Shadowpeople / shadow giants

21

So, to bring things back around, maybe this is the right answer (or, at least a palatable one): that the pre-imprisonment shadow people (and the halflings who created the Pristine Tower) drew on the power of light and darkness somehow to tap the sun and the black, and between that and teaching from Rajaat while imprisoned, they learned to harness that from the otherside to both become the shadow people we now know and to do all the supernatural stuff they seem to need to do.

In all fairness, the shadow people aren’t really halflings anymore, so I suspect that either Rajaat would quietly eliminate them if he even succeeded in his plans, just to keep them from “messing up” his re-perfected Athas.

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22

I thought they would turn back to halflings when they left the Black? I think that’s what is happening with the halflings running around killing people in Ur Draxa while Rajaat is briefly freed…

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23

Well, but completely? And even if they return to halfling form, are they irrevocably metaphysically changed by their time in the Black and the adaptions they had to make to survive? And even if they’re JUST normal halflings after returning, would Rajaat buy/accept that or would he eliminate them just to be on the safe side?

Who’s to say?

(Though, I think he’d nuke them from space - its the only way to be sure… :wink:)

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Hmmm, who knows. Them turning back into halflings is what I thought was going on in that part, but it’s not given much detail.

Rajaat is crazy (at least in a human sense, there may be a consistent inhuman logic to what he’s doing), I don’t think we have enough information to know what he’d do.

I think it depends on how powerful Rajaat actually is. If he can’t just create life from scratch, he’d need someone… the shadow-people-turned-back-to-halflings would certainly be changed at least psychologically… but then the Forest Ridge halflings and even the rhul-thaun aren’t exactly what Blue Age rhulisti were either.

But if he’s got the power to essentially rewrite reality now (and turning the sun blue, the statues in Ur Draxa turning into halfling statues, etc. suggests he’s altering reality in much more dramatic ways than just a huge Elemental Water gate), he might be able to create new halflings.

But it would probably be simpler/less magical energy to take the former-shadowpeople-halflings and Forest Ridge halflings and rhul-thaun and just rewrite their memories (and undo any physical changes).

… for that matter, I wonder if he actually needs to kill off all the other races to achieve his goal? With his current power level, could he just turn everyone into rhulisti? That seems like something potentially achievable by epic level magic… (I mean technically a basic Polymorph spell could do it, but that’s Dispellable. I mean a permanent change. Although if it takes a Psionic Enchantment to turn one half-elf into a human or elf, it’d be a ridiculous level of magical power … but maybe not more than changing the sun.)

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25

Its like with Thanos and the infinity gauntlet, he had ultimate power, but instead of using it to double the resources, he decided it was more logical to kill off half the universe, mad people do mad things🤷

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That’s possible… but I think it’s also possible that Rajaat has a plan that is ‘logical’ (in the sense of coherent and internally consistent) even though evil and inhuman. If he’s insane, it’s not any normal kind of insanity, he was able to stick with his plan for a really long time.

We know he lied to the Champions about his real plan. Do we know for sure that “kill all humans and return the world to halflings” was the actual real plan … or at least, that it was all of it?

There seem to be inconsistent reports on what exactly was supposed to happen after the Cleansing Wars succeeded. Sacha and Wyan in the Prism Pentad seem to believe that the Champions would have to give up magic, but not that they’d be killed or anything. In Rise and Fall of a Dragon King, it seems to be that Hamanu was supposed to be the Champion-bane Champion, to kill off all the other Champions and probably humanity too.

There’s also the question … if the Cleansing Wars lasted 1500 years, didn’t the Champions get suspicious about why there was no Halfling-bane Champion, and why Rajaat ordered them to avoid halfling areas? Perhaps there’s more to this than we’re told (even if you take Rise and Fall as canon, Hamanu was a very late addition).

I’d be a lot more willing to dismiss Rajaat’s plan as insane and unworkable if he doesn’t seem, in Cerulean Storm, quite capable of actually achieving his goals. He immediately starts creating a ton of water, and the landscape changes back to a Blue Age version (weird coral-plants, the statues in Ur Draxa change to halfling statues), and the sun turns blue… While the sun and landscape changes go away when he’s reimprisoned, the water doesn’t. If the Dark Lens hadn’t been used against him, I think he genuinely would have succeeded in re-oceanifying(?) Athas eventually…

To me, the big weird thing is the apparent lack of connection between “empower Champions to lead armies to kill off the Rebirth Races” and “turn the world back to ocean-world”.

