Ok, a clarification on the necessarily-short topic title. I’m not talking about the rules. If we want to talk about the troubles and triumphs of the 4e rules, that’s a different topic.
I’m talking about the world-building itself. 2e’s Prism Pentad got a bit weird, and heavily modified the world laid out in the first boxed set. The second boxed set, and subsequent products, expanded far beyond the Tyr Region. It’s controversial, to say the least.
Recently, I’ve been thinking about how Athas might often work best if you just completely ignore history… even if you fast forward to the world state after the Prism Pentad, you more or less ignore the deep history of why things are supposed to be the way they are. Oronis may be an avangion pretending to be a dragon king, but that’s just what it is… you’re unlikely to ever know the secret, or the reason behind the secret. I might decide that it’s one way, someone else might decide it’s another, but it’s not spelled out because it’s not important in the current day. There’s the Cerulean Storm and that’s new but only like five people still alive have an inkling as to why it’s there.
4e kind of does this; I’ve been looking through the book, but I may have missed some of it. 4e is immediately after the death of Kalak (the section on Urik says “In recent weeks”), more or less ignores the north (Kurn and Eldaarich are mentioned once), and the Jagged Cliffs and Crimson Savanah get slightly more than half a page altogether. Rajaat is mentioned 5 times in the entire book, all in one sidebar.
So, from your view, what did 4e do wrong with regards to the world-building of Athas?
4E, in terms of the reset, did a lot of things right. It basically returns to the status quo of the original boxed set of 2E Dark Sun. The designer of 4E Dark Sun, Richard Baker, gave his reasoning for the decisions that were made in an interview.
IMO, the 2 things wrong with the world-building of 4e DS were endemic to all of 4e: shoehorning in corporately-mandated content and using the IP of lore/history-rich settings however they wanted (i.e., poorly).
Content-wise, its the same old complaints - making dray available to play as PCs was good, making them just dragonborn was “eh”; goliath as half-giants? If i have to; tieflings in Dark Sun with only the weakest of explanations? Come on!
As far as lore and such, i get why they rolled the 4e setting back to the death of Kalak, but i just wish they had teased a lot more of the lore that had come before - not used it, necessarily, but somehow made more of an effort to communicate the wealth of stuff that had come before to the folks new to the setting.
I understand the point of 4e DS was to sell 4e DS books, but even if it was just a list of adventure hooks in Dungeon Magazine that mentioned characters or events that alluded to published 2e adventures or sourcebooks, that would have been great - something to get the “4e only” newbies to the setting to ask questions, dig in, and really fall in love with the setting even more (and to remind folks there was a tine of ideas you could port into the newest set of Dark sun mechanics). (Which could have arguably made the setting and books [even?] more popular and profitable ).
The “don’t worry about what came before, make up new adventures and never look backwards” attitude was kinda gauling.
Just because we reset the timeline, it doesn’t mean parts of Dragon’s Crown or whatever weren’t worth having the “4e kids” take a look at and reinterpret.
You have to remember that there was no DnDClassics/DMsGuild back then for people to easily buy the old supplements/adventures. Access to them was limited to pirated PDFs and original copies.
Thinking more about this… how often does Ancient Sumer come up in your daily life? Or Cahokia? Obviously, there aren’t direct parallels… I imagine Ancient Sumer has far more impact on daily life in Iraq than it does in the US… but I also don’t imagine that “far more impact” amounts to all that much, and the leaders of Ancient Sumer aren’t still hanging around. But the timeline of the Brown Age is long, even by dwarven standards… seven thousand years is still 140 generations (at 50 years per generation), the equivalent to 2800 years in human generations. 2800 years ago, the Greeks were figuring out the alphabet. It’s before there were Celts. The Olmecs were building pyramids. And some of these things affect us today (I mean, this is a descendant of the Greek alphabet), but they’re so distant that they’re not something that their genesis matters to people today.
IDK, that depends on what aspects of their culture you focus on. There’s a argument to be made that ancient religions in that area influenced religion in the The Levant, which eventually heavily influenced Christianity, which heavily influenced current Western culture. And, IDK which culture “really” invented/developed agriculture, but i bet you ate farmed crops in the last few days.
It all depends on what you’re considering.
But, yeah, the small-scale historical events probably didn’t matter much.
I very carefully didn’t say anything about pdfs. Folks during 4e were constantly telling newbies about cool old adventures and giving them synopsises so the 4e “kids” could rewrite/reframe the content in 4e. More hints at that content would have driven that even harder and that would have led to more engagement and (presumably) even more new players (from word of mouth and such).
Yes and no. While those things are certainly relevant today, the details thereof are often unknown, and obscured by time and myth. That farming was developed is certainly relevant, but not necessarily how many bushels their first crop produced.
Getting too deep in the weeds about these things risks losing sight of the present, as anyone with a PhD can tell you (or not, because they have a thesis defense next week and they do NOT have time for you )
My humble opinion (based mostly on skimming the books):
I liked the internal consistency of the 4e lore. It just made more sense to me.
I also liked that they didn’t try to shoehorn regular D&D classes into Dark Sun.
Clerics? A divine class. No connection to the gods, so why would there be clerics be included.
Templars? It’s a profession, not a class. Only some of the templars have access to magic from their Sorcerer Monarch. Makes them warlocks. (Didn’t like that there were so many more arcane defilers running around the cities, though…)
I still don’t know what combinations of class and theme represents the general case for the 2e classes. E.g., Shaman + Elemental Priest is, what? Elemental Priest? If, instead, you use Primal Guardian, that’d be a Druid?
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