That's the big divide that's going to happen over Dark Sun, and why I think it's going to be such a glorious train wreck. Fans like, say, Purple up there, are old fans of Dark Sun. They don't want tieflings or a retconned cosmology.
On the other hand of the spectrum, you have people who haven't really played Dark Sun and don't really care. They go "Man whatever, just give the funky creatures!"
I think it comes down to this: What do you put more emphasis in? The 4e part, or the Dark Sun part?
This is a 100%
false dichotomy.
I'm a huge fan of old Dark Sun. It's one of my three favorite settings of the 1E/2E era.
And I find the idea that (just to pull an example from earlier in the thread) making the dray into dragonborn "ruins" the setting to be so utterly nonsensical that I almost have to assume people are looking for reasons to be upset.
What made Dark Sun great was the
themes of the setting. The desertscape, the tyrannical sorcerer-kings, the brutal city-states, the gladiatorial conflict, the struggle for mere survival (let alone freedom)...
None of this is dependent on whether or not a specific race is added into the setting in 4E.
Seriously, I've yet to see
anyone offer a reasonable explanation of
why it would be bad if the dray were dragonborn, or
why it would be bad to include tieflings, other than "Well, they weren't there before!"
If such things are added in without any effort at making them fit the mood, theme, and feel of Dark Sun, then yes, that would be a bad thing. But if they're included in a way that fits, where's the downside?
)