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I think you’re confusing two different things - Rajaat is clearly insane, but he’s not necessarily confused or incapable of follow and achieving goals. There’s lots of kinds of mental illness, and I think Rajaat is insane b/c he thinks he can/needs to reboot the world back 10,000 yrs and murder everyone, but he’s not “stumble around in a confused haze, homeless-bag lady” insane.

His hatred of his own deformities and his delusion that his goal makes sense can be a different kind of crazy than the paranoid schizophrenia or whatever that makes a person bounce around chaotically.

But, IDK, lots of things could be going on…

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One of the things I used in my campaign is that Rajaat didn’t have that level of power during the Cleansing Wars. He was powerful, but he was also limited by an inability to kill the rebirth races directly. His connection to the Pristine Tower altered him even more than ancient Pyreen oaths to guide and protect the rebirth races.

One of the changes he made to the PT was that it absorbed the life force of those races that were attuned to it in order to gather power in addition to absorbing the power from the sun. The races that were targeted were chosen for two specific reasons. They either had a culture and ability that could allow them to stop Rajaat’s plan or they reproduced at such a rate that they were a good power source.

Rajaat became so powerful because he had 1,500 years of deaths from the wars and thousands more years of power absorption from the sun which he was able to tap into as soon as he was released from the Hollow..

As for his end game, I run with the idea he really was going to return the world to halflings. He was always going to flood the world, which would take time but he couldn’t show his cards when there were still people that could stop him. His servants were corrupted by the mere presence of Rajaat himself, so they were always going to be killed in the end. They weren’t a rebirth race, so he was capable of doing that himself when the time came. His Champions were a rebirth race, so he couldn’t kill them, that’s why he needed Hamanu, but once they underwent the dragon metamorphosis they were no longer human, no longer a rebirth race, and could now be killed by him.

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I mean he’s probably crazy in some way … But there seems to be something inconsistent here. His motivation being about hating his own mutated form is very weird … shapechanging is well within the power of even non-epic magic. With his epic magical abilities, he could easily have permanently changed his form to whatever he wanted.

There’s no way he’s crazy enough to not think of that but also stable enough to run a millennia long plan.

I don’t think he’s delusional, per se. He does actually seem to have the power to return the world to the Blue Age … if Sadira hadn’t figured out the shadow trick or if the Dark Lens hadn’t been available, he would have.

And he may get another chance pretty soon, on an immortal’s timescale. (Sadira’s wards are set up to warn her … what happens when she dies?)

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There’s perhaps too much capitalizing on supernatural power as a way to change a person’s nature. That’s because this bit of fiction is from an rpg that uses a magic system we can consult and we’re familiar with, so we constantly ask “why didn’t they do that”, or “why’d they stop”, or “this is stupid”.

The way to interpret the motivations and solutions of fictional characters, I find, is to not imagine them as rpg characters but novel characters, who are flawed, swept in the moment, proud, fearful, as compared to rpg characters often played in an unrealistic way only possible because the player has all the time in the world to plan their next action, doing math along the way.

This being said, Rajaat sought ways to make his body and mind beautiful (he knew both were hideous), and did not find it in sorcery, nor in metamorphosis, and seems to have wanted to achieve something grandeur and with even more power to affect things but failed to achieve that. It’s only after the failure of these three things - sorcery, metamorphosis, and “godhood” - to provide an adequate solution that he gave up and succumbed to self loathing, directing his hate and anger outwards, cooking up the idea of genocides. It’s all in the Time of Magic timeline section of Defilers and Preservers, the one detailed source we have on Rajaat’s motivations and hopes.

To me it’s clear that what Rajaat truly wanted was the power to transform himself both in body and spirit, and for that he needed the now lost art of lifeshaping, or to achieve godhood through sorcery. With both found impossible, he lost hope for a meaningful personal transformation.

Sorcery could only cover up the ugliness of his body, and do nothing for his mind.
Metamorphosis could change him, but not remove the fundamentals, so the ugliness would remain.
Godhood would have allowed him to perhaps finally change his physical and psychological nature, but that state was unachievable.

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Hm. In general I agree with the principle, but in this case … Rajaat did have all the time in the world to plan, pretty literally. According to the timeline he was at the Pristine Tower for something like 3000 years before he made the Champions.

