Brilliant. So youâre in for 3.5 conversion of Unseen Ways.
Now, how much support would you like for what youâre doing? Layouts, editing, art, someone to bounce ideas off of?
At the moment, not much other than any ideas people want to toss my way for me to take note of, as I still have to finish my current learning project (republishing the SRD plus a bit extra)⌠and then I had mentioned the Powers of Athas project to Raddu previously.
I suppose I could also consider combining the two (Unseen Ways plus Powers of Athas) as they are both psionics focused, depending.
In any case, I am finishing my current project before embarking the next. I am estimating a month or two of work left. (Less if anyone here happened to wanted to beta read a republish of the SRDâŚ)
I am republishing the original WotC SRD files, the same ones that d20srd.org modified to make their site. If you read the details on their site, they actually made a number of changes they felt improved the material, so it is technically not 100% original, more like 95-97%.
But yes, that D&D 3rd edition SRD.
I am aware that there are already a few copies of the SRD on DriveThruRPG, but I am republishing it to learn the editing and publishing processes with something that is not a pet project of mine, so that if I screw it up, itâs no big deal. And I am indifferent to making a profit, since my goal is learning.
My version will be around 98-99% original, which is actually not necessarily an improvement. More like an exercise of discipline on my part, lol.
Huh. Ok. I donât understand why though.
Why make a repeat of something which people already have, especially when there is no demand for it to be changed?
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https://arena.athas.org/t/nijinekos-project/3097/2
Getting off topic so I posted my explanation over there. 
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I see thereâs a Reman continent project open â has anything substantial been done on this â or even basic ideas about whatâs supposed to be there?
Is there a reason only the ânorthwesternâ Remaan continent is specified â could the southern part be developed as well?
I think that was just jack referring to the continent as ânorthwesternâ which is highly relative depending where on Athas you are lol
Rema(a)n (Iâve tended to add another A to as Reman tends to conjure star trek nemesis flashbacks XD) is specifically the continent in the northwestern corner of the Steve Bell/ACG globe maps. The southern one is not Remaan, it an entirely separate continent never or only sparsely inhabited by the Rebirth Races. Like the rest of the greater world, Remaan is entirely fanon- the earliest use of it I can find of it is from the netbook Last Frontier as âRemani.â Peter Nutall (Brax), who was one of the main people working on Secrets of the Dead Lands and Lost Cities of the Trembling Plains, greatly expanded the names from said netbook- Melai, Tanysh, and Reman, into the larger-scale human cultures of Green Age Athas, with Wisdom of Sorrow being the most prominent case. Brax laid some basic ideas for the continentâs current state in his old sitechttps://urbraxa.tripod.com/AthasianPhoto.htm, which Iâve used as a base for my own take on Remaan.
The basics are that âRemaanâ was not just a human culture, but a âcreedâ based around inter-rebirth race unity and cooperation, with each race occupying an âecological niche,â and encouraging peace through trade, kinship ties, ect. They resurrected the old Rhulisti âLawgiverâ system and developed the Athasian âGreat Pantheonâ which was a collection of ancestral folk heroes, spirits, gods, ect, all as aspects of the four major elemental cults (for example an orcish fertility goddess would be associated with earth and was probably based on an actual spirit of the land or elemental lord). Their systems migrated back to the tablelands with Remaan colonists who resettled places like Balic and Tyr, and became the de-facto global model for politics, culture, religion, and language.
Based on Wisdom of Sorrow, Remaan started as the only multiracial tribes to emerge out of the Rebirth and were actually descended from the angry crowds who seized the Pristine Tower and willfully mutated to be with their loved ones. âRemaanâ is probably a linguistic artifact of a rhulisti term for âWe stand together!â like a protest chant. They fled the Tablelands when the human-supremacist Tanysh flooded out of the north like a plague, and settled the distant continent both for safety and also to get as far away from the Pristine Tower and rotten legacy of the Nature-Masters as possible. They took a lot of Pyreen with them, as the Remaans were entrusted with care of the first baby Pyreen. Eventually the roles reversed with the Pyreen being the âguardiansâ of the Remaan peoples and showering them with favoritism. Remaan culture focused on long term stability out of a fear of a repeat of the Blue Age, and locked Green Age into its millennia long psionic stagnation with massive inequality, and left populations as kindling for Rajaat and the Age of Magic.Think of them as a sort of archaic, psionic form of global neoliberal hegemony 
While nominally the âgood guysâ their was rife with hypocrisy- be it favoring the first five member races (Human, Elf, Dwarf, Orc, Pterran) to having extremely wierd bioessentialist views that each race was âideallyâ suited for a certain role (Humans are herders, orcs are farmers, elves are sailors, ect) with the endgoal basically being hybridizing all of them out of existence into hybrid races like half-elves, who were free of the âsins of the rhulisti.â
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The whole thing could be developed, certainly!
