Why Rajaat Needed Champions

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I’m not sure if this is a crazy idea, or something everyone else already thought of 20+ years ago, but…
In Rise and Fall of a Dragon King, Hamanu questions why Rajaat needed Champions - he was so powerful he could have done everything himself much quicker. But in The Cerulean Storm, Rajaat banishes/imprisons Andropinis rather than killing him, and kills Tectuktitlay with the Dark Lens used as a physical weapon - not with his immense magical/elemental powers.

Perhaps Rajaat, for some reason, can’t use his own magic to directly kill … maybe as part of some weird elemental pact he made?

So he created Champions to do it for him.

Or is there some canonical example of Rajaat directly killing with magic?

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So, the Dragons were more or less Rajaat’s Templars? Able to access magic through him that he could not access himself?

I think Hamanu might be wrong about Rajaat’s level of power, though… Rajaat was, very possibly, playing up his power. He was strong enough to destroy Myron, but possibly only because he made the Champions, and they hadn’t yet had centuries to figure out ways around his backdoors.

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Maybe it ties back to him being a pyreen. Since the pyreen were originally created to safeguard the Rebirth races, he might be bound by some ancient geas or instinctive prohibition that prevents him from directly harming them. That would force him to work through intermediaries, manipulating events, empowering proxies, or nudging others into conflict, so he can pursue his goals without violating the core nature of what he is.

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Hmmm… might also explain why he picked humans… he found that he could hurt them, so having them kill everyone, then killing them himself, would avoid his geas.

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Or by turning them into Champions, they were no longer human and no longer part of the original Rebirth races creating a loophole he could exploit.

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Yeah, but that leaves the rest of the humans.

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The human population would have been greatly reduced with warring with all the other Rebirth Races. Rajaat likely had someone or something planned to eliminate those surviving the CW.

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Lile a good, cleansing flood? :squinting_face_with_tongue:

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Rajaat is a weird dude. It’s possible that proxy violence was considered by him to be a “loophole” in his twisted ethical framework. My guess is that he would not harm those that did not harm, or intend to bring harm, to him. If so, that includes the mass of individuals in the races that he wanted to cleanse.

The story of Rajaat came late in the development cycle. I can see why Dark Sun fans have trouble reconciling it with the rest of the lore.

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“Reconciling the lore” is more or less the necessary occupation of every fan of Dark Sun.

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12

Genocide is always more fun with your best chums?

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Honestly, that raises another question… returning the world to the Blue Age (flooding the continents) probably would have killed off most of the Rebirth races anyway. Why were genocidal wars necessary as a first step? The use of defiling magic during the Wars moved the world farther from its Blue Age state.

But The Cerulean Storm at least strongly implies that Rajaat really could have re-Blue-Age-ified the world if he hadn’t been re-imprisoned. So if he could do that starting from the desert state of FY10 Athas, couldn’t he have done it much more easily starting from Green Age Athas that still had oceans?

Or was FY10 Rajaat, who had apparently become some kind of elemental being, something fundamentally different from the Rajaat that created the Champions? Maybe he “leveled up” massively during the Cleansing Wars, and began some kind of super advanced being transformation?

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RAFOADK maybe implies that Hamanu was meant to be Rajaat’s final weapon, to get rid of the humans as well?

I’m not sure that losses in the Wars necessarily would have reduced the human population, though they might have. Depends on whether the Wars started large scale and then most of the time was taken up by local operations hunting the last holdouts (in which case losses would have been recovered way before the end), or whether they started as centuries of subtle political manipulations of existing conflicts before exploding into large scale genocidal total war (in which case the end would have been the bloodiest), or whether they were a series of separate wars with relatively peaceful phases in between (so the human population would recover between wars).

If you take the timeline literally, the Wars took something like 1500 years (though I find this highly implausible). If that’s accepted, there must have been long periods of apparent peace or low grade conflict; if it was all one total war, the Champions would have either won or been killed off much quicker.

It also depends on how much of the desertification of the landscape was due to the Cleansing Wars, versus the transformation of Borys into the Dragon and the Dragon’s Rampage afterward.

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My understanding was that Rajaat was worried that all the races would band together to stop his plan, and theat eliminating the ~12 moat powerful races was necessary to keep them from having the psionics/magic to put a damper in his plan.

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That’s possible, I guess… but I’m not sure it entirely fits. In The Cerulean Storm he starts the transformation anyway.

And Rajaat was the one who taught everybody magic in the first place. If he was worried about their magical capabilities, it’d have been easier to keep magic to himself.

Also, it would seem that if that was the only reason, he’d only need their civilizations to be destroyed, not the entire species (there’d be no need to hunt down every hunter-gatherer band or remote isolated village).

I think there has to be more to it - either in Rajaat’s own warped psychology and motivations, or in the magic involved. For some reason, Rajaat at least thought (at the time, 3500 years ago) that extinction/genocide was a necessary prerequisite - but apparently no longer thinks so at the time of The Cerulean Storm.

And something turned Rajaat from mutant-pyreen to the gigantic shadow/elemental being we see in The Cerulean Storm. His imprisonment in the Hollow beyond the Black is clearly involved, at least for the shadow aspects, but OTOH I’m sure the imprisonment wasn’t meant to give him enormous elemental powers.

Someone suggested that the Cleansing Wars were actually a mass gathering of life force, which might work.

Another possibility is that Rajaat was doing his own advanced being transformation while the Cleansing Wars were going on - some unique type not described in the rules, that leads to the “clouds for flesh” water/rain based form we see.

