World maps for Athas

Like, you mean NW of Om?

Above Om in the basin.

I like the idea of other structures (not necessarily towers), but would imagine the Pristine Tower was the master one controlling all other points.

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The pristine tower had a bunch of strange crystals inside it, those might be what made the tower so special and might be found in other lesser towers.

Personally I imagine whatever network consisting of multiple towers since I envision them connecting with one in an invisible network and emitting pulses of magical power to do what they do.

The way I saw it, what made Rajaat and the Pristine Tower of the Tyr region special wasn’t just the tower itself, but the Dark Lens being wielded within the Pristine Tower. I always considered the Dark Lens up there with the Pristine Tower as the most powerful artifacts on Athas.

That being said, I could easily see the Pristine Tower being the “central” structure of whatever network the Rullisti made to destroy the Brown Tide and create the Green Age.

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Another take would be the other points are actually rooted to the Pristine Tower deep beneath Athas’ surface and is technically just a single superstructure.

Think along the lines of the Pando Tree in Utah but on a more global scale.

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Here’s an idea: What if there are 7 ‘daughter’ towers of the Pristine Tower - one for each of the 7 gemstones within the Steeple of Crystals? At that point you’d have an Emerald Tower, a Ruby one, Amethyst, Sapphire, Diamond, Opal and Aquamarine.

That would give the Steeple of Crystals a raison d’etre as the central nexus that gathers the energies of each tower to the ‘Mother’ tower - the Pristine Tower. Each of the individual crystal towers could have a similar place to the Steeple, only composed solely of that tower’s crystal (so the Emerald Tower would have the Verdant Steeple, the Ruby one the Sanguine Steeple and so on).

As for placement, you could have one tower at each of the poles, then 5 daughter towers and the Pristine Tower along the equator. Thoughts?

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I like it! I actually had no idea the Steeple of Crystals had 7 different kinds of crystals within it.

As for the placement, I think that’s a good starting point and if we want to add some variety, what if one of the towers was now submerged by the silt seas or caught up in the obsidian flows?

Edit: On the earlier point regarding the Pristine Tower connecting to the other less structures underground, honestly I had a similar thought at first. The reason I initially didn’t suggest it was that the Tower was built during the Brown Tide as a desperate measure. While I can see the rhullisti making 8 odd monuments across Athas to defeat the tide, connecting them all seems like a far lengthier endeavor. The way I see it, if the monuments were connected it would mean the brown tide was a slower force than we might’ve thought, but still just as dangerous and inevitable. Or there might have been some preexisting infrastructure the rhullisti used to connect the monuments together.

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Was the PT BUILT to combat the Brown Tide, or USED to do so? I don’t recall.

Built. There is a timeline on pg 8 of the revised setting boxed set that states:

“Those nature-masters seeking to counter the tide create the Pristine Tower, which they use to focus the sun’s energy in order to kill the brown tide”

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Ehhh, alright. If they said built, I’d be happier. Created could still be twisted to mean repurposed, but there’s bot a LOT of ambiguity there.

“Specifically made for that purpose” it is. :+1:

It becomes even funkier if they were only connected up during the Green Age. What else did this Rajaat fella do all those decades and centuries besides stirring up some violence and hatred?
I mean, anyone with a couple of years of propaganda and the use of media (read: bards, messengers, whomever) can do that.

On Page 10 of the revised setting:

“A brown tide spread across the waves, and the endless sea of the Blue Age slowly died. All life sprang from this sea. Without it, life could not survive beneath the azure sun. It was a desperate time, and it called for desperate measures. The halflings used their mastery of nature to manipulate the very building blocks of life from their outpost-a stronghold that would one day come to be called the Pristine Tower. By changing the sun so that its energy could be focused through the tower, the halflings were able to kill the brown tide”

Seems to imply is was repurposed to me.

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Ok, see so between the two, IMO some part of the PT existed before the Brown Tide crisis, but it BECAME the PT we know because it the crisis response.

Whatever that means - maybe it was just a tower before, or something.

But there’s still some room there for purists with strong opinions to have their way - which is a manner of writing i enjoy.

