I can see why they are concerned about a setting where oppressive oligarchs keep the common folk crushed down to maintain their hold on power, all while not caring about the societal and ecological damage they cause in doing so, and the players are often rebels against the system trying to bring them down.
Probably hits a little to close to home to sit easy with them.
His exact words.
“The Dark Sun setting is problematic, in a lot of ways”.
But not a single problem was mentioned.
No mention of themes, tropes, psionics, or anything. Nothing.
I’m not sure he knows why it’s “problematic” for 5e or a future version and is just repeating what’s been said by others. They released it under 4e with many of the same tropes and themes. But magically,13 years later it’s problematic.
Problematic because the target audience refuses to buy it or because the writers refuse to produce it?
My two ceramic bits.
He said that WotC could not be faithful to the themes of Dark Sun while maintaining the inclusivity ethics of WotC.
I believe this to be true. A new version of Dark Sun would be gutted and not really Dark Sun at all. I appreciate his honesty. That said, WotC “ethics” suck.
“Maybe they should put Dark Sun in to the Creative Commons so that people can make of it what they will.”
I agree with his suggestion.
I feel quite vindicated, because WotC confirmed what I already strongly suspected years ago.
Not gonna happen. Hasbro will keep DS as their forever IP and chop it up to use the parts they like of it in other settings.
I’m sorry, but this is a jerk suggestion: that the IP owners “won’t do it right” (they won’t, but that’s beside the point) and should just let everyone else earn money off the IP instead.
What entitled crap. Fan work is already completely free and clear - the only thing the copyright is stopping anyone from doing is producing content to earn money.
Yeah, no doubt. 70yrs + life of author is a bit much.
The laws were supposed to protect the author, but often it doesn’t turn out like that it the content is owned by multinational companies. Also, there is endless pressure to further extend the copyright by these very multinationals.
We had a discussion about this yesterday in the Pristine Tower Dev Group Discord about asking WotC about releasing Dark Sun, and another discussion today about exactly what they might be thinking was “Problematic”.
Here are summaries of the points that came out of both discussions.
First getting WotC to release Dark Sun:
Next, why WotC would find it problematic.
That doesn’t mean we’re stuck though. As Moneymaker pointed out on the FB group, we can still homebrew an independents like ourselves still have leeway to make what we want via OGL.
Similarly, I do think we could have an opportunity to “fix” the problems with Dark Sun’s lore, presenting a way in which WotC could move forward with bringing it back into the fold, but that would be a separate proposal, and would likely prove too spicy for some purists…
I follow the RL community fairly closely and was even published in one of their netbooks. The RL folk dealt with it fairly well by consolidating under two canons. The new 5E canon, and the old RL canon. Some of the 5E stuff is worth mining for ideas, or even making different domains out of them because they are different enough to co-exist alongside. Take Sri-Raji and Kalikeri, for example. Kalikeri was supposed to REPLACE Sri-Raji, but a lot of campaigns (including 5E campaigns) play them side by side as part of the same “cluster”.
I think this is the approach to take and is the approach that I hope that we will see here eventually.
This is the wrong starting point. The starting point is people at WotC that respect the setting. If someone thinks that the setting is “problematic”, for any reason, they will have an unconscious bias and will not do their best work. That’s human nature and it can’t be mitigated. Finally -
alleged racial stereotypes (elves compared to Romani culture, halflings compared to some indigenous cultures)
Its important to state that DS hating trolls are doing this deliberately. I’ve been a DS fan since around 1991. Never heard of halflings being stand-ins for indigenous tribes, or elves being “Romani”. Unless people push back, these trolls will meme this into reality. We should consider this a form of disinformation warfare and push back vigorously. But its hard when WotC comes along and says “that’s true!”, and throws their old game designers under the bus.
I think a further problem is the definition of ‘problematic’ in American society right now.
Dark Sun IS problematic by textbook definition right now - it’d be a pain in the a$$ for WotC to release.
Whether it meets the current understanding in America of “problematic” (notice the quotations), as in racist, sexist, homophobic, etc is a different story.
Keep that in mind.
Those “DS hating trolls” you’re discussing are literally members of the DS facebook group. The hating is coming from inside the house! This is precisely what I’m talking about-- we are our own worst enemies!
And it seems to me our biggest enemies are purism and preciousness about the past. Clinging to these will do nothing for the future of the setting. If we want a new generation of people playing our game, we need to be flexible for them. There’s no way around that. Without a new generation, our setting dies a slow death. And no salesman has ever succeeded in forcing their vision of what the customers want onto the customers.
That doesn’t mean we can’t use “problematic themes”. But if we address these things early on in the book with disclaimer, you’ll be pleased with how much we can get away with.
