Ah - a fellow space traveller. I wouldn’t mind a one off adventure similar to Tale of the Comet in Dark Sun, but most of the forum dwellers hated the idea. Alas!
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My ‘universe’ uses planets that each take from existing games - so I have a Shadowrun planet, a cyberpunk planet, Cthulu, Bloodshadows and so on… took me years to figure out how to integrate Athas without destroying so much of what is special about it! (Though I expect many will consider what I have done to be sacrilege anyway!). I have an Astral plane to run D&D type stuff where technology just does not work, but Athas is more fun because they have all the technology, but are absolutely paranoid about using any of it (with justification!).
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I already shared my vision of Athas history here:
However, as a resume:
- Nature-masters brought people from other planets to repopulate Athas. That’s why races and civilizations are the same as in other settings. They spread and populate vast regions of Athas.
- Zik-Chil are mutated nature-benders, which also made the thri-kreen intelligent to be used as a weapon.
- Rajaat was a nature bender/Zik-Chil creation. He shared the same vision that bringing other races to Athas was an abomination. That’s why he started the cleansing wars.
- The surviving civilizations moved back to the Tyr Region, as the ultimate habitable place.
-North is the Ecuator and it’s too hot to live.
-South, you have the Dead Lands. What’s beyond that? Maybe some civilization still exists in the South Pole
-West, the Kreen Empire, still hating other races due to their genetic-memory.
-East, was blocked by the Dragon and Ur-Draxa until very recently. Now, some old lands and some old city-states will start to enter into play. - All the history from the end of the Blue Age to today, took more or less 1500 years.
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I don’t have a custom history of Athas because somehow out of the dozens of different game systems used for hundreds and hundreds of game sessions over a span of thirty plus years of roleplaying, I’ve somehow never managed to play in or run a Dark Sun game before.
But if I did, I would probably go with that one heresy I proposed over in the heresies thread with Athas being a Thri-Kreen planet where halfling-gnomish starfarers arrived via giant colony sleep-ships with their genetic biotech and gene libraries to terraform the planet and adapt themselves as needed, explaining all the races and what eventually became lifeshaping.
Probably add in the heresy about the undead as a druidic method of drawing the poisons out of the land and being sent out into space to form a planetary defense and environmental control shield.
Likely make “magic” a degraded form of psionics for those who are seeking a shortcut to power wherein a familiar (which is actually the spirit or revenant of a past person that is desperately trying to avoid death or complete ancient imperitaves) is forcibly opening the target “wizard/sorcerer’s” psi channels at the expense of draining their vitality to feed the familiar spirit’s lifeforce… thus explaining the drive to defile, and defiling itself in a purely psionic way. As “magic” can only be used at the whim of the familiar, which fact is carefully hidden from the caster, spells are the activation protocol and signal to the familiar. This allows me to remove any and all magic from the story, without changing the story elements that appear to be magic to the reader.
Tweak it so that the SK’s have fused with their familiar spirits as part of the “becoming an advanced being” falsehood (actually the ritual is designed for the familiar to take over the host, plus forcibly channeling ancient genetic knowledge via psychometry and attempting to apply it on the fly to themselves via micro-voyance and micro-kinesis, etc.), and the mixture of memories drives most of them insane, regardless of which spirit survived the process.
I wouldn’t know what parts of the story to tweak, since I’ve never read any of it. I am only vaguely aware of story elements due to all of you, and what is alluded to in the rule books.
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Something similar is on my list.
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It seems to me that the obvious and unavoidable intent of Mr. Baker in the writing of the masterful Dragon’s Crown adventure set was that Merek the Wrong was another Champion of Rajaat. Indeed, as we point out in this thread, Merek refers to Hamanu as a peer. Indeed, the text refers to Merek as a “defiler warlord.” This was also the term used to describe Irikos in the Book of Artifacts, and as we all know, Irikos was assigned as the original Orc Plague, as Book of Artifacts makes perfectly clear.
That Merek is some sort of subordinate is not a tenable argument. Merek is described in Dragon’s Crown as commanding legions, and wielding dragon magic (10th level spells). “Defiler warlord” meant Champion of Rajaat at this early time in Dark Sun’s publishing history, and as Champion of Rajaat is an almost cult-like title likely only recognized within Rajaat’s inner circle, we ought not to expect many of their enemies to deign to use such a title, or even necessarily know of it.
Merek, like Irikos, is fascinating to me. And it is interesting that both Merek and Irikos were destroyed by rival preservers of the time, Merek by the defiling magic of Haakar at Akarakle, and Irikos by an unknown but obviously very powerful sorceress at Bodach. Many of us here in these forums over the years have preferred essentially god-like Champions of Rajaat, a la Lynn Abbey’s depiction of Hamanu in R&FoaDK. I have not favored this. Ascribing to them such radical power is outside of Troy Denning’s narrative, makes them all but unassailable to any PCs that might ever encounter them, and is well beyond the limits of their game mechanics, at least as the game might work in 2nd Edition.
The “defiler warlords” of Rajaat may have been ageless, but they were not immortal gods. At 21st level, their hit points were not yet off the charts, and may not even have yet broken 100 hp. Disasters and mortal mistakes were still risks, their PSP pool was not endless (and could be rather finite if pressed with many lesser psionic foes), and they could not employ endless 9th level spells, but rather had but a few. Poor generalship or overconfidence (as seems to have been the case with Irikos) could spell their end.
I ask, what race do we think Merek was assigned to terminate? Dragon’s Crown does not say, or I have missed a buried hint. But this notion that he was but a “captain”, or some other subordinate officer under a Champion, was absolutely not what Mr. Baker intended. No “captain”, in any sense, commands legions, plural. He was a Champion of Rajaat, plain and simple.
Obviously our sense of the timeline for Hamanu, being a latter-day Champion, feels off somewhat in the reading of Dragon’s Crown. Indeed, there is a mismatch. Retcondor however can swoop down, and suggest that the siege of Akarakle was much later in the history of the Cleansing Wars.
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