0. introduction
1. geography (detailed info on landmarks, terrain description, living creatures, roads, etc, in the wanderer's journal style)
1.1. immediate north
1.2. glowing desert
1.3. scorpion planes
1.4. troll grave chasm
1.5. lava gorge
1.6. scorched platau
-> not including last sea (already has an accessory)
-> not including lost cities (coming up "soon" anyway)
-> not including jagged cliffs (already has accessory)
2. raider societies (includes general town descriptions, leader detailed info + info on most of the high-ranking officers, philosophy of each village, relationships with others, raiding 'schedule' etc. will include the short remarks from wanderer's journal as the skeleton and will expand greatly on them)
2.1. pillage
2.2. plunder
2.3. ravish
2.4. ravage
2.5. kel's lot
2.6. wrath
2.7. spoil
3. other societies and locations (mixed, will sort later. Note that some of these locations are mentioned in the expanded campaign setting, while some are not. I'll excercise the "first come first served" right and will add completely new info on the unexplained locations.)
3.1. nexus
3.2. pyreen grove
3.3. winter nest
3.4. dry spring
3.5. foul puddle
3.6. godshold
3.7. burried city
3.8. small water
3.9. gith's spring
3.10. steaming water
3.11. magehome
3.12. tradenest
3.13. ral
3.14. moon runner's rest
3.15. bartigar
3.16. star rock
3.17. hogalay
-> any other?
-> if any of these locations are already described please tell me so I can either dump them or expand.
4. wind rider clan (as you could already see from the prcs built, this is an interesting (at least to me) adaptation of the bandit states raiding practices into a brand new clan with it's own unique lifestyle)
4.1. clan organisation
4.2. culture
4.3. tests of leadership
4.4. battling drakes
4.5. raiding
4.6. new weapons and vehicles
4.7. adventure (will write a short 5-10 page adventure using this clan, don't worry, it will include lord doomspike and athasian pikachus. and a Living Legent character who will most probably wield Maldra, the ancient elven ... trident! of great power.)
-> all this is entirely new content
5. what else?
...3.14. moon runner's rest...
Right around the time that I joined athas.org, I was working on a somewhat expansive supplement for the Scorched Plateau region. Almost immediately afterwards, though, I was invited to join athas.org and haven't really had any spare time to work on it since (bizarre as that sounds, it is true).
This thread is a preliminary fluff-only writeup on the Moon Runners, bit also contains some preliminary notes on Moon Runner's Rest and other elven tribes of the Plateau.
I also did a writeup of the ssurrans as a player race in PHB format. It's not available online anywhere that I am aware of, but I can send you a pdf if you are interested. And I also have about a page of notes about the plateau (focussing on the ssurran) - it's pretty fragmentary, but you can maybe nab some ideas from there. Drop me an email if any of this might be of use to you and I'll send you the docs.
Edit: a look at the map confirms it.. there are 3 noname oases + Steaming water, and ofc ourse the totaly non-descript and omnious magehome ruins (oh do i have plans for this one!). They are far enough from the gorge to be livable, so why not. a few skirmishes here and there and here we go, lively community.
If I understood correctly, you envisioned only ssurans to be able to survive on the scorched platou? Only, as in the only intelligent race capable of living there? Perhaps I could modify some elf tribe, them being naturally hardy, and make their camp nearby, say, some 20 miles of the lava gourge? That would be an ideal place to live if security or secrecy is a concern, but they would relularly have to go hunting or scavenging or raiding outwards. Just an idea, I think it could be developed.
Edit: a look at the map confirms it.. there are 3 noname oases + Steaming water, and ofc ourse the totaly non-descript and omnious magehome ruins (oh do i have plans for this one!). They are far enough from the gorge to be livable, so why not. a few skirmishes here and there and here we go, lively community.
Yeah, iirc my original concept had the ssurrans as the only regular race hardy enough to live in close proximity to Lava Gorge. Other races could certainly inhabit the plateau, but the closer one gets to the Gorge, the more inhospitable the temperatures become. My initial draft of the ssurrans actually gave them fire resistance 10, but we ditched that for ToA in order to avoid trumping the dray racial ability.
I had also intended to have the waters of the northern-most oasis (called Dwimmerdeep in my notes) possess mystical qualities - that oasis is the one that had been settled by the Dreamwalker elven tribe.
As for Magehome, my initial concept had been that it was one of the schools of preserving that was set up during the Time of Magic. It was destroyed during the Preserver Jihad, with Lava Gorge coming into being as a result of a cataclysmic magical battle that took place there between the preservers and Rajaat's defilers.
