Explanation of the Yuan-Ti (a resurrection of an old thread)

[phaaf_glien]

The venerable Pennarin asked near a decade ago about the origins of the yuan-ti in Dark Sun. This subject has long needed some love:

Hopefully somebody, someday, somehow, will find the holy grail of an explanation, marrying logic, poetry, and a Dark Sun-ish twist to their culture, appearance, and demeanor.

See the old thread for the original responses. Here I proffer my own:

SUMMARY: They are the design of a great lizard man king from the time of the early Cleansing Wars. This great lizard man, endowed upon hatching with tremendous psionic talent and profound intellectual qualities, rose in time to become a 22nd level psionicist/druid character spirit of the land, and the great king of his scaly people. When slain and his body destroyed by Keltis and his army, and his spirit beholding the destruction of his people and the defiling of his vast swampy region, the nascent spirit of the land, defeated but not destroyed, settled to undermine the human kingdom that had taken the place of his own. As his wetland domains had not been totally defiled, though his body was destroyed, his spirit and powers slowly recovered. When his powers were suitably regathered, the spirit of the land then manifested at the royal palace and, with the bite of a serpent, poisoned the blood of the human king that had replaced him, a descendant of Keltis. The poison warped the king’s mind and body, and with his fanged bites he and his court spread the blood disease throughout the kingdom. Chaos and civil war followed. Keltis’ own templars fought against the lizard men abominations that now infested people throughout the kingdom, even among the royal family. The kingdom collapsed in short order, and although many of these abominations were killed, they were not extinguished, and still hide and terrorize humanity as they may.

Commentary: I think the very name “yuan-ti” is not helpful to realign our thoughts about the Dark Sun version of these creatures, though I would follow very closely their stats and much else about them from the Monstrous Manual. I give to the original lizard man spirit of the land king the name of Nabathth. His guarded lands long since utterly destroyed by defiler wars and cataclysm, and now an enormous salt flat, the echo of his spirit exists now only in his creations, in the very blood of the Sons of Nabathth. They know next to nothing of their ancient history, but the spirit of Nabathth whispers within their minds images and dreams for them to follow.

The Prophesied Return of Nabathth: Aside from vengeance upon humanity, which can serve to expand their numbers by infecting other humans, or to create monstrous servitors from humans, their poisoned blood urges the best and most suitable of them to become druids of swampy lands (if any such lands can be found upon Athas!). If one of them becomes great enough (14th level, capable of casting the reincarnation and a quest version of the resurrection spell), and a suitable ritual is completed (likely involving the sacrifice of 22 willing newly inflect pure-bloods), perhaps Nabathth will be reborn upon the swamp, hatching with a reborn body from the mire, and thus their long-promised-to-return-king would be among them again, and restore their ancient kingdom, and complete their vengeance upon the human world.

Perhaps one day I will expand upon this, as I see the backstory of Nabathth and the Sons of Nabathth playing an important role in several ancient events.

[ouroboros]

Check Scale, Tail & Claw, we explored this subject there after going over all the available canon (not that there is much, mostly 4e and wake of the ravager game) and many fanon sources.

[Star-Sage (of Balic)]

I knew nothing of how the snakemen were meant to be depicted in Dark Sun originally and settled on them being an exotic monster hinting at deeper mysteries from a faraway land. Here’s the yuan-ti of my campaign.

The yuan-ti reign over jungles and bamboo forests in the Far West where they enjoy the dubious honor of being one of the only races in the West to practice defiler magic. That said yuan-ti defilers practice human sacrifice in tandem with preserving as their arcane tradition. During the cleansing wars the humans of the merrshaulk empire would discover human sacrifice as an alternate means of defiling and seek to combine it with what they knew of nature bending, a forbidden art they had rediscovered from ancient ruins in the Crimson Savannah. The yuan-ti are the monstrous descendants of those who sought longer lives and greater power at the altar of human sacrifice and nature bending.

The yuan-ti of the east, those dwelling in the forest ridge, were descendants of an exiled clan from merrshaulk that sought out greater nature bending lore from the ancients. Believing they would discover these ancients if they crossed the jagged cliffs they unearthed rhulisti ruins of the forest ridge. Believing in their hubris they fully understood the power of these ancient ruins the outcast clan attempted their ritual of ascension utilizing the revived lifeshaped relics converted to their own dark purposes. Unfortunately for them this backfired, turning them into twisted mutants led by a being known only as Anathema.

