Early descriptions of Draj described it having an advantageous geographic location connecting to cities to the north. It still does, but with Eldaarich where I have it and the Silt Sea cutting off bypassing Eldaarich means the locations further east might be more isolated than I intended.
That, or it would mean by necessity Eldaarich ends up more visited by merchant caravans than was planned before. Maybe that’s cool, maybe that is undesirable. I can see a scenario where Eldaarich’s enviable position and ownership of the bridges across could lead to paranoia that everyone traveling through wants what you have, but you cannot survive without the visiting trade.
I’m not sure still so I added a trail line through the northern, lava-filled fault split in the mountains to the north.
I didn’t move Eldaarich further south because I saw it peeking into portions which Valley of Dush and Fire showed as silt sea and it was a goal of mine that if that map showed silt sea I left it silt sea. But moving the islands further south would allow the option to make a land connection to Kurn that bypasses Eldaarich’s bridges monopoly.
The thought of the Mons Olympus volcano also makes me think for some reason of the planet in Subnautica – it’s of course an opposite environment, but the biome the game takes place in is in a crater that drops off into an ecological deadzone with deep sea gigantism leviathan class predators. What if the lowlands of Athas – the craters etc. had a similar theme in Athas – some of the trenches would be filled with super predators more dangerous than anything in the tablelands – mutated dinosaurs, xenomorphs/tyrannids, let your imagination run wild.
I’m also thinking of the early fluff that suggested, I believe, that there might be OTHER dragons on Athas besides the Dragon of the Tyr Region.
I also think some of the John Carter novels have some interesting ideas for Athasian biomes – the underground realm of the first born, the mountain realm of the thern, and the artic realm at the top of the world of the yellow men could all be inspirations for other Athasian realms.
I like the idea of super predators mutated from whatever forces seemed to create the big threats of the Tablelands, but regionally-themed.
Since I’m taking the Sword and Planet fantasy inspiration to Dark Sun quite explicitly for this, the Barsoom of John Carter would be ripe for the grabbing.
I kinda wish spirits of the land went more kaiju-scale in size, but my knowledge of the breadth of sword and planet isn’t compete enough to know if monsters that size are represented in the genre. I kinda want it anyway but have always wished D&D did a better job at foes of scale large than gargantuan.
I think the reason we don’t get proper kaiju monsters in D&D often is the simple fact it is very hard to justify fighting them. If you’re a dude with a sword, no matter how magic that sword is, it gets a bit hard to explain how the blade can actually get deep enough to do any serious damage.
Don’t get me wrong, games like Shadow of the Colossus prove you can make that work. But it’s the sort of thing that D&D isn’t really built to represent particularly well. Not to get too off topic, but I think the best compromise is to give individual monsters of kaiju scale their own rules for how fighting them works. Kind of like how hydras or krakens have sometimes gotten special rules to account for their multiple heads/tentacles being attacked as “sub-monsters” almost.
Which is also why ToB didn’t go far enough. If you have a ki-conductive blade, and pump enough ki into it, suddenly your effective slash size is 20’-50’ long. And by the time you hit that point, you should already be able to project your ki, so you can toss said slash a few hundred to a few thousand feet.
Obviously that sort of thing is around upper high level to low epic level play.
I agree that the current iteration of D&D was not designed with that in mind, though it is not really hard to add it with a small amount of effort, given that they already have Gargantuan+ and Titanic creatures. Add a Behemoth size category and change Titanic from a template to a size category, and maybe add Leviathan size category and you are most of the way there.
If you want to give the nod, add a Kaiju size category too, lol.
I had a brainstorm about what I could do if I brought Eldaarich even further south, giving up on not infringing into Valley of Dust and Fire’s areas marked as silt.
I tried it out and liked it enough to keep it.
The result is another route to bypass the silt bridges of Eldaarich. That other route gave me the idea of relocating all the bandit tribes within the Ring along this second trail.
Just found this map and love it so much. I think it’s honestly my favorite map I’ve ever seen and I love that you’ve done it in a way where it’s compatible with 99% of canon. It would be easy to swap this map.
I really hope you do this at some point too. this would be an incredible combination of ideas.
Thank you so much for saying so! I’m glad it is finding appreciation out there.
I’m fairly certain I’m going to do exactly this. In fact I got the progress begun by starting a rough layout using a narrow portion of the northern edge as the southern edge of the new one.
I’ve got a start but I placed it on pause while my attention detoured to finishing up some Greyhawk regional maps from an old unfinished project. I’ll be circling back to the north and the west Athasian regions, that’s for sure.
Yeah I first posted those to the old Canonfire website long ago when I hosted them in my MobileMe account. That wasn’t sustainable so I moved to host over on DeviantArt instead about something like over a decade ago.
I only just got past my burnout to restart that old project and finished off the Sea of Dust and Jeklea Bay, then moved to the Northern Reaches and old Empire of Iuz. I’m near completing those.
But I did in fact share links to the newly completed ones over in the Canonfire discord and the Greyhawk Online discord too. I predict in a few days the Empire of Iuz region will be postable for a preview.
However, it’s not from a comet-impact; if a comet made that impact, it would have annihilated all life on Athas. That, and such an impact would have incinerated the crust, so mantle-plumes would raise up and create a kind of lava-volcanic highlands.
If anyone is interested, I recently upgraded my computer but the old Wonderdraft file refused to open on my new computer. Admittedly the old file was barely opening on the old one with its excessive amount of symbols!
I opened the old files and created detailed maps of each corner. It allowed my to reduce the type size and quadruple the resolution.
So if you are interested in higher resolution versions of the map, but zoomed into each regional quarter, feel free to check out the most recent uploads in my Alternate Athas gallery.