As for defining problematic, even if we can explain away unintentional stereotypes, it’s pointless to argue about whether slavery, racism, and genocide is problematic or not. Besides, once again, it’s not about us. It’s about our intended target audience for these new books (which is newcomers, not us), and what they see as off-putting.
Let me posit a scenario. Let’s say that every time you reference something, let’s call it X, and X can be described many ways, your detractors say that you are actually speaking in code and using slur. “Sorry mate, won’t do it again”, is it?
I won’t deny there are some goofballs in the Facebook group complaining that when they look at desert elves, they see “Romani”. That’s a problem that is better dealt with methods such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy than by changing yourself to suit their hallucinations.
Kyle Brink is right. What you are asking for cannot be done while maintaining any semblance of the Dark Sun setting. Sure, it will be called Dark Sun, but it will be a different thing. And by the time you are done sanitising it, the goal posts will have moved and now you will be the racist.
At some point these people simply have to be shut down. “Athasian elves are not stand-ins for Romani. That’s a misconception by racists and bigots”.
This is a direct quote from someone, who was in a place to know at Wizards, to my inquiries:
There were a couple issues that steered us away from DARK SUN. Psionics are a pretty important component of the DS setting, and we weren’t confident in our ability to satisfy DS fans with our treatment of psionics. (We were opposed to the idea of making psionics its own separate system, as it was in previous editions. Most 5E fans preferred our tighter, more unified approach to game mechanics.) More importantly, slavery is an important part of the setting, and we decided that topic wasn’t appropriate for our particular flavor of D&D. I’m sure we could have solved the psionics problem, but the slavery issue was tougher. It wouldn’t have been difficult to excise slavery from the setting, but in our experience, D&D is attacked more often for what appears in older material than what the current products actually say. In other words, even with slavery removed from the setting, we were sure to see a lot of press re-hashing DARK SUN’s past, clouding any hypothetical launch. In the end, we decided the risk wasn’t worth the reward.
I asked if they had considered alternatives like just leaving it to the DMsGuild or creating a new region without slavery and they replied:
We talked through a lot of alternatives. Again, our primary concern wasn’t what would appear in our hypothetical product, but the certainty the press would relitigate all the earlier products.
Thanks. If slavery is conceptually difficult due to “inclusivity ethics” at WotC, trying to make slavery work within the Dark Sun context implicitly means attempting to whitewash slavery.
I don’t think there is any “sensitive” way to deal with slavery, just like you couldn’t deal sensitively with certain serious crimes.
Rather, you proceed from the premise that slavery is distasteful and go on from there in creating content. But WotC cannot do that. There is no such situation as 40+ year old grognards holding back Dark Sun from some hypothetical future in which WotC wants to publish Dark Sun material, if not for those backwards and dastardly grognards.
Remember when the OK symbol meant OK until a 4chan trolling campaign turned it into a “white supremacist” symbol? And then “sensitive” people did what was predicted and turned it into an actual hate symbol? This is happening to Dark Sun now. Either pushback like the Harry Potter fandom is doing against “goblins are Jews”, or face the prospect of the same in every aspect of Dark Sun, not just slavery.
I don’t think that every critique is intelligent or in good faith. Intelligent, good faith people should say no.
The original boxed set specifically notes that slavery is wrong and that you can not be good aligned and have slaves.
I was around, and playing, during the satanic panic era, and caught some of the flak from being a gamer back then. It almost feels like a return to those days, but instead of being a satanic panic, its more a problematic panic.
That isn’t to say there aren’t issues or problems that can be looked at, but at times it feels like an overzealousness that stifles discussions or even looking at the problems. And Dark Sun seems to be the latest casualty.
Shutting down dumb arguments I agree with, and here it is the way to go. But nobody has ever gotten anywhere in an argument by saying “Calling x is racist is itself racist.” It’s far better to say “You’re using a surface analysis as the basis of your argument. If you did any looking into the details of this, you’d know better. Any resemblance between the Elves and Roma is coincidental. Frankly, it could just as easily be American businessmen…”
If we’re going to be working with an old setting, we need to be aware that the sensibilities of our current culture may have changed over time, and we need to be prepared to discuss the issue with those who do not understand. This is why I’ll be adding a text box handling these issues into any updated products we do for Athas.org so people don’t have to do the explaining themselves (which can get tiring). If people cannot listen to reason then this game is simply not for them. But for people who worry about aspects of the setting the explanation will be welcome and will make newcomers more comfortable and willing to have fun in our setting.
This is not anything to get angry about, it’s just how the generations have changed over time.
That’s interesting. It likely means Dark Sun will never see the light of day again in a WotC release. It brings me back to the question: “Will you please just let us go, Wizards??? You clearly don’t want us, so just give us the license to go our own way with this!”