I had ideas for adapting a dark sun âfan novelâ called âNew Breedâ that never took off from like 2004âs ideas for the southern continent, ie a relatively untouched, hostile continent inhabited by a mutant race with lifeshaping, called âFyanralasâ - I found it while perusing old Dark Sun geocities remnants on wayback machine and liked the concept. It might have been the user âRal of Tyrâsâ site?
"Across the Silt sea, beyond the valley of dust and fire lies the ancient continent once known as Fyanralas . This verdant subtropical land survived the ravages of the Cleansing Wars due solely to the presence of one of Athas most ancient and deadly races the Rux. The Rux are a race as old as the Blue Age halflingâs and very little was known about this mysterious race. That was until the Wanderer ventured there⌠I thought my life was due to end, and I would be drawn into the gray. It had been over a week since the skimmers food stores had been depleted and out of the twenty five crew which set sail from Balic only twelve were left. Daranga the water priest was the only person keeping the rest of us alive with her undying devotion to her sacred element. The expedition had been traveling east for two score days and the mindbenders were working day and night using their own power and the psionic energy stored in the crystals which stood round the floaters pit to keep the skimmer moving. Then the lookout screamed with joy, almost dropping his Kingâs eye overboard. Land had been spotted on the horizon. The closer the skimmer got to the mainland, I was surprised to see a dense tropical forest growing up the steep hill sides. The silt was also getting more shallow and with every yard and eventually turned to mud and to the crews delight shallow muddy green water with plant life abundantly growing and almost grasping out at the hull of the Winged lady as if to welcome us to this new land. "
Likewise for the other continentâs names I wanted to recycle really old info from super early drafts of Secrets of the Dead Lands, like going back to the original Denning Manuscript. The very basic idea for the Descendants of the Chosen at Nagarvos was there, but were like 4 feuding families from different parts of Athas, including polar regions. Less the idea itself and more those names for continents and regions.
(Very) Tentative concepts (mostly just âplot hooksâ)
-Fyanralas is the continent south of Remaan, and was never colonized by them for good reason- the native Nikaal of the continent, around since the Blue Age, also mastered lifeshaping- while not as advanced as the rhulisti, they had less qualms aboit altering themselves and now call themselves Rux. Fyanralas is the most untouched, vibrant continent on athas, even bearing a thin ring of ocean around it- this is mostly because the Rux have slaughtered anyone, Blue, Green, or Brown Age, who so much as step on their shores
Pyatha and the islands of Messenia and Seren- following of one of brax and bellâs only mentions of these continents, the âcentral continentâ, Pyatha, was pretty much unhabitable to the Rebirth races but home to sizable populations of Kreen, Rhulisti, and Nikaal- and many, many giant bugs. Most kreen civilzation is centered around the heavily alkaline central sea, while most of Nikaal civilization proper is on the western end facing Remaan. The Remaans failed to colonize Pyatha but âupliftedâ the Nikaal via kobold, pterran, and lizardfolk emmisaries, and the Nikaal are organized in a series of pseudo-Remaan ârepublicsâ
-Grank (Based on ideas from Brian Sanchez) Athasâ north pole, hone to a massive ancient rhulisti experiment with the planes and the most advanced remnants of their civilization (basically the halfling New World Order hiding in a bunker in Greenland)
Yutcha- Athasâ south pole
Note this is going off the Bell/Brax concept that in addition to the Kreen the Nikaal were another race native to Athas before/along with the Rhulisti, but likewise only semi-sapient at the time.
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Interesting â has anyone thought about including Anadian halfling | Forgotten Realms Wiki | Fandom as another early halfling subrace on another continent of Athas? The xenophobia and slavery would seem to fit in with Dark Sun concepts â maybe they warred with the rhulistic faction?
