I've spent most of my summer wandering in the deserts of Athas, and I have to say, it's a pretty cool thing to roll into work every day with the opportunity to work on a new version of Dark Sun. Here's one little example of something that I got to play with just the other day that I had a real blast with: types of desert.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at http://www.athas.org/articles/deserts-of-athas