Rajaat's Cover Story

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From the Daskinor thread…

What did Rajaat tell the Champions, to explain why an obviously non-human being was giving them vast powers supposedly intended to make humanity supreme? How did he explain why halflings were spared, without ruining the entire charade?

Maybe something like this ..

"The Pristine Tower is a danger to the whole world. Very long ago, its power mutated humans and halflings into the other races of the world. As the effects progressed, they grew more severe. The first changes were relatively small - halflings to dwarves or goblins, humans to elves or orcs. But then they worsened. The newer forms were far more drastically mutated - tari, pixies, the lizardfolk and aarakocra that aren’t even mammals.

And then creatures like myself began to be born - twisted and unique beings. If things had been allowed to progress, in some far distant time no two beings would be born belonging to the same species - and then life would end, for none new could be born.

But my own unique form, as much as it is a sign of the blight that wracks the world, gave me power. Four thousand years ago I sought out the source of the damage, discovered the Tower, learned of its effects, and contained them.

My power is immense, but it is not unlimited. I cannot destroy the Tower - it is linked to all life upon this world, and cannot be destroyed without the death of all. As long as I remain at the Tower, I can control its effects. You all can study here, live here, without becoming mindless monsters as once would have happened.

But by myself I cannot repair the damage to the world, or even prevent its slow progression elsewhere. I have blocked the poison at its source, but it diffused into the world for thousands of years before I arrived, and out there it still eats away at all life.

This is why I developed magic - a way to take the tainted life energy that flows through the world and shape it to a purpose. This is why defiling is the true and higher form of magic - it doesn’t just tap into the tainted life energy as preserving does, it actually rips out the tainted energy from the land.

Yes, it’s not a clean process - defiling kills the soil and plants in the immediate area - but the damage done is tiny compared to the long term benefit. It’s like surgery, cutting out something that festers. Transform the tainted energy to something else - fire, or lightning, or motion, or matter - and you cleanse the world, one small bit at a time.

But there is another stage to that surgery that must be completed…"

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I wonder if he didn’t also have a reserve of halflings… those of the Jagged Cliffs being considered far enough away, and hidden, to let the halflings survive, even if some were killed in the Cleansing Wars.

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I thought he specifically told them to avoid the Jagged Cliffs? I don’t think it’s far enough away for them just to have never stumbled upon it.

Trembling Plains says that Daskinor accidentally killed a halfling city thinking they were goblins, and then had to hide that from Rajaat.

(I do think the Jagged Cliffs are a bit of a “preserve” though, and were that way even before Rajaat due to the actions of other pyreen - they’re just not nearly far enough from known Green Age cities for life-shaping not to have become known, in an era when deserts didn’t make travel hard, unless something was interfering. And Pyreen Grove is right there…

IMO High Lord Rhan Thes-onel was likely subtly steered into never returning …)

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As I have argued elsewhere, I would think rather conclusively, Troy Denning clearly cast Rajaat as a human. A deformed human, but a human all the same. The pyreen business was a 2nd box invention. The word “pyreen” is not even in the Prism Pentad.

Rajaat simply kept his final Blue Age pro-halfling intentions a secret from his Champions, as is clearly stated in the Cerulean Storm.

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Oh, I agree the pyreen thing is a later retcon. But I don’t think it’s really an issue … Rajaat didn’t look like a pyreen, so if he didn’t call himself one, the Champions (even once they learned what pyreen were) might not have any way of knowing he was one.

I doubt anyone would have known except the other pyreen… and maybe not many of them, so many millennia after Rajaat’s birth.

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I agree he kept his real intentions secret from the Champions. The issue IMO is how he could keep that secret for 1500 years from a bunch of theoretically very intelligent Champions, when there were fairly blatant signs something was iffy and it probably involved halflings somehow.

(The easy answer would be that he messed with their perceptions somehow, either psionically or as part of the Champion transformation, but given that they did eventually figure it out and rebel, that seems unlikely.)

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Part of the problem is, IMO, that the Cleansing Wars just don’t hang together.

“You mean they spent more than a thousand years trying to exterminate people in an area roughly the size of Texas? With overwhelming force on their side? And they either ignored other continents, or they all decided to settle in one place?”

