I’m a gamer. An old-school tabletop role-play gamer. There, I said it.
I started playing Dungeons & Dragons when I was thirteen, right around the time Mazes and Monsters hit theaters and scared the living daylights out of every suburban parent in America. That was the era when people honestly thought dice and graph paper could summon demons. I lived through the “D&D is satanic” panic — the tracts, the sermons, the moral hysteria. My own father once threw my little brother’s entire hardcover Second Edition collection into the foundation of a house he was pouring, including the first-print Monster Manual. Somewhere out there, a basement’s holding a trapped hoard of Beholders and Bugbears.
I play because I’m addicted to stories. Always have been. And tabletop role-playing games when you have the right group aren’t about stats and loot; they’re about story immersion. You’re not just reading about a hero. You become one. Sometimes it even becomes part of you. You live the moral choices, the fear, the failures, the tiny triumphs. And because the dice don’t care who you are, the story has teeth.
The story that bit hardest for me was Dark Sun. My husband played a thri-kreen, an insectoid desert warrior, and he took great joy in grossing everyone out by eating the bodies of fallen characters. It wasn’t gore for shock value. It was Athas, a world so stripped of mercy and abundance that survival blurred every moral line. Cannibalism, slavery, gladiatorial arenas — none of it was “fun,” exactly, but it was real within the logic of the world. It reminded us that civilization is a fragile miracle.
That’s what made Dark Sun brilliant. It wasn’t heroic fantasy in the safe, high-magic sense. It was a moral pressure cooker. Magic itself drained life from the land. The kings were monsters, the priests were liars, and the good guys were usually barefoot and half-mad. You played it to see what scraps of decency might survive when everything else had turned to dust.
It’s rumored that Wizards of the Coast is developing a new version of Dark Sun, and fans suspect that, like much of WotC’s recent revisits and releases, it will be heavily sanitized, stripped of the slavery, brutality, and moral tension that defined the original. In other words, no contrast. They want the sun without the shadow.
And that, to me, says something bigger about where we are as a culture.
We’ve decided we don’t want darkness anymore — not in our games, not in our movies, not even in our myths. We still crave the hero’s glow, but we’ve forgotten that light only matters when it pushes back against something. The new Dark Sun will have its blazing deserts and its psionic warriors, but it won’t have the moral drought that made the setting human. It’ll be a stage play with the villains written out, a wasteland where no one’s allowed to bleed.
The problem isn’t just creative cowardice. It’s philosophical. We’ve come to believe that if we don’t depict evil, it somehow won’t exist. We treat ugliness or even disagreement as contamination instead of context. But the ancients knew better. Every great story, Biblical, mythic, or modern, depends on the clash between sin and grace. The Odyssey needs its sirens. The Lord of the Rings needs Mordor. Even Star Wars needs the Dark Side.
When we strip that contrast away, stories stop teaching us anything about ourselves. They become moral comfort food, sweet, bland, and nutritionally useless. There’s no tension, no cost, no redemption. Just a flat moral landscape where nothing can fall and nothing can rise.
That’s what happens when you take the dragons out of the world. You don’t make it safer. You make it meaningless.
We’ve been here before. In the early 1800s, an English doctor named Thomas Bowdler decided that Shakespeare was too rough for polite society. He “cleaned up” the plays, cutting the bawdy jokes, toning down the violence, and smoothing out anything that might offend his sister. His family called it The Family Shakespeare. It was a hit among the timid and a punchline to everyone else. From it we get the word bowdlerization: the act of censoring or sanitizing literature to protect readers from moral discomfort.
But what Bowdler did to Shakespeare was a paper cut compared to what we’re doing now. He trimmed the edges; we’re hollowing out the core. At least Bowdler still believed in objective virtue. He thought he was protecting decency. Today’s bowdlerizers believe there is no sin, only offense. And because offense is subjective, everything must be softened until nothing can cut, burn, or challenge.
It’s moral infantilization disguised as sensitivity. We no longer trust audiences to wrestle with darkness or temptation, so we take it away altogether. That’s how you end up with a Dark Sun without slavery, a Frankenstein without monstrosity, even a Bible without Hell.
But a sanitized world is a world without moral gravity. And a world without moral gravity produces people who float through life, unable to tell right from wrong, only what makes them comfortable.
That moral flattening doesn’t just ruin stories. It ruins us.
A society’s myths are its immune system. They teach us how to face evil, how to endure suffering, and how to recognize beauty even when it’s scarred. When we bowdlerize myth — when we scrub away the blood, lust, greed, and sacrifice — we erase the very mechanisms that build resilience. We end up with citizens who can’t metabolize hardship, who think discomfort is harm and moral conflict is trauma.
In every civilization worth the name, darkness wasn’t hidden from the young. It was interpreted so that young minds could process it. That’s what fairy tales did. That’s what epics did. The wolf, the witch, the dragon, they were mirrors of our own fallen nature. Children learned that evil was real but defeatable; later, adults learned that it was never fully vanquished, only resisted anew. Take that away, and you get a generation terrified of shadows, because no one ever taught them that light can win.
This is what happens when we treat moral discomfort as danger. We produce fragile souls, people who can’t tell the difference between evil and the depiction of evil, between offense and sin. We replace tragedy with therapy, confession with self-expression, and judgment with hashtags. The result is a world where everyone wants to be the hero, but no one wants to fight the dragon.
Frankly, they don’t want to slay the dragon anymore. They want to make friends with it. Or date it, as I’ve said before.
That’s the modern instinct: don’t confront evil, negotiate with it. Redefine it until it stops being evil. The dragon isn’t greed or lust or wrath anymore. It’s just “misunderstood.” The serpent simply needs therapy. Lucifer’s not fallen, he’s “different,” or worse, he's the real hero. We’ve turned the moral universe upside down so no one ever has to feel judged.
But the old myths understood something the new ones can’t: you can’t redeem what you refuse to name as wicked. The dragon doesn’t stop burning villages because you empathize with it. You have to stand against it, sword in hand, knowing it might burn you anyway. That’s what courage is. That’s what virtue costs.
When we stop demanding that from our stories, we stop demanding it from ourselves. We start mistaking tolerance for goodness and cowardice for compassion. And we fill the world with people who would rather coexist with darkness than confront it, because confrontation implies truth, and truth makes some people uncomfortable.
But the only thing that ever made humanity noble was its refusal to surrender to the dragon. We need stories that remember that. We need Dark Suns that scorch, Beowulfs that bleed, Odysseys that are lost in darkness and chaos and claw their way back. Because only when we face real darkness can we understand why light is holy.
That’s why I still roll dice. Because every time the scenario begins and the map unfolds, we get a chance to remember what stories are for. They aren’t safe spaces. They’re proving grounds. They teach us to face the dragon, not flatter it; to walk through the wasteland, not pave it over. Stories without darkness aren’t safe. They’re dead. And the moment we stop daring to walk through the desert, sword in hand, is the moment we forget how to find our way home.
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