Complete Sorcerer Monarch lore from the Original Boxed Set

Setting
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Thanks to the amazing model, Gemini 2.0 Pro Experimental 02-05, we can extract massive amounts of text. I got the text file from archive.org, and uploaded it to the AI model. You can find this model on Google AI Studio. Note, there is no mobile phone app for this. Use your browser.

Sorcerer-Kings: General Information

  • Power and Role:
    • “Every city is led by a king. He (or she) may be addressed as ‘Magnate’ in one place and ‘Vizier’ in another, but is always the absolute dictator of his subjects.” (Wanderer’s Journal, p. 12)
    • “All are precariously balanced at the edge of starvation, barely scratching enough food from their small plots of land to support their populations.”(pg.2)
    • “In the center of every city, a powerful sorcerer-king lives inside a secure fortress, ruling his subjects through a sophisticated hierarchy of bureaucrats, nobles, and rapacious clergymen. Each city is a state unto itself, its king wielding absolute authority over every living thing inside its walls and crawling through its fields.” (Wanderer’s Journal, p. 4)
    • “Powerful sorcerer-kings often masquerade as gods and demigods but, though their powers are great and their worshippers many, they are not true gods.”(pg.29)
    • “All monarchs jealously guard the use of magic and employ a sizable force of templars whose sole duty it is to ferret out and execute unauthorized Preservers.”(pg.12)
    • “…for the most part, above the law.”(referring to defilers in a sorcerer-king’s employ.)(pg.59)
  • Longevity:
    • “Most kings have reigned for hundreds of years. Many have reigned for more than a thousand years, and one or two are even credited with founding their ancient cities.” (Wanderer’s Journal, p. 6)
  • Worship:
    • “In some cities, the sorcerer-king is glorified as if he were some sort of immortal being. In fact, many such rulers are actually able to bestow spell-casting abilities upon the templars who serve them.” (Wanderer’s Journal, p. 5)
    • “Templars are the clergymen devoted to the sorcerer-king of their city. Like other priests, they are granted spells in return for their worship. Unlike true priests, who draw their power from the elemental forces of the world, Templars tap into the magical forces of their sorcerer-king.”(pg.12)
  • Magic Use:
    • “Almost without exception, every king is a powerful Defiler who has risen to his position through the unprincipled use of magical and psionic abilities.” (Wanderer’s Journal, p. 12)
  • “A sorcerer-king tolerates a select few defilers in his employ…”(pg.26)

Specific Sorcerer Monarchs

  • Andropinis of Balic:

    • “Balic is ruled by the Dictator Andropinis, a powerful sorcerer-king who was elected to his post over seven-hundred years ago.” (Wanderer’s Journal, p. 67)
    • “Though the term ‘dictator’ originally referred to the power of dictating (as in stating) a city policy sanctioned by a democratic assembly of property owners, Andropinis has converted the title and office into one of total authority.” (Wanderer’s Journal, p. 67)

  • Tectuktitlay of Draj:

    • “The sorcerer-king of Draj calls himself ‘The Mighty and Omnipotent Tectuktitlay, Father of Life and Master of the Two Moons.’” (Wanderer’s Journal, p. 68)
    • “…claims to be a god.”

  • Lalali-Puy of Gulg:

    • “The sorcerer-queen of Gulg, Lalali-Puy, is called the oba by her subjects.” (Wanderer’s Journal, p. 69)
    • “In their eyes, she is a goddess…” (Wanderer’s Journal, p. 69)

  • Nibenay of Nibenay:

  • “The city of Nibenay is named after its founder, the sorcerer-king Nibenay. Called the Shadow King by his subjects, Nibenay is a bizarre and enigmatic figure.”(pg.71)

  • Hamanu of Urik

    • “I am Hamanu, King of the World, King of the Mountains and the Plains, King of Urik, for whom the roaring winds and the all-mighty sun have decreed a destiny of heroism, and to whom the life-giving waters and the nourishing soils have trusted the mightiest City of Athas.”(p.72)

  • “Hamanu is a warrior-king.”(p.72)

  • Kalak of Tyr:

    • “Tyr is ruled by the sorcerer-king Kalak, who calls himself simply King Kalak or, as he sometimes prefers to be addressed, the Tyrant of Tyr.” (Wanderer’s Journal, p. 73)
    • “A pragmatic and ruthless man, Kalak is perhaps the most honest of all sorcerer-kings.” (Wanderer’s Journal, p. 73)

  • Abalach-Re of Raam

  • “The sorcerer-queen of Raam, Abalach-Re, calls herself the Great Vizier. She lives in a beautiful palace with ivory walls and an alabaster roof…”(p.71)

    • “Abalach-Re professes to be the representative of some greater power, and claims that her powers are gifts from this mysterious being.”

