Rajaat's Initial Experiments and Athas

Hey remember the blurbs about how when Rajaat was first experimenting with magic in what would become the misty border that he “tried puling power directly from the planet and it backfired” or something, and he abandoned that line of thought?

Anyone remember back in the BECMI days there was something called a megalith, which is basically a living planet? What if Athas is a megalith, and Rajaat basically tried to dragon-defile a planetoid-sized creature? What if he killed it?

Thoughts?

Thoughts about Athas a sa megalith? Thoughts about what exactly it meant (or could mean) by Rajaat trying to defile the planet and it not working?

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Well, he later managed to defile a star, so it’s definitely not out of the realm of possibility. Maybe it attacked him, and that’s why he gave up.

Also, that would mean that what the Pterrans are worshiping is actually this Megalith.

to be fair, the life shapers defiled the star first, going from blue to yellow.

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Very true. I have a theory that Rajaat based his magic off lifeshaping. Life-shapers manipulate energy within living beings, and wizards extract the energy and manipulate it outside their bodies.

I had a theory back in the days where Athas was a living entity with no consciousness. Its life energy was in everything liquid (remember the blue age where most of the planet was covered in water) That same energy is the reason how magic works (preserving/defiling the life force of the planet thud killing it spell after defiling spell). I think I named it Mindë or something similar.

The spirits of the land were always the biggest clue to me that Athas has a natural life force of its own. I imagined druids drew power from that instead of the elemental planes. I figured Rajaat effectively tried to draw power from those spirits or perhaps THE spirit of the land (i.e. Gaia).

If I were to decide there is a Gaia-like spirit of the land I would be going with Jiun’s idea of it having no real consciousness, having at most acted on instinct a few times (such as lashing out when Rajaat drew power from it), or being a source of knowledge for epic level druids completing some great quest.

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I like the megalith idea a lot! I tried to do some research, here’s what I got so far:

Cons:
It is unlikely that the megalith defended itself while in its Awakened phase, because a) they tend not to care, and b) that would explicitly involve cataclysms of earthquakes and volcanoes that would mark a setting’s end. They’re also supposed to gently help their denizens thrive, and at this point the world’s state doesn’t look like it’s been helped any.

Pros:
Straight from the source:
“During its active phase, a megalith can communicate […] The only mortals able to understand megalith “speech” are specialists called druids, and even they do not fully understand the process or the implications”, and later “Background: […] The home planet of all PCs is a megalith, […] The Immortals made special arrangements with this creature […] before starting to cultivate life forms upon and within it.” So what this says is that every setting with druids (and every setting period) is a megalith, although this is ‘basic dnd’ content, so it could be an outdated cosmology.

Both ways:
Of interest is the bit about gods making arrangements with it before making life there (supposedly because, before hibernating, the megalith rotates with increasing speed until it’s discarded everything on it, lands and life included), yet there are no present gods in Dark Sun.
Also, their average density is anywhere between dry clay and solid iron+, so we can’t make any deductions based on the low metalic content (the heaviest of materials).

Off the wall theory:
So, pre-blue age, Athas was a very standard and goded planet (let’s call this the Awakened Age). At some point, the megalith Athas decided it wanted to nap (in an event we shall call the Dormancy), and began the spinning-dispersion process.
The advanced tech-magic of Awakened Age populations (on par with the terraforming tech-magic of the blue age or higher) allows the denizens to delay their doom even as the heavier materials of the crust are slowly torn out and flung (because they would get their gravity overcome by centrifugal force first, as in lab tools today, tl;dr metals and rocks shooting out of the earth into space), and the situation gets progressively worse.
The gods then intervene, forcing an end to this either by fracturing the Megalith’s spirit into the spirits druids today commune with, at the price of their life, or by killing the Megalith and changing their nature into replacement life forms, as modern druidic spirits.
This ends the calamity, but at supposedly high loses of life, civilization and technology, and most importantly, of material. The heavier the material, the least of it left and vice versa. Most of the material left is water, followed by typical soils and only the smallest quantities of metals. This leaves our familiar metal-poor planet behind, but most of the mass left is water, and as the suface settles, most of it is covered by vast oceans. Welcome to the Blue Age.
In an effort to repair the damage done to life (mostly nonsentient), the Gnomes focus research in the fields of life-shaping, that was most advanced at the Blue Age’s dusk. Generations later, they decide the sea will need to host more life, being the most of the planet’s surface. The rest is history (or rather, legend).

Ok, so this is 99% a pile of crap, but it is crap consistent with what little we know :yum: