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.

 

[Scribe]

Really though, it's way more than a thousand, right? Call of Cthulhu has been a constant presence in our hobby for the last 42 years earning numerous awards over multiple editions. Who knows how many gamers have spent their hard earned money on something with Lovecraft's fingerprints all over it?

I mean if one really wants to get down to it?

How many "problematic" tropes? How many versions of Fantasy, of Horror, across how many types of media?

Cosmic Horror? Sword and Sorcery? Dark Fantasy? Folk Horror? Sword and Sandal? Hell you dont have to go far on this forum alone to see people calling LotR a racist work, Lord of the Rings. So that covers High Fantasy as well.

If the weight of all that is a problem, the essential bedrock of "The Western Fantasy Tradition" is no longer acceptable?

 

[AnotherGuy]

I agree with you that a big part of this - maybe all of it - is how things are normalised in the hobby (and its associated genres).

Depends what you want out of gaming I suppose. But I find it strange for someone who has historically had much to say about mechanical alignment, you seem to be criticising D&D now for not espousing the the correct moral and ethical outlook - i.e. being too complacent.

It would be one thing to say that there were factors in place (mechanical alignment) in the earlier editions of D&D which had repercussions for character complacency on things immoral and unethical issues, but instead you went the route of 4e moving away from complacency leading to its commercial downfall
How does 4e deal with problematic content such as slavery, genocide or eugenics which make it non-complacent? And how did any of that lead to its commercial downfall?

 

[Clint_L]

Dark Sun hasn't been revived because it is built on problematic themes for 2023 and it was always a money loser anyway (c.f. Ben Riggs' reporting in Slaying the Dragon). After releasing Spelljammer to controversy and poor sales, is anyone really surprised that WotC looks at Dark Sun and goes "nah"?

They have what looks like a great movie coming out, and are working on OneD&D. They want a D&D that is fun times, not edgy and bleak. They are focused on the future, not reviving a troublesome IP from the past.

Now give me my Greyhawk campaign guide for 5e, please.

 

[Sepulchrave II]

I mean if one really wants to get down to it?

How many "problematic" tropes? How many versions of Fantasy, of Horror, across how many types of media?

Many.

Cosmic Horror? Sword and Sorcery? Dark Fantasy? Folk Horror? Sword and Sandal? Hell you dont have to go far on this forum alone to see people calling LotR a racist work, Lord of the Rings. So that covers High Fantasy as well.

Yes. Lovecraft's overt racism, Gorman's fetishism, Howard's racial perspective, Farmer's obsession with sex, Asimov's exclusion of women, Tolkien's implicit class-and-race-and-religious worldview. Let's face it, the list is endless.

If the weight of all that is a problem, the essential bedrock of "The Western Fantasy Tradition" is no longer acceptable?

It's not about it being acceptable. It's about honest scrutiny of literature from a modern perspective. I love Tolkien and Asimov, but they aren't without their problems; I even have a warm spot for Howard. But I'm as conscious of their prejudices and limitations - dictated by their time and cultural milieu - as I am of any other author. Dickens is problematic. Hemingway is problematic. The author of Beowulf is problematic. It's all problematic.

An honest critique of the problematic elements in a work of art is not a moral anathematization. It is an evaluation based on our own cultural perspective - i.e. Now, in 2023, in a world where the sum of human knowledge is around one Google search and 3 links away.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

Isn't it funny? the teleserie "Lovecraft country" was all the writter hated.

Then can't slavemasters be showed in children cartoons?...

In the episode "Troubles in Arcadia" of He-Man and the masters of the universe the male population was slavered by the women.

Slavery can be showed in the fiction, even in productions for children. The self-censorship shouldn't be the first option. It is wrong, if it appears in the TTRPG is because they heroes are going to eradicate. Maybe the mistake was if it was too easy and fast when it costed a lot of time and sacrifice in the real life.

D&D is +12y, among other reasons because rules are too complicated for preteen children. I suppose teenages can enjoy fiction set in postapocaliptic worlds when the bad guys have done some horrible things.

I guess Hasbro/WotC should have come to true and profesional psychologists to ask advice about potentially sensitive content.

My opinion is we should know what are the criteria by the "modern sensibilities" to verify this to be clear and coherent.

DS is daylight grimm but there is also enough space for the hope. The evil lords rule, but soon they start to fall. Who said it had to be easy and painless?

* Aren't the gnolls created to be a genocide force? They have to be terminated or they will terminate you. Diplomacy is not an option with them.

* Eugenetic supremacism is wrong. That detail can be rewritten very easily. Here the solution is easy, you have to explain your genetic code doesn't matter when your civilitation or society is doomed toward the self-destruction by fault of endless internal conflicts and civil wars.

Here I really worry about World of Darkness to be a Overton window about possible elite supremacism (and negative priming)

... and also we have to say the supremacism is wrong because the Natural Law teachs us we have to respect the human dignity.

