There’s also one of Abalach-Re’s illegitimate daughters, Nanda Shatri. Leader of Raam’s Veiled Alliance and aspiring avangion.
Obscure, yes, but there’s important female characters in the older 2e material if mined for. Had the product line not been cancelled these characters would have likely been more front facing in the larger metaplot of the setting.
As somebody who has read the 2e version of Dregoth Ascending, had the product line not gotten cancelled Nanda Shatri would have ran away and hidden inside of her own room while Raam burned (yes, really). Thankfully athas.org did explain that in the 3e version by having her get feebleminded by Dregoth.
Nijineko, yes. Unfortunately the focus back in the day was crunch over fluff.
Would love to see these types oF NPCs evolve in future products. In my campaign Nanda Shatri jumped to 1st stage avangion. using the Star of Badna in a ritual.
Bdmdragon. I’ll have to look at my 2e copy of that as well. Poor use of the character that athas.org luckily corrected.
I gave up on the fiction after the first book, so my impressions are based on the original boxed set, what I’ve read recently in 2e adventure modules and what I’ve read on Athas.org. I’m going to try to guess where the problems are and please feel free to educate me.
Only 2 out of 7 Sorcerer Monarchs are female? No idea know how that compares to Greyhawk or Forgotten Realms.
Abalach-Re presented as ineffectual. All I can say to that is I’m happy to see that most of the people on Athas.org have a much greater appreciation for Abalach-Re and see her at least an equal to any of the other SKs. If I remember right, she’s also the only SM to make an appearance in 2 modules, if appearing in a module counts for anything.
Lalali-Puy presented as too sexual (?). On the positive side she was the only SM that was actually loved by her people. But Gulg never seemed like one of the heavy hitters in terms of city states.
In terms of character development, I don’t recall that any of the SM’s had any sort of in-depth character development in the original boxed set.
Actually, the first boxed set and thus the 4e reboot based on it aren’t particularly bad, besides the 2e box set Abalach-Re being ineffective. My concerns are more about the rest of Dark Sun continuity being full of well developed male characters but seemingly forgetting about half the population, the lack of women in historically prominent roles, etc.
The problem is less the 2 out of 7 and more the 3 (Sielba, also hyper sexualized) out of 13 (15+ if you include champions and not just Sorcerer Monarchs) and how little development they get. A similar ratio applies to other similar positions of power or historical figures in Dark Sun.
I don’t feel qualified to speak for Greyhawk, but Forgotten Realms is pretty lousy with respect to developed, interesting women. However, it also has a lot more prominent women in general, so through sheer volume there are a number of interesting and developed ones, as opposed to barely any. (It’s still not great)
This touches on more of a fantasy issue in general however, so I’ll keep it to Athas for now.
Absolutely. The 4e reboot also took this track, which helped a lot.
Aside from the art (which to be fair, oversexualised female character art is hardly a Dark Sun specific trend) and one brief line in an adventure, Lalali-Puy is actually one of the less overtly sexualized and (unrelatedly) one of the most interesting SM’s. Lynn Abbey is the only writer to have explicitly sexualized Lalali-Puy, but wow, she did so in a spectacularly weird fashion that has had me scratching my head for literally years.
You guys are only focusing on extreme high level here.
Think of the women in Dune Traders. All the decent PC pregens. The female thri-kreen (tohr-kreen?) in the Order in Dragon’s Crown. The NPCs in the Veiled Alliance, etc, etc…
The majority seem to be cast in a negative light (I haven’t tallied anything myself as of this post), but to be honest alignment at the 2E-2.5E times was starting to get blurred as is… and it ain’t like there’s paladins running about on Athas.
When you say Lynn Abbey sexualized Lalali-puy in a strange way do you mean that throwaway line where Hamanu says she killed the ogres by having sex with all the males?
I thought Kalak killed the ogres by the way.
As for the line. If that’s what you mean I don’t think Hamanu was being serious. I always took that line as an insult to show just how little he thought of her Army or combat abilities. That the only way she could have succeeded was to use her sexuality since she has no other skills of note be they magical or psionic.
Oh, he was undoubtably disparaging. However, he did not actually say that line to someone, rather, it was his internal thoughts on how she’d accomplished her goal, which makes it look a lot more like he was being literal.
Normally I’d still agree with your assessment, but given that everything else he said about her is shown to be true in the context of Rise and Fall (about her relative power, her temperament, and her being a fool juxtaposed with her making a really dumb suggestion on how to deal with Rajaat in the past), and that her first words to him in the book were both explicitly said seductively and strongly hint at them having had a closer relationship of some sort in the past, I’m actually not convinced that this wasn’t Lynn Abbey’s interpretation of her character.
You would be correct, probably, but Lynn Abbey didn’t know that.
Lynn Abbey’s notes made it clear she wasn’t given access to everything, and had to make up some things to fill the gaps in what she knew. We can discuss how canon Rise and Fall should be, but elements of it were certainly seen as cannon in the 3e conversion by this site.
Nibenay has a healthy respect/rivalry with the Oba. This question goes unanswered still, by the way.
There are no stats. It’s a plot device. In the 2E campaign I played in, our DM ruled that it would have made her a 42nd lvl Defiler and 42nd lvl Psionicist - quite literally doubling her existing stats as a stage I dragon.
