This isn’t what I am saying. I am not the taking a 4E line, where “if its in D&D then its in Dark Sun”. What I am saying is that the default should be inclusion of classes, until they are proven to be unsuitable. Let me give you an example.
2E Bard in Dark Sun: The Bard is different in Dark Sun, and is actually an assassin, not a skald.
2E Paladin in Dark Sun: The Paladin is said explicitly to not exist.
3E Sorcerers in Dark Sun: The material is utterly silent on the matter. Some arcane spellcasters in the PP seem to cast spells like a 3E Sorcerer, however.
3E Barbians in Dark Sun: The material is utterly silent on the matter. There are barbaric tribes out in the wastes, however.
The starting position should be inclusion. So you start by asking “is there any way we can fit the 3E Bard into the setting?”. Since the 3E Bard simply uses the same name as the 2E DS Bard and has an entirely different function, I think the answer is no.
What of the Paladin? We are told explicitly that there are no paladins. Is there any way we can fit the Paladin class into the setting? I think not.
Then what of the Sorcerer? Is there any specific impediment to their implementation in 3E Dark Sun? I can’t see any. Spellbooks and whatnot are minor matters.
How about the Barbarian? They were excluded as “not being in keeping with the flavour of Dark Sun” for some reason, then when they were finally allowed were renamed Brute, until it must have sunk in how ridiculous it is to rename a core class and the Brute became the Barbarian again.
This happened because the basic stance was demanding that 3E justify itself to the 2E Dark Sun setting. Which is back to front. Every effort could have been made to turn DS into a mainline 3E setting, including retconning certain spellcasters as having levels in the Sorcerer class, like WotC did in the Forgotten Realms setting with the Simbul, a major NPC.
That’s the rub. Certain details about the Sorcerer could have been changed, but the Sorcerer was excluded entirely. People spent years (years!) wasting time arguing about whether the 3E Barbarian class was a good fit for Dark Sun, and the reason for that was trying to force 3E to justify itself to the 2E Dark Sun setting, a literal impossibility because it touches on non-existent concepts at the time of the 2E publications. There was a conversion, but it was a conversion of 3E/3.5E to Dark Sun 2E concepts, not the requested (by WotC) conversion of Dark Sun to 3E/3.5E. It may be a subtle distinction, but its a very important one.
ADDENDUM: Its probably worth posting one of the prestige classes for Sorcerers from the Dragonlance setting. In Dragonlance, there are no “natural” users of magic. Rather, both sorcery and wizardry are learned. Despite a handful of differences in the two traditions, they are more similar than different.
There is no reason why this cannot be conceptually applied to Dark Sun to allow for Sorcerers, Warmages, Dread Necromancers, Beguilers and so on. A lot of people have moved onto 5E, so I may be beating a dead kank, but its worth putting it out there now because people are far more receptive to this idea than before.
This comment from the mailing list is relevant.
As I said before. All the other campaign settings did not have sorcerers in there histories, but with the advent of 3E they have adopted them into there worlds like they have always existed. I mentioned this example before, but in the Forgotten Realms they change the mighty Symbol from being a high level wizard to a high level sorcerer. They’re is nothing in any of the novels that explains this its just assumed she always was in 3E terms. Sorcerers can be easily explain in DS, its just a matter of players and DMs wanting them in their campaigns. Its obvious that the powers that be over at athas.org just do not want them as a core class. Which is fine. I just don’t see it being that far fetched that sorcerers can’t exist in DS. I keep hearing “give us a convincing argument that sorcerers should exist on Athas”. How about a good argument that they shouldn’t.
Bryan Bock