The Return of Dark Sun

So much of the roleplaying game industry focuses so much energy on what Wizards of the Coast is doing. Can you blame them? They’re the owners of Dungeons and Dragons which automatically makes them the 800-pound gorilla in the room. Despite the fact that D&D is just one of literally thousands of roleplaying games, it has only briefly ceded its position as the number one roleplaying game on the market a couple times (Vampire: The Masquerade briefly overtook it in the 1990s and Pathfinder was beating it back in the dreadful 4^th edition D&D era). Other than those two times, it’s been all D&D all the time.

So we’re going to talk about them.

Oh, by the way, I worked there from 2000 to 2004, so I’ve actually seen how the company operates from the inside. Before we get to the current news, I’d like to provide a brief history of WotC:

1997: WotC acquires TSR, which includes games like Dungeons and Dragons, Gamma World, Star Frontiers, and others.

1999: Hasbro acquires WotC (mainly because they were making a mint off the licensed Pokémon Trading Card Game at the time).

2000: WotC releases 3^rd edition D&D along with the Open Gaming License, thus making it possible for anyone to release game material compatible with D&D.

2003: WotC releases 3.5.

2014: WotC releases 5^th edition, which has proven to be the most popular roleplaying game of all time.

2023: WotC tries to revoke the OGL, temporarily throwing the industry of third party support into chaos. This results in them changing course and officially releasing 5E via the Creative Commons license, effectively changing nothing, but introducing a whole new layer of licensing into the mix of third party support.

Also in 2023, WotC send the Pinkerton private investigators (a notorious group with a long history as the largest private police force that was especially concerned with union busting over a hundred years ago) to the house of a fan who accidentally released a YouTube review video of a set of Magic: The Gathering cards prior to its official release date.

So what’s the latest news out of WotC that has gamers talking? This year at Gen Con, they’ve announced that they’re going all-in on reviving several campaign settings that have been almost completely ignored since TSR’s heyday. But, there’s one setting in particular that has people talking: Dark Sun. The reason is simple. Ever since the launch of 5^th edition, WotC has been engaged in making D&D a kinder, gentler sort of roleplaying game (never mind the irony of trying to make a game about hacking your opponents to bits with medieval weapons and magic nicer).

Dark Sun, originally written by Timothy B. Brown and Troy Denning and released for 2^nd edition AD&D from 1991 to 1996, was never what you would call nice. With this setting, D&D dropped its feudal Tolkienesque origins and embraced a darker post-apocalyptic world that had more in common with the He-Man, Gor, and the Sword and Planet genre. Magic destroyed life, so most resorted to psionics instead. The entire planet was a desert except for a thin thrip of green called the Verdant Zone, and it was ruled by dragon kings. Most of the humanoid population was enslaved by these tyrants.

Let’s talk for a moment about slavery. Despite the fact that early D&D had an entire series of campaign modules collectively called the Slave Lords, depicting slavery in RPGs has fallen out of fashion. While slavery has been a persistent evil for just about as long as humankind has existed in the real world, it took on a particularly ugly form in the United States which was based entirely on racial inequality (in ancient Rome, you could be an ordinary citizen who fell behind on their bills and thus became enslaved to your debtors). For that reason, enough people have chosen to become offended by the inclusion of slavery in roleplaying that many major publishers have backed away from using it as a plot device entirely. Paizo Publishing was one of the first to say that they would not have any depiction of slavery at all in Golarion from a certain point foward, while WotC has quietly backed away from the subject matter without saying anything in particular about it publicly.

For this reason, Dark Sun has for years been considered the one setting WotC could never touch again after the more sensitive turn D&D has taken under 5^th edition. This is why the world was shocked when it was announced this year at Gen Con that the setting was getting new life.

Now, I’m going to be blunt and honest. My initial take was that I couldn’t see them doing this without destroying the very things that made Dark Sun special: the violence, the slavery, the blatant nihilism. This is a world you couldn’t even visit using spelljamming ships because the presence of one ship harnessing that much magic would probably be enough to destroy the entire verdant zone. How could WotC do this book without filing all the sharp edges off and making it milquetoast?

Well, there’s a response to that. They’ve announced that this will be the first R-rated product since 3.5’s Book of Vile Darkness and Book of Exalted Deeds (the latter of which was the first major gaming product I managed to get my name on. What was so mature about the book of Exalted Deeds still mystifies me, but it carried the warning sticker nonetheless). This time, they’re going to shrink wrap it, and the artwork is going to depict ultra-violence and nudity, and the setting content is going to throw caution to the wind and really dig into the mature themes.

Following their rejection of half-species in the core rules which ignored decades of having some of D&D’s most well-known characters like Tani Half-Elven being members of those half-species, I have to wonder how they’re going to handle the Mul, which were a half-human, half-dwarven slave race. I mean, if we’re abandoning the desire to appeal to everyone, the mull make a certain kind of sense. Or, maybe, the Mul will just be rationalized as a species that was bred into existence from human and dwarven progenitors. Who knows? As a quick aside, I still have half-elves and half-orcs in the Daring & Dread campaign setting because there have been half-elves and half-orcs in my games and I’m not about to change it because the latest half-edition decided they were somehow problematic.

So, given the fact that I’m talking about a book that isn’t even out yet, which I’m not working on, what do I think of it?

If I have any concern, it isn’t that they’re including subject matter that many find problematic, but that it looks like they’re going so far in the opposite direction that they’re likely to change the tone of the original. The original Dark Sun setting and its line of support products prominently featured gorgeous art by Gerald Brom, which featured savagery, the stark beauty of the desert world, and a distinct alien element that set it apart from standard D&D. Likewise, the writing was descriptive, informative, and dealt with mature subject matter in a very calm and matter-of-fact manner.

With all the available information, my main concern at this moment is that by making this a mature title, they’ll have to set the elements D&D normally won’t touch to 11 in order to justify the Mature label, thereby changing the flavor of the setting. At present, there is no indication that the original authors of the setting, or even Brom for that matter, will be involved in the creation of this setting book. While it is entirely possible to bring new professionals in to recreate something from 30 years ago, what are the odds that they’ll manage to get the flavor just right?

And that’s where WotC frequently fails. As intellectual property managers, they have a reputation for diluting, subverting, and fundamentally changing their core intellectual property. Tieflings, Dragonborn, Goliaths, weren’t core playable species they added them, yet under the new rules choosing them is just as valid as playing a dwarf or halfling used to be, thereby diluting the original game’s distinct flavor. Both Dragonlance and the Forgotten Realms underwent dramatic changes to both their magic systems and their geography… at least until the fan backlash forced them to change them back to the way they were (and to be completely fair, Dragonlance 5^th Age began in the declining days of TSR and didn’t last long). And the novels line… let’s just say that outside of the new novels by Weis and Hickman, and R.A. Salvatore, the less said about the new ones the better.

My hope is that WotC does justice to Dark Sun. My hope is that the mature rating on this means they won’t be diluting or exaggerating what made that setting special in the first place. In short, I hope they get it right. But, after seeing the way they’ve handled pretty much every other setting they own, I have my reservations. Fortunately, the 2^nd edition AD&D material still exists and can be purchased in both PDF and print-on-demand form, and there’s more than enough 3^rd party/fan-made rules out there to make it work with 5E. Sometimes the best thing about a setting revival is that it serves as a reminder of how great the original was, and provides incentive to revisit it again after all this time.