I was reading the history section of the Trembling Plains book, and Daskinor existed a LONG time before Rajaat started training his Champions. The history shows him mind swapping again and again.
Was he already a strong mindbender? Or something else?
In my own world:
Daskinor is the oldest of champions, in fact he is likely one of the oldest beings on all of Athas, living, undead or otherwise. Born just a few generations after the Rebirth, he lived when halflings still had great cities and roamed the lands, before their decline into their current state.
He was one of the earliest masters of psionics, long before it was codified by the teachings by Taynarus and her predecessors. Using his powers to travel, Daskinor has forgotten more of what he’s seen of Athas and the planes than most will ever know. He also learned at a rather young age how to move his mind from one body to the next. In this way he’s managed to survive all this time. In the early days of the green age, he helped create the Planar Mirror and while he is no teacher, he knows more history than even the most learned scholar. Rajaat himself sought his counsel in matters related to history and the planes.
In exchange for this information, Rajaat taught him magic. A troubled student, Daskinor took very slowly to magic but Rajaat persisted mostly for continued access to Daskinor’s experiences. In Dregoth’s youth, Daskinor told him stories of the gods of other worlds, and dragons, inspiring the dragon metamorphosis. When the dragon came to collect his levy, Dasknior created a facsimile of the Planar Gate, opened the gateway to the Hallow. The mirror shattered and Dregoth’s mind split…
| Daskinor | Green Age | Green Age | Red Age | Brown Age | Age of Chaos |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pre Student | Student of Rajaat | Cleansing Wars End | Just before PP | Current | |
| Level | 25 | 36 | 42 | 44 | 44 |
| Barbarian | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 |
| Nomad | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Elocator | 10 | 10 | 10 | 10 | 10 |
| Tribal Psionicist | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 |
| Body Snatcher | 6 | 6 | 6 | 6 | 6 |
| Wizard | 1 | 7 | 7 | 7 | |
| Student | 10 | 10 | 10 | 10 | |
| Dragon | 2 | 2 |
Wrote a bit about it here:
Daskinor’s Shards: They could be spread far and wide by this point. There is a faction that is working to gather all the shards across the mulitverse and reintegrate them with their creator. Maybe he went crazy when he accidentally stumbled into the ability to access all the multiverse - at once.
Importantly, Rajaat body locked him. Even though he’s a body snatcher he can’t actually swap minds any more. Rajaat didn’t want the power of a Champion’s body to be placed in the hands of some random person.
Well, while the timeline in LCotTP obviously (and purposely) leaves room for DMs to do whatever they want with stuff, the below items pretty heavily suggested to me that Daskinor was a psion/psionicist.
"-14,015 Year of Desert’s Slumber:
Daskinor is born as one of the first trueborn human children in a cave in the Dragon’s Crown Mountains.
-13,963 Year of Guthay’s Agitation:
Psionics have become commonplace among children born to the Rebirth tribes. Psionic children are born more and more commonly in the surviving halfling enclaves.
Daskinor uses true mind switch for the first time."
That’s, what 52 years for him to become a wickedly powerful mindbender?
Though, the idea of him being some kind of mind-jumping psychic vampire or something is pretty interesting…
A couple posts down in that second link I have a bit about how he jumped from place to place and mind to mind, taking over royals and empires. Nothing there that changes the Mind Switch idea and Body Snatcher PRC lets him get into that.
I think Daskinor used true mind switch to escape aging and thus live through the thousands of years before he got Champion-immortality.
My one question with this background is … If Daskinor lived that close to the Rebirth, wouldn’t he have known that halflings rather than humans were the original species, and thus been able to spill the beans on Rajaat’s lie to the Champions?(
Yes. Doesn’t mean he CARED to do so.
And, I’ve never seen it said that Rajaat claimed he wanted to return the world to humans b/c they were the podigenator race, just that he wanted to wipe out all the other, non-human races and give it “back” to humanity (but don’t mess with the halflings). He had already spent a bunch of time amping up racial tensions, so “F*ck those other races!” wasn’t a hard sell by then.
Hmmm. I’d always thought that the “give it back to humans” thing meant that the Champions believed that humanity at least predated the targeted races (whether Rajaat specifically taught them that, or it was already believed by humans in the Time of Magic).
Was the amping up of tensions done before the choosing of Champions? I’d kind of thought that was done largely by the Champions as phase one of the Cleansing Wars (perhaps not entirely recognized as part of the larger picture except in retrospect)… 1500 years is a really long time, surely it wasn’t all open total war.
I’d lean towards at least some of the amping up have preceded the wars, as it would make the wars easier to start.
You can certainly imply that without saying it, but a subjective thing like “humans are the best race, and the others don’t deserve nice things” is much easier to convince folks of than something objective like “your people predated all other races, and i wanna give the world back” (which you can have a logical, fact-based argument about)
Yes, depending on your accepted definitions of words. Rajaat and others working for him were cranking up racial tensions before the Preserver Jihad, which came before the creation of the Champions (per the v8 Rules timeline).
Also, Gretch was setting humans against other races down in Ulyan sometime between when he left the PT in -4877 and when -4275 when Pandruj leaves the PT for Ulyan, whereas the Champions and their armies attack Nagarvos in the year -3351 with the excuse of capturing Pandruj, which is eventually considered the first battle of the Cleansing Wars. (All that is from the Secrets of the Dead Lands timeline).
That all makes sense, and I’m probably wrong here.
