This is completely correct and supported by multiple sources 
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I agree Andrea. Legands of Athas gives us the Champion of Rajaat template which I like - it differentiates a Champion from a Dragon (and putting all the SMs on a different level to ‘standard advanced beings’).
I respectfully disagree here. Sadira got a fairly raw power boost, and then only during daytime hours. It’s conceivable that the raw power was enough to go head to head with Uyness, at least for a while. Remember, the combat is cut short by the shard of the Scourge doing her in. A longer combat would have seen Abalach-Re take Sadira more seriously as a threat and her greater experience and knowledge would beat Sadira’s raw power.
Bear in mind that none of the SMs have faced a serious threat in 2,000 years. Even Kalak’s downfall was a distant event (even if it rumbled like an earthquake across the Tablelands) and a common view was that the Tyrant of Tyr was going senile.
“Well, it might have happened to that doddering fool Kalak, but I’m the Queen of Raam, I won’t be so easily despatched!” squish
Arguably this goes back to the fundamental problem with any fictional Big Bad Evil Guy/Gal - they’re invincible and untouchable, until they’re not, and then everyone complains about how easily they get taken down (B5’s The Shadows, ST’s Borg, Elminster from the Realms, the Circle of Eight in Vecna Lives etc). Ah well, I have 7-8 years of game time before I have to worry about how/if I’ll represent the events of The Cerulean Storm to my players. Thanks goodness for Clone, Contingency and Wish spells!
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I respectfully disagree. As I’ve mentioned on another thread, Kalak’s death was narratively satisfying because his own failures led to his demise. His arrogance and desperation to obtain ultimate power in one stroke left him blind and desperate, something that the Verdant Passage made really clear. It was that, more than the Heartwood Spear or anything else, that led to his defeat.
The problem with how both Borys and Rajaat were defeated is because they lacked this narrative through line that explained how they were defeated. Rajaat was defeated by pure author fiat, but Bory’s is possibly worse, because he was functionally defeated by brute force. Borys was fully aware of the capabilities of all of his opponents, the artifacts they had, and the sources of their power, and he had the backing of five sorcerer monarchs. He in no way underestimated his opposition, and had thousands of years of experience on them, and he proceeds to lose the fight, not because of his own mistakes or personality, but because Troy Denning needed it to happen.
This is why I mentioned above that Borys was underwhelming. The narrative makes it clear that he is not holding back, yet strangely his feats aren’t very impressive. The sorcerer monarchs likewise have the same problem. Troy Denning had the heroes fight strength with strength, and they should have lost horribly, but didn’t purely because they were the good guys (Tithian excepted).
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Sadira’s problem goes far deeper than the sun wizardry. In the Verdant Passage, she was maybe level 5 at most, but in book 3, she was far, far stronger with no explanation, and somehow defeated Nok in a mental duel. Moreover, Troy Denning went to the Ed Greenwood school of pulling made up spells out of nowhere that would blatantly violate game balance if one were to try to put them to print, the only difference being that much of Greenwood’s nonsense actually has made it to print over the decades. And all this was before she became a Sun Wizard.
Moreover, she got far more than a raw power boost from sun wizardry. A thread on the old forums called The Sadira Problem discussed this. She was functionally invincible and was almost as physically strong as Borys. Further, she could basically shape spells at will, without memorization, and with multiple examples of whim based abilities. Does this sound familiar? Well it should, because Lynn Abbey took this to its logical extreme in RaFoaDK.
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The Borys takedown issue is one I wasn’t tackling above. Mostly because as all canon material makes plain, and as discussed on this forum, Borys should walk over pretty much any opposition, bar Rajaat.
I was focusing specifically on the Sadira/Abalach-Re fight on the Ivory Plain. I stand by my comments about the 2 of them. Abalach-Re has the arrogance and necessary blindspots for Sadira to give her a bloody nose. Plus Sadira has a lucky ace in the hole - the deus ex machina (or perhaps the literal deus ex makhaira?) of Rajaat’s goo emerging from the shard of the Scourge. WIthout that, even Abalach-Re beats Sadira.
Swap Abalach-Re for Nibenay, or Andropinis, or Hamanu and I think you’d have a very different outcome - round 1, SM wipes the floor with Sadira. I could potentially see Sadira going a few rounds with Tec or possibly Lalali Puy, simply because they have the arrogance and grandiosity that Abalach has. That’s not to say either case would be a certainty of Sadira lasting a few rounds, but I figure both are less likely to wipe her out in round 1 than the other 3.
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Ah, thank you for the clarification. Sorry.
