So I’m reading a blog about the Adventure Black-Spine; believe it or not, I’ve never ran or played an official Dark-Sun adventure in my life; I always wanted to create my own adventure or play one that another DM created adventure.
So, on with the adventure; Queen Trinth is going to try and take over Athas, you know, Borys and Rajaat in the way, so she can take over the Lich-Queen because the Athasians are stronger and more wipey, this begs the question: If she and her army is strong enough to take over and enslave Athas, a people whom can conquer and enslave the Githyanki, why not just skip Athas and go after the Lich-Queen herself?
There are a couple of ways to do this. It’s kind of a matter of what you want to change as a DM.
Trinith is after a MacGuffin that would let her absorb life like a sorcerer king so she can make herself…umm like a sorcerer king. In this case she does have an idea how powerful Athasians are but she needs the power boost to stand a chance against Vlaakith.
Trinith doesn’t understand how powerful Athasians are. Githyanki need fortresses outside of the astral plane to grow food and so their children can grow. The last time the githyanki had reliable intelligence on the state of Athas it was during the Green Age (so seriously dated). She needs a place where she can breed her armies that Vlaakith doesn’t have easy access to (Athas is cut off from normal access to the Astral plane).
Forget Trinith entirely and rewrite it as Vlaakith invading. Vlaakith discovers that she can gain immense psionic and sorcerous power from Athas. You could make this into an entire campaign. I would suggest looking up some vintage Dungeon magazine, and Dragon magazine as in 3rd edition they had a campaign for githyanki invading your gaming world. They also had a module where you went after Vlaakith herself in the Astral plane at the end of said campaign.
So maybe I’m just misremembering or making something up, but afaik Trinith and her Githyanki were meant to be part of a larger invasion force some thousands of years ago (the remnants of that old invasion are now the Gith) and they had been trapped in some sort of time anomaly in the Grey or the closed sphere that resulted in them not being able to breach Athas in a timely manner. They are, in effect, the late-arriving main host of a failed Githyanki invasion of Athas. Or at least, that’s the way I’d play it, allows for Athas to maintain its isolation but also allows for a very interesting resource for whoever can claim the carcass of the city or somehow capture it
That would probably be another way to make it work. I would need to reread the third book of the adventure again but I remember it being vague on details about how Trinith’s githyanki were separate from Vlaakith’s.