I did several post up when I stated “Could be that AR knew of the kreen legend and just ran with it” 
3 Likes
I meant I was uncertain whether or not the Champions traversed the Ringing Mountains and ‘cleansed’ peoples/places there.
Unless there’s a source I’m unaware of, all we know is that:
- Rajaat told them to leave the Halflings alone.
- There are only Halflings, Petrans and Kreen living over there now.
- There are no known existing or ruined settlements (except for the above races) NW of the Ringing Mountains.
For all we know (lacking a source once again - there’s always room for me to be wrong), there could have been a confederation of 12 Elven cities that existed in a forest that spanned the entire area west of the RM, from North to South, that ran from the Mountains in the East to the Jagged Cliffs in the West, all of which were razed by the Champions, their ruins buried under 3 inches of sod, and no one would know.
2 Likes
I thought Rajaat told them to stay out of the Jagged Cliffs, not the Ringing Mountains.
I also think there’s a line in the Mind Lords of the Last see about a city in what’s currently the Kreen Empire that was wiped out in the Cleansing Wars.
1 Like
What it ultimately comes down to is, whether or not sorcerer-monarchs bother to go outside the region and look around—and they do tend to be highly insular and focused on their own city-states—the larger a power, the bigger the threat, the more likely it is to draw attention from the sorcerer-monarchs. A third-level preserver wandering around in the Jagged Cliffs is someone that nobody cares about, but a post-20th-level avangion showing up will definitely draw attention. Even assuming that the sorcerer-monarchs don’t have some system by which they know when someone is casting a psionic enchantment within a thousand miles (which would be pretty easy to do and seems like a no-brainer when your main enemies are other sorcerer-monarchs using psionic enchantments), an avangion whose presence was so significant that it impacted the entire racial memory of the thri-kreen was pretty splashy, and news would’ve reached the sorcerer-monarchs even if they hadn’t detected it personally (via magic or psionics).
Basically unless an avangion takes specific measures to conceal its presence, the sorcerer-monarchs are probably gonna know about it, and the fact that this one impacted the racial memory of an entire species means it wasn’t exactly low-key.
2 Likes
Bottom line: the module author screwed up. In game, you could run with the idea that the SMs know how the dragon metamorphosis ends (see Borys) and that each wizard’s metamorphosis is slightly different, so they know how to extrapolate from their own changes how they’ll end up. Not too much of a stretch to assume they can study the Preserver Metamorphosis spells and extrapolate the Avangion.
I’d also argue, for all her faults, AR is probably one of the best placed to do this. She’s managed to duplicate KM’s spell, using Kalak as an inspiration, and she knows something about lifeshaping, having looted one of Dregoth’s laboratories in Giustenal where he was doing the prep work for creating Dray.
1 Like
Do you belive life shaping is how she created the forest? She could not have done it magically, as the tenth level spell to create a forest is preserver only.
1 Like
That’s the problem with racial memory for a species that doesn’t do much to track time. They remember a being made of light that came to them. No idea when that happened. It must have been fairly late in the green age since Rajaat only closed his schools to.privately tutor his champions.
I would imagine whoever this Avangion was must have started as a master of the way 20th level psionicist. Then progressed very quickly as a preserver but had a very uncorrupted heart so Rajaat didn’t consider him or her as a champion. Either way if we take Dragon Kings as correct when it says there has never been a fully metamorphosized Avangion in the Tyr region then we must assume this being didn’t participate in the cleansing wars. It must have been off in the hinterlands at the time.
1 Like
“fully metamorphosized Avangion” or they only made it to the 9th level of the transformation.
1 Like
I’m not sure why several people here seem to think that the champions never travelled outside of the Tyr Region. Do you think every race that was completely eradicated just conveniently stayed in the same state-sized region for thousands of years?
Most certainly, but even more certainly, the Thri-Kreen of Athas author screwed up even worse.
She did do it magically. She used a corrupted artifact that prevented her from defiling but allowed her to cast preserver specific spells.
3 Likes
From the description in the prism pentad after the nature masters used the pristine tower to kill the brown tide and the waters receded they walked across the land and where each one fell new races sprung up from their bodies. The rebirth. I’ve always taken that to mean outside of the Tyr region there is no intelligent life. I’ll admit that makes for a small area of the world. Given that the progenitor race is halflings “small” seems appropriate.
1 Like
The 4e Dark Sun Campaign guide, among other sources, strongly implies that was not, in fact, the case. Furthermore, even if all the races originated in the Tyr region except for Halflings and Thri-Kreen, the idea that they would never go elsewhere in a hundred generations is ludicrous .