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Do I read that as they started with an outpost and turned their outpost into the PT?

That’s my read, yes. The stronghold could have been a tower already and was simply made powerful…

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Which the tower was likely grown via life-shaping. Tracks that the rhulisti may have had similar structures that grew from it like coral prior to the end of the Blue Age.

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I could definitely buy that the Pristine Tower was repurposed to combat the Brown Tide. Imagining it as vast network of coral that was spread across Athas to perhaps aid in the natural balance of the sea is a neat idea and maybe when the tower was repurposed it caused the coral to calcify into the white stone we recognize today.

So here’s a hot take going off that idea. What if the network of towers/monuments is what the rhullisti used to try and bolster life in the sea, only to create the Brown Tide in the first place? That might be putting too many eggs in one basket so to speak, but we have no idea what created the Brown Tide to begin with and it’s neat to think that by changing the cause of the Brown Tide they were able to eradicate it at the cost of the Blue Age.

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Loving this discussion. Couple more hot takes!:

Having multiple towers which are connected could be a nice way to visualize how the energy of the sun is captured and then directed down into the planet, as a form of terraforming really. Imagine the towers are spread equidistant across the globe, 8 towers roughly on the points where a cube would map to a sphere (like this).

Having the towers essentially be a dormant terraforming artifact gives a huge hook if one wanted to create a campaign where the players can end with attempting to “fix” athas.

Maybe the 8 towers are actually one gargantuan life-shaped artifact, 99% of it is deep underground, like ley lines connecting each of the towers. Built and shaped over millenia.

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Actually, in one of the novels, I believe the Amber Enchantress, Sadira encounters one such structure when she travels with the elves. It’s a location called Cleft Rock and it is specifically compared structurally to the PT as I seem to remember. It contained a vast underground network of tunnels and such which never was fully explored due to the encounters there and the hurry she was in. But one of the things she did run into were cryostasis halflings.

Who’s to say there aren’t many such structures spreading outward like a web from each such tower-location.

And what if the Messenger comet is the timed release measure to reset some sort of unknown power buildup in those towers? And what would happen if the Messenger wouldn’t periodically show up and by it’s proximity reset something? I see some more campaign/adventure ideas there that can complement the ones @Freysi just shared.

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Oooh I like that. I had totally forgotten about that structure. Need to find the passage and re-read it. Also connecting with the Messenger is epic. This is all starting to remind me of a crazy Final Fantasy plot haha.
EDIT: For reference, here is the text @johndoe was referring to (I think)

Sadira looked up and saw a vaulted ceiling shaped from porous white stone that bore a faint resemblance to pumice. The dome had not been carved, for its contours were so softly rounded that the structure looked more grown than hewn. The entire surface seemed to glisten with tiny, pink-glowing droplets that occasionally fell free and plunged into the darkness below.
Deciding it would be wisest to see what she was getting into, Sadira pulled a wooden ball from her satchel. She pointed her palm toward the ceiling to summon the energy for a light spell, but did not feel the tingle of life-force entering her body. Instead, mottled pastel colors glowed deep within the porous stone above her hand. She pulled harder, and the stain deepened in hue and spread outward, but still no energy came to her body. Sadira gasped and closed her hand, both puzzled and frightened. The ceiling itself seemed to be absorbing the life-force she summoned, but she had never heard of any rock that could do such a thing.

And later:

When Sadira’s turn came, she saw the reason for the elves’ concern. The walls of this passageway were lined with notches that appeared to be crypts, though none could have held a person any larger than a child. Each hollow was faced with a strange son of translucent stone that Sadira had never seen before, a little too cloudy to be glass and with a texture as smooth as ivory. In each hollow she could make out the form of a small body, and at first Sadira feared they were the elven children.
When she peered into one of the crypts more closely, the sorceress saw that the hazy figure inside was not that of a child. Rather, it seemed to be a mature man, with skin as viscid as clay, short-cropped hair, and even features. He was dressed in a plain tabard, with a small skullcap on the top of his head. Only the fact that Sadira’s elven vision saw his body in a cold blue tint suggested that he was dead.

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