This animation popped up in my Twitter feed awhile back, and I just stumbled across it again, and it kind of put a (pulp) bee in my bonnet for an alternative to standard Avangions.
IMHO Athasian dragons are cool as all heck, but avangions are these weird mothman / nightgaunt / bat things that never really did anything for me. My first impulse was just to keep them mechanically the same, while looking more like dragons.
But the image here inspires another take: Dragons are the manifestation of trying to center power in the self and in physical existence forever. But what if avangions are the antithesis of this: The idea that power can be greater when it’s shared across all life, that physical existence isn’t everything and there’s a path to immortality of a sort through a sort of interconnected, distributed or holistic existence. Almost, but not quite becoming a Spirit of the Land.
Does anyone else have any alternate takes on avangions?
I don’t have alternate takes, but I sympathize with your reservations regarding avangions being less obviously badass. So instead I’ll simply explain how I reconciled my own views regarding the glowing buggers.
First off I’ve found the varying stages of avangions have a great deal of appeal in their own right, although I tend to take some creative liberties with their precise appearance I generally follow the following guidelines: The early stages can resemble more otherworldly or divine equivalents of humans which has plenty of fun in its own right, but get an avangion around halfway, advanced enough for working wings but still usable arms and they are weird combinations of angels with the greys or glowing energy bugs. The idea of something that is angelic while extremely alien at the same time has a lot of appeal to me. But I never really needed to reconcile myself with how I saw the earlier stages, its once they lost their arms I grew less impressed.
So with the later stages I saw them as these glowing layers upon layers of brilliant energy wings and found that to be honest it makes them come off as bizarre deities more than anything else. Sure they don’t seem physically dangerous but they are clearly otherworldly beings of immense power. The appeal I saw in avangions is less they become progressively more monstrous and more that they became progressively more alien and divine.
Now Athas has no gods, or living ones depending on the version you’re playing. Avangions aren’t gods either and don’t have templar (unless another region beyond Tyr has avangion god kings ruling the populace) aside from Aronis. However taking Avangions in a more angelic/divine direction and playing them up as flawed as the Greek pantheon made them quite appealing to me.
When I was young, I pictured Avangon as a product of forced evolution.
For few groups - the Athas aren’t dying world, but is world in stage of transformation, evolution or mutation. New species are more and more insectoid, reptile and mixed types + rising value and frequency of psionism. With time, material pressure on species will be more and more strange. This, mixed with growth of psionic, can make to realization idea “mind over body”. Reductionism of mattery etc.
And this also would be genetic source of hatred from and for dragons. Dragons are relic of past. Avangions are product from future. But candidates on Avangion-transformation are mentally connected with past; those mages want repaired world to similar stage like in Green Era. This is core internal conflict, therefore Avangons have relational small efficity to repair of old ecosystem.
