Just got the 5e Spelljammer books. I had heard beforehand that “Athasspace” was to appear somehow, only for it to be replaced by “Doomspace” before printing.
So I checked out the two-page summary of Doomspace. Not only is it pretty obvious that this was originally meant to be the Dark Sun system… but they were totally going to murder Athas to death!
Doomspace had a war thousands of years ago between the gods and primordials. The gods lost and were banished by the primordials. (4e DS explanation for absence of gods)
The primordials erected an impenetrable crystal sphere around the system to keep the gods out. (Reference to 2e DS and 2e Spelljammer’s reason why you couldn’t travel to Athas via spelljamming)
The planet obviously meant to be Athas is now called “Fyreen”. (Reference to Pyreen?) Fyreen is described as a world “despoiled by dragons” with “dwindling resources” and ruled by “tyrants”.
Doomspace’s natives also appear to be entirely Dark Sun races.
So yeah, if this was Athasspace, somebody was actually going to kill off the entire campaign setting. The gods had finally shattered the crystal sphere, which is how the system is now open. Athas’ eponymous Dark Sun has died, collapsing into a black hole which is now months at most from destroying everything in the system. The gods may or may not have had a hand in that. One moon had already been ripped from its orbit around Athas and the other would soon follow.
So… To whoever it was that stepped in to save Dark Sun and Athas…
As I said in another thread, ( [Keeping hope for the 5th? - #19 by Machal1])(Keeping hope for the 5th? - #19 by Machal1) it seems that WOTC have the idea to open their entire worlds via the different settings like they always do, using spelljammer.
If they create a world “like Athas” but without calling it Athas or Dark sun, it always can be use for us as we want. We always can transofrm the resources they provide. we can use certain places as we need.
I’m not talking about the rules wich is not interest me but just the setting.
We juts keep what we need and reject the rest.
May Dark sun live through their supplements. We are smart enough to sort out
You know, the orher way to look at this is that a writer at WotC was handed a literal “throwaway” world, and chose to use it to smuggle us all 5e Dark Sun monster stats, which i kinda appreciate.
Save Dark Sun from what? A new generation playing with it?
If I were to analyse it, it seems to me that the conflict the general Dark Sun community is having about whether there should be a 5e Dark Sun or not is being mirrored inside WotC’s own development team.
There are some who still think you cannot recreate the setting in the new editions without “ruining it”, while there are others who believe it can work and are willing to push for it even without having any good psionics rules. And what we’re seeing here is what came out of the two groups opposing each other in editing.
What I mean is I assume the 5e version of the monster keeps sizes the same and other attributes similar across versions. the high str score stays high and a low con score stays low.
Like in 2e to 3e thri-kreen went from Large to Med. but dex stayed high and cha low.