, it means I don't have to worry about making my own 5e version dark sun just to have the official version be released. Though I guess that wouldn't really be much of a worry anyway.

 

[Charlaquin]

So they probably would have a hard time of figuring out how to include slavery without also including an official way of PCs become slavers.

Why? It’s the easiest thing in the world to just not include that.

 

[Charlaquin]

D&D is a PG-13 brand, and DRk Dun is pretty edgy. Doing PG-13 Dark Dun might tick off more people than it interests.

They did a perfectly fine job of it with the 4e version

 

[Charlaquin]

It's been a looong time since I read it and I may be misremembering, but didn't Athas also have nomadic, thieving, swindling elves? Because given the awful stereotype of "thieving, swindling gypsies", that's potentially also a thing of problem for WotC, I imagine.

Easy fix: make the thieving, swindling thing an inaccurate and hateful stereotype in-universe.

 

[squibbles]

Reposting because I think this deserved a thread of its own. Click through to the article and the video, it's pretty unambiguous.

Kyle Brink D&D Executive Producer comments on Dark Sun

athas.org

“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.”

Well, it certainly confirms what a lot of us had suspected about why the Spelljammer monster book got to plunder all Dark Sun's stuff, and why Light of Xaryxis was fully intent on dumping the entire planet into a black hole before a last-minute editorial change of heart. This makes me sad as hell. Beggars my mind that Wotc can't find a way to responsibly re-invent for the modern day a setting where the main bad guys were explicitly written to be brutal law enforcement serving corrupt genocidal authoritarians, people despoiling the environment for personal gain, and slavers.

Thanks for making a thread!

And ditto; sad as hell.

I'm a huge fan of Dark Sun and I really wanted to see something in a Dark Sun vein from them, even something quite different from prior incarnations. 5e, to date, badly underserves the sword and planet and sword and sorcery vibes of the founding textual influences of D&D, and all this time, WotC've been sitting on a setting that does both of them like gangbusters and which, more than that, is incredibly tonally and thematically textured and very of moment to the 2020s.

But nah, it's "problematic." We're just gonna sit on the IP, make weird maybe-half-references to it in other products, and kill anyone else's projects that resemble it for copyright infringement (as they did with the admittedly dubious Red Dawn: Into the Dawn Lands ripoff).

Boo. Boo WotC. That sauce is so weak. Boo.

Same, but it goes to show that they don’t really care about the actual messaging of their content, all they care about is avoiding controversy. Dark Sun is thematically straight-up woke, it’s just tonally edgy and that alone is enough to make WotC scared they’ll get “canceled” (inasmuch as a giant corporation can even meaningfully be “cancelled”).

Yeah, well put. They're being safe and calling it ethical, inclusive, and responsible.

I dunno, I guess I can see from their point of view why being safe is the best course; maybe they'd have been more inclined to take a risk on Dark Sun if it weren't for their psionics rules always being rejected. But, man, I wish they'd just come out and said "we're don't want to publish Dark Sun content because we're afraid of being pilloried for another hadozee mistake and screamed at by the fans for flubbing the psionics rules we're expected to put in it," instead of this false and unexplained "problematic" screen.