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Yeah. There’s definitely major issues. I think there are several internally consistent versions, but none are consistent with everything published:

1 - The area affected really was relatively small on a planetary scale, because the Rebirth Races lived relatively near the Pristine Tower. However, the Wars didn’t last anything nearly like 1500 years, but were much briefer. This is IMO the most compatible with the novels*, and works well with the idea of a largely kreen world, but can’t be reconciled with either the Wanderer’s Chronicle timeline or Athas.org timeline.

2 - The Wars were global in scale, and that’s why they lasted so long, but all the Champions came back to settle in the relatively small Tyr Region/Forgotten North/Ur Draxa area because that’s where Rajaat’s prison was and they needed to be there to provide the Dragon’s Levy. This is how I used to think it worked, but the problem with this is that the Champions seem to have claimed cities before the Levy was established, since they were protecting cities during the Rampage and the Levy didn’t exist until Borys regained sanity and realized the prison was badly weakened. So there would be no reason for them to pick locations based on a requirement that didn’t yet exist.

3 - The Wars were global in scale, and that’s why they lasted so long. All the Champions didn’t come back to settle in the relatively small Tyr Region/Forgotten North/Ur Draxa area, TSR just only wrote about the ones that did. There are lots more elsewhere in the world, ruling city-states with no contact with the known areas. This is inconsistent with the numbered list of Champions in Wanderer’s Chronicle … Not sure if it causes any other direct problems? All the TSR material implies the history all happened in a relatively small area, but I don’t think it’s explicitly stated.

4 - The Wars, in historical hindsight and from the Champions’ perspective, lasted 1500 years; but most of that time didn’t actually involve continuous open war; instead, there were fairly brief bursts of war interrupted by long apparent peaces, and it wasn’t known for centuries that it was a coordinated campaign against non-humans in general; there was a war against kobolds, and then centuries later a separate war against ogres, etc., with lots of political stage setting and use of false identities and troublemaking in between. I think this is inconsistent with various Athas.org product timelines.

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*Vague Prism Pentad references to the past aren’t entirely consistent, but I think the weight of evidence is on the side of the shorter timeline. There are numerous references to SKs being a thousand years old, and generally pretty much everything happening a thousand years ago; the Green Age temple under Tyr is said to be 2000 years old and the royal tower of Kemalok 3000, which would imply a much shorter timeline. OTOH the Dragon is at one point said to be several thousand years old.

Rise and Fall of a Dragon King has various canon problems, but it seems to imply the Wars lasting in the ballpark of 120-150 years. When Hamanu discovers Myron’s betrayal of Rajaat, he mentions old veterans who feel even more betrayed, whose grandfathers were in the first rapidly successful push before the targeted races learned to fight back. If those veterans are say 50 at the time, and there’s 25-30 years per generation, and those grandfathers were young soldiers of maybe 20 then, that would imply that first push was something like 80-90 years before. After that, Hamanu fights trolls for 30 years and then there’s some time between the last troll and the rebellion…

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I keep the Wars global in scale, with many bursts in different areas. It’s not all the Champions that returned to the region, it’s the Rebels that did so, and in part because they might need each other if the other Champions returned. The Wanderer is very well traveled.. for someone in the Tyr region. That doesn’t mean he’s traveled the globe, learned the histories of everyone and every thing. The Rebels were selected from a relatively small group that Borys thought he knew well enough to convince to join, and that were close enough he could reach before the rebellion was discovered. The Tyr region may have been the origin of the wars, and the conclusion, but that doesn’t mean they remained there the entire time, nor that the wars aren’t still ongoing outside the Tyr region.

Maintaining Rajaat’s prison was for more than simply keeping a black sphere whole.

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Indeed. For a supra-genius like Rajaat, there seemingly isn’t much use for the Cleansing Wars unless these wars were global.

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Well, the alternative wouldn’t be ignoring the Rebirth Races outside the region; the alternative would be that the Rebirth Races never spread very far (on a planetary scale), staying generally in the region of the Pristine Tower.

While it’s not compatible with Athas.org material (with Remaan, etc.) I tend to think that was the initial TSR idea - that the Rebirth Races were mostly restricted to the area around the Sea of Silt/former Sunrise Sea, and the rest of the world was mostly kreen. I think the Crimson Savanna is intended to be more verdant because defilers never really got that far.