In either model, Rajaat at the time of empowering the Champions wasn’t powerful enough to turn the world back to the Blue Age, but was that powerful by the time of his imprisonment.
…

But … the use of the Dark Lens (a ridiculously powerful magical & psionic amplifier) as a physical weapon, and the imprisonment instead of killing of Andropinis (especially since he specifically says “a thousand years” of imprisonment - Rajaat is way older than that, so that’s not effectively-forever like it would be for us), really makes me think Rajaat has some kind of limiter on directly using his magic to kill.

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That’s some strong reasoning, there. It’s easy to think of Rajaat as being effectively all powerful, but you’ve really highlighted some possible weaknesses.

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Thank you!

While RAFOADK’s Hamanu seems to think of Rajaat as close to all-powerful, and his appearance in Cerulean Storm kind of suggests that his shadow is his only weakness, he was defeated somehow to be imprisoned in the first place – and I don’t think he had the shadow connection before his imprisonment. So he has to have some other limitation.

How Rajaat went from the mutant-pyreen form he originally had to what he is in Cerulean Storm might be key. I think possibly the implication is that he was ‘killed’ but then his body and spirit had to be imprisoned separately to prevent him from just coming back to life? So the shadow form is basically his spirit and the clouds-to-flesh thing is him rebuilding his body around his bones? But then his gigantic size seems unexplained… and the clouds bit seems reminiscent of the cleric-elemental advanced beings.

I wonder if the implication was meant to be that Rajaat is some kind of super combo advanced being, a supermulticlass of defiler/preserver/psionicist/elemental cleric/maybe druid, with avangion- and cleric-elemental-like advanced being abilities?

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I’ve always wondered whether Rajaat’s Cleansing Wars plan is meant to be read as simply insane (in a crazy attempt to return the world to the Blue Age, he’s actually done the complete opposite) or as an evil-mastermind type carefully plotted plan with its own consistent internal logic. The very long time scale, and Rajaat’s apparent actual ability to re-Blue-Age-ify things in Cerulean Storm, kind of argue for the latter; but if it’s internally logical, there has to be an actual reason why the Cleansing Wars are a necessary or at least useful step toward restoring the Blue Age, despite the massive use of defiling magic having the opposite effect.

One possibility, I guess, is that Rajaat didn’t have the whole picture or sufficient power at the beginning. He didn’t yet know how to turn the sun blue or raise the oceans/flood the continents (or if he knew how in theory, didn’t yet have the power to achieve it), but killing off the Rebirth races was a step toward making the world more like the Blue Age world which could be taken in the nearer term (while he worked on learning how to do the sun & oceans stuff). Perhaps he also was working on other, smaller scale things that we don’t know about because - unlike the Cleansing Wars - they aren’t directly relevant to how Athas ended up the way it is; maybe the other things were ultimately blind alleys.

That could explain why Cerulean Storm Rajaat starts trying to turn the sun blue and create oceans immediately. While it’s implied that he’s going to turn Tithian into some kind of Champion (that could just be a lie, but OTOH he doesn’t just kill Tithian upon being freed either) he clearly doesn’t need to wait on any wars to start altering the world. The difference is just that he now has the power to “cut right to the chase”, which he didn’t have 3500 years before.

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Well, to be fair, Rajaat was definitely busy doing SOMETHING the entire time the Cleansing Wars were going on.

One could argue that he was busy coming up with the Champions’ creation process during the Preserver Jihad and maybe making the various artifacts we know about (through maybe those were handed out before the Jihad, IDK), but he certainly had plenty of time on his hands as the Champions did their thing during the Wars.

It’d be a perfect time for him to be figuring out the middle step of this process, which could be why he started out needing the Champions, but didn’t by the time he was released in Cerulean Storm.

South Park - Underpants Gnomes - Cleansing Wars
South Park - Underpants Gnomes - Cleansing Wars640×439 55.5 KB

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20

Yeah.

There’s an odd passage in the The Wanderer’s Chronicle history that says

“From Rajaat’s place atop the Pristine Tower, bathed in the light of the crimson sun, an immeasurably older Warbringer waited for victory. Weeks turned to years, years to centuries, until one day Rajaat saw his Champions return. He stood before them with his long shocks of gray hair and his white, burning eyes, eagerly anticipating the news they brought him. “Have all the abominations been destroyed?” Rajaat asked his Champions. “Can the Blue Age start anew?””

That implies that Rajaat was still in basically humanoid form at the time of the Champions turning against him, not clouds-for-flesh form, and that he wasn’t directly involved in the Wars themselves.

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Andropinis being imprisoned for a 1,000 years is poetic justice for a guy who helped imprison Rajaat for twice as long. Plus the choice of the Black is a wink to what he helped do to Rajaat’s halfling followers.

We don’t know what the living conditions are in the Black. Andropinis’ every second of life there may be torture of the most horrible kind. Think near absolute zero temperatures, no light, and unamed things in there with you, perhaps attacking his immortal flesh. This is Black Mirror digital hell level of nightmare.

Tectuktitlay he chose to kill (his reasons were his own, he needed not justify himself), and used extreme blunt force to achieve it. Immortal flesh can be vanquished with a big enough meat grinder.

I hope this helps dispel the idea that Rajaat was somewhat limited in his scope and means beyond whatever limitations he put on himself, ethically and psychologically, just as we all do everyday of our lives.

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