If it was just a game rules vs fluff thing, too … But most of the sorcerer-kings are constantly either shapeshifting or disguising their metamorphosed forms, even in the fluff. There’s plenty of that going on.

I wondered if maybe Rajaat’s unique nature prevented him from doing any of that … If his “mutated” form “form-locked” him in some way … But he does appear to have done something not too terribly different from an elemental advanced being transformation, eventually. He’s described as having a basically humanoid form at the time of the Champions, but in Cerulean Storm he’s a gigantic storm being.

Maybe he just wasn’t satisfied with that (yeah, possibly because it couldn’t change his mind/spirit)…

But I think it’s an interesting possibility that there was more to it. That Rajaat’s self-hatred may have driven him to start his research into life-energy and the Pristine Tower…

(Hmmm, also, why didn’t Rajaat manage to get life-shaping? The rhul-thaun of the Jagged Cliffs have some knowledge and ability left even in FY10; 6500 years earlier or thereabouts, they must have lost less. We’re told Rajaat knew about the Jagged Cliffs and told the Champions to avoid them, right?)

–

Btw, Rajaat isn’t a rhulisti himself. Did he intend to die once he’d created a new Blue Age? Could he even die? - the Champions didn’t seem able to figure out how. Maybe whatever the last step was, would be powered by his own life energy…

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Rajaat is a pyreen. Born of pyreen. In the Defilers and Preservers timeline he’s said to have learned as much as he could about lifeshaping by talking to those who still honor the old science and pass it on. So that’s halflings. When he discovers the Tower it seems the halflings there are no more or less knowledgeable about lifeshaping than the other halflings of the world, but they know how the Tower works, and that’s a bit more lifeshaping knowledge he gains.

The knowledge of lifeshaping was vast, but only a tiny portion of it – growing living tools – survived the passing of the rhulisti, and it survived in the rhul-thaun. What knowledge the Tower halflings knew is either lost or still present, but they aren’t talking.

To make himself no longer ugly within and without, the complete knowledge of lifeshaping would have been needed.

You point out that game and novel characters use shapechange spells and powers, and illusions, but I remind you those are not permanent, and as such do not change your nature. They especially do not change your mind. Rajaat wanted to permanently remove whatever (genes, I imagine) causes him to be deformed without and within.

Solutions we haven’t seen for Rajaat would be to stumble upon hibernating rhulisti and convince them to operate on him or teach him all they know, though he could use sorcery or the Way to steal the knowledge, or he could have time travelled to the past and petitioned the rhulisti nature masters.

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Not only did Rajaat believe he was ugly.. he believed the entire Rebirth was a mistake. A mistake he could undo. His body and mind was just a symptom. Even if he used magic to mask his form, alter his mind, it wouldn’t change the fact that the Rebirth was simply, utterly, WRONG. Think of him as the Operative in the Serenity movie. He knows he’s a monster, the new world isn’t for him. He’s just the one who’s going to make the new world possible.

In my world the Pyreen are practically eternal. The Gray can not consume their spirits so if they are actually killed, they simply go into a cycle of renewal that sees them reborn right from their substance as a new Pyreen with no real memories, just instincts. When this happens all Pyreen within a thousand miles know there is one nearby who has been reborn and will need guidance. To truly undo the Rebirth, Rajaat must collect the souls of all the Pyreen and destroy them, himself, and the Pristine Tower all at once, something that can only be done when blue waves again surround the tower.

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I agree that Rajaat wanted to undo the Rebirth wholesale… But why?

I think it’d be interesting if there was more to it than self-hatred (even if wanting to transform himself is what got him started on his research). If there was actually some connection between his methods and his goal.

Rajaat, apparently, studied the Pristine Tower for something like 3000 years before he made the Champions. And he taught a bunch of preservers… which he then decided to kill off.

Maybe the Champions/Cleansing Wars weren’t Plan A. Maybe they weren’t even Plan B. Maybe Rajaat discovered something, in that 3000 years, that meant his original plan to restore the Blue Age (whatever that was… But possibly involving preserver magic) wouldn’t work, and that’s when he came up with the Champions/Cleansing Wars idea.

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The lore is pretty clear that Rajaat taught baseline arcane magic (which is preserving) to folks for years, and only started teaching a more powerful form of sorcery (defiling) after he understood how various races interacted with sorcery and how they operated in general. Once he selected humans as the race that’d be easiest to manipulate into running the Cleansing Wars, he started teaching defiling to select human students and then chose his prospective Champions from the “best” of those defilers.