Still though… It took the Champions (who theoretically were all highly intelligent) 1500 years to figure out that Rajaat really wanted to give the world to the halflings, even with the huge clue that they were the one nonhuman race Rajaat protected.
If the Champions’ entire education was fully shaped by Rajaat, that could make sense. But I don’t think that’s the case - even excluding Daskinor, they came from different cities in different places. They weren’t all raised in some kind of Rajaat cult compound.
So it’s hard for me to make sense of it taking so long to figure out unless there was a solid story behind it, a pre-existing understanding of the world that would make it plausible to the Champions… especially since Rajaat wasn’t human himself. Wouldn’t that be super suspicious? Especially if the argument was “humans are best” not “elves, giants, dwarves etc are corrupted flawed mutants that are better off dead” or “the mutagenic effects of the Rebirth, unless stopped, will eventually reduce everyone to horrible monsters - look at me, I shouldn’t be like this!”. Rajaat isn’t exactly a plausible advocate for “humans are best”; he’s obviously not human* and obviously way more powerful than anyone else, and (from an ambitious evil person’s perspective) why would he want to hand over the world to another race?
IMO it’s not about why the Champions were willing to kill the nonhumans, with immortality as a promise it’d be easy to find people to do that; the hard part or explain is why they were so trusting of Rajaat.
(The fact they did ultimately turn against him, and that Myron could go rogue even before that, makes me think Rajaat didn’t psionically or biologically build loyalty or remote control into them … Which was probably a mistake on his part.)
*or did Rajaat somehow convince them that he was a weird looking human?
I believe he was open about being a pyreen and pretended to be really cool when he introduced arcane magic; nearly everyone accepted and trusted the “peace-bringers”.
I’m not saying you’re necessarily wrong, but there IS a conceptual gap between what’s said to have happened and what might have happened. That gap - while completely explainable as bad world-building - is critical for readers to latch onto and go “huh, you know what i think was going on here is…”, thereby creating investment in and a love of the setting.
Conversations about the facts of Athasian history can be about did/didn’t happen - I’m happy to help clear those up.
“So it’s hard for me to make sense of it taking so long to figure out…”-type stuff is where headcanon and new adventures and such things happen (which is awesome, keep it up 
). That’s “yeah, maybe” territory for me; there’s rarely right or wrongs there - just ideas and musing.
Oh hmmm. I always thought that pyreen were seen as at least semi- legendary even in current Athas, and the peace-bringers name was a result of rumors/legends about their attempts to mitigate the Cleansing Wars.
I hadn’t thought of the possibility that Rajaat was generally known to be a pyreen, and that pyreen were well enough known and liked that that was an argument in his favor.
(I’d figured Rajaat was taken as an unique immortal being, not a member of any race.)
–
Maybe Daskinor did know more of the real history than the other Champions, but Rajaat gave him a slightly different spiel and convinced Daskinor that he was going to be set above the other Champions in the new world they created (so Daskinor wouldn’t spill the beans to the others, who’d be expected to be jealous).
But Daskinor did join the Rebellion … but maybe because he expected it to succeed and wanted to be on the winning side?
Maybe. They’re certainly legendary NOW, but it seems to me the question is how they were seen in the Green Age.
The below is the first paragraph from Athas.org’s Legends of Athas (an epic level 3.5e book) pyreen entry. I can’t tell you if its JUST Athas.org fanon or based on info that’s not in the original 2e pyreen MM write-up, but it definitely informed my stance. As always, YMMV.
“Pyreen were the last of the Rebirth races to be made from the remnants of the rhulisti nature-masters (see LifeShaping Handbook for more information). When they knew their civilization was no more, they turned themselves into pyreen to watch over their “offspring,” while moving among them undetected. During the height of the Preserver Jihad and throughout the Cleansing Wars, the pyreen were known as peace-bringers, as they tried to end the Wars. Not all worked for peace, and some joined the Rebirth races in resistance to the Champions of Rajaat. Since the coming of the Dragon of Tyr, the pyreen have been looking for a way to destroy him and return Athas to the peace and prosperity of the Green Age.”
Hmm, I read that same text as implying something different - that they weren’t known to others during the Green Age proper, existing in secret (since they were “undetected”) and became known, and got the reputation as peace-bringers, during the “height of the Preserver Jihad” and later during the Cleansing Wars.
Which to me implies that when Rajaat first became a public figure and started teaching magic, well before that, no one would know what a pyreen even was.
Well, that’s definitely not a crazy take IMO.
But I’d suggest that being “known” as peace-bringers means they were known in some fashion, because they weren’t “acting”" or “working towards peace”. The simplest read of the word “known” is that the person/people you’re talking about are known by others. But, that’s definitely up for interpretation, and even if they were known of, how well known and by whom as as what are still reasonable questions.
But, that interpretation of that text is where I’m coming from. No wrong answers here.
“In knowing the teachings of Zerthimonn, I have grown stronger.”
But, yes, I’d agree that the pyreen were, if not famous or legendary, people of power were at least aware of them and their reputation, which Rajaat was able to exploit.
But, to wrap it back around, would Daskinor be interested in the words of a peacemaker?
Oh I agree they were known post Preserver Jihad.
I just had taken that, combined with the “undetected” bit, to imply they were not known before that - that the crisis of the Preserver Jihad/Wars forced them to break their previous secrecy, and people then talked about them and they got a reputation as peace-bringers.