Speaking of the idea of Myron becoming addicted to troll death and other champions and the same.
That just doesn’t make sense to me.
The champions need motivation to finish their tasked races. You don’t get someone addicted to cocaine and tell them to snort all the cocaine in the world until it’s all gone (forever!). Not unless you want to deal with a super-powered cocaine addict going through the DTs once their task is finished.
And a number of the champions DID finish their tasks. There had to be some sort of real and tangible reward for those who finished their wars, whether a power upgrade or something else, I don’t know.
The addiction thing comes from Lynn Abbey. I don’t think there was any concrete reward for successful cleansing. I think that the champions had a cause that they believed in, and that their motivations were thus ideological.
In the PP Agis tried to attack the mind of either Sacha or Wyan (don’t remember who), and find his mind full of dead pixies. His mind was “at peace”, and unattackable by the Way. So there IS a reward for a Champion who did his task
I never saw the Champions as addicts - addiction and the desire for your next ‘high’ would be liabilities in a general, let alone one highly skilled amin arcane magic and the Way.
I do wonder though whether the process of becoming a Champion plaued with their heads a bit. In terms of a suggestion or compulsion to seek out and destroy their chosen race. That could explain what happened to Myron- did the compulsion fail in his case (maybe something about him interacted badly with that part of the process) which meant after an initial genocidal impulse he got bored and merely did enough to keep Rajaat off his back for a bit?
One of the nagging issues, though, is WHAT was Myron’s deal, and what did he do that was so bad that Rajaat killed him for it. Especially considering that Myron was with Rajaat longer than any of the other champions. The “answer” in RaF was simply that he’d become addicted to killing Trolls (as Hamanu feared he himself would become, thereafter foreswearing use of the “fire eyes” ability or whatever), and starting herding/farming them for his personal use, thereby pissing off Rajaat. And that just doesn’t sit right with me.
Other takes are basically just “he had a crisis of conscience” or "he discovered Rajaat’s true plans.
Per the “Hamanu is TEH SPECIAL!!1!!” line of thinking, Hamanu was set up to be Rajaat’s final solution. He would ultimately turn into the final dragon and kill off the other champions and humans as the final act before Rajaat’s new rebirth. But surely Rajaat would have put a final solution into play before then. Maybe Myron was “special” in the same way Hamanu ultimately was, and whatever he did not only displeased Rajaat, but also threatened him, too.
If we take RaF seriously (which I, for one, do. At least as a whole, and embracing the unreliability of Hamanu as narrator), then Rajaat IS ultimately stopped for good. By Hamanu. Rajaat went and made a creature that had the potential to defeat even himself. If Hamanu was made of the same stuff as Myron, then maybe Myron also had the potential to be a legitimate threat to Rajaat.
It’s a shame we don’t have more on the Champions and proto-Champions (Irikos for example). I’d imagine there could be some good novels about that time that could be written
I can see a lot of Dark Sun setting novels being good if they embraced the core tenets of the setting as more of a sword and sorcery type setting than a straight fantasy setting.
I toyed with the champion template Athas.org put out awhile back and ended up adding a few things to it.
One of the additions worked with the UA Spellpoint system I use. Genocidal Focus also gave the champion 1 temporary spell point per HD of the slain creature to be used first when casting spells. There was no maximum and the spell point lasted for 24 hours.
Another was a Genocidal Compulsion, the Champions had to kill any of their Focus targets (rather high will save to resist) and were required to kill at least one of their focus targets per month or they went on a focused rampage (beeline for the nearest known focus target) until they killed their own HD worth of targets. This wasn’t as bad as it seems since they were also Tower Bound - if they died to anything other then the touch of Rajaat they were reincarnated at the tower.
That could easily be seen as a addiction, and also explained Myron’s desire to kill each troll himself. As an aside, Myron was the same as Hamanu in my campaign, when he finished off the last troll, his secondary focus of humans would kick in. The only way to sate the hunger was to finish the mission and wipe out the assigned race. At that point the Genocidal tendencies were negated.