* What if psionic powers could be used for reverse engineering with remains of lifeshape creations?

What if the rushtili created a plan B for the green age in case of a new apocaliptic disaster to save population, biotech and civilititation? And this was activacted and worked not too bad.

What if there were different alternate timelines of Athas, and most of them horrible happen? An invasion by the sheens (biomechanical horrors), a merger between the material plane and pieces from the infernal planes, conquested by the Vodoni empire (a faction from Spelljammer), cultists of Tharizdun created a plague of elemental mutants and summoning Lovecraftian kaijus...

* What if the sorcerer-kings were "glamour-gatherers"? They caused suffering, but also allowing hope, because those feelings can be used to "fill" their psionic power-point pool, like a variant of defiler magic. Then they would allow some slave running way from time to time, because when these reached the freedom, they will sense hope and suffering. And these feelings can create "glamour", a type of mana what can be gatherer by the sorcerer-kings and other defilers.

And even in the afterlife the sorcerer-kings don't allow the eternal rest. The souls of the sentient beings are blackmailed by the sorcerer-kings. If they don't obey their will, they will be exiled to the Grey. If they are pleasued with their work, they can be rewared reincarnated into living constructs as workers, and later within biological bodies. The ultimate reward is to be reincarnated into elans(psionic specie).

 

[pemerton]

Depends what you want out of gaming I suppose. But I find it strange for someone who has historically had much to say about mechanical alignment, you seem to be criticising D&D now for not espousing the the correct moral and ethical outlook - i.e. being too complacent.

You mean something different by "complacency" from what I do.

And I don't see what mechanical alignment has to do with this at all: except that it can be a manifestation of, and even an excuse for, complacency.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I don't know. And I don't really care - I mean, a controversy might be interesting to observe, but it wouldn't change the fact that I have these games available to play, and play both from time to time.

Fair enough.

What I don't get is why there are posters lamenting the lack of good S&S RPGs who won't go and play and evangelise for good S&S RPGs. It confuses me.

While I think the complaint here is chiefly about the presence of S&S elements in D&D and the risk companies and writers face if they employ a lot of those elements more broadly in the hobby, I do agree with the point that people should spend more time evangelizing for the games that do have that content if that is what they want to see. Admittedly that is a little hard to do here (most of the topics on this forum do seem D&D related). But people can always start threads on games they like.

Many.

Yes. Lovecraft's overt racism, Gorman's fetishism, Howard's racial perspective, Farmer's obsession with sex, Asimov's exclusion of women, Tolkien's implicit class-and-race-and-religious worldview. Let's face it, the list is endless.

It's not about it being acceptable. It's about honest scrutiny of literature from a modern perspective. I love Tolkien and Asimov, but they aren't without their problems; I even have a warm spot for Howard. But I'm as conscious of their prejudices and limitations - dictated by their time and cultural milieu - as I am of any other author. Dickens is problematic. Hemingway is problematic. The author of Beowulf is problematic. It's all problematic.

An honest critique of the problematic elements in a work of art is not a moral anathematization. It is an evaluation based on our own cultural perspective - i.e. Now, in 2023, in a world where the sum of human knowledge is around one Google search and 3 links away.

No one is really challenging the idea that people of the past had outdated views on these things and that they crept into their work (we may debate the extent of it in the cases of individual authors, but it is pretty obvious if you read Lovecraft he had very outdated ideas about race, ethnicity and bloodlines. I think what a lot of us are reacting to is how this becomes the focus, the obsession and the overriding ethos of the hobby. It is one thing to see and comment on the racist elements in Lovecraft (I remember seeing those and recognizing what they were when I first read him when I was young). But this is starting to get treated almost like original sin, where it isn't just about saying yes there was racist stuff in something written during very racist times, but about scrubbing out and revising any element that may have 'infected' the tropes they contributed to the hobby. It is also becoming the lens through which everything is read (it is one thing to see the racism in Lovecraft, but another to see racism in everything Lovecraft wrote). I think what it boils down to is not a different opinion on the issues themselves (many of us do mostly seem to agree broadly on a lot of the moral issues being discussed) but differences in attitude and opinion about media, and how outdated elements in media out to be handled

Also in the case of Tolkien, we've covered the whole are orcs stand ins for mongols and such in other threads (as well as ideas about class and race) so I don't want to relitigate that here. But I don't understand making an issue of his religion. I don't view the writer of a fantasy setting holding religious views to be a problem or outdated (there are still lots of Catholics around today, it isn't like the religion was something only of Tolkein's time). One of the things that has made his work appealing to people who are religious is those themes seem present in the work. I've read plenty of books by Catholics, Protestants, Buddhists, Atheists, Muslims, etc. Any writer is going to have a worldview that makes claims about ultimate reality (even if those claims are Atheistic).

