I have it on kindle, so the page numbers will be different. If you can give me the first few words of a sentence, I can search it.
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Okay, thereâs a lot to find, because while Iâm at it Iâm also going to try to clear up some other misconceptions, ie, only Hamanu can kill champions: Iâll not bother with page numbers as you can look them up, but for anyone wondering, these will all be exact quotes.
âŚRajaatâs champions had learned how to kill each other eventually (outright stated, emphasis not mine)
âŚthere were three ways to transform a champion into a dragon (read the paragraph)
I will create edits to add more, Iâm busy this second, and searching a physical book takes time, but you should be able to find some by looking around the time of the imprisonment of Rajaat (specifically around Dregoth and Borys), and a page or two after Hamanu becomes a champion. Also try looking at when Hamanu first examines his own metamorphic body, both in the beginning of the book and when he discusses his initial campaign against the trolls as a champion in the past.
Edit: also, try looking at the conversation between Borys and Hamanu, I believe Hamanu says something like âhave you looked at yourself recently?â and then drops his disguise, and thereâs some stuff in there that might be useful.
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OK. I have verified this. According to Abbey, all Dragons created by Rajaat can have their metamorphosis quickened by arcane spellcasting or their templars drawing on the SMs for spells.
This wonât be part of my headcanon, but you can easily implement this process by using the ad hoc mechanic I mentioned earlier.
Basically the way I see it, the metamorphosis is two pronged. Its internal (even spiritual affecting the soul, perhaps), and the external (the body). Even if the SMs are not advancing their metamorphosis through spells, they are still undergoing the internal change, as represented by salient feats.
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I do like Lynn Abbyâs work, and I enjoyed RaFoaDK, I view it as a first person recounting by Hamanu himself. Some of the inconsistencies have spawned entire adventures for my groups. It all comes down to a SMâs memory is not perfect, and Hamanu specifically came into Rajaatâs service late. Itâs entirely possible he simply assumed some things are true for all because they are true for him.
As I recall he was initiated as a Champion and saw the others in their true forms (non-draconic).
Champions learning to kill each other could be as simple as âUse Hamanu, or one of Rajaatâs swords.â
In my own head cannon, Borys and Hamanu both had a forced transformation brought on by killing their genocidal focus with arcane magic. I do need to see if I can track down that paragraph about three ways to transform a champion, I donât remember it off hand. Since Rajaat only gave his Hands the ability to have Templars in my version, Hamanu just assumed all Champions could. The rest got it after the Rebellion.
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Sorry, but these are definitively untrue. Considering I finished rereading the book for the fourth time a few weeks ago, I consider myself something of an expert. He did see their true forms, and they were all explicitly dragons, the âchampions learning how to kill each other lineâ was about him thinking about how other champions had learned how to kill him and each other. Also, his memory is explicitly perfect, to the point where he can remember things such as the inside of his motherâs womb. The only confusion comes from when an event occurred, because his sense of time is also explicitly not as perfect as his ability to recall events.
Pennarin put it best on the old WotC forums. Iâll see if I can dig up the quote, but the gist of it was that RaFoaDKâs problems cannot be hand waved or cherry picked away if you are trying to talk about canon or even official support for ideas that differ from what it says, because the book itself is extremely clear as to what the truth is, from an individual with an impeccable memory.
Edit: Pennarinâs words below, not mine
Its funny how everyone tries to reconcile most aspects of RaFoaDK with the rest of the setting: it is mostly ireconcilable. Hamanu knows the other Champions are dragons, he knows he doesnât need to cast the dragon metamorphosis spell to advance in the Dragon PrC, he knows all the stuff he says throughout the novel.
Lynn Abbey simply had a different take than what the authors of the Timeline and other book products had for the setting. For example, the Champions were not gifted with anything right after they defeated Rajaat, while the Timeline says Borys rewards the Champions by beginning their transformations into sorcerer-kings. Abbey also says the Champions had templars for thousands of years before Rajaatâs defeat, while the Timeline says it all began there.
That novel is simply not compatible as read with the rest of the setting. Saying Hamanu was fooled by the other Champions, or he got all his info wrong, or immortality has dulled his mind, or any of a dozen other explanations Iâve seen throwned around to reconcile what he says with the rest of the setting, simply cheapens Hamanu as a character, as well as the entire novel.