Sorcerer-Kings: Duties and Relationship with Cities

  • Administration and Justice:

    • “In return for his exalted position and unlimited authority, the king has the duty to administer justice, protect the citizens from famine and crime, and safeguard the city from external attack.” (Wanderer’s Journal, p. 13)
    • “In practice, these gluttonous monarchs spend most of their effort protecting their power base and seeing to their own comfort. Justice tends to be self-serving and arbitrary, and the king’s agents are so corrupt that they often ignore crime altogether—providing the criminal pays them a large enough bribe.” (Wanderer’s Journal, p. 13)

  • Response to Famine:

    • “Most kings take quick and decisive action when famine begins: they raise armies and go to another city-state, steal its food, and replenish their supply of slaves.” (Wanderer’s Journal, p. 13)

  • Defense of the City:

    • “All kings maintain standing armies, they usually have some large defensive project under construction, and I have heard that they devote most of their magical research to developing spells to fend off enemy armies.” (Wanderer’s Journal, p. 13)
    • “Most cities are so well defended that it is impossible to criticize any sorcerer-king on this basis.” (Wanderer’s Journal, p. 13)

  • Control of Magic:

  • “…every ruler controls it tightly.”(pg.10)
    *“…most sorcerer-kings are Defilers of the highest power.”(pg.10)

  • “…sorcerer-kings send their defilers out into the countryside to maintain order and terror…”(pg.34)

  • Relationship with Templars:

  • “…the templars are any sorcerer-king’s best means of maintaining a stranglehold on the population.”

  • Relationship with Nobles:

    • “The nobles control the farms and the water of the cities.” (Wanderer’s Journal, p. 14)
    • “…they form the largest block of slave-owners in any city.”(pg.14)
    • “…every family is allowed to maintain a standing army of slave soldiers, with the young men of the family serving as officers. In an emergency, the king can freely call upon these armies to supplement his own troops.” (Wanderer’s Journal, p. 14)

Specific Sorcerer Monarchs: Further Details

  • Andropinis of Balic:

    • His palace is “a majestic palace of white marble, rectangular in shape and adorned on all sides by magnificent columns.”(p.67)

  • Tectuktitlay of Draj:

    • “His templars, called ‘Moon Priests,’ claim that he raised the city from the dust and made the surrounding lands fertile.” (Wanderer’s Journal, p. 68)

  • Lalali-Puy of Gulg:

  • “…the only city ruler who enjoys the popular support of her subjects.”
    *“Gulg is an exception to the general rule.”

  • “All halfling chiefs are preservers…”

  • Kalak of Tyr
    *“…has been diverting the city’s resources to the consturction of a massive ziggurat.”(p.73)

  • Hamanu of Urik:

    • “The Great King, The Mighty King, King of the World, King of Athas, an unrivaled potentate who holds sway from the great Ringing Mountains to the shores of the endless Sea of Silt…”(p.72)

Sorcerer-Kings in General: Additional Context

  • Relationship with Defilers: While generally hostile to independent wizards, sorcerer-kings employ defilers, seeing them as valuable tools. The text implies a complex and often tense relationship, with the kings needing the defilers’ power but also needing to control them.
  • “When a templar falls from favor with his sorcerer-king, all of his spells can be lost, including those granted for having a higher Wisdom score.”(pg.2)
  • “Templars gain levels as do clerics, but their spell progression at low levels is slower.”(pg.32)
  • Vulnerability: Though long-lived and powerful, the text hints at vulnerability. The existence of deserted city-states (“at least two”) suggests that sorcerer-kings can die or be overthrown. (Wanderer’s Journal, p. 6)
  • “…the only way to leave his service is through death–a hired thief knows too many of the noble’s secrets to be allowed to ‘resign’ in any conventional way.”
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Thanks; and for the AI-advertisement. I never liked the books(though, they are well written for gaming-books), or Prism Pentad, so in my DS-games, I kept Sorcerer-Kings exactly like they are depicted in the OG Box-set.