I think the only thing that contradicts is the numbering of the Champions in Wanderer’s Chronicle - that they’re 1 through 15, no numbers skipped, implies the ones known in the Tyr Region really were all of them. Otherwise it works extremely well.

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So, the Cleansing Wars were the global equivalent of a knife-fight in a dirty alley behind a bar called “The Pristine Tower”?

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Haha, maybe?

The impression I get from 2e-era TSR materials specifically is that the area settled by Green Age Rebirth Races was - while a lot larger than the Tyr Region - still pretty small on a planetary scale. Maybe about the one million square miles mentioned in the original boxed set Wanderer’s Journal.

We’re told in the original boxed set Wanderer’s Journal that there aren’t a lot of ruins beyond the Ringing Mountains; we’re later told of some associated with the humanoid/kreen nation of the Great One, but those seem fairly limited. The Jagged Cliffs are not very far at all from known Green Age ruins like Godshold - especially in an era before desertification made travel difficult - yet their history is one of near total isolation. Elves must have reached the Crimson Savanna at one point since Kosveret is originally from there, but that’s really the only reference - in general beyond the Jagged Cliffs is pretty much kreen-world (and the isolation of the Jagged Cliffs halflings & general lack of ruins suggests that even the Hinterlands were never very settled).

I think the Sunrise Sea watershed was essentially the home of Green Age civilization.

IMO in this model - as distinctly opposed to the one found in later Athas.org material with Remaan, etc. - any other continents on Athas would (in the absence of a Pristine Tower) have only halflings and kreen.

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Of course, there’s another possibility, because we’re talking rhullisti and kreen… other races coming from life shaping/zik’chil manipulations.

Like, sure, the rhullisti don’t purposefully make intelligent creatures, and zik’chil work mostly on kreen, but “purposefully” and “mostly” give you a bit of wiggle room to spread weirdness.

Are aarakocra natural creatures, or are they some rhullisti hang-glider that got a little bit out of hand?

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I was reading Secrets of the Deadlands and the bug empire that existed at the southern end of what became the Obsidian Plains was apparently “uplifted” by people they called the “six fingers.”

They’ve been so altered that they’ve gone genderless and can only reproduce by cloning using their life shaped thrones. They rose against their masters, then fled to distant lands to hide (and raised the Hoarwall to get isolation).

Which says to me that the zik-chil (kreen have three fingers per hand, right? though would that be twelve fingers?) were doing a little bit of experimenting. They probably “uplifted” other insects/bugs back in the day. I suppose that they might have destroyed other experiments after that one got out of control, since I don’t recall (it’s been years) the kreen empire having various life shaped servitor races.

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Oh absolutely, there’s tons of possibilities, especially when you bring in later material. I was just talking about what I think the 2e-era intent was.

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My post was an “isn’t this cool” comment. :grin:

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Ah, yeah.

There’s a lot of potential in lost zik-chil experiments, kreen empire stuff, etc. Especially as I don’t think we know how old the current setup is … conceivably the Green Age zik-chil, or ancestors of zik-chil, were doing all kinds of crazy stuff that’s not done in the modern kreen empire.

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Dark Sun is way cooler setting if you take lore at face value right up until the end of The Obsidian Oracle and do not include the stuff about the halflings. I’ll probably use AI to extract the lore and present it on the forum soon. Way different. Way better.

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Hmm, which game books would you count as belonging to that era? I wouldn’t want to lose the stuff in Thri-Kreen of Athas or City by the Silt Sea, for example, which were published later than Obsidian Oracle.

And actually, I’m more annoyed by the way Wanderer’s Chronicle - especially, but not only, its timeline and list of Champions - interpreted the history, and nailed down things that weren’t actually nailed down in the PP, than I am by what’s in the PP itself. (Lore wise, that is … I don’t like the sorcerer-kings dying too easily in Cerulean Storm.)

Wanderer’s Chronicle gives us the new (and now canon) timeline that is both bizarre on its own terms (1500 years of Cleansing Wars…) and incompatible with basically everything published before it about the ancient past.

It gives us the full list of Champions, strongly implying that those were the only Champions that existed.

It introduces the weirdness about Rajaat giving the Champions immortality and the power to draw life with obsidian orbs (powers previously attributed to being a dragon), but Borys (redundantly) making them actual dragons only later.

And so on.

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