And Another:
But what some, if not many, people are implying is that wherever RaFoaDK diverges from the rest of the setting, it means that its a fault of Hamanu.
Saying that is like meaning that Hamanu battled Rajaat, then went off for a leak, a short time during which the other Champions received their reward from Borys. Hamanu came back as clueless as ever. Also, its Borys who organized the rebellion, and only Borys, and as such Hamanuâs memories of helping him are but schizophrenic hallucinations. Also, Hamanu made an error when he heard the titles of the other Champions: he heard Sprite-Claw instead of Pixie-Blight. His bad. Having an infallible Champion memory that allows you to remember the color of the inside of your motherâs womb apparently doesnât help with any of the above details. The failing of his infallible memory apparently occurs whenever a detail happens to contradict the rest of the setting.
My words below
While I donât like everything about RaFoaDK (see my posts above) I firmly agree with these 15 year old comments on the matter. Simple fixes or cherry picking donât work, it is basically a âwhat ifâ for the setting. You can use from it what you like, but trying to meld any of it with the rest of the setting in an official capacity runs into problems.
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@phaaf_glien and I were fighting the good fight on the wizards dot com forum about this. Neither of us referenced RaFoaDK for this, rather we believe that Bill Slavicsek made a continuity error in the Revised Box Set. That mistake, that Borys conferred the ability directly or indirectly on the other champions to grant spells to templars, became canon.
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You know, this is pretty accurate. From the templarate to the Overcouncil, we all had a deep love of the setting and varying degrees of design experience, but we were very much finding our way as we went. There was a definite tension between remaining true to the feel of 2e, building a stable system under 3e, and not stepping too far outside the lines of the agreement with WotC - and we didnât always get it right. Iâd certainly approach Terrors of Athas differently these days. Overall, we leaned more towards coming up with a system that would feel like 2e in play, for better or worse. I think we were mostly successful in that regard but yeah, there are wilder reaches of 3e that might have produced more innovative designs, had we opted to explore them.
The relative successes (or lack thereof) of the stuff we came up with, though, is actually not the thing I think of the most when I look back on that period. Itâs actually the continual daily outpourings of creativity and enthusiasm that the WotC boards had. The Dark Sun section wasnât alone in this - those forums were wild and there was a great buzz that everyone contributed to. Just on the DS side of things, we had a great community and you could just swing by every day and there would be tons of different discussions and projects and variants going on. WotC really killed that community stone dead when they did what they did with the boards. The Gleemax debacle was the beginning of the end, and the lack of a strong, centralised DS community is a real shame to this day.
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I agree with the second part in full, but, as somebody comparatively new to all this, what exactly was the Gleemax debacle?
What was the agreement, exactly? As Redking and I discussed above, there seemed to be a disconnect between what many of the templarate said they could(nât) do vs some of what actually happened (i.e the Scorcherâs very different 3e stats).
The fact that they didnât even bother to leave us with a searchable database was unforgivable.
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Arguments about epic prestige classes from 2005. I post this because it is typical of the kind of debates we saw right until Wizards destroyed the forums (twice).
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Apologies if I misremember some of the details.
Originally, WotCâs forums were as youâd expect - divided up by categories, with sub-forums for âOther Worldsâ and world-specific sub-forums for Dark Sun, Greyhawk, Planescape, Spelljammer etc. Each of these had its own thriving and active communities, nominally in support of an official website licensed to produce 3e material, and with lots and lots of unofficial sites all producing their own additional material.
Then WotC decided to rebrand its forums under the Gleemax banner (named after a Magic: the Gathering card, iirc) which was supposed to be a wholesale revamp of WotCâs online presence. Part of this involved restructuring the forums and collapsing all accounts deemed inactive under one account - all the posts in the archive that are listed as being posted by âZombie Gleemaxâ are actually posts by dozens and dozens of different users who were all lumped under one account, making it almost impossible to find their individual posts.
Further reorganisations removed the separate sub-forums for Dark Sun, Greyhawk, Planescape etc and lumped all their posts together into one sub-forum, meaning that all our various posts were heaped in together, making it even harder to sift out the material you were interested in. I mean, I love me some Greyhawk, but I donât want to sift through posts about Rary when Iâm looking for stuff on Rajaat.
