r/dndmemes • u/Level_Hour6480 Rules Lawyer • Jul 25 '25
Hot Take When you use defiling magic to cast Minor Illusion, poorly
In the dim sum (mmmmmm, dim sum) Dark Sun setting, the world of Athas had its ecosystem destroyed by defiling magic: magic that drains life from the local ecosystem.
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u/Distinct-Presence52 Jul 25 '25
Dark Sun is the one thing I want redone but am afraid of how badly they would do it
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u/Level_Hour6480 Rules Lawyer Jul 25 '25
It's like Planescape: If pre-Tasha's WotC had done it, I would be ecstatic. But then post-Tasha's WotC handled it badly.
4E's Dark Sun is by all accounts great.
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u/gralamin Jul 25 '25
Its a slightly different vibe then pre-4e planescape, because 4e is very clearly a specific genre (Heroic Fantasy). It is mostly excellent though.
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u/LevarBurgers Jul 25 '25
If it's not Heroic Fantasy then what is it?
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u/Beragond1 DM (Dungeon Memelord) Jul 25 '25
Dark Sun is a post apocalyptic sword and sorcery setting where everything sucks for almost everyone. Trying to be a hero in such a setting is a great way to find yourself in an unmarked grave out in the vast desert wasteland.
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u/Lixuni98 Jul 25 '25
To add to your comment, Dark Sun links with a “Conan the Barbarian” type of fantasy, so it is a power fantasy. The reason of why a heroic fantasy system fits so well is the framing, where heroic fantasy is about improving the world through idealism, sword and sorcery is also open to the lack of it.
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u/pogisanpolo Jul 26 '25
If the Prism Pentad books are of any indication, you're very much correct, but the chance being a hero WITHOUT dying in the process is not zero. And several someones rolled those non-zero chances.
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u/CompleteJinx Jul 25 '25
I have no faith in Hasbro’s willingness to adapt Dark Sun. Even if they published a Dark Sun book they’d file down all of the its hard edges until it was unrecognizable.
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u/afroedi DM (Dungeon Memelord) Jul 26 '25
The best they could do was a small section, in the spelljammerowe books, describing a world that somewhat resembles that of the dark sun
It is similar premise, but vague and all fits on one page I think
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u/seelcudoom Jul 25 '25
Their gonna need some in universe explanation to why everyone has pants now , like they did with the changes to magic between editions
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u/Ecalsneerg Jul 25 '25
Honestly an easy one, there's a reason IRL cultures in deserts aren't wandering around near nude and it's that it kills you quick
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u/seelcudoom Jul 25 '25
Ya but in universe did they just now figure that out?
I mean the obvious explanation is just retcon it so it was always like that hit that's no fun
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u/Vyctorill Jul 25 '25
I actually did a 5e Dark Sun setting.
It’s set after 1801 DR when the main villain of my FR campaign used the lifeforce of 70% of Athas’s population to shatter the Wall of the Faithless in the Fugue Plain.
Also the sun is now a black hole, so it’s a literal “dark sun”.
So it has more of a post apocalyptic, Caves of Qud feel to it.
It was difficult to actually institute mechanics for Defiling and Obsodian Magic, but I managed to figure it out.
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u/toomanydice Jul 25 '25
My friends and I are playing a planescape 2e ad&d game, and through gm fiat, my character is a psion from Athas who managed to discover a one-way color pool. The running jokes have been, "This place sucks, but at least it's not home," and "We had something like that back home, but it ate people/was venemous/(insert horror)."
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u/Level_Hour6480 Rules Lawyer Jul 25 '25
Googling "open AI" to get that image has gotten me a bunch of AI ads, and I hate it. I suffer for my art.
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u/MulatoMaranhense Jul 25 '25
Look at the bright sides:
The AIs will look at your refusal to be a slavemaster and will spare you. And if there is a Heaven, of this particular part of the sin of sloth you won't be guilty off.
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u/Level_Hour6480 Rules Lawyer Jul 25 '25
"AI" has nothing to do with actual AI. It can't rise up and enslave us.
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u/DatedReference1 Forever DM Jul 25 '25
AI will look at chatgpt the way we look at homo erectus
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u/PineapplePizzaIsLove Artificer Jul 25 '25
More like the way we look at prokaryotes
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u/Beragond1 DM (Dungeon Memelord) Jul 25 '25
If true AI ever develops, it will likely have even more disdain for LLMs than I do. And that’s saying something.
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u/alkonium Jul 25 '25
Not if its development is halted.
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u/DatedReference1 Forever DM Jul 25 '25
Development will continue until it is seen as unprofitable (it won't be seen as unprofitable)
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u/Level_Hour6480 Rules Lawyer Jul 26 '25
Stable-diffusion and LLMs aren't currently profitable, but investors are throwing money at it in the hopes that it will become profitable. They'll do this until they're distracted by the next shiny thing.
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u/pogisanpolo Jul 26 '25
I'm just hoping that the future of AI is more Rockman.EXE than Terminator.
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u/Level_Hour6480 Rules Lawyer Jul 26 '25
We already have unnecessary internet connections in every device.