[phaaf_glien]

What excellent work, Ouroboros. If I am not mistaken you were a principle author in Scale, Tail & Claw, no? Surely, this is a quality publication and much appreciated. My apologies for not having reviewed it earlier. Another win for the Pristine Tower Development Group.

I pause to reflect on your adaptation of the yuan-ti to Dark Sun. For the moment, among the most fascinating elements to me is the being called the Sevenfold Serpent. For those unfamiliar, I post the offered depiction of that being here:

One wonders at such a being, to be sure, especially as I have enjoyably mused on the great psionic masters of the Green Age, and upon all the esoteric works they may have pursued. Surely, the Sevenfold Serpent could be one of them.

For me, and I suspected for many of us, the depiction of the Sevenfold Serpent is highly evocative of the great naga king of southeast Asia, most specifically being the seven-headed naga king of the Khmer Empire. Behold, for those of you who may not recollect, the naga’s famous statue at Angkor Wat:

A terrible monster, to be sure. The being, which we are to understand might also be seen as a spirit or “genie”, is quite often depicted in the ancient Khmer Empire, and is in many ways a kind of totem. See how the same abomination is depicted upon a modern Cambodian dancing-woman’s headdress:

Now, certainly, we understand that the city-state of Nibenay is a strong port from ancient Khmer. The original designers seemed to have had an impressive familiarity with Angkor Wat and even of Zhou Daguan’s medieval account of that kingdom (a fascinating read!). The Khmer capital indeed seemed to have a royal complex at the center of the city, which was associated with and even guarded by the seven-headed naga, and we even read from Zhou Daguan that the Khmer king enjoyed a female bodyguard and an extensive hierarchy of wives, concubines, and other females of the hareem. Perhaps it was not exactly as foreboding and secret as Gallard’s future compound, but we see the outline of the Naggaramakam.

As I prepare a formal and in-depth “boxed-set” for the city-state of Nibenay, I feel it necessary to come to some terms with this seven-headed dragon, and if I should have a reason to explain its presence or tastefully exclude it.

What does this being have to do with Nibenay, with Gallard? What is its myth, and was it ever real?

This work on the yuan-ti and the Sevenfold Serpent reinvigorates my interests in this problem-set. I would prefer, I think, to have the Sevenfold Serpent have something to do with this seven-headed hydra of Nibenay, but that necessitates some careful thought. I dislike the real-world ports being too direct, and if the real-world myth exists in some fashion in Nibenay, it should be tastefully conceived, and be seemly with the tone and history of Dark Sun.

As some food for thought, I end this post with one of Zhou Daguan’s most fascinating and famous remarks about the naga that dwelt in the Khmer capital, a fun little passage which might remind us of our Shadow King:

Inside the palace there is a gold tower, at the summit of which the king sleeps at night. The local people all say that in the tower lives a nine-headed snake spirit which is lord of the earth for the entire country. Every night it appears in the form of a woman, and the king first shares his bed with her and has sex with her. Even his wives do not dare go in. At the end of the second watch he comes out, and only then can he sleep with his wives and concubines. If for a single night this spirit does not appear, the time has come for this foreign king to die. If for a single night he stays away, he is bound to suffer a disaster.

-Zhou Daguan, A Record of Cambodia: The Land and its People, tr. Peter Harris

Maybe Gallard is not motivated as much by lust as much one might initially think, but is rather driven by some occult necessity! Haha!

Thoughts, gentlemen? Again, wonderful work on the Dark Sun Yuan-ti, and other scaly folk.

[phaaf_glien]

In my initial review of Scale, Tail& Claw, which was an enjoyable read, I wondered about the proposed meaning of “Yuan-ti”, as well as the name fro which the cult that the Athasian yuan-ti originated, the Su-Shenwan-Ti. What might you speculate these names mean?

[ouroboros]

That’s @neujack’s work, a basterdization of the word ‘sushen’- meaning “body scolpting” in Vietnamese or Chinese, can’t recall which, and the suffix ‘ti’
The name L’Sstan ti was ported from Raddu’s write up from when he was 16 iirc of a good nature snakemen related to the evil yuan ti