I think when you read stuff that was written in the past, it is important to put it in the context of its time, to understand its flaws. But it can also become this thing where that conversation drowns out the rest of the works value. It reminds me a lot of how Victorians handled primary source material in history where they had tremendous difficulty taking themselves out of their own moral framework when understanding people writing in the past (again talking primary source material here, not literature). And what you noticed when you read history books that were written in that way is, they ended up really having a hard time understanding what people in the past truly thought. The issue I see in these discussions is the emotions around our moral concerns (and there are valid moral concerns being raised that in the real world certainly deserve our attention), feel like they cloud our ability to interact with earlier material (save on that sole level of where the problems are).

 

[Remathilis]

Many.

Yes. Lovecraft's overt racism, Gorman's fetishism, Howard's racial perspective, Farmer's obsession with sex, Asimov's exclusion of women, Tolkien's implicit class-and-race-and-religious worldview. Let's face it, the list is endless.

But I'm not buying Howard 's work. Or Tolkien's or Lovecraft"s. I'm buying an RPG book based on tropes found in those books, filtered by different authors and different opinions. Presumably, someone is going to take the Chuthulu mythos and make Lovecraft Country with it. They aren't going to declare any reference to cosmic horror as toxic.

Part of the human experience is taking art and reinterpreting it. While some will blindly copy (and intentionally or unintentionally perpetuate harm) others will steal it and make it better in the retelling. Not to declare it as untouchable, it's value lost due to imperfections. So much of our art is flawed work made by flawed people. It is the job of future generations to find the flaws and refine them out, not to declare the whole thing wasted and discard it.

(What would really help is shorter copyright periods that allow works to freely enter the public domain sooner. Sure, we can reinterpret Conan or Chuthulu now, but Middle Earth is still off limits and will be so for a great while longer).

That said, an author isn't a genre. No one believes wizarding teen school dramas are no longer viable because of one prominent terf author. I'd play Strixhaven any day, even with its obvious inspiration out of The Wizarding World. Joanne doesn't own the rights to magical schools. Likewise, you can make cosmic horror free of Lovecraft's racist and eugenics views. (They weren't important to the main thesis anyway: No Lives Matter).

You can make a Dark Sun that engages in the central premise of the setting, but excise a lot of its negative tropes. You just have to accept things are going to change. Ravenloft did it. And I think it's stronger for facing the obvious imperfections in its source material rather than blinding copying them. Dark Sun could be the same, but it's not going to look like 2e Dark Sun.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

It is funny when I think some things are allowed, tolerated in this current age, even seen as something totally normal, but in a couple of the future decades they will be tagged as propaganda, Overton window or negative priming.

The cleasing war was a genocide, but this happened in the past, it shouldn't be happening again in the same time than the PCs. Teenages should understand some horrible things happened in the past.

Some elements of the lot are very sinnister, for example the origin of the dead lands, but it is not worse than teenages reading the plot of old horror movies in the wikipedia.

Now I am thinking other of my crazy ideas. For the blue and green age the rhulisti created "rescue units", and later these were recreated by magic and psionic to evacuate for disaster or violent conflicts. After the cleasing war these "rescue units" are still working, but in a wicked way. Do you remember the old legends about fey changelings, where a human baby is replaced with an "impostor"? Something like this. These (magitek) "rescue units" infiltrates among the population and abduct people to ben sent to other place. This place is relatively safe, but they have to start from zero, something like the survival videogames where your airplane has crashed or your suffer a shipwreck in the ocean.

Some times adult people are abducted and sent to no-so-safe zones, and this is not an error, but intentionally by some unknown power, like a test or penance. When the "pilgrim" has "passed the test" and "cleaned her karma", then she is rewarded with a teletransportation to a better place within the "land-within-the-wind(Athasian feywild)", where she will help to restore the damaged Nature.

* If somebody published in DMGuild about "lifeshape craft" the crunch for DS could break, because players would ask their biotek for their DS adventures.

* I don't remember complains against Amazon Prime because the new teleserie about the Middle-Earth promoted hate against the orcs.

 

[Minigiant]

You can make a Dark Sun that engages in the central premise of the setting, but excise a lot of its negative tropes. You just have to accept things are going to change. Ravenloft did it. And I think it's stronger for facing the obvious imperfections in its source material rather than blinding copying them. Dark Sun could be the same, but it's not going to look like 2e Dark Sun.

That, my friend, is the core of the "issue"

If WOTC was going to do Dark Sun in 5e, it would be Dark Sun done with the mindset of 5e. And not just 2e Dark Sun converted to 5e rules. IT would change a lot in lore, story, options, simulation, and game mechanics.

And Dark Sun fans would have to accept that.

And WOTC doesn't think enough current Dark Sun fans would accept the changes nor enough potential Dark Sun fans would be interested in the changes to buy the book. And WOTC isn't willing to put up the money to find out.