I like this explanation.
1 Like
I didn’t read the comments, so sorry if already said.
If it exists, somewhere, sorcery or the unseen way can reveal it to you. You can even see the past this way. The greater your power, the more obscure or shielded a thing you can see.
I believe the Dragon must have reported to some of his fellows his encounter with the new being, the new threat, of Nerad. Shared a mental image of it, even a psychic sense of what it could become.
1 Like
I agree with your statements completely. Also, thank you for the correction. I haven’t read Forest Maker in a long time and I’ve never run it. It’s just not a very good module. Although I do appreciate the map of Altaruk.
1 Like
I’ve always wanted to see a psi-only variant Avangion transformation. I though it would fit better with the world setting. Ditch magic entirely and work hard to heal the world with pure psionics.
1 Like
It is not a good adventure. There’s even a honorable, good-aligned ranger with a flaming artifact sword of goodness. A paladin in disguise if I ever saw one.
The adventure appears written by someone who had access to the trappings of the setting but had no understanding of its essence.
2 Likes
Also the fact that the adventure expects both the PC’s and Abalach-Re to act like complete morons. I mean, everything tells you that “the avangion” is evil in disguise, but of course, if you actually try to do something about, you’ll get slaughtered, which the adventure never bothers to tell you. Furthermore, if Abalach-Re realizes you aren’t enthralled, she proceeds to…do absolutely nothing. Oh, and the “big reveal” of the rituals true purpose requires you to first go through a room with 50,000 unguarded gold pieces in it. Like, why don’t you just take the money and run? That whole adventure is built out of pure stupid.
3 Likes
I’ve just been poking through Thri-Kreen of Athas and it kind of just adds to the confusion.
The Avangion in question was one of the leaders of a nation made up of both kreen and humans who lived in the region just south of the Dragon’s Crown Mountains, beyond the Ringing Mountains. It was founded about two thousand years before and then fell, though the kreen apparently have no knowledge of why it fell, or even that it had humans in it anymore.
So it does appear that a sizeable population of humans once did live outside the Tyr region beyond the Ringing Mountains during the Brown Age.
And more it also says the nation probably fell when it came into conflict with the Dragon and the Sorcerer-Kings. If that is true then it means the SKs and Dragon did operate beyond the Ringing Mountains and wiped out an entire nation and that they met and defeated an Avangion so that would be how they know what one is and looks like.
2 Likes
Thanks for that tidbit. I went looking for that section and found it on page 81. Can’t believe I missed that part about a joint human/kreen nation. That potentially went up against the SK.
2 Likes
If you look for it in Terrors of the Dead Lands there’s an undead with the background of that city. It looks like the two leaders are described as a halfling-like being with wings (that’d be the avangion), and the other the most awesome-looking kreen ever (wings are not mentioned). Then the avangion vanishes during the siege and all is lost.
1 Like
I don’t have that product. Terrors of the deadlands? Is that a printed book?
Many of the monsters, templates, undead customization rules were removed from Secrets of the Dead Lands and published separately as Terrors. The lore contains things that indicate they come from Secrets.
Faces of the Forgotten North is the same, containing info found in the unpublished Lost Cities of the Trembling Plains or watchamacallit.
1 Like
Just to confirm. Does the majority of the community consider the lore contained therein to be cannon? I only joined at the end of October please forgive my ignorance.
1 Like
TSR gifted an organization, which one day concretised into what came to be called “athas dot org”, the manuscript to Secrets of the Dead Lands, with the charter to adapt it to 3e and publish it. Other material may have been provided, I don’t recall.
Short of reading the original manuscript you can safely assume the lore from Terrors is official as it came directly from it.
1 Like
As someone who has read the original manuscript, I just want to clarify that much of the lore in Terrors of the Deadlands did not come from Secrets. Importantly, this includes The Neskos (possibly another Champion of Rajaat) and the Avangion/Kreen City-State. Those are unique to this site.
As to whether or not it is cannon? I honestly couldn’t tell you, and frankly doubt anyone here can. By the license agreement, every 3e thing that this site published that was under the auspices of WOTC is arguably 1st party material, and therefore as official and cannon as anything Wizards produced. In practice, you’d have to ask WOTC, and when they brought back Dark Sun in 4e, not a single reference was ever made in any print book or article to anything that an athas.org publication added to cannon (I know because I spent way too many hours checking).
4 Likes
Separating this because I feel this a bigger issue. Which “community?” I doubt everyone who still visits this site considers the stuff here to be canon, much less the majority of Dark Sun fans, much less the rest of the D&D community. I wasn’t around for the old days, but looking around online, there is pretty much no mentions of any of the supposedly official conversion sites from 3e anywhere. Not even on optimization guides with dubious definitions of officially, or threads dedicated to 3rd party products.
Maybe somebody with greater knowledge than me could clarify, but AFAIK, the work on this site was seen as roughly as definitive as random home-brew. Even people on this site, myself included, often have very different ideas about what has been made here that should be counted as canon.
2 Likes
Things appear to have not changed a bit.
The sentiment was endlessly debated over on the WotC old boards.
I wonder how much of the conversion and expansion efforts for the other at-the-time abandoned settings are today even considered by anyone interested in, say, Spelljammer for example.
3 Likes
I’m aware of one DS adventure written and posted online since the athas dot org days. Have there been more stuff? There’s endless 5e DS conversions, shlocked together, some rewriting the basics until it can at best be a homebrew version.
2 Likes
I’m confused, what edition are you referencing?
1 Like
All since the end of 3e
1 Like