I asked this over on the WotC boards, but in case anyone doesn’t read both places, here again: I’m currently throwing together some Dead Lands stuff, just for fun while my paying design project simmers in its own creative juices for a bit, and I’ll put it up on the Studio site when I have a decent chunk.

For new comers to the setting, the Dead Lands are a vast obsidian plain south of the Tyr Valley region, an area even more deadly than the Tyr deserts because of the ubiquitous presence of undead and the complete lack of water and living things.

I’ve always been kind of bored by the idea that the Dead Lands are just a big, wide plain of flat, black obsidian. That’s kind of like thinking that because Athas is all desert, it is nothing but sand dunes everywhere. The Tyr region boasts numerous different types of desert terrain (the aforementioned sand dunes, plus scrubland, boulder fields, salt flats, etc.) and I feel the Dead Lands should have more variety as well.

As well, obsidian is often grayish, not black, especially after it weathers for a couple hundred or thousand years, so I don’t see the Dead Lands as being this weird black, featureless plain. I mean, an obsidian landscape looks like a dusty jumble of gray and dark-hued rocks. And obsidian can have a golden or multi-colored sheen, a rainbow coloration, or have a matte-white snowflake pattern. Etc.

A little bit of thinking on the subject inspired the following terrain types:

Petrified rock fields: fallen forests whose trees turned to stones scattered everywhere.
Black desert: where the obsidian has been ground down into deep, shifting black sand.
Shards: where unstable layers of razor-edged obsidian shards cover the ground.
Volcanic vents: splits and cracks in the obsidian release smoke, ash, and toxic clouds.
Magma: churning pools or slow rivers of molten rock surrounded by basalt and etc.
Ooze: volcanic sand and ash combine with moisture creating fields of ill-colored muck.
Ash: dry, blinding areas coated with ash and pumice.
Crystals: huge black crystals grow in large clusters from the ground.
Spike forest: Narrow spines, spikes and splinters of obsidian, like a fallen forest.
Razor-trees: large clusters of sharp obsidian spears that crack and fall at the slightest touch.
Undead Trees: eternally rotting trees that give off an overpowering stench and cause despair.
Pools: standing water that has become brackish and fouled.
Obsidian Badlands: columns, plateaus, and twisting natural towers of obsdian.
Cliffs and chasms: uneven splits cutting through the obsidian.
Polished glass: where the obsidian is level and unbroken and has been polished smooth.
Brittle: the ground here appears solid, but can crack and shatter with the slightest weight.

I have a number of other things written up right now, too, but I wanted some feedback on the terrain. I’m curious if anyone has any other generalized terrain types, like one would put on a region-scale map, that might fit into this? Anything I’ve forgotten? Or comments on any of the above types? (I’m thinking some of them aren’t really “terrain types” maybe.)

(I’m trying to stick close to what real obsidian is, how it is formed, what happens to it when it weathers, etc. Though clearly I’ve also dipped into the fantasy end of things.)

These are great ideas, and make me want to think more about/explore the possibilities of the dead lands. I had written off that particular part of Athas as unplayable.

Of the cuff, the only thing that I could think of is that there might be some kind of structure in the deadlands. Perhaps a dragon king has an undead city there?

Gerald Lewis put together an interesting guide to the Dead Lands here: http://siltskimmer.org/_access/tdloa.pdf

One of the terrain types he had that was particularly striking was an obsidian ocean, Lewis called it the “Chalat Ocean”, which is flat & solid to the living but “to all undead, the area retains the properties of the sea. Ghost ships float by adventurers walking on the sea as if it were ground, animated bones of fish swimming through the water, ocassionally jumping out to bite an unexpecting traveler.”

Lewis also extended the Ringing Mountains & Forest Ridge further south into the Dead Lands, where they became the “Dragon’s Back Mountains” and the “Razor Spine Forest”. The Jagged Cliffs region also has its analogue in the Dead Lands, known as the “Sable Falls”, and the Sea of Silt turns into a “Black Silt River” that extends inland. There’s also cities with undead humanoids that were wiped out in the Cleansing Wars, such as the gnomes & pixies. The original gate to the Gray that created the Dead Lands, originally opened by the necromancer Qwith through his experiments, is there somewhere as well – along with the undead Qwith himself. Obviously, there’s no reason you have to limit yourself to someone else’s unofficial guide to the Dead Lands, but you could certainly get some ideas from it.

Another fan project that might be useful for inspiration in creating the Dead Lands is Obsidian Twilight, a Dark Sun-Ravenloft crossover campaign setting designed by Louis Porter Jr – http://lpjd.blogspot.com/search/label/Obsidian%…

TNO: Oh, yes, definitely structures. I have plenty in mind on that front. But all in good time.

Raist: I’d read Lewis’ stuff a while back. Some of it was very cool, other stuff I wasn’t a big fan of (I really don’t like the Q’with material and Gray gate, frex).
And, wow. I thought Porter would be done with that setting by now.

Tangent rant: I almost became a patron of it back when he first announced it, until I discovered his attitude towards artists — ie: shitty. He might pay them in a timely fashion, but he doesn’t think they’re worth paying what they’re worth, has some screwed up ideas about how much artists should charge based on his own limited grasp of illustration and design work, and has a pretty snotty attitude towards those who dis the crap rates he was pushing as reasonable. (It’s possible he’s wised-up since then; I sure hope so.)