If you take the 3.X rules, that doesn’t make her so hard as spell/power progression caps out at lvl 20 and thence relies on feats for increased casting/manifestation. I suppose you could rule it functions as a unique ring of wizardry/psionics doubling all her spell slots, psi points and doubling her caster/manifester level. That’s something Borys would have feared.
Don’t knock my crunch dude, that’s what makes story interesting. Without crunch, story is bland. It’s what you can’t do that makes the plot move forward more than what you can do.
and in any case, I’m the crunch guy, so I’ll work with you on harmonizing fluff and crunch, but I refuse to allow fluff to dominate crunch… and for that matter it’s no good if crunch dominates fluff either, since either extreme leads to failure. Both are needed in balance.
I was just as guilty developing crunch over fluff as anyone back then.
Athas.org folks were just timid in advancing the setting beyond what was already laid out by TSR/WotC. I believe it had to do with the licensing agreement on what could be produced.
Also speaking of important women. Wasn’t the first image of dark sun ever produced by Brom that painting of Neeva? In a way she was the inspiration for the whole setting.
Ooh, another great thread!
Throwing my two cents in: I don’t have a problem with the characterisation of the female SMs, but rather with how certain traits are exclusive to them. I don’t think Lalali-Puy’s and Sielba’s sensuality is bad - it’s more that no male SM shares it aside, maybe, from Niblenay. Let’s… Not think about it. Similarly, it’d be much easier to stomach Abalach-Re’s ineffectual rule if she weren’t the only ineffectual SM (among those that count. Daskinor… Yeah. He exists.)
In a way, it feels like personalities and roles were handed out based on sex. Just talking about SMs from the original box - on female side, we’ve got:
On the male side, we’ve got…
To sum it up: Male SMs seem to either project a strong image while they’re consumed by insecurities; much of their actions revolve around either displays of power or compulsive hiding from judgement. Female SMs are nurturers, manipulators, care a lot about their public image and are generally less effective. They enjoy their long lives more, but they don’t project nearly as much power.
This all feels just so… Bound by sex and gender. SMs are who they are because of their chromosomes, not personalities. You don’t get a male SM who pursues his appetite for life or a female tyrant SM who rules her CS with an iron fist. You don’t get a male manipulator who are loved by their subjects or a female monster who’ll rip your heart off with her bare hands.
That said, I’m strongly opposed to the idea of injecting more women into the setting for the sake of it. Rather, we need more characters with good, non-archetypical/stereotypical characterisation.
I’m going to be polite and simply state that this might be the weakest argument I’ve heard today.
I agree. It isn’t necessarily a terrible thing by itself, but at the very least more fleshing out is required, and a few more unusual examples would be appreciated. In fact, I concur with your entire post up until the very last paragraph…
Acknowledging a problem, then saying you are opposed to doing anything about it, is tantamount to saying the problem is unimportant at best. Characters are rarely, if ever, added merely for the sake of it. They have a role and reason.
These things are neither exclusive with each other nor with your sentence above. Why do you assume that female characters added to the setting will automatically have poor characterization? TSR’s mistakes do not have to be athas.org’s, nor any GM running the setting with ideas from here.
Thank God I did no such thing.
My experience says otherwise, unfortunately.
Sorry, I probably just spend too much time in various art and writing communities. These people post their creations online, and the prevalent mood in that community is… Paranoid, to say the least. I know a lot of people who get bashed on the basis of their characters’ chromosomes. They (and their peers) tend to inject such characters into their works just to protect themselves from further attacks.
Then, I know people who cynically exploit the gender sensitivity as though it was a fad. They inject their stories with such characters in hopes it’ll trick the audience into liking them. Thankfully, it doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t stop them from trying, and even from trying to convince others it’s the right thing to do.
I have a (somewhat automatic) habit to call out against such behaviour. You’re right, though: This probably doesn’t apply to the role-playing community. What we do generally doesn’t get judged by randoms on the internet (unless we stream).
With all due respect, I make no such assumption in any part of that paragraph. Don’t put words in my mouth, please.
Okay, but this paragraph…
…certainly gives the appearance that that is what you are saying (you wrote it as an exclusive statement with the Rather. i.e. deliberately seeking to add more female characters necessitates that they are archetypal/stereotypical).
I apologize if that is not what you are saying. I was responding to how it looked, as I understand English.
As I said, I agree with you on almost every count.
I appreciate you being polite Bdmdragon. I believe importance can come in multiple forms. Dark Sun was the first setting TSR produced that was inspired by a single artist’s work. Let’s be real most people don’t think of dollar or baxa when thinking about dark sun art.
The art was what the setting was based on. Neeva was the first painting Brom made for the setting. A very muscular woman holding a trikal. She was clearly a warrior and not a sex object. Yes she’s wearing the armour bikini but for nearly all of Brom’s art both men and women wear very skimpy clothing. It’s even mentioned on 1d4chan about Athas how everyone wears female fantasy armour on this world.
Clearly Brom felt inspired by this image and in turn his art influenced and directed Denning and Brown. So I repeat in a way Neeva is far more important than just her role in the prism pentad.