What's Your History of Athas?

[redking]

@Zepa77

My players, spaceship borne travelers from the ‘modern world’ arrived and were promptly comprehensively turned over by Nibenay.

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!

[Zepa77 (Richard Rogerson)]

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!).

[Otello]

I already shared my vision of Athas history here:

Dark Sun heresy

First of all I want to say hello, as this is my first post. I’ve been a long time lurker of this forum and a longer fan of Dark Sun. I want also to apologize in advance for my English, as is not my native language and I had to use Google Translate to be able to have this post translated to English. This heresy is based on some of the original ideas from the Gor books, the Counter-Earth, in which existing civilizations have their origin in our Earth. So, considering that the original set was alr…

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.

[nijineko (nijineko prismaticpsion)]

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.

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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.

[The_DMs_Revenge (Adam Cieszlak)]

Something similar is on my list.