Eventually, WotC announced that the forums werenât necessary anymore - they wanted us to talk about our games on other platforms. Gleemax as a whole was shut down. Thereâs real-world tragedy linked with the failure of the Gleemax project as well, with the project lead perpetrating a murder-suicide and this may well have been a factor in the project ending.
As for the forums, they were deleted and the data lost. There were various attempts made to save content - youâve seen some here and at Pandius - but the community that was there fell apart, scattering to places like here, the Piazza, Reddit and elsewhere. It is a real loss and, I am sure, part of the reason why some of the 3e material being worked on by athas.org hasnât been finished. There simply arenât enough people working enthusiastically on it together in the same place to see it through. It takes a lot of time and effort and coordination to make projects like that work. Yes, people move on (Iâve gone back to 2e, for example) but the lack of a strong hub is a key factor in that.
Initially, our charter was to convert DS from 2e to 3e and we tried to hew as closely to that as possible. There were also some legacy products we were allowed to convert (Dregoth Ascending, for example) but we werenât supposed to stray too far from the original in tone and feel and mechanics (and, in our desire to maintain the feel of the original, we were happy to keep to that). Over time, though, it became clear that WotC werenât super concerned with the minutiae of what we were doing, which is one of the reasons that later products are more adventurous and start to step away from that original mandate more boldly. I came on board as part of the Templarate when the core rules were in their final couple of iterations and ended up on the Overcouncil before I moved onto other things, but those who were involved from the start can probably give you a more detailed breakdown of how the initial relationship with WotC affected things.
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Thank you for that breakdown. It helps my understanding a lot.
Edit: The only thing that Iâm still confused on is why anyone would have thought that obliterating the forums was a good idea. Like, what was WotCâs rationale? Thatâs the kind of move I would have expected from TSR, given what little Iâve heard about TSRâs less than stellar interactions with their community in the early days of the internet.
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Since weâre getting pretty far off topic here Iâll just leave you with some food for thought. My wife has mild hyperthymesia, âperfect recallâ combined with an eidetic memory. 10 years ago she could tell you anything about any day she experienced or even was told about with 100% accuracy. Sheâs losing that ability now but she wouldnât admit it. Hamanu could be the same, he had it at once time but not any longer. In the entire book, we have only Hamanuâs mind to draw on and no other source that has corroborated his perfect memory.
Happy to discuss it further in another thread, just donât want to derail this one completely.
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I agree with this. This thread should stay relatively close to topic.
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Well, TSR had its issues with its online presence, but it was struggling to catch up with online fandom. They got freaked out about intellectual property and whatnot, but they did learn and ended up with some fairly lenient approaches after realising the error of their ways.
WotCâs mistakes - or so it seems to me, where Gleemax is concerned - were driven by a desire to be a social media hub rather than a place that supported what the fans actually derived benefit from. This was in the period where platforms like Facebook were really taking off and WotC thought that Gleemax could be a one-stop shop for blogging and content and social media activity and I donât know what all. But it was extremely buggy, weirdly adversarial in tone, and just didnât deliver what it promised, along with removing features that people were actually using. In short, I saw it as misguided bandwagon jumping that fragmented the communities that existed there, which have never really recovered.
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I was less referring to Gleemax and more the literal deletion of the forums (Gleemax included), but that info is also useful.
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I really couldnât say for sure - like you said, it just seemed like bizarre move. I do recall some talk at the time that WotC didnât think that forums were the way that fandom wanted to interact and that communities were moving away from forums to other online platforms, so there was no reason to keep them. But I donât know how much of that was genuine, how much of it was due to a desire to push users towards other platforms, how much was down to the fact that running large forums is labour intensive, and how much of the closing of the project was due to the real tragedies that unfolded offline.
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Iâve seen a lot of speculation. I can even understand why they might want to shut down the forum. But why not leave us with a static copy?
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Hey SeruZmaj, just noticed this line in your post. As you said, donât want to derail the thread, but this isnât even close to true. Rajaat and Windreaver both make statements in the present that line up perfectly with his memories of the past events. Moreover, when Enver searches old records for the last time so much rain fell near Urik, what he found matched Hamanuâs memories. Finally, Hamanu was able to perfectly recall the location and meaning of the ancient troll glyphs near Deche, confirmed when he visited them again in the present for the first time in millennia.
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