I’ve even run Dark-Sun to Mage: the Ascension, and Cyberpunk:2020 rules, keep that same mystique.

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I know you just said that you used the rules, but my mind was temporally blown by the concept of bleak, dark, pitiless Athas merged with bleak, dark, soulless Cyberpunk. This is clearly a concept that needs building, then placing in a box and burying a long way away from anyone. :roll_eyes:

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Or the concept of a bleak, dark, pitiless Cyberpunk and a bleak, dark, soulless Athas; I mean, they are interchangeable.

The Cyberpunk combat system is lethally realistic, and the rules on pscionics are awesome and work better than the AD&D2e rules, (IMHO).

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Looks like I’m digging out some cyberpunk books for psionics ideas…

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It’s quite notable here that some sorcerer-kings can’t grant spells which strongly implies there are powerful defilers in wider Athas, and some of them may even have been warlords since the Green Age, reigning over the ashes of the realms they conquered

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This makes me wonder, what happened to the vortexies, that grants SK’s the ability to grant priest-spells, of Yaramuk, Kalidney and Guistinial.

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Perhaps they disperse, but judging by the ruins of those cities it seems like the vortices decay. That these vortices begin to form connection with The Grey or perhaps even The Black as the departed or semi-departed soul of a given SK is in those dimensions, infusing the vortice with negative energies and creating undead and other monstrosities - yet there is also some level of parallel to the Dead Lands, as these cities remain in a sort of stasis rather than going to complete ruin despite hundreds of years

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Dregoth is still (un) alive and kicking, so his hasn’t disconnected. Maybe he wasn’t dead long enough before his Contingency spell kicked in.

Kalid-Ma is in Ravenloft (his high priestess is the Dark Lord), maybe the conduits rerouted? (I saw a fan Canon that his body and city were dropped into the Black or Grey, don’t remember which, but his orbs stayed in Athas.)

Don’t know anything about Sielba.

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Most likely the vortices is connected to the soul not the body. That’s how Dregoth’s connection could persist as an undead being. It also sidesteps the problem of sorcerer monarchs that switch bodies, such as through true mind switch.

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I guess this would be true if he instantly turned into an undead right after being killed, otherwise his soul was going somewhere. But from his story I dont think this happened, so his vortex was probably loose for a bit, before he got it back. He is obviously aware of the vortices since in a certain adventure he captures one from a fallen SK.

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Would it be going somewhere, though? Or, given the nature of the Gray, would it be going next door, as it were, and so not disentangled from the Athasian Prime near as much as it might be on a standard world?

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It would have gone to the Gray.

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Which is fairly, as @LibraryOgre said, “next door” to the Material Plane of Athas (compared to the Outer Planes on a more standard world), as the Gray basically replaces the Ethereal.

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Notably, also, the Gray is between the Prime and the Elemental Planes, while the Astral (which a soul traverses to get to the outer planes in standard cosmologies) is orthogonal… getting to the Elemental Planes from the Astral requires special circumstances, while getting to the Elemental Planes from the Ethereal is next door.

A soul going from the Prime to the Astral might, conceivably, snap a connection to the Inner Planes, as there’s no straight line between the two. A soul going from the Prime to the Ethereal, even a corrupted Ethereal like the Gray, stays on the straight line that connects the Elemental Planes and the Prime.

So, it is more plausible to me that the nature of Athas is such that an elemental vortex, attached to a person’s soul, would survive their death (for a time), than it would in a standard cosmology. I’m not saying this is manifestly the case; it’s based on a pile of suppositions; just that the way Athas’s planes work makes it more likely, IMO.

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I will point out that a straight line is not the quickest distance between two points in the presence of gravity. Add a dimensional axis or three and it might be even more distant.

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Possibly, but not given the maps we’re given.

The Prime is adjacent to the Ethereal, which is adjacent to the Elemental Planes. The Prime is adjacent to the Astral, which is adjacent to the Outer Planes. But the Astral is not Adjacent to the Ethereal. While these are no doubt simplifications (after all, what direction is the Astral? What direction is the Ethereal? Those directions don’t exist in 3 dimensional space), that the Astral is not adjacent to the Ethereal or the Elemental Planes is clear.

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