Once that was all in place, he trained his Champions and their forces by purging all the remaining preservers to make sure they couldn’t help oppose him and his plan.

Defiling only survives are the “main” way Athasian wizards operate because they’re largely the only ones who survived the Preserver Jihad and became the remaining preservers are hyper careful.

Defiling is like the spice vanilla - its more powerful and awesome than the other kinds of sorcery/spices, but its currently so ubiquitous that we think of it as the “boring” spice/sorcery.

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Another possibility in the “Why didn’t Rajaat use halflings” is he didn’t want them to change.

A halfling society that bent towards genocide wouldn’t be the halflings he thought the world should be. So he bent humans towards genocide, for whatever reason, and planned to wipe them out himself.

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I agree that that’s the history as presented. But what’s presented is a pretty short capsule summary of thousands of years. I think there’s plenty of room for Rajaat to have changed plans between setting up the first preserver school and starting killing preservers, or to have had multiple plans running before eventually settling on the Champions/Cleansing Wars one.

I think he probably didn’t have, or at least hadn’t fully committed to even if he had it in mind as an option, the Champions/Cleansing Wars plan when he started teaching. He wanted to undo the Rebirth by then, sure, but he might have originally wanted to do that by direct magic - “reverse the polarity” on the Pristine Tower and use it to undo the changes it had made, or transform life directly back to its Blue Age forms and gate in tons of water from the Plane of Water. (The latter seems to be what he’s actually doing when briefly free in Cerulean Storm - in addition to all the water, weird coral plants appear.)

But he learned that the Pristine Tower, at least as is*, couldn’t simply undo what it had done, and his power wasn’t (or wasn’t yet … He kept researching the Inner Planes during the Cleansing Wars) sufficient to do the second one, and the preservers he trained couldn’t help much. They could grow some grass (rejuvenate spell) but what good was that in the Green Age?

And so he went to Plan C (maybe with an intent to use the gathering of vast amounts of life energy through Champions’ dragon magic to fuel his real plan?) and he was set on his evil path.

*I think it would be interesting if (and this isn’t entirely original to me, I think someone suggested something similar ages ago on the WOTC forums when those existed) there was some remaining link between the Pristine Tower and the Rebirth Races it created, a link Rajaat exploited somehow, but one that also limited what he could do. That’s maybe why he couldn’t teach, or couldn’t do as well teaching, halflings magic; they didn’t have that link, since they were never remade by the Tower.

And so Rajaat ultimately decided that to get the full power of the Pristine Tower back, he had to kill off the Rebirth Races - not just because they didn’t exist in the Blue Age, but because some of the Tower’s energy was still “out there”, “committed”.

Or maybe it wasn’t magic he couldn’t teach, but the dragon metamorphosis (and/or Champion transformation, in the version where that’s a separate thing). Maybe the physical metamorphosis of an advanced being needs a Rebirth Race; it’s a hack built atop changes already made by the Tower, and a halfling or kreen has nothing to add that hack to. (This works better in the older material where half-elves could be dragons as Dragon Kings says, rather than human-only as Defilers and Preservers says.)

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This is a new theory, I think. A rare thing in 30+ years.

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39

Hey, you chew the same cud long enough, eventually you’re gonna find SOMEONE’S gold tooth. :wink:

(not a dig at you or WingOfCoot; just at us, in general)

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Thank you!

Honestly the more I think about this, the more I like it. There’s a lot of form-alteration stuff going on in Dark Sun (halfling/rhulisti life-shaping, Pristine Tower mutation & the Rebirth, zik-chil stuff, advanced being metamorphosis & transformation); it’d make sense if these things are all based on the same fundamental principles. The Pristine Tower is derived from rhulisti life-shaping “tech”, and I think it’s at least a common fan theory that zik-chil stuff is also derived (maybe from nature-benders); only the advanced being stuff isn’t connected yet. And given that the Champions’ and the Dragon’s transformation were done at the Pristine Tower… And so was Sadira’s. That’s a connection.

Obviously you don’t need the Pristine Tower to do an advanced being metamorphosis, plenty of SKs (and Nerad and Korgunard and Farcluun, and Graytch and Amiska if you consider those canon) have cast dragon or avangion metamorphosis spells elsewhere. But maybe you need at least the indirect connection from being a Rebirth Race …

Hmm I wonder if being an unique Pristine Tower mutation would help you do an advanced being transformation…

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