One of the issues you’ll be dealing with when you flesh out the Dead Lands is Athasian cosmology – i.e. how Athas and the inner planes (elemental planes, Grey, Black) interact – since the the usual explanation for the Dead Lands is that the first necromancer, Qwith, opened a portal to the Grey. However, I also read something about a portal to the Plane of Magma as an explanation for the Obsidian Plane. Other people seem to consider the Dead Lands as an area that was completely ruined by defiler magic, so that it can never support life, and is only fit for the undead. I guess different fans have conceived of it differently…

This is complicated by the fact that the creators of Dark Sun never went into enough detail about Athas’ connection to the planes. There was some material in the “Defilers and Preservers” supplement briefly described the Gray and Black as they had appeared in the Prism Pentad series and expanded it a bit, introducing the necromancers & shadow wizards that tap into those planes. Originally, it seemed that the Gray & Black were simply the counterparts to the Ethereal & Shadow planes in standard 2nd edition, but the D&P book seemed to conceive of the Gray as a combination of the Ethereal & Negative Energy Plane, since it was not only a misty realm that teleporters travelled through but also now a realm of the dead & undead that necromancers drew their power from. (This didn’t make a lot of sense though, since psions & wizards in Athas typically use the Gray for dimensional transport without ill effect, whereas if it was linked to negative energy of some sort you’d think it would drain them of life.)

The “Earth, Air, Fire & Water” supplement briefly described the elemental planes & their connection to Athas, along with introducing the paraelemental planes of Athas (Silt, Magma, Sun & Rain) which only vaguely matched those of standard 2nd edition (Ooze, Magma, Smoke & Ice). In fact, they described the sun, silt & magma clerics as basically evil & in league with the defilers in seeking to destroy all life on Athas by enlarging the sphere of their patron element, which made them seem more like the negative energy quasi-elementals from 2nd edition (Dust, Ash, Vacuum & Salt).

This gets even more complicated by the fact that the publishing history of D&D has changed the conception of the planes over the years, and in 4th edition it was consolidated down to the Feywild, Shadowfell, Astral Sea & Elemental Chaos – which still don’t quite match up with Athas. Wikipedia’s got the scoop here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner_Plane
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manual_of_the_Planes

Anyways… however you conceive of the planes & the origin of the Dead Lands will obviously influence the terrain of the Dead Lands. I personally like to think of them as the ultimate defiled land & linked to the Negative Energy Plane, which explains the undead & the corruption of the elements.

Actually, Raist, I’m a twenty-year veteran of Dark Sun, and on the AO Senate…I’m familiar with all the background material. So, any thoughts on the terrain types above, or think of any I might have missed? I’d like there to be as much variety in terrain types as on the Tyr region maps.

Sorry, didn’t mean for it to seem like I was schooling you on the history of Athas, just pointing out that terrain types could vary quite a bit depending on whether you see the Dead Lands as linked to the Gray, the Plane of Magma, the Negative Material Plane, or something else. With the Gray, I’d expect banks of mist (almost like the Mists of Ravenloft) that teleport you god knows where. If it’s linked to Magma, then you’d have the things you listed above like magma, volcanic vents, fields of ash, obsidian forests, etc. If it’s linked to the Negative Material Plane, you could throw in features from the quasi-elemental planes (salt, ash, dust, vacuum) along with the features from the Nine Hells & the Abyss: pools of acid, castles made of bones, rivers of blood, etc.

Other than the undead, there’s some other creatures & terrains that seem like a good fit for the Dead Lands – tar pits with pit snatchers, a field of ash with ash golems, cities of obsidian with obsidian golems, cities of rust with undead so-uts & rust monsters, black silt lakes filled with grey-touched silt horrors….

I’m curious what your source is for Q’with and a lot of the other topics regarding early Blue and Green Age histories and the planes and such. My knowledge of the novels doesn’t extend past the Prism Pentad and the Tribe of One series, and I stopped buying/reading the DS supplements after the revised edition was released, but I have to say, I don’t know much about these characters/ periods. How much of this is official, and how much of it was the fever-dreams of messageboards like this one?

I imagine some of it might be in Rise and Fall of a Dragon King (?), which is a novel I have never seen in actual physical form. Sometimes I wonder if it even exists or if its just a legend.

Well, for “official” info on the planes of Athas, you can look at the D&P and EAFW supplements I listed above, plus the revise dbox set has some stuff I think. As for Q’with, I believe she didn’t show up until Athas Online’s “DM’s guide for Dark Sun” for the 3.5 edition, but I could be wrong…

Not a problem, Raist. No harm, no foul.

TNO, as I understand it, Q’with and all the surrounding jazz was part of the unreleased Dark Sun materials handed over to athas.org. Some of it shows up in AO’s “Terrors of the Deadlands” release. Much of the rest is culled from various supplements, as noted by Raist, and things like the novels, Dragon Kings, Psionic Artifacts of Athas, Windriders of the Jagged Cliffs, etc.

(Also, I have a copy of TR&FoaDK. It took me almost a decade to track one down, though.)

Here’s a Russian site that has a copy of TR&FoaDK:
http://www.litru.ru/?book=88274&page=1

greyorm- I’m currently working on an extension of the ’Wander’s Journal’ chronicling a journey into and beyond the Deadlands. Its intended to be all in character and avoids spelling everything out in favor of dropping adventure seeds. Like you I’m of the mind that the Deadland should have at least as much variety in terrain as the Tablelands. Would you consider letting me use some of the concepts you drop here as part of my own project?