Keep the Chains

Keep the Chains: Dark Sun, Slavery, and the 50 Million

The Grogs were right.

I should probably establish something before going any further: I have never played Dark Sun. I don’t have a nostalgic attachment to Athas, and I have never had much interest in playing there. I prefer my fantasy worlds a little more fantastical, with green forests, ancient ruins, castles, dragons, and taverns, rather than spending Saturday night wandering around what looks like the waiting room outside the gates of Hell. So this is not me demanding that Wizards leave my childhood setting alone. I have no childhood memories of Dark Sun to protect. Besides, I was a teen engrossed in basketball when a Lorraine Williams-led TSR released Dark Sun in 1991.

What interests me is the principle behind changing it.

For years, grognards have warned that if Wizards of the Coast ever brought Dark Sun back, it would not come back intact. Athas was too brutal, too uncomfortable, and too unwilling to soften its world for modern sensibilities. When somebody gets something right, they deserve to hear it. On Dark Sun, they called it.

In a recent TTRPG Insider interview with D&D executive producer Greg Bilsland and senior game designer Makenzie De Armas⁠, Wizards discussed how it is adapting Dark Sun for a modern audience. Bilsland explained that Wizards has invested more heavily in sensitivity readers for Dark Sun because of the particular challenges presented by the setting. The most significant change concerns slavery, an institution woven throughout the original depiction of Athas. Bilsland argued that a setting does not need slavery in order to portray oppression.

In the abstract, that is certainly true. There are countless ways to create an oppressive fictional society. The more important question, however, is why an established setting should have one of its defining evils removed simply because that evil is uncomfortable to some?

I'm uncomfortable with gay beholders hosting orgies but here we are.

Dark Sun is supposed to be uncomfortable. Athas isn’t the Forgotten Realms with less water. It’s a dying world devastated by the abuse of magical power. Sorcerer-kings rule city-states as tyrants. Resources are scarce. Civilization is brutal. Ordinary people live in ruthless exploitation. The original designers were not presenting slavery as honorable. They were showing us a civilization that had gone horribly wrong.

Scar taking the kingdom of Pride Rock and corrupting the land does not endorse tyranny. Tolkien did not endorse industrial devastation by describing what Saruman did to Isengard.

Slavery works the same way. A slave market in Athas does not have to be presented as problematic or background decoration. It can be horrifying. A Dungeon Master can introduce players to families being separated, gladiators forced into arenas, and ordinary men and women struggling to survive under an institution that denies them agency. The players choose what to do about it. They can break the chains, attack the slavers, and smuggle people out of a city-state. That seems considerably more powerful than pretending the institution does not exist.

There is also an uncomfortable contrast between the amount of cultural anxiety surrounding fictional slavery and the state of slavery in the real world.

According to the International Labour Organization’s Global Estimates of Modern Slavery⁠, produced with the International Organization for Migration and Walk Free, an estimated 49.6 million people were living in modern slavery on any given day. That figure includes approximately 27.6 million people in forced labor and 22 million in forced marriage. The estimates are for 2021, so this should not be mistaken for a literal 2026 headcount.

Roughly fifty million real people live in conditions classified as modern slavery, yet we expend enormous cultural energy debating whether imaginary slavery is appropriate in a world ruled by sorcerer-kings.

Right?

Here is an alternative for Wizards of the Coast: leave Dark Sun alone and put the controversy to work.

Publish Athas as it was, make absolutely clear that slavery is an evil of the setting rather than something the game celebrates, and then commit portions of the proceeds from the books to fighting the real thing. Ten percent of the profits from Dark Sun products donated to reputable organizations combating forced labor, human trafficking, and modern slavery would be substantial.

Let a fictional world with tangible oppression help free actual human beings from it.

Wizards could tell its audience that Dark Sun depicts an evil that still exists in our world and that the company intends to use the success of the setting to help fight it. Put information about modern slavery in the book. Point readers toward credible organizations working against it. Publish the numbers. Donate part of the profits. One of the most controversial elements of the setting could become an opportunity to educate people and materially support the fight against the very evil the game portrays.

I cannot possibly know what individual sensitivity readers, designers, or players do with their time or money. The point is about priorities. We have developed a strange cultural habit of treating the depiction of terrible things as though eliminating the depiction somehow strikes a blow against the terrible thing itself.

The hideous nature of slavery is precisely why it can have a place in serious fantasy. Stories have always allowed human beings to examine things that frighten, anger, and disgust us. We tell stories about war without endorsing war. We tell stories about betrayal without endorsing betrayal. We create villains because courage means considerably less with no stakes for the hero. Fantasy does not become stronger when every uncomfortable element has been removed.

It simply becomes incapable of saying anything meaningful about evil.

If there were ever a Dungeons & Dragons setting capable of confronting slavery directly, Athas is it. The entire world is constructed around consequences. Magic destroyed the environment. Powerful rulers built societies around domination. Ordinary people inherited a world ruined by those who came before them. Survival has become an act of defiance. Slavery fits that world because it demonstrates what happens when power becomes completely divorced from human dignity and accountability.

I would've thought more people would recognize that in 2026?

There is also tremendous potential for heroism in confronting it. Imagine a campaign in which characters begin as slaves in the arenas of Tyr and eventually help destroy the institution that put them there. Imagine underground networks moving escaped slaves between settlements, Templars hunting them through the desert, merchant houses profiting from the trade, and players forced to decide how much they are willing to risk. Those stories do not celebrate slavery. They make slavery the enemy.

That is what bothers me about sanitizing established fictional worlds in the name of protecting modern audiences. We should trust adults sitting around a table to understand the difference between portraying something and approving of it. We should trust Dungeon Masters to establish boundaries with their players. Most importantly, we should remember that fantasy has never existed merely to make us comfortable. Some of its greatest value comes from allowing us to walk into terrible imaginary places and decide what kind of people our characters will be.

The grogs were right about this one. Dark Sun could not return without somebody deciding that parts of Dark Sun were no longer acceptable for Dark Sun. That does not mean every change Wizards makes will be bad, nor does it mean the new material cannot produce good adventures. It does mean that longtime fans were justified in wondering whether the modern company was willing to let Athas remain as ugly as Athas was designed to be.

Meanwhile, the latest global estimate puts roughly fifty million real people in modern slavery around the world. If we genuinely believe slavery is an abomination, then perhaps our moral imagination should be large enough to do two things at once: confront the real institution wherever it still exists and allow fiction to portray that institution as the evil that it is.

Wizards shouldn't remove slavery from Dark Sun. It needs to show exactly how ugly slavery is and then use some of the money made telling those stories to help people suffering. Keep Dark Sun as Dark Sun. Ten percent of the profits to fighting modern slavery.

Turn sensitivity into action and controversy into something measurable.

You do not defeat evil by pretending it never existed.

Put it in front of heroes, give them the power to act, and choose what they are going to do about it.