Of all the many and varied fantasy worlds to arise from Dungeons and Dragons, Dark Sun is one of the most sinister, morally compromised, and compelling. It’s a personal favorite, but as much as I want new supplements set in this world so that new fans can discover it, I simply don’t have faith in the current DnD brand to handle a setting which draws so much of its strength from moral horrors and challenging ideas.
Dark Sun was first published for DnD second edition between 1991 and 1996, with third edition support provided by Paizo in Dragon magazine, and official modules returning for fourth edition in 2010. But in the ten years since DnD fifth edition launched, we haven’t heard a whisper of Dark Sun or its unique world Athas.
Athas is a post-apocalyptic fantasy setting that consciously subverts tropes of the genre. Many classic fantasy species are extinct, killed in wars of genocidal extermination in millennia past. The world is almost entirely devoid of oceans and greenery, a great expanse of desert. The farthest explorers may reach inhospitable mountain ranges, or jungles populated by savage, humanoid-eating halflings.
There are no gods in Athas, but there are the Sorcerer Kings. These beings are the greatest arcane spellcasters in the world, and are responsible for Athas’ terrible desolation. Arcane magic is drawn from the lifeforce of nearby living creatures. Those who practise their magic without care are Defilers, scouring the land of life as they suck up every drop of vitality.
Each of the Sorcerer Kings rules a city state, a relative oasis of stability and order within the endless desert, but these are cruel havens. Slavery is ubiquitous – some races, such as the half-human, half-dwarf Muls, are almost all enslaved.
It’s a grimdark world, and an explicitly political one. The ecological harm wrought by Defiling magic is a fantasy translation of industrial pollution and climate change. The original adventure modules for Dark Sun led the players through a slave revolt that slew a Sorcerer King and liberated one of the city states.
Dark Sun handles complicated topics indelicately. It is a pulp fantasy adventure world, inspired by the Swords and Sorcery writing of Robert E Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs. It is not attempting to engage seriously with the subjectivity of enslaved people. It is not a game about trauma and resistance, it is a game of heroes and adventures.
Nor is the depiction of DnD races delicate. The distant jungle halflings are drawn from the pulp fiction concept of man-eating pygmies, originating in Victorian hysteria around ‘savage’ indigenous cultures in the regions of the globe Europe was colonising.
In the Muls’ second edition rules, their DnD stats meant they were less intelligent and charismatic than humans, and in fourth edition they still have characteristics that make them ‘naturally suited’ to a life of labour. Even the name ‘mule’ reflects a variety of prejudiced slang used for people with mixed heritage.
It’s what the online discourse calls problematic fiction. Even as Dark Sun is a right-on, pro-environment, tyrant-smashing fantasy, it clumsily reproduces harmful stereotypes, and deploys some of history’s worst atrocities as pulp setting material.
And in 2023, DnD’s then executive producer Kyle Brink said that Dark Sun was “problematic in a lot of ways” and “that’s the main reason we haven’t come back to it”. What, precisely, he meant by this was ambiguous: so problematic that it no longer fit with the WotC (and Hasbro) brand? So problematic that WotC wanted to do a good job or no job at all? We don’t know.
There are three ways to reckon with the problematic elements of a game and its story. You can just leave them in, perhaps labelling them as period elements that reflect outdated sentiments. Audiences can find them discomforting, or laugh them off, or accept them ironically, or ignore the work, or take the wrong message. It’s a fine enough way to handle reproductions of old material.
You could also remove them – or at least attempt to hide them. This seems to be Wizards of the Coast’s current approach to dealing with problematic elements of its games and their fictions. And DnD has a lot of them.
DnD’s mechanical heart, the very concept of adventuring, comes from Original DnD. That was a wild west fantasy, a game in which players would accrue money, power, and personal growth by venturing into the unknown, and would bring safety and stability to the frontier by killing anything that resisted. The party colonises the world, building strongholds, acquiring followers, hiring mercenaries, quelling ever greater resistance from intrinsically evil members of other races.
The new DnD Player’s Handbook illustrates all the different species of adventurer as happy societies, focusing on their lives outside dungeon encounters. It reflects the contemporary player experience of DnD as a fun social activity, with adventurer groups forming found families. But no matter what Orcs look like, modules will still involve killing a lot of sentient beings, usually without negotiation. The problems in the gameplay persist, beneath the narrative wallpaper.
A more egregious example of Wizards of the Coast failing to engage with a moral challenge came in the recent Magic the Gathering set Outlaws of Thunder Junction. This set used the aesthetics of Wild West films and books – media created by non-native Americans to mythologise a period of colonial land-grabs, enabled by the displacement and murder of millions of native Americans.
To attempt to nullify the moral horror underlying this fiction, WotC opted to create a custom MTG plane that was literally an empty world, devoid of sentient species. There would be no colonial violence in this Wild West, because there was no-one to colonise. But this idea of an empty world, or “terra nil”, is itself a piece of colonist propaganda that was used in the real world.
The third, and to my mind best, way to handle the ‘problematic’ elements of fiction is to embrace them. Just because a concept is easy to mishandle, does not mean we should not attempt to engage with it, or that failed attempts to engage with it are valueless or wrong.
Dark Sun may be clumsy, but it goes places other DnD settings don’t, and can’t. It is richer and more interesting for it. Representing slavery and race is difficult, and in a pulp adventure game even more so, but I don’t want to live in the narrow band of life that is easy. The most interesting things come from artists doing something difficult. I haven’t seen evidence that Wizards of the Coast is able to meet the challenge – I look forwards to the time when they prove me wrong.
Up to date with the DnD release schedule? Wargamer has handy guides to help you create great characters, like this guide to the DnD classes – we also have a useful feature about the latest class to appear on DnD Beyond to help you decide if it’s safe to add to your game table.
Source: Wargamer
