Kalashtar are an eberron setting specific race. Any ideas about how to incorporate this race into the Dark Sun setting?
Incorporating them could be with or without the quori. There is no need to lift the lore wholesale from the eberron setting.
*Obligatory objection to kalashtar in dark sun *
Now that that’s out of the way, we first need to ask if there is any quori equivalent being in dark sun, perhaps psurlons? Framented mindscapes coalesced into a sapient but incorporeal being? Things trapped in the black trying to find a way back?
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Psychically distributed caller in the darkness perhaps? Or maybe that could be something for the Inspired.
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Presumably you’re looking for something more complicated than “use them as alternate Vellachi, perhaps males”?
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4e DS stated that kalashtar are living embodiments of the Way. A race of
psionic beings, evolved from masters who trained in remote monasteries long ago and
a psionically adept subset of the human race.
Weak justification IMO.
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Where can I find it?
Also, building off on that, maybe elderly psionic masters transfer their spirit into a willing student in exchange for tutelage, that way the master remains “alive” and the student gains power
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4e Dark Sun Campaign Setting book.
It doesn’t really go into anything more than a paragraph on including them.
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Heavy Elan vibes from the Paizo version of 3.5 Dark Sun.
Wasn’t Celik supposed to have been destroyed in a psionic catastrophe?
Maybe all the previous inhabitants get stuck in a hellish shared mindscape, and Kalashtar come from the Celik of today. You could even somehow work the Inspired in as the more hateful/evil/insane residents of the mindscape. 'Course, that would geographically tie/ concentrate their origins down, which is less than ideal.
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The concept of the Kalashtar fits perfectly with the concept of Athas, even if there was never any expression of such beings in the novels (or so I’m given to understand) or the sourcebooks, other than the 4e reference.
The core concept of the Kalashtar (stripped from the Eberron trappings) is a race of beings who have a weak shared psionic connection created by a non physical psionic / mental / dream entity or embodiment of some sort. There are also two distinct themes available if one includes the Inspired. And there is the themes of past disaster, survivorship, and hidden existences.
The mass extinctions of living beings on Athas form the perfect backdrop for the evolution of Kalashtar.
It would make perfect sense if the dreams / minds / souls / psionic gestalt of the exterminated races came to form the sort of disembodied fragments that serve as the basis for the Kalashtar race… perhaps the hopes and wishes of dying races, as well as the nightmare fragments of pain and destruction that could form the basis of the Quori and the Inspired… it all depends on which polarity one attuned to.
This could also lead to interesting lore and prestige classes related to specific emotions or goals of the racial spirit fragment in question.
One could optionally include the possibility of mutation into the race the mental fragment came from over sufficient time if one wanted to explain and allow remnant fragments of old races.
The hidden nature of the Kalashtar would likely be carried out to an extreme, possibly leading to secret mental communities in cities where members may never once knowingly meet each other physically… almost like an anonymous mental LAN only internet. Especially if the Inspired / Quori are still seeking to finish the extermination imperatives to the point of stamping out even psychic fragments and remnants, no matter how small or in whom they might reside.
This sounds like something that would be interesting to include with the Athas project I am working on.
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