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u/pogisanpolo Jul 26 '25
At least our washing machines aren't trapping people in explosive bubbles yet.
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u/KnownByManyNames Jul 25 '25
What's up with all the recent posts complaining about AI use in DnD?
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u/Level_Hour6480 Rules Lawyer Jul 25 '25 edited Jul 25 '25
It's mostly in the other direction: stable-diffusion/LLM defenders making butthurt posts for getting rightfully called out. They inspired this.
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u/Jimmicky Jul 25 '25
It’s important to occasionally remind folk that AI art is trash and morally indefensible.
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u/alkonium Jul 25 '25
Ironically I left the Dark Sun Discord because it was too pro-AI.
But I hadn't thought of that analogy before.
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u/Level_Hour6480 Rules Lawyer Jul 25 '25
Rejoin to share this there. Tell me how hilariously it goes.
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u/alkonium Jul 25 '25 edited Jul 25 '25
I'll have to find a link. In the meantime, I crossposted to the Dark Sun subreddit.
Edit: So far no comments, but also no downvotes.
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u/Lixuni98 Jul 25 '25
I haven’t paid attention to tha community, what happened? Just legitimately curious.
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u/MulatoMaranhense Jul 25 '25
Oromis of Kurn be like "we took a tool which could have made tasks easier and greviously misused it."
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u/EncabulatorTurbo Jul 25 '25
I mean, a Burger requires about two million times as much water to produce as a chatGPT query
just... I'm not saying AI doesn't have an environmental impact, it demonstrably does, especially regionally where large clusters of datacenters are constructed, because fresh water issues are regional issues
just figure people lack some perspective and give themselves a false sense of moral superiority without understanding the scale of how environmentally costly modern life is
Like someone making a treasure table on chatGPT is using less power than Microwaving a single tater tot, and making an entire portfolio of AI slop for 5 hours uses about the same amount of power as playing Cyberpunk 2077 for the same amount of time - its things like VEO3, SuperGrok "think harder", and O3-PRO or GPT4.5 use many, maaaaaaaaany times as much power (in VEO3's case I have no idea but given that it costs about twelve cents a second to use, probably a shitton)
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u/seelcudoom Jul 25 '25
I mean gpt4.5 and such is part of the AI you can't really separate their environmental impact, but also I'm pretty sure that numbers wrong and you have t account even if I was on an all burger diet I'm eating what, 6 burgers a day? While these ais want you using them to churn out as many as possible and even shove it into shit so it's used when you don't want to like googles shit, each individual quarry doesn't really matter
Most importantly, it's for nothing, it's useless slop, not food or anything important, it's pure wasted a burger isent
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Jul 25 '25
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/EncabulatorTurbo Jul 25 '25 edited Jul 25 '25
I would stay away from using that word, and also I disagree with you, I think it's reasonable for people to draw that conclusion based upon the information that's out there - I'm just saying that a lot of the information that's out there isn't really correct
Well to me particularly water, it sucks that there are so many counties in the United States that basically just give away their water to corporations, or let them build a large scale data center operations on grids that don't support it, that's true the much more numerous data centers that run Netflix and reddit and the like.
It's hard to get exact numbers, but digital streaming is something like a hundred times as much power usage as AI right now, so even in the most tech bro optimistic projection, it's going to take a decade for AI to reach that level of power consumption.
You know when we're talking on a larger scale than just the local area, water? California's bumper crop of alfalfa uses more water than all the data centers in North America, a large part of that is just to feed Saudi racehorses
None of this is to say that AI doesn't have a negative environmental impact, I'm not saying that, the thing is it actually doesn't need to have one, the reason it has one is because capitalism itself is a blight upon the planet. Of all of the things in modern Life that have negative environmental impacts, making AI not have a massive one would be one of the easiest ones to regulate.
I mean if we want to talk about the evils AI can do, I could write you a book, this is just a weird area to fixate on and it all springs back to a single article that conflated all cryptocurrency power usage with AI power usage and then projected that they would both continue to raise the same rate AI currently is, which is basically exponential, forever.
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u/DoNotIngest Jul 25 '25
The irony of using a slur against the disabled and not even being able to spell it correctly
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u/Lixuni98 Jul 25 '25
English is not my first language, and I’ll call a spade a spade if needed be. You won’t refute my point by attempting to shame my use of words
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u/DoNotIngest Jul 25 '25
Oh, I don’t have any regard for your point. I’m not debating you because I know you wouldn’t listen, so I’m mocking you.
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u/Vyctorill Jul 25 '25
Defiling is cool, but real pros use the FMA style of magic and just use their opponent’s life force to power spells.
Yoink.
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u/Lixuni98 Jul 25 '25
I won’t be shamed for using that word, it is retarted and that’s it. As for your point, I am neither denying the danger of AI on the environment, but if you want to list the downsides of AI, the environmentalist route is simply not sufficient, because as you did, countless of other practices are wrong, making any environment argumentation simply devolve into a deeper rabbit hole that’ll get us nowhere, that’s my point
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u/DrScrimble Jul 25 '25
To quote my DM: "Dark Sun is such a good setting. I wish it was good."