In general, I agree. Being an advanced being isn’t auto win. If your average newly metamorphosed 21st or 22nd level avangion or dragon, or newly transforming cleric elemental, just walks in (or is caught in a situation where they can’t afford to just teleport away and come back later, like Kalak was) they can totally be overwhelmed by decently powerful but definitely non-advanced/non-epic foes.
The kreen have somewhat of a disadvantage compared to a comparable group of humanoids since they don’t have arcane magic and have basically no knowledge of it, but it’s not an insurmountable one if they’re willing to accept losses - at least if a dragon/avangion decides to stand and fight. Hit and run tactics are more questionable… I think a smart wizard with 9th level spells and the resources to make magic items can become essentially unfindable with the resources they’d have.
But the Dragon is far more powerful than a starter advanced being, and Valley of Dust and Fire claims he has all these contingencies and defenses etc. If that’s true, I don’t think the kreen could do anything to hurt him longer than it takes to regenerate PSPs and HP after he teleports away.
OTOH, the Dragon as shown in the Prism Pentad novels apparently doesn’t have any of that; he doesn’t fight smart, doesn’t teleport in and out, and doesn’t have contingencies whisk him away when he’s in real danger. So it depends on which you take as more canon…
But more importantly, this all assumes that there’s an open fight … That the advanced being’s enemies know the advanced being is an enemy. The sorcerer-kings and the Dragon have the time, psionics, and magic to rig the situation so that isn’t the case. While Ivory Triangle disagrees, it seems pretty clear in the Prism Pentad that the Dragon’s Levy isn’t a generally known thing. For kreen it would have to be a bit different, given that they don’t practice slavery, but if the normal base rate of hunting parties not coming back ticks up somewhat… All you have to do is mind control a leader and get them to come to you…
(Thri-kreen of Athas says that there can be up to 30 eggs in a clutch. Even if that’s an extreme and the average is more like 15, their mortality rate has to be colossal for the situation to be remotely stable. I think life expectancy would end up being something ridiculously low.)
Though, that’s assuming he gets to; the first time he teleports away, you might have several kreen psionicists with Teleport Lock dogpiling him… then it becomes “Can Borys get away to come back prepared?”
Mind, I think Borys is going to win… it’s hard to beat a 30th level dragon… but the kreen don’t care about numbers, and they only have to win once.
If they can get the right group, with enough psionicists and elemental clerics with both the right specific powers and the right spells and enough HP not to die instantly, they might have a chance.
The key problem I think is mobility/information - a divination protected Dragon with both magical and psionic mobility as well as flight isn’t going to let them organize a group with the right composition.
But again, that all assumes an actual fight. The smarter way is to take over their leaders with magical or psionic mind control and shape their whole society to his purposes.
But anyway, I think this is off the topic. Dragon’s Levy issues aside, I still think it would be interesting if the kreen arrived in the Tyr Region proper after the fall of the Great One’s kreen/human nation.
Another possibility in this vein, that preserves a little more of the canon setup: Rajaat is an Elder Evil from another universe/multiverse/dimension beyond The Black, not native to Athas at all.
The Hollow isn’t so much a prison holding Rajaat, but a sealed gate or breach between multiverses; still sealed by epic magic maintained by the Dragon’s repeated massive sacrifices of lives, though. The sorcerer kings and the Dragon aren’t Rajaat’s former students/servants, but an alliance of necessity to maintain that seal.
Rajaat’s Swamp is a horrible mutagenic place because it’s where Rajaat first tried to break through into Athas - the Great One’s mysterious avangion companion tried to seal that breach, and partly succeeded, but only at the cost of its own life - completely consumed by the spell of sealing. Also, the sealing wasn’t completely successful - Rajaat’s influence still seeps through and mutates creatures in the area.
When another breach was attempted, the Dragon wasn’t willing to sacrifice himself to close it. Instead, he created the Black Sphere as a super obsidian orb to power the sealing spell fueled by massive sacrifices of lives.
This lets the politics of the Levy and the sorcerer-kings, as small-time enemies but larger scale allies of necessity against a greater threat, stay in place without making Rajaat responsible for everything that ever happened in Athas’ history. In this alternate history, Rajaat the Elder Evil was only able to access Athas once powerful magic had badly disrupted its reality, well after the Deadlands formed. This works well with the idea that reality on Athas is fundamentally damaged.
Isn’t that more or less the hypothesis of everyone who ignores the Prism Pentad?
However, running with that:
If we go by a 4e cosmology, you then can infer that Rajaat was from the Far Realm… he was a force of change because he was from a place so mutable, so incomprehensible. The incursion of the Far Realm could have brought psionics (the two are, IME, often linked), but also the completely foreign idea of wizardly magic.
Rajaat, in this sense, didn’t invent arcane magic, just the means by which it is powered.
Tangent: In a way, arcane magic on Athas is druidry-by-theft. Both draw their power from the land itself, but while a druid makes friends with the land, a defiler rips his power from it, and a preserver takes what she needs.
That would work. I was trying to go with the “broken reality” idea though, that the Far Realm (or whatever) could only access Athas once arcane magic on a huge scale had already “chewed up” and weakened its reality.
On the tangent: I’ve wondered about that. Do druids draw from the land in the same way that preservers do? Given that they use the same elemental spheres as clerics, I had kind of figured that their power was ultimately elemental (even if indirectly, like templars: I think all the “priest classes” in the 2e sense have an ultimately elemental source). I see the spirits of the land as being something like metaphysical trees, with their main presence (their “trunk and branches”) on Athas but their “roots” reaching into the elemental planes.
In it, there is a wall between the planet and the realm of demons. But that wall is old, and is weakening, and so only two kinds of demons can get through: The very small and weak, who can slip through cracks, and the very powerful, who can force their own way through. The mid-range demons were stuck until the wall broke.
I kind of think of it like that.
Rajaat would be one of those very powerful Far Realms creatures, who could serve as a vanguard, who could weaken the wall between the Prime and the Far Realm. The Psurlons might represent some of those smaller demons… powerful, yes, but only in the context of mortals, not in the context of beings from the Far Realm.
