Dark-Sun’s been out over thirty-years; if you play every Friday-night, and all day weekends, you should be at 30th in no time; say, everyone else plays Dark Sun two and a half days a week too, right?
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Depending on the outcome of Grave Circumstances (reproduced and edited here), there may be another 30th level (2E) or 10th rank (3.5E) dragon in the north of the Tyr Region.
If you go by the original boxed set, there is a lot more latitude for other sorcerer monarchs out there. The Hinterlands are basically removed in the revised campaign setting, but if you keep the Hinterlands in your game there is a lot of potential. In my humble opinion, the Deadlands make a lot more sense as part of the Hinterlands. The Deadlands in this scenario separate part of Athas from the Tablelands, make gives creedence to the Wandering writing that he had never heard of someone returning from the Hinterlands.
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I loved the expanded map when 3.5 came out and I really got giddy when the internet came around and I discovered that world-map.
And given how, Borys, Kalid, Dregoth and Esturren became or tried to become dragons, it seems NPCs don’t have the patience to advance to 30th level through XP.
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Hmm. I found it interesting that it was implied that the process of becoming an advanced being allows one to shape themselves. That further implies that the dragon form of body is actually optional, and that the shaping is either controllable or can be influenced by the one performing the ritual. Again, that all implies that the forms chosen (dragon, lion, avangion, other) are being guided by cultural, belief, and historical based sources.
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I mean if we imply enough anything is possible…it still doesnt make it true.
The issue is TD gave SMs wildly different and strange features. But if something is called a dragon- there is a certain implied(using your word) view of that form: scaly, has tail, wings, dragons breath, big, etc.
But these ‘dragons’ look anything but. Why not just call the SMs advanced being and be done, why even require a metamorphosis?
TDs novels totally shit over Dragon Kings ideas and Dragon Kings ignores the novels. Its like two folks stop getting along and ignored each others contributions.
As for the dragon, it is stated in one of tge revised books that there is only one Dragon (Borys).
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In 3.5e, you can handily sidestep this problem as I did with my Advanced Being Framework. Essentially, the prospective advanced being selects the type they want for their metamorphosis. The main thing is whether it is a defiler metamorphosis or a preserver metamorphosis. And no longer is “dragon” type evil for some reason.
And -
So like you said, we have advanced beings. There is a metamorphosis but they metamorphose according to their individual preferences. So you can have an avangion dragon, and a ravager fey, both advanced beings, categorised by their avangion or ravager advanced being status, not by their type.
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Doesn’t automatically make the idea false either.
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I agree, thus my suggestion to call them something else other than ‘dragon’ - because of the visual connotations the word ‘dragon’ carries with it.
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Advanced Being works for me. Technically speaking, the gaming material refers to “defiler metamorphosis” and “preserver metamorphosis”.
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Given the 2,000 to three-thousand years, surely someone else has figured it out.
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Sorry, wonky forum issues. I stated previously that perhaps there are other dragons in other regions besides the SKs and the Dragon Tyr because of these reasons:
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Mentions by Nok and one old monster Manuel that mentions Athasian Dragons and hints that there are others in far away lands.
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The Tablelands region is stated by many sources to be similar in size to the Southwestern United States, therefore providing much more territory for others.
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What if the Dragon’s Frenzy and the mass defiling are subjective and the transformation is different for different beings.
It is true that the Tyr-Region is the same size as the American-SW, but, Athas does’t appear to be as old as the Earth, leading my to believe, geologically-speaking, there were as many meteor-impacts or volcanic-events to bring metals to the surface from the core and mantle. That is why Athas is metal-poor.
As I imagine it, there are no “30th level Dragons” aside from Borys.
There are a number of other 30th level Advanced Beings on Athas (as I imagine it), but they are all Elementals, Paraelementals or Spirits of the Land.
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Not even one of these was presented canonically. The rules in Dragon Kings for clerical and druidic advanced beings appear to have been quietly ignored.
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I don’t think we can draw any conclusions as to the age of Athas on the basis of metorite impacts. For a start, we have the Lava Gorge (and further afield the Cauldron), which could have been created by a metorite.
Also, up until 14,000 years ago, the entire globe was covered in a world ocean, which would have had an ‘impact’ (sorry!) on how much evidence of meteor craters is visible (erosion of the craters, covered by the current silt sea etc).
Finally, the creation of Earth’s solar system was (as far as scientists can tell) a very messy process (Late Heavy Bombardment etc). D&D crystal sphere solar systems don’t seem to be created by the same process. In any event, of the two shattered worlds that could provide meteors, one appears to have been broken during the Cleansing Wars, and the other (the Sextant) is also young enough to have a name that Athasian historians/astronomers can still recall.
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A spirit of the land does appear in the Lynn Abbey novels, and the rules for making them were in “Earth, Air, Fire, and Water”
Edit: Now I think about it there are arguably two in those novels (Quaraite and Urik), and also Desverendi in the Korgunard adventures
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In a 4e Dragon Magazine article, there’s three or four other spirits. For example, Lalali-Puy enslaved a rain spirit and it has gone mad.
Don’t know if more are described elsewhere… (Dragon and Dungeon magazines, 4e Dark Sun core books.)
The plains northwest of Kurn have multiple spirits, but they cover a much larger region and only are active in their respective (Athasian) season.
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I was speaking more of advanced being elementals.
Another thing to ponder is, besides Athas’s size, if any other ancient sites like the Pristine Tower exist beyond the Tyr region, which is very logical. Perhaps someone has harnessed these sources of power to help aid their transformation.
The mutagenic powers have to stem from some exceptional power source.
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Yeah, things got real crazy when Saturn and Jupiter got into a 2:1 resonance and forced Uranus and Neptune to switch positions.
A bigger problem is that Earth had a very toxic Venus-like atmosphere for the first half a billion-years. And yes, the oceans were at, like 300°, but the oceans didn’t boil away due to the increased air-pressure.