“Oops! This moon is all spiders!” - Rovewin’s players
Though I like the idea of the jungle/archipelago moons of Athas (very pulp/sword and planet), I also like the idea of running an adventure in the desolate future Athas you describe.
We have talked about running adventures in Blue or Green Age Athas and (seemingly most popular) Pre-Prism Pentad - has anyone run campaigns in an Athas of the far future ?
Only in my head. And everyone died. shrug
In FY 14 one of my PCs (a new avangion) teamed up with Nethas and Xaymon to travel about 3000 years into the future. They spent a couple months there traveling the wastes, looking for life. They visited the seven city states, a dozen villages, they scoured the tablelands and they found… desert and ash.
Whole swaths of land were defiled, the Crescent Forest and Forest Ridge were gone, silt had pushed even further into the tablelands, cities were broken ruins, villages were just gone, mountains had erupted into volcanoes and the sun beat down mercilessly. They did not encounter a single living creature, but a lot of undead, intelligent and not. All wanting to extinguish their life. They could not find the cause, but looking around them they could see evidence of defilement and the paraelementals everywhere.
They returned to FY 14 and vowed to never let it come to pass. They knew they were not strong enough alone, they would need to take on all the Sorcerer Monarchs, the para elemental priests, every defiler would need to be destroyed. Undead would need to be wiped from the face of the world.
In FY 14 alone they located three more potential avangions, invited them into the newly formed council and used the Korgunard’s Annulus to help them transform into avangions. In FY 15 they started courting three more that accepted. One has already used the Annulus succesfully, one it turned out had defiled long ago and turned to ash, and a third hasn’t yet used the Annulus while the council tries to figure out what went wrong. They identified another three candidates that will need assistance to gain the required power including Atzetuk (who they don’t yet realize has been lost to the spirit of Tek) and Shatri.
Xaymon knows his mentor Korgunard had an avangion mentor, but not where he or she is, if they are still alive, or if the council could convince them to help. They don’t believe even with all of the council they can yet avert this coming apocalypse, but with the First One’s help (who they believe is fully metamorphisized), more preservers, and becoming more advanced themselves, they think they have a shot. Until then they hunt for allies, helpful magic and psionics, destroy undead, defilers, and para elemental clerics, and try to stay under the radar.
Hit reply by accident…
I also did a few other time travel adventures:
Unknown future time when the world had returned to the Blue Age. Halflings were rebuilding under Rajaat. The Storm Lord (a halfling inhabited by Tithian) was leading a war against the last of the human and demi human races. Halflings lived on the oceans in life shaped cities while humans and demi humans lived on scattered islands and used boats, magic, and psionics to travel between them. Non-halflings were mostly wiped out by the flooding of the Cerulean Storm. This was the final adventure for one of my groups, PCs all died in this timeline but managed to take out some of Tithian’s key lieutenants and their sacrifice enabled several hundred humans and demihumans to escape to the past.
Unknown future time when the world had returned to the Green Age, but Dray ruled, there were still some humans that lived outside the cities but demi-humans were hunted for sport and had been nearly wiped out. The Dray all worshiped Dregoth, the one and only Dragon of Athas. This is what caused one of my PCs to turn Dray and start a trading house devoted to building up Guistenal, the Dray, and converting humans.
After seeing that grim future I hope the campaign becomes about…
Silk wyrms. Not spiders. Guthay is really a giant egg that hatches all silk wyrms as fully-grown adults. See the story of Uncle Tontor in Dragon Kings pg 5. But yeah, that’s all my players would find on a moon.
I’m a big fan of exploring strange new worlds and seeking out new life and new civilizations…
So I would have both moons support their own forms of life, but I would also lean heavily into Nausicaä for one moon (acid seas, spore choked air, giant insects), and some other theme for the other… (probably entirely silicon based life firms and fractal ecosystems).
No adventuring without constant environmental protections! And even then risky.
Yeah, because Athas doesn’t have enough giant insects. (Just teasing mate, sounds like a fun idea!)
Lol. Yeah, Athas is pretty scant on giant insects in comparison to Nausicaä. Plus Athas’ desert is quite different from the dense jungles more common in the manga. Though it does have deserts too.
Honestly I could see tons of life shaped creations that had gone rogue and degenerate halflings. Though the moons have life it’s only limited to zones on the moons because maybe the same effect that changed the color of the sun scourged them as well. However, it would be interesting to have places that are irradiated, maybe infested with hostile fusions of green age races and life shaping tech, and maybe one lone derelict spelljammer ship of unknown and exotic origin.
Just had an idea about Ral especially. It has been said the Tablelands are roughly the size of the southwestern US, so if Athas is Earth sized there is a LOT of unknown territory besides the places we do know exist. So how big would Ral and Guthay be?
Ral I can guess has clouds of water vapor, methane, carbon compounds that create a hazy upper atmosphere but below there could be a perpetual overcast environment that’s habitable but makes flying or upper elevations hazardous. Also I have the belief that from the flavor we do know, that it has shallow, vegetation choked seas. The red jungles may take in light of a different spectrum and I wonder what other life there could be.
How big are the moons is a @Rovewin question - its his thing. Sir?
Edit: Also, shameless plus - you know we lightly detailed the moons of Athas in Crimson Sphere, right? https://athas.org/products/crimson-sphere
Interesting. However I did think about something. I do heavily believe the Rhulisti were alien to Athas. Think about it. Highly evolved and advanced species that exists on a still evolving water world and their tech suggests they are a Type 1 or 2 civilization. The tower of red stone that is used like a planar gate suggests they are too. The suggestion in another thread that the Pristine Tower was part of some sort of terra forming network adds to this.
The thing is I think perhaps Ral or Guthay may be outposts to watch or control the system as a primary or backup.
Ivehad similar thoughts, and hope to pursue them soon.
Can you provide more information about the tower you mentioned? As I long as I know, the only planar gate is the Dregoth’s one
It was a red tower that supposedly things appeared to phase in and out of it at night. Think the book was post pentad. I do remember you had to know the old halflings language to use it.
That description is definitely not wholly familiar to me.
It kinda sounds like the Crimson Monolith, the avangion’s tower from the Sorak books, and the (i wanna say Sun tower in the Ringing Mountains) all mixed together.
Color me intrigued; I’d love a source and pg refrence.
I believe…I don’t remember the book. It was after the Great Earthquake and showed how the Tablelands had changed.
Novel or RPG product (like Dragon Kings)?
Those changes we detailed in the sourcebook Beyond the Prism Pentad.