Slavery - This must be handled extra carefully and must absolutely be seen as an evil to fight against. Years (decades) ago in the 2e Dark Sun days, I ran a short campaign that amounted to the player characters being ex-slaves who freed other slaves and were raising an army to fight against the local sorcerer-king. Lots of muls, half-giants, and thri-kreen in there.
Just have to make it clearly evil and the players as against it. People who fight back.
I'm not certain about this one. Maybe they're all working towards it, seeing the success of Borys, but they try different things with different results. Some good, some very bad.
They're all working towards SOMETHING. Just make it more individual rather than a "This is the one Evil Path and there's also one Good Path as well" type false dichotomy. I hate dichotomies like that so much, there should always be various options for the Sorcerer Kings.
Each more evil than the last!
I like this, but would it then be available to players?
100% available at all times. Defile away! Everyone hates you and wants you dead. Especially your party members that are now down 10hp each until they find a Cleric on Athas.
Possibly, though I would approach it with the players exploring ruins and discovering that the world was once a very different place and could be so again.
Maybe, yeah. But no big "And you need to know this" DM Timeline of the world that puts stuff into context. Broken tidbits of lost lore and history scattered across creation.
I always liked the idea of Borys being the only dragon on Athas. I'm not wholly a fan of his art and I really dislike his name. Borys sounds like a dude from Russia, not the big bad of the setting.
It was a weird name choice...
I like this. Would everyone hate arcane magic still?
ABSOLUTELY. Because your average person doesn't know there's a difference between Defiling and not Defiling.
On this one, I disagree. Maybe they died. Maybe they realized this world wasn't worth saving.
It's the most controversial. I like it, but I get why many don't.
I liked how 4e had no divine power source, so no clerics or paladins. I like the idea of a primal magic source, kind of like what they did in 4e. It looks like they're going back to that in One D&D.
Eh... The Primal Power Source is definitely a must in my book. But I like the idea of the Sorcerer Kings granting Paladins/Heralds magic powers. Priests, too. Just -evil- ones.
And Warlocks, too, of course.
I liked how in 4e, there was a sorcerer-king warlock pact. I think that would work well in this case.
Yup.
I would really like to see some research on rain in real-world deserts, such as the Sahara. Mimic that.
Once every several years there's a little rain. But due to the heat of the Sahara it creates a general buffer zone across it's length and breadth of high pressure around which cold pressure zones move.
If you have a whole planet which is a high pressure zone, you can't really -have- that dynamic. But unless the vast majority of the water were utterly destroyed, there would still be SO MUCH WATER.
And the options in that situation are either:
a) The humidity is constantly 99+% but it cannot actually rain because the temperature is too high for water to exist in a liquid state (Which is 100C or 212F in either case everyone is steam-cooked and dead)
b) It rains Hot.
The Atmosphere can only contain so much water under the boiling point before it has no choice but to fall out of solution.
1. Psionics are a must. I would love to see a focus on that in 5e. Now, the question is, does psionic magic allow for defiling?
Check my Signature. And also no, Psionics don't defile because they aren't magic.
2. I want to see druids trying to restore nature. They know it's off in a bad way.
Some, sure. Preservers. But most Druids try to protect their own little plot of land/sky/caves within the Dark Sun lore.
3. Elemental Magic - This would be good for the druid. I liked the elemental priests. Don't go with earth, air, fire, and water, though. That's too cliche. Go with sand, sun, wind, and rain. It's essentially the same, but that sounds cooler for a Dark Sun campaign.
Yup, that's a part of the canon that the elemental priests follow those four. Like since it's inception.
4. Make Dark Sun more recognizable. Let's see Dark Sun versions of a lot of monsters, rather than most monsters being new ones just for Dark Sun.
I like it.
Really Scarce. Always has been in Dark Sun. That wouldn't change. Bone and Wood weapons are super common.
6. What about magic items?
Similarly scarce. Hard to enchant a bone weapon when you know it's gonna break on a nat 1.