The problem I have with this is that I don’t feel it would go that way if Denning wrote it. Sadira gained so much power so quickly that it breaks immersion completely. She was doing just fine against Abalach Re up until the sorceress queen focused herself entirely on psionically attacking her, and even then she didn’t drop immediately. As I said, Nok is another example of such a thing. Sadira is absurdly telepathically resistant for somebody who is untrained.
More importantly, the fact that she can magically rival a sorcerer king or queen to the degree where they have to use psionics to beat her is the problem I and several other people have. If the shadow people, magically incapable halflings, were capable of using the Pristine Tower alone to produce someone like Sadira, how powerful should the Rajaat created, Dark Lens and tower empowered, dragon metamorphosing sorcerer-monarchs be? Lynn Abbey actually tackled this question, and regardless of the issues I have with her work, I can see how she ended up with her Godlike Sorcerer Monarchs simply by asking the logical questions that Denning didn’t even consider.
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The way I see Sadira is that in addition to her normal abilities as a wizard, she has the powers of a 20th level sorcerer in the day time. At the start of each day she selects her sorcerer spells known for that day, drawn from Rajaats personal selection of spells (ie, the spells from the sorcerer/wizard list in the SRD). This accounts for her flexibility.
Could she have given Abalach-Re a bloody nose? Yes. Defeat Abalach-Re is another matter altogether.
I’ve written about this before, but if I were to keep the prism pentad in place, I could simply treat the events as having happened, but the fallen SMs as simulacrums. The plot proceeds apace, and the implications post PP is that the post Kalak status quo is retained as is.
I think the main problem with the easy defeats of the Abalach-Re and the other SMs was that Troy was not giving the devil its due. Consider - Maetan of House Lubar from the Crimson Legion is a far more interesting villain than the easily defeated SMs (with the exception of Hamanu, when he was fighting for fun in Urik against the Tyrian revolt).
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Definitely a name I remember from those old forum days! 
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That’s also supported by canon material: for instance during the Cleansing Wars the Champion were “just” champions, than we have Farcluun, who’s a Dragon but not a Champion or a SM.
And from what I saw in a thread about the lords of the Dead Lands, one of them got recently bound with an Elemental Vortex, so he became a sort of “SM” (in the sense that he can grant divine spells).
And wow, I almost forgot the Sadira vs Nok fight… Seeing a wizard with just a basic training in the Way defeating a master psionicist like Nok in a mental duel was nonsense. Unless “Sadira’s player character” has loaded dices or cheats with her rolls 
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Depends on how much weight you give to certain cannon material. There is a strong argument that the second boxed set misinterpreted a number of the details revealed in The Cerulean Storm, and that’s before you get into Lynn Abbey. But regardless of the champions/dragons/vortices problem, Farcluun is a cannon example that the dragon transformation isn’t everything.
True, but the explanation for why it happened is virtually nonexistent, and directly contradicts a boatload of cannon (this ties into my comment above. Still, that Dregoth Ascending also would go with living vortices surviving the death of their hosts does add weight to the possibility that it was a deliberate change and not just a continuity error. It’s a change I like, personally, but it’s worth noting) Also, the stats for the lords of the dead lands are ten kinds of nonsense and riddled with errors.
Yeah, I don’t expect high art from Troy Denning, but some more thorough plotting to maintain basic consistency in character abilities would have helped the series immensely. (this also applies to items, incidentally. Kt’s Cane, for instance, aged him from old to dead in a handful of uses, and gave Agis grey hair when it was used near him. Sadira uses the thing like it’s giving away free candy with every spell, and it doesn’t appear that she ages a day.)
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It’s worth remembering that, during the TSR era, there was little to no communication between the game design department and the books department. So, as time goes on, you see greater levels of inconsistency between game material and the stuff in the novels. This matters when you’re trying to figure out what material to use and what material to ignore - because one set of sources simply weren’t in communication with the other set of sources.
As far as the game material is concerned, the distinctions between dragons, champions, and sorcerer-monarchs are clear and consistent. If you start to include material from the novels, you will run into inconsistencies very quickly. It’s worth bearing in mind when deciding how to model your own personal DS games.
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The question of how Bill Slavicsek came to his conclusion about Borys being the creator of the metamorphosis process is an interesting one. The most clear inference that I and many others made is that Slavicsek simply made a mistake. However, Slavicsek’s mistakes are our canon at the end of the day.
