I’m cool with that. Alien glowing butterflies ahoy!
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HA! I just looked, and this thread just became the longest thread on the entire website in terms of number of posts, even though it’s pretty much just you and me talking. I don’t know whether that’s sad or awesome.
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I’ve been going through all the old wizards dot com threads about advanced beings. This was the subject of an enormous amount of consternation on the wizards forum. If attention to this thread could be bought to those people, I think they’d get closure.
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Apologies for being late to the conversation (I’m assuming we’re in different time zones). I think there’s a good argument to be made for Outsider Avangions, possibly modified Native Outsiders. The 3.5 MM states that “An outsider is at least partially composed of the essence (but not necessarily the material) of some plane other than the Material Plane.”
Now on the face of it, Avangions don’t have an extraplanar essence. Whether we go with Red’s personal cosmology (which I like btw) or the traditional Athasian one, the Outer Planes are inaccessible and the elemental planes are already occupied. Shadow Shifters access the Black and Necromancers the Gray.
But. Where does the Avangion’s wellspring of energy within itself come from? They’re essentially a self-recharging spell battery. Preservers take energy from the land but give back as well so it’s possible that they forge a minor and limited link with Athas’ own energy sources (the same source Rajaat disastrously failed to control).
What if their internal wellspring comes from the Positive Energy Plane? It would fit. It would avoid drawing upon planar energy sources already taken by other classes. It would also give a rationale for the Outsider/Native Outsider type. You could even look at giving them the Vivacious Creature template, although the automatic fly speed and incorporeal subtype mitigate against it unless we’re talking higher level Avangions.
I’d actually like a Temporal Being type or template if I’m honest. The Chak’sa in the Hinterlands also suggests that at least one Avangion has reached back into the past to help create it. I see Avangions as a temporal loop. In at least one possible future every Stage I Avangion becomes a Stage X.
The Preserver Metamorphosis X spell has the Avangion’s body disappear for up to 2 years, …bound for planes unknown… The potential Stage X Avangion reaches back to the Stage I as the first metamorphosis is cast and closes the temporal loop, infusing its earlier self with the energy wellspring. Essentially the Avangion is, will be and always has been a source of temporal energy, drawing on the past and future fertility of Athas to power its spells.
In the absence of a fully fleshed out Temporal Prime for Athas and 3.X, the Positive Energy Plane could be a good alternative.
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Excellent case made for outsider type.
In the Dark Sun canon cosmology, there is apparently no positive material plane. In my DS cosmology, the positive material plane exists, but it exists beyond the Gray in the mainstream D&D universe.
I like the fluff, but time traveling scenarios are very difficult to pull off. I also can’t have that as the main avangion, because some people will rebel against it.
That said, I am a huge believer in alternatives to the Dark Sun setting. In the first box set you never even heard of Rajaat and the cleansing wars history. That doesn’t have to be the history, and we should come up with say 5 to 10 alternative ‘lost histories’ for Athas.
Examples:
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Maybe the Mind Flayers were the rulers of Athas at one point. Perhaps the Sorcerer Kings discovered magic, and led their followers in a war of rebellion against the Mind Flayers.
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Maybe the Sorcerer Kings get their magical powers from evil extraplanar beings. No one goes to any happy after life. The souls of the people of Athas are harvested by the evil outsiders.
And so on. I remember many alternative histories from the wizard’s forum. If you haven’t seen the Dragonlance 3.5E supplement ‘Legends of the Twins’, you should really get your hands on it (not hard). We should follow what they have done for Dark Sun.
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The one thing about later 2E DS and 3.X (and don’t even get me started on 4E) that I loathe with a passion is the cosmology. I prefer the traditional Great Wheel cosmology. In my Athas all the inner planes from 2E exist. Sundered, incomplete, isolated inner planes but all there nonetheless - the 4 Elemental and 4 Paraelemental, the 8 Quasi-Elemental and the 2 Energy planes.
Defilers & Preservers does allow for the Energy and Quasi planes if you take a liberal interpretation of the images above - the ones that seem to work are the ones that just say ‘inner planes’.