2 Likes
While I can agree the races spreading out over 10K years would be inevitable. There is also no cannonical evidence that permanent large settlements exist outside the mapped areas. After all we don’t know at what rate technology advanced in the green age. We know the green age itself was about 10K years. We can also guess at what level of technology had developed based on the city of Saragar. Assuming Saragar was at the peak of green age technology. Who knows how long it took for the green age races to develop ships capable of traversing the waters that are now the sea of silt. Who knows if they found fertile lands beyond? After all the brown tide had ravaged the life giving properties of the ocean and was only stopped at the Tyr region by the pristine tower. Who’s to say those lands weren’t barren and devoid of potential?
I will readily admit however that I have no knowledge of the 4th edition Dark Sun books. I avoided that game system in favour of Pathfinder. So I’m only going by what I’ve read in the 2nd edition sources I have and the novel series that I’ve consumed. I would welcome more information. Would you consider the 4th edition books a good purchase if I only want them to fill in holes in my knowledge of the world and not the game system?
2 Likes
Probably not, unfortunately. While there are certainly a couple of lore “patches” introduced that I suspect would be used if Dark Sun ever comes back to 5e, there are a larger number of lore shifts made to make it compatible with the rules and planes of 4e that aren’t terribly compatible with 2e lore.
4 Likes
Thanks for the advice. I’ll save the money and keep with my current sourcebooks and homebrew pathfinder rules.
1 Like
The rhulisti were the masters of an globe spanning ocean; it’s not unreasonable to assume that some of them went back to other cities around the planet after they underwent change from the Pristine Tower. Plus, who’s to say there weren’t several Pristine Towers positioned equidistantly around Athas? Just because the Tyr Region doesn’t know of any others doesn’t mean they aren’t there.
I found the 4E rulebook to be gorgeously illustrated (not on a par with Brom’s work though) and to have some neat additions to the world (naming some mountain ranges, adding a small mountain chain near Dragon’s Bowl to explain why it hadn’t filled with silt etc). Generally, I’d echo BDMDragon’s comments. Too many lore shifts to squeeze DS into the 4E paradigm for my comfort.
Yup, the Skull of Dorag Thel IIRC.
Agreed. In the 320 years between 1500 AD and 1820 AD, the population of Europe and central Asia grew from c. 78 million to 220 million, along the way sending emigrants to the Americas and Australasia (among others). The c. 10,000 years between the Blue Age and the start of the Cleansing Wars allows oodles of time for populations to expand, migrate and populate the world.
4 Likes
When you get down to it, Dark Sun had a lot of continuity problems and a times contradictory lore.
Initially the Hinterlands was described as the last hospitable place left (except for the Forest Ridge). Then you get the vast Kreen Empire with their rivers and huge swathes of grassland which would be a defilers paradise and a far cry from the Athas as initially presented. And the Ringing Mountains aren’t exactly the obstacle they were initially presented as either.
So there would have to be a compelling reason no SK headed out there but none are given.
4e had some gorgeous artwork. Trying to shoehorn it into 4e rules and lore had issues, such as Goliath’s being reskinned as half-giants and doing a bad job of it. The eladrin/Land beyond the Winds concept was interesting but wouldn’t work in a 2e/3e setting due to lack of eladrin in them.
2 Likes
I’d go with a literal Empire full of millions of Kreen and other carnivorous insects that never sleep, can overwhelm with numbers and view mammals as little more than a smorgasbord as being a compelling reason. Yes, there are plenty of verdant lands to defile, but the SMs have gardens full of Trees of Life as well as a city of souls to defile if needed (as happened at the fall of Giustenal and as intended by Kalak in his metamorphosis). There’s no compelling reason for the SMs to want to go beyond the Ringing Mountains.
The Mountains are enough of a barrier to most would-be non-dragon defilers, particularly if they travel alone. Survive the mountains and you have miles of rainforest full of cannibalistic halflings to contend with before you can get to the Hinterlands, and then you have the issue of a general lack of resources (where’s the well water sites in the Hinterlands?) and rampaging zik-trin running around the place.
The Hinterlands are challenging to survive in. Just because there’s grassland doesn’t make it any less of a deathtrap. If the Hinterlands are a deathtrap, the Crimson Savanna is a killing ground. Only the foolhardy, insanely powerful, or truly desperate would try to settle the Hinterlands/Savanna.
4 Likes
I like this explanation. The SK are powerful beyond mortals but they are also intelligent enough for basic risk/reward assessment.
2 Likes
An easier explanation is its the SMs dragon psychological make up keeping them holdup in their city-states. Dragon’s become more insular and territorial as they age on other worlds, rarely leaving their lairs and basking in their hordes.
Could be the same for the SMs. The combination of their age and the stage in their metamorphosis could be keeping them from leaving the greater Tyr region on a subconscious level.
5 Likes
Worth noting: one of the “patches” I mentioned above that 4e made was removing the kreen empire from existence, something I wholeheartedly agree with. Doomsday army of Thri-kreen who vastly outnumber the entire population of the Tyr region was an incredibly dumb idea, and simply another symptom of TSR’s seeming inability to create problems that didn’t nuke settings.
1 Like