(In a later idea I had also considered the possibility that it might be an impact crater of some sort. I had imagined a series of impacts raining down along a rough north-south axis in some ancient time - Dragon's Bowl, Troll Grave Chasm and Lava Gorge all lie along this axis. I never went anywhere concrete with these ideas about the origins of the Gorge, though - they never even made it into my notes and were only referenced here and there in old posts on this and the former DS boards).
As far as an elven tribe living near to the Lava Gorge goes, I also considered this as an idea. The Flambringers were intended to fill this role - they are briefly covered at the end of the Moon Runners post I linked to above.
When it came to Godshome, I had been sifting through various DS releases to try and find references to the composition of the Green Age pantheon of false gods. One good point of reference for this was actually the poster map from the first boxed set. On the steps of Kalak's ziggurat there are pictures of these strange beings engaged in apparently divine acts. I had imagined these to be representations of the lost pantheon and was going to flesh out their aspects and portfolios, as well as the misguided beliefs of their followers. The Crimson Shrine in UnderTyr was also a reference for this, as well as the mention of the being called Iliandrim in Terrors of the Dead Lands.
Anyway, all old ideas now and, with current commitments, I doubt I'll ever have time to return to them. I have always had a fondness for the Scorched Plateau region, though, and the quirky ssurran race. Good to see it getting some more attention
.Edit: Looking at the Moon Runner notes, it also seems like I mixed up Ral and Guthay. AFAIK, Ral is the smaller of the moons, not the larger. Ho hum.
IIRC I have place the Mir'iseth in the Somber Woods- they will be appearing in the next version of ToA- I plan on doing a write up on them and their culter/socitey/ect sometime so I will donate it when I get it done- that is if the editors in Athas.org did not change it- I have not really heard anything about them since I submitted them except that they will be in ToA.
They are in the pipe, never fear. We have diverted some resources away from the ToA revision to tackle Secrets of the Dead Lands (as that is a little more pressing than another ToA edit, heh). It's a long, slow, process, I'm afraid, but you can rest assured that your winning critters haven't been forgotten
.Just read page 29 of Mindlords of the Last Sea and it says something about the recently renamed scorched plateau. To me this hints that lava gorge was a recent creation which happened in the final days of the Cleansing War.
(In a later idea I had also considered the possibility that it might be an impact crater of some sort. I had imagined a series of impacts raining down along a rough north-south axis in some ancient time - Dragon's Bowl, Troll Grave Chasm and Lava Gorge all lie along this axis. I never went anywhere concrete with these ideas about the origins of the Gorge, though - they never even made it into my notes and were only referenced here and there in old posts on this and the former DS boards)
I like this. The lava filling thr gorge may be a result of the battle between preservers and defilers, but the crater itself - as well as those other places you mention - could well be impact craters.
My god, I had an idea: What if the Messenger is in fact a recurring periodic phenomena caused by celestial mechanics, which results in the impact - every few thousand years - of a large object on Athas. The Messenger has crashed already, so would have the "Messengers" from before, and in a few years or King's Ages from now the celestial mechanics will ensure that a new Messenger will appear and continue to appear for thousands of years until it crashes again. Then the cycle continues.
(The current Messenger doesn't need to be a huge lifeshaped object, it can just be a hunk of stone settled by a lifeshaped pod.)
Btw Mark, for one artifact I still haven't finished, I wanted Coranuu to have battled in the past an evil tribe of elves who could enter people's dreams in nefarious ways, and they were called the Dreamstalkers. Just thought the parallel was strange!
When it came to Godshome, I had been sifting through various DS releases to try and find references to the composition of the Green Age pantheon of false gods. One good point of reference for this was actually the poster map from the first boxed set. On the steps of Kalak's ziggurat there are pictures of these strange beings engaged in apparently divine acts. I had imagined these to be representations of the lost pantheon and was going to flesh out their aspects and portfolios, as well as the misguided beliefs of their followers. The Crimson Shrine in UnderTyr was also a reference for this, as well as the mention of the being called Iliandrim in Terrors of the Dead Lands.
The figures on the ziggurat were stylized representations of Kalak, says PP1.
The best reference I found for the pantheon you mention is in the history of Lawkeeper Efkenu's Bodach project. He called it the Great Pantheon. The pantheon would have contained dozens of gods if not more. I imagine the pantheon was successful at supplanting other religions during the height of the Green Age because it absorbed previous gods. With this rationale we can put all previous Green Age divine beings in the pantheon.