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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mark Hope" data-source="post: 4470881" data-attributes="member: 27051">Dark Sun wasn't actually a closed cosmology - it was just very difficult to get from Athas to anywhere else.  It was connected to the elemental planes (although they were fairly different from the standard 2e elemental planes).  It also had a plane called the Black (a bit like the plane of Shadow) and a plane called the Gray (which was where all the dead went to linger until dissolution).The Gray cut Athas off from the Outer Planes, but the Outer Planes were still there.  City by the Silt Sea explicitly features Baatezu and the Blood War.  There's a farastu in Merchant House of Amketch, a nabassu in Dragon's Crown and the kreen have a mythology that incorporates Caina (which they call Kano).  There's also a very cool piece of art in Dragon Kings of a wizard summoning a glabrezu.  The connections are definitely there.Of course, there are many DS fans who prefer to keep the cosmology closed, and it's very easy to do, and doing so makes for a very cool feel to the setting, leaving Athas extremely isolated.  But it's not the case that having a more open cosmology in DS4e would run contrary to prior canon.  It would be important, imho, to retain the closed feel, however, by having a plane such as the Gray make travel to the Astral/Outer Planes/whatever extremely difficult.As for dragonborn, the 3e version of that race was, imho, largely inspired by the dray from Dark Sun, who were created from other races and transformed into draconic beings.  Dragonborn seem to be their own race now in 4e, but you could probably use their stats with no problem.Tieflings as one of the New Races from the Pristine Tower could work, but it is rare that New Races breed true or last beyond a generation or two.  Mind you, there is nothing to stop WotC from revising that particular piece of canon and deciding that at least one race has bred true over time.  When Paizo did their conversion of Dark Sun, one of the coolest elements was how they incorporated the elan into the setting, so I believe that changes of that type can work.  Not guaranteed, but certainly possible.(I actually don't play 4e, but is it a given that races like the dragonborn and tieflings will automatically be part of any setting that WotC makes?  After all, Dark Sun already doesn't have any gnomes - two more missing races wouldn't be such a problem, would they?)As for classes, I know that paladins aren't supposed to exist on Athas, but a poster over at the WotC DS boards made a very cool elemental champion that worked.  And using them as templar-knights is also a great option if they have to be included.Either way, I'd probably buy DS4e, even though I haven't bought any other 4e books, particularly if they can get Brom back to do some more art.  I can always use extra ideas for my DS games, no matter what edition they come from.  Bill Slaviscek worked on DS back in the day and did some good stuff, so I'm sure it would keep true to the feel of the original, if not true to its minutiae (which, to be fair, were not exactly internally consistent to begin with <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />...)</blockquote>

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