Based on the contents of a recent playtest packet for Dungeons and Dragons, it seems that Wizards of the Coast is working on some form of new supplement for its long-neglected post apocalyptic fantasy setting Dark Sun. I'm equally excited and apprehensive for this return to the blighted world of Athas. Dark Sun is one of the most nuanced and interesting campaign settings in all DnD, but the designers will have to be bold and thick skinned if they want to realise its full potential.
I'm on record saying I doubted that Wizards of the Coast would ever return to Dark Sun. I am very happy that I'm going to be proven wrong. Perhaps the size of the challenge is why WotC is attempting it. With long-standing Dungeons and Dragons creative leads Jeremy Crawford and Chris Perkins leaving the studio earlier this year, Wizards needs to demonstrate it still has a firm hand on the game. Successfully delivering Dark Sun could cement the new leads' reputation and firm up fan sentiment around the studio. But they have a long hard road to climb, and whatever they make won't please everyone.
The things that make the world of Athas and the Dark Sun setting so distinctive and so compelling are inherently political, and that makes them divisive. Athas is a desert world where the lonely bastions of civilization are the city states, each one ruled by a tyrannical Sorcerer King. Their Defiling magic has drained the life from Athas and caused its current environmental collapse, and their rule is propped up by both military power and pervasive slavery. Classic Dark Sun adventures tell stories of slave revolts and the liberation of one of the city states.
That's not subtle politics. The Sorcerer Kings are simple metaphors for oligarchs, billionaires, industrialists, and the devastating impact on the environment that is necessary to support them. The desertification of Athas is literal climate change. The slave revolts are stories of collective solidarity between the oppressed. It's green, it's socialist, it's very left wing.
Making these politics an explicit pillar of the new design could be a source of creative energy, and would certainly be in line with the original creators' vision. Failing to engage with them would be deflating, a mark that DnD is toothless corporate entertainment, not the work of artists with ideas and beliefs. But the reason toothless corporate entertainment exists is because it offends no-one (or at least reassures the money men that no-one will be offended) - and being explicitly political will definitely offend some people.
Emphasising Dark Sun's left wing politics will expose the new designers to the tirades of internet nothings accusing Dark Sun of "going woke". If I sound rather resigned about that, it's because I have seen far too many baby libertarians suddenly notice that something that has never agreed with their politics does not agree with their politics, and lose their shit. They're like cats turning around and seeing a cucumber. Superman, the immigrant refugee who just wants to do good, is woke now. Final Fantasy VII, the game about a band of eco-terrorists attempting to save the planet from extractive capitalism, is woke now.
From the other side of the aisle, there's the charge that Dark Sun is problematic, a claim that, in February 2023, then DnD producer Kyle Brink cited was a key problem with bringing Dark Sun back. The term "problematic" hides a lot of meanings. I like it in its original context, the "problematic favorite": a show or book or game that has many compelling qualities and one or two things you know are kind of wrong.
It's that fantasy series you love, despite the author continually being a real dick about fat characters; that anime with an incredible plot, deep character arcs, and a freaking incest subplot you wish didn't exist. It's not that these concepts aren't worthy of representation in art (everything is), nor that they render the work as a whole unfit for human consumption. The art isn't evil, it's just problematic. Most stuff is, to someone.
Dark Sun is particularly problematic about race - and the DnD races are always a whisker away from being problematic anyway. Take Athas' halflings, who dwell in the jungles at the very distant fringes of the desert, and eat other sentient humanoids. "Cannibal pygmies" is a grotesque trope from pulp fiction with its origins in Victorian and colonial representations of indigenous people.
Divorced from context, it's just a bit of pulp fun. But, given that real world colonial violence had real, catastrophic consequences for millions of people throughout human history, and its legacy still harms those people's descendants today, there is necessarily a swathe of DnD's modern audience for whom the idea of setting aside the historical context is not only impossible but insulting.
Or there's the far more knotty concept of the 'mul', one of Dark Sun's unique playable characters, people who are half human, half dwarf. They're larger than dwarfs, have more endurance than humans, and are almost universally enslaved, often because they are the result of a forced union between two enslaved parents. The muls reflect the reality of some of humanity's worst atrocities, as well as touching on the charged theme of interracial identity. The name 'mul' even reflects derogatory terms for mixed-race people.
The mul aren't problematic just by virtue of existing, but by virtue of how they're handled. Dungeons and Dragons rulebooks inevitably have a finite word budget, and are created by writers with a limited band of perspectives, whose main job is to deliver gung-ho, swords-and-sorcery adventure. There is scope to do tremendously interesting and meaningful things with the mul, but DnD books are not a great medium to do it in.
The other issue with problematic content is that, thanks to today's inescapable culture war, there is no way to adapt it without someone taking issue. If WotC leaves the rough stuff untouched, it'll be showing indifference to the concerns of an increasingly diverse audience who find they have been superficially depicted but hardly represented. Modernize what existed before to respond to criticisms, and reactionaries will raise hell for 'making it woke'. Modernize it badly and they'll get it from both sides. Remove it entirely and I, personally, will call them cowards for throwing the baby out with the bath water.
I thought that this would deter the DnD design team from ever trying to go back to Dark Sun, but I'm delighted that they're seemingly going to try. New books will be better than no books, whether they're tub-thumping anti-capitalist stories that end with a Sorcerer King in a guillotine; timid reheats of old aesthetics with none of the spine; or hot messes with the old problematic elements somehow swapped for brand new ones. Wargamer's DnD rules whizz Mollie Russell is quietly optimistic about the new Athas-themed DnD classes. And with so much potential for brilliance and for failure, whatever happens - good or bad - will at least be interesting.
How do you feel about the prospect of a return to Athas? Excited? Apprehensive? We'd love to chat about it in the official Wargamer Discord community.
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