Now the Gray obviously seems to take the place of the Negative Plane on Athas. Maybe some catastrophe (an Athasian Dawn Cataclysm perhaps?) caused a major leak from the Negative and infused the Gray. Both Positive and Negative may be there but inaccessible to normal travel.
As for time travelling Avangions, I take the view that the Stage X disappearance is a storytelling ‘fluff’ moment, rather than a rules-based ‘crunch’ exercise. As one of many different potential futures that add the wellspring to the Stage I unseen, the Stage X doesn’t cause a paradox if it doesn’t survive from Stage I to X. Essentially the entire Avangion metamorphosis becomes one giant temporal loop, drawing upon all the possible futures to empower the beginning of the journey, regardless of whether that journey is completed.
I’ve been watching far too much Doctor Who lately! 
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Its not a big deal to say that all those Inner Planes exist in the Dark Sun setting. Its compatible with my cosmology, which I revised from the last version. Dregoth explains that an elder elemental gave him the information in my fiction about Dregoth.
“In the decade I was away, I spent some time in the elemental planes – not your elemental planes, but the elemental planes as they are defined in my universe”, stated Dregoth. He continued, “I spoke to the eldest of the elementals. The eldest are incalculably old – there are no numbers that can describe their ancientness. They spoke to me of the universe as it used to be, a place very similar and yet very different to your own. There was a cosmic disaster, and my universe was being swept away, its death to give birth to another universe, your own universe. The elemental leaders of my universe took action to prevent this occurrence. They created the Gray as a barrier to save themselves. The Gray was created, and the Outer Planes of the old universe fell into the Gray. This is where we are now. The graveyard of the old order”.
In game terms, the Elder Elementals basically did what the Halfling Nature Masters did to the seas of Athas hundreds of thousands of years later. They poisoned the Astral Sea (of Athas) to force to it block out the newly budding multiverse (which would destroy the older multiverse of the Dark Sun setting). The Outer Planes of Athas came crashing into the Astral Sea, turning into a place toxic to life, now called the Gray. Souls of the dead from Athas still try to travel to the Outer Planes and end up in the place where the ruins of the Outer Planes exist now - in the Gray.
Legends of the Twins offers many different ways to handle time travel in the Dragonlance setting. Personally, I conceive that time travel on Athas does not change anything in the past or the future. As soon as you return, the timeline simply snaps back into place the way it was before. That doesn’t mean that like Legends of the Twins we can’t give many options on how to handle it.
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I disagree with this completely, but I’ll get back to it later. Suffice it to say that of the main options I consider outsider making the least amount of sense. If you’re looking for them being connected with strange energy sources, then make them fey. If you don’t like that and wonder where their wellspring comes from, make them aberrations, as strange life shaped organisms.
Redking’s right. I have read literally every single dark sun source, magazine, art print etc with the sole exceptions of the unreleased material, and I have seen exactly one mention of the positive energy plane, and in a fluff source that most people would consider dubious cannon at best. It’s even more fluff breaking than Quest Spells canonically existing in Dark Sun, despite their being exactly zero entities who are capable of granting them.
I agree with Redking, again. Also, true time travel opens up way too many cans of worms in a setting like dark sun (why do you think that mind lords of the last sea was so hated? It’s not just because of the telepathic dolphins.) Why the time travel power was even made in 2e Will and The Way is anyones guess, but that same book also made a planar based power that assumed that the athasian cosmology was identical to the great wheel, incidentally the ONLY athasian source I have ever seen mention the positive energy plane, but it also mentioned several other things that are definitely not athasian cannon.
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Well as DS is discontinued as an official game setting and if it’s ever revived will be shoehorned into whatever rules and setting Wizards are pushing at the time, everything we discuss here is academic. Just a few points:
That’s why my thoughts explicitly state it’s a fluff moment. Any Stage X Avangion in my campaign isn’t going to be marauding through space and time. Rather it will be more like the psychodelic acid trip at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey - you can look but not touch.
You haven’t read Dragon Kings then? Pages 64-66 specifically refer to the Positive and Negative Energy planes several times. They also refer to the Quasi-Elemental Planes, which can’t exist (at least not in the traditional cosmology) without the Energy planes interacting with the Elemental ones. DSS2 Earth, Air, Fire, Water also refers to the Quasi planes, again implying the existence of the Energy planes, even if Elemental and Paraelemental (ie: matter-based) clerics can’t access the Energy planes for power directly.