The champion vs dragon vs sorcerer monarch is one of the most vicious debates in Dark Sun circles, and has the least impact on the game as it is played itself. To my mind, ‘shadow wizards’ drawing power from the Black, ‘necromancer’ drawing power from the Gray, and ‘ceruleans’ drawing power from the Cerulean Storm are the far more important question. No concept has been more deleterious to the Dark Sun setting than the special energy sources introduced in Defilers and Preservers: The Wizards of Athas. Ironically, defilers and preservers becomes a misnomer, because under these new rules defiling and preserving henceforth becoming a meaningless concept because of the special energy sources. Thereafter, every PC, without exception, was either a shadow wizard, cerulean, or necromancer. At this stage, preservers were defiler lite.
Needless to say, none of these special energy sources exist in my conception of the Dark Sun setting. I realize this is a fantasy setting, but a little realism goes a long way.
That is very clearly the case. Either Slavicsek misinterpreted the details in the Prism Pentad, or he innovated. @phaaf_glien and I raised this issue on the old Wizards forums. I remember Kamelion there too, saying much as he is saying now. Its a very old and contentious debate, but as I mention above, not even close to the most important one.
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Don’t make me post my giant quotes document again!
I do agree with much of your argument about Defilers & Preservers, though (although I used a variant on the system presented in the Preserver’s Choice article). Mind you, I’ve never seen one of the non-standard wizards in play so I’ve never had to deal with the thematic issues - nobody ever wanted to play one, so preservers and defilers remained the default in my games. (A player was going to play a necromancer in my upcoming game, but ditched the idea because of the kit’s inability to multiclass).
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If I recall correctly, ceruleans actually put themselves in real danger and had real limitations on their abilities, plus rajaat’s elemental power is a logical source of energy. Now, I have never run a game set post prism pentad, but I feel that ceruleans are by far the least problematic of the three.
Necromancers, on the other hand…I don’t know. Undead special powers come from somewhere, so I have no problem with the Gray producing energy. I do, however, have a major problem with non undead spell casters being able to draw on that energy consequence free. Personally, I would ban it for living creatures, or inflict horrific consequences for doing so.
Shadow wizards…yeah, I got nothing. There is a reason that 4e dark sun ignored the Black completely, because what little we knew about it was confusing and contradictory (living creatures without a life force? darkness making creatures from a dark dimension die? Thanks Troy Denning). It’s a mess, and nothing we know could possibly explain the existence of shadow wizards (how are they drawing power from a plane that lacks energy or true substance?).
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My choice is that anything too special is unavailable as a starting character. You don’t get to start play as a Dray, or a shadow wizard, or any of a number of weird things I will let someone eventually play. Generally you have to have met them in the game to be able to play one. Then you need to die so you can get a new character. Luckily its dark sun.
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I agree with your opinion about Ceruleans and the such.
Since i like the concept of arcane caster in the Deadlands, I accept Necromancers but I’d make something like “a living creature would slowly wither and die using powes from the Grey”. An undead would’ve no problems channeling the powers of the Grey, but the on living creature would be a sort of “auto delifement” (think the effect of Dragon Magic, but on the caster itself).
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Unpopular opinion here, but I like Ceruleans, Shadow Wizards and Necromancers. It makes perfect sense that Athasian wizards would draw upon planar fuel sources, after all, what have clerics been doing since the Green Age?
That said, they should be rare as hell. Further, if clerics can get dragged into planar politicking, I see no reason why Shadow Wizards, Necromancers and Ceruleans shouldn’t as well. Ceruleans are going to have a daily temptation from Tithian (and possibly Rajaat). Necromancers are going to find that although they can control undead, the more powerful denizens of the Gray are going to want mortal pawns as well. As for Shadow Wizards, well, I’m keeping quiet on that score in case one of my players reads this forum. Suffice to say, Tom will be finding out soon what Shadow Wizards get dragged into.
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Maybe unpopular among DMs, but in my anecdotal experiences, these alternative power source wizards are very popular among players, who correctly perceive that these alternative power sources get them out of the problem of defiled.
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My own view is that Preserving vs Defiling, although a key part of the DS setting, and a great thing for RP, is a massive pain in the arse rules wise and slows any combat down to a crawl.
In every DS campaign I’ve played or DM’d, preservers have essentially behaved like normal wizards, while defilers had accelerated levelling (2nd), cool visuals (any ruleset) or added mechanics (great Raze feats in 3.X).
The only time its interesting is when the wizard either slips up in front of a crowd (cue pitchforks and burning torches), wants to repent of his defiling ways, or the preserver has to defile for the greater good.
I’ve let one player in my current (3.5 Ed) campaign take the shadow wizard PrC. There won’t be anymore SWs, or any Necromancers. I might allow a Cerulean if the campaign advances past FY10 (we’re in FY2 now) and a RP hook permitted it.
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Oh dude. Agree 100%. I simply don’t do any defiling mechanics. Just handwave it and say that the land is defiled.
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