D&D 5E What do you want in a Dark Sun book (sans psionics)?

[Winterthorn]

I would like to see 10th level spells for casters of levels 19 and 20. Wish at 9th level RAW only safe to use if you want to emulate an 8th level spell or weaker - any other effect is subject to the DM whims in terms of consequences. So in theory a totally risk free Wish spell would have to be at least 10th level or higher. I imagine 10th level spells on Athas would be the sort that create artifacts, or change climate, or repairs or ruins vast tracts of land, or raise floating cities into the sky, etc. A high level campaign plot for Dark Sun could be one that ends with the casting of 10th level spells to repair the land and begin create a new better world as a reward.

 

[squibbles]

I would like to see a level of setting detail similar to the what Eberron got, but with some kind of novel take.

Jump the setting forward to 50 years after 2e's Beyond the Prism Pentad:
All the books' main characters except maybe Sadira are dead from old age (because she makes an interesting alternate sorcerer queen). Dregoth laid to waste and occupied Raam; his dray are now everywhere. Balic is greatly diminished from internal conflict, but Andropinis is somehow influencing it from the black. Tectuctitlay's "son" Atzetuk is a powerful psychic who rules Draj. There's lots of religious strife between Lalali-Puy's proseletyzers, Dregoth's cultists, Atzetuk's moon priests, and others rightly suspicious of them.

Jump the setting hundreds of years back to the post-cleansing wars:
Athas is newly desolated. It's a bit greener because it hasn't been defiled as long, but there's a much greater sense of what has been lost--shorelines replaced with salt flats, ruined port cities, peoples with traditions held over from the good times, a memory of the genocides. Borys is still nuts, Dregoth hasn't been betrayed and undeadified yet, Sielba still rules in Yaramuke, Kalidnay hasn't been sucked into Raveloft yet. The sorcer kings are still kind of cooperating, but a cold war is beginning to settle in.

Move the setting out of the Tyr region to some other part of the tablelands--one that maintains similar themes, i.e. terrible scarcity and immortal jerkwads destroying the planet, but with different personalities and adventure locations.

Something that is not the status quo from the original box set... we got that 2 times already.

In any case, the deep lore abut Rajaat and the blue age and so on and so forth needs to be vague and hidden. It's background fluff that ordinary people don't know anything about outside of rumors.

I’m still curious about what side setting agnostic mechanic or subsystem they could add to the book, as an additional selling feature.

Maybe something related to multiple characters, like what 2nd Edition did. Advice on how to manage it and when you can switch and how treasure/ magic is handled.

Mechanics for a character tree would be great, emphasizing Dark Sun's deadliness and enabling other settings to borrow some of that same deadliness. That is something I would like to see.

I would also like the strong restrictions on races and classes that others have mentioned.

Where defiling/preserving is concerned, I'd prefer a subsystem that all arcane classes can use. To make defiling tempting for players, I think the mechanics should be simple and relatively powerful but acquisition of long term defiling stigmas/penalties should be random.

 

[Remathilis]

I think that's definitely part of DS that I'd like to retain. Someone mentioned above that they wanted DS material that was part and parcel of general D&D such that it would be freely portable; personally, I'd like the exact opposite. I'd like DS 5e to be different enough that its rule changes register as a profound break with 5e conventions, much like DS 2e's 5d4 stat generation method did.

If that requires some retconning and some canonical breaks with 2e/4e DS, I'm OK with that.

I cannot imagine WotC doing that. WotC's mantra has been "widest possible net" per product, so that any given product might have something to offer to people who might not otherwise have interest in it. To that end, every setting has offered something that can be ripped out of setting and placed elsewhere (races, classes, spells, or systems like guilds or patrons). A Dark Sun that is wildly incompatible with 5e (such as changing stat gen) limits its usefulness to people who might just pick it up to cannibalize it. WotC has recently even shied away from creating a whole new mechanical system for psionics and opted for variant spellcasters, I don't imagine they will make it too radical a departure.

 

[TwoSix]

I cannot imagine WotC doing that. WotC's mantra has been "widest possible net" per product, so that any given product might have something to offer to people who might not otherwise have interest in it. To that end, every setting has offered something that can be ripped out of setting and placed elsewhere (races, classes, spells, or systems like guilds or patrons). A Dark Sun that is wildly incompatible with 5e (such as changing stat gen) limits its usefulness to people who might just pick it up to cannibalize it. WotC has recently even shied away from creating a whole new mechanical system for psionics and opted for variant spellcasters, I don't imagine they will make it too radical a departure.

Of course. I said this in another thread, but I totally recognize that what I want and what is actually feasible are two very different things.