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Going off some of Peter Nutallâs (Brax) more recent ideas in the DS facebook group, about a âBlack Ageâ before the Blue Age, I think a cool concept to link into spelljammer is that the Rhulisti are Anadian Halflings, or rather that both groups are remnants of âspace halflings,â with the Rhulisti being ancient exiles imprisoned or otherwise trapped on Athas, and that Lifeshapingâs similarities to say Illithid âbiotechnologyâ is not just a coincidence- maybe the ancient âspace halflngsâ sided with Githâs Rebellion and got their hands on the Illlthid Empireâs leftovers, which sparked a civil war and the exile of the proto-rhulisti. I could see interaction between these ancient Halflings, the Gith, the Jua and Kreen (whom themselves were âupliftedâ by the Jua) - also, on the excellent fanmade flow chart of the Spelljammer lanes, Athas is actually within what was presumably âJuaspaceâ with Krynn being the closest main DS setting sphere. Going off some of jackâs ideas for incorporating the âCrimson Sphereâ spelljammer tech continued in a localized form on Athas - probably the ancient basis of the Rhulisti airships and sea vessels and later Green Age psionic skyships, and modern psionic silt skimmers, but without spelljammer helms or a way to make them, they were regulated to being âearth-based.â
I had some ideas that the âGateâ idea of Brian Sanchezâs at the north pole is actually where the Rhulisti spelljammer âarkâ ship crashed, and the Pristine Tower and other âtowersâ were part of Elemental Priests, Psionicists, ect trying to break through the Gray and âfind their homeâ, which led to a ideological split with the Nature Masters and those groups being suppressed and eventually siding with the Nature Benders.The Messenger was the top nature masters running back to the same people they oppressed to save them, much like my metaplot in Beyond the Dead Lands, where the âElemental Lordsâ of the south are actually the people who solved the Brown Tide by using the Pristine Towerâs true power- the mutations and rebirth are just the result of the Nature Master and Benders, who had no knowledge of its magical core functions (the Steeple of Crystals and its ability to alter the cosmological axes of Athas) mucking with the thing. Specifically, the now-dead Sun Lord, Dagia, was the person who designed the Steeple and âcontrol crystalâ (Dark Lens).
Ultimately, all of Athasâ disasters and suffering are the result of a bunch of asshole academics 14,000 years ago. The snowball that led to the First of Wars started with a student protest movement against the corrupt academic elite that were the Nature Masters, and ended up in tens or hundreds of thousands dead, the world ruined, and planting the seeds that the Green Age could never move on from thanks to the stifling stagnation enforced by the Pyreen, and one outcast Pyreen building a utopian image of the Blue Age in his head after finding ancient propaganda, and going on to destroy the world again. Not even the Pyreenâs fault really, they were groomed as guardians of the new age so it didnât repeat the mistakes of the past, but had no real framework for how to do so beyond ancient half-remembered histories and creeds and were subconsciously biased to favor the âfirst 5â Remaan races, with the others often treated patronizingly.
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I like Athasâ position as the âAtheistâ setting of the dnd worlds, one where there were no or very few cosmological forces like gods or primordials, or good/bad afterlife, where mortals had full run of their own fates, and promptly locked the world in an endless, dying cycle of suffering chained to the mistakes of the past. Rajaat and his fascist nightmare would have never risen if the founders Green Age had learned the actual right lessons from the Blue Age, and so on. Despite them being the âguardiansâ of the Green Age, the Pyreen failed hard, one of their own destroyed the world they cultivated. Thereâs an athasian timeline where Rajaat may have just been a Pyreen who was a bit physically warped but well-adjusted. Whoâs to say his âuglinessâ was not from the perspective of his race of shapeshifters? What if his âmutationâ was just looking like a human?
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Thatâs super interesting â I doubt anyone else will much like these ideas, but I had some of my own homebrew Athas lore which also connected it to the old Alternity Star Drive lore. In this setting, there is a race of precursor aliens called âStoneburnersâ whose servants include psionic, post-human tentacled entities known as the iâkrl. They are the âgodsâ of an immense stellar theocracy, and the Stoneburner/tech races in general were bio-organic, and looked something like tyrannids or xenomorphs. I imagined that as the source of the lifeshaping abilities â including the kreen, which are similar to the klick, which are another Iâkrl Theocracy race.
I suppose it depends how much you want to lean into the planetary adventure/sci-fi aspect of the setting. I also thought the seshayans and reptilian tâksa would be good Dark Sun races.
Hereâs an interesting thread that connects them with the illithids and/or aboleth â I wonder if you could posit that both aboleth and illithids descended from some kind of tentacled psionic proto-species: AlternityRPG.Net Forum -> Stoneburners
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I like it, kind of touches on the ERB Barsoom elements of Dark Sun. With my take Iâve been trying to account for as much âcanonâ dnd cosmology as possible, but I think there should be always be an element of vagueness to leave things up to a dm for their own takes.
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Iâm loving this.
When the time comes for us to update the Crimson Sphere crossover fanon, would you like to join the dev team on that?
sure, though Iâm not really sure of the extent my ideas would be acceptable â I used a lot of the Alternity lore, with the idea that the Iâkrl Theocracy exists somewhere outside Athas and had visited the planet in the Blue Age. The Glassmakers â the âgoodâ precursors, would have been the origins of the nature masters and the Stoneburners the source of naturebending and similar arts. I also see a similarity between the Stoneburner tech and the âtenebrion seedsâ in Monte Cookâs arcana unearthed â the dragons (!!!) in that setting had mutagenic obsidian orbs that âadvancedâ races in their own evolutionary chain