Now I concede the Energy planes fall out of favour as the setting develops, but they were there in the very beginning and they have never been explicitly disavowed, even if they’ve been ignored.
I always thought Mindlords was hated for surfing beach druids, psionic templar equivalents and generally riffing off of every bad 1970s dystopian sci-fi film ever. shrugs I guess you don’t like my idea for telepathic life-shaping Athasian whales then?
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Of course I’ve read Dragon Kings (many, many times, I GM’d an Epic Level Athas Game). But Dragon Kings actually WAS explicitly overwrote by Defiler’s and Preservers (to my eternal annoyance, as they weirdly removed a bunch of athas specific spells from canon, which I had to add back in). Also, the para and quasi planes of dark sun are different than that of other worlds, so without a DIRECT mention of the positive or negative energy planes, which only shows up in Dragon Kings (replaced) and an extremely pseudo cannon part of The Will and The Way (made before a lot of things about the setting and it’s planes were truly hammered out), I’ll take what is generally stated and implied as far as the base cosmology.
This is much better. I can accept this.
Actually, this is one of the few things about it that doesn’t completely suck.
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It doesn’t suck until you consider that Eldaarich is actually thematically very similar. While the Mindlords of Saragar insist on happiness or else, Eldaarich is a Stalinist or North Korean type state. When you scratch the surface, Saragar and Eldaarich are quite similar.
I agree, but in 2e, Eldaarich was far less fleshed out than Saragar. Also, Saragar does have a “false utopia” vibe. I’m not a big fan of Saragar, but that aspect of it wasn’t done half bad.
Anyway, back on the main topic, have you made any decisions on avangions you’d like to share? Also, are you going to make any avangion specific feats? In Legends of Athas, the only avangion feats were literally pointless (as in, they gave the avangion something they could already do) and felt like they were copy-pasted out of an earlier version, whereas dragon meta-magic and extended dragon meta-magic were cool and unique feats (that I utilized in my first stat block above).
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Not yet. It took me three years to come up with the content you see so far. Lol.
I’ll need to think on this. I didn’t come up with any defiler feats myself because the whole time I’ve been designing a universal framework.
Specifically, from Legends of Athas, what feats are available to avangions that they can already do?
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There’s one that gives them a minor globe of invulnerability aura, which requires them to already have an aura, which means that all the feat does is give them a weaker version of a feature that they are already going to get in a spell or two anyway. It’s a really strange design choice.
The other one is equally as weird, as it gives them a way to block defiling damage, within their aura, again requiring 8 spells or more to even get, and it really seems like they should have such an ability as a class feature anyway. Plus, there are spells for that.
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Did they choose it, or is it just the feature from 2E? I’ll have to look at Legends of Athas again to figure this out.
I’ll get back to you on that. I will say this - some of my work logically depreciates some of what is in Legends of Athas, although for the most part it’s compatible and you can just plug in the LoA content.
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I’ve had a look. From what I can see, avangion aura is a class feature that isn’t actually granted by the avangion prestige class. And there are some feats that rely on it like the minor and major globe of invulnerability feats, and the anti defiling aura.
So what you are saying is that these feats should be in regress into the metamorphosis spells themselves? That can be done without me overriding the LoA content, by simply including the feats in the metamorphosis spells themselves.
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Correct and incorrect. The aura is still granted by the spells, like it was in 2e, and does the same as the feats and more, if you take a glance at them. Large parts of LoA felt they were still in alpha and shouldn’t have even made it to the beta version. Those feats are a prime example. The only reason I can think of that they exist is that they were from an earlier or alternate version. They certainly don’t synergize with anything, unlike the dragon meta magic feats
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I just looked. The aura gives SR/PR not a globe of invulnerability, which is different. Am I wrong?
From page 53, preserver metamorphosis X.
Your avangion aura also advances to its final state with a radius of 200 feet and gains the ability of a globe of invulnerability (caster level equal to your arcane caster level.) in addition to all its other traits.
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Oh. Lame. Don’t worry, I won’t make that mistake.
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