Stats for Eldaarich?

Post/Author/DateTimePost
#1

zombiegleemax

Oct 24, 2006 20:54:17
One of my players in a Dark Sun Campaign wants to play an Eldaarich PC. I knowa little bit about them in several netbooks, but I cannot find stats for them anywhere. Thus, I have a few questions:

1.) The Eldaarich as a whole are smarter and stronger than the average human, but can pass as one. Are the Eldaarich their own species like Elves and Dwarves, or are they merely a physically and mentally advanced human group?

2.) What languages do they speak?

3.) What classes are common and restricted among them?
#2

dracochapel

Oct 24, 2006 23:57:09
One of my players in a Dark Sun Campaign wants to play an Eldaarich PC. I know enough about them in several netbooks, but I cannot find stats for them anywhere. Thus, I have a few questions:

1.) The Eldaarich as a whole are smarter and stronger than the average human, but can pass as one. Are the Eldaarich their own species like Elves and Dwarves, or are they merely a physically and mentally advanced human group?

2.) What languages do they speak?

3.) What classes are common and restricted among them?

1. I was unaware that the Eldaarich are a superior human race or superior example of humanity.

2.) Their own version of common that is probably slightly different from the 'trade tongue' due to their isolation. There are also dwarves, half-giants and muls so the dwarven tongue would be fairly common.

3.) Most classes could probably be common and restricted depending on Daskinor's mood (i think he was anti-psionics at the time mentioned in the WJ). I think rogues and assassin-types would get a lot of work. Bards and traders not so much work, unless they are involved with the House Azeth of Kurn.
#3

jon_oracle_of_athas

Oct 25, 2006 1:26:16
The upcoming accessory Prison-state of Eldaarich from athas.org will include all the information you request. Meanwhile, Brax can probably answer your questions.
#4

cnahumck

Oct 25, 2006 6:44:50
Check out Wisdom of the Drylanders v2
#5

kalthandrix

Oct 25, 2006 7:05:40
I actually think he is talking about the psionic race Elan - at least that is the assumption I am going with from the material that they wrote -

http://www.d20srd.org/srd/psionic/psionicRaces.htm#elans

The elans are not a race that are in the Athas.org version of DS due to (I think) the fact that they were not in 2e - they are in the Paizo version of DS from the Dungeon/Dragon stuff, and they are in the XPH (and there for are open to being a DS race).

If I am wrong - then whoops! but I really think this is what Gwenfloor was asking about.
#6

zombiegleemax

Oct 25, 2006 13:08:11
1. I was unaware that the Eldaarich are a superior human race or superior example of humanity.

I was not saying that they were superior examples, but possibly had better education and healthcare, thus giving them physical and mental advancements.
#7

kalthandrix

Oct 25, 2006 13:12:43
I was not saying that they were superior examples, but possibly had better education and healthcare, thus giving them physical and mental advancements.

If anything - it would be the exact opposit of that - they are ruled over but a demented (more then the norn) and parionoid (again - nore then is usual for these guys) sorcerer-king.
#8

cnahumck

Oct 25, 2006 16:30:09
yeah, Daskinor is different. I wouldn't go near him. In fact, avoid Eldaarich altogher, if you like your sanity. Then again, I hear it's lovely this time of year in the Dim Lands...
#9

zombiegleemax

Oct 25, 2006 20:17:23
If anything - it would be the exact opposit of that - they are ruled over but a demented (more then the norn) and parionoid (again - nore then is usual for these guys) sorcerer-king.

If their education and healthcare are so poor, then how come willing Eldaarich slaves tend to outperform the non-Eldaarich in tasks both physical and mental?
#10

kalthandrix

Oct 25, 2006 22:02:41
Where are you getting your information from because it has all been wrong.

I will do you a favor and point you to the Wanderer's Chronical, pg.92-95 to allow you the opportunity to actually read the material before you begin telling others that they are wrong - because I for one have read the material, have it sitting before me as I type, and know that you are misthinking something or confusing the information somehow. It is called the Prison-State of Eldaarich for a reason.

I am not attempting to flame you or anything, but I am trying to point out that you are wrong and I hope I am not voming across to hard.

If I am - I appoligize now, but I say again to check your facts before you start telling others that they are wrong.
#11

zombiegleemax

Oct 26, 2006 11:07:41
I got my information from Wisdom of the Drylanders, on Athas.org
Who did I say were wrong? I did not say anyone was wrong, I was merely asking questions about the Eldaarich and attempting to get answers. When Kalthandrix answered me, I asked him how it is possible for Eldaarich slaves to be so smart and strong if their country is strictly controlled and oppressed?
#12

kalthandrix

Oct 26, 2006 11:45:28
Such a frightened, submissive people, you think. They slink penniless to your gates, asking timidly for work. They embrace the role of slavery as worms take to the soil; they refuse to learn to write your characters, or to shoot your longbows, even though learning these skills would entitle them to the privileges and duties of citizens. When asked questions, they answer loudly and clearly but deferentially. They rarely initiate a conversation with a Kurnan, and speak in whispers with their spouse and children. If you stare at them without speaking, they tremble.
The Eldaarish refugees seem like a meek and cowardly people. Yet their children born in Kurn grow as tall as Kurnans, become prominent citizens, and often out-compete your children at contests of wit, will, and strength. How curious that the children of the meek will inherit your city.

I stick by what I said - I think you are misreading the information in the Wisdom of the Drylanders.

The whole section in Eldaarish shows how totally these people are oppressed - so the idea that they are better naturally is coming from left field.

Now the above quote does say that they excell WHEN these refuges come to Kurn - but that is only because, like many immergrant workers through history, they finally have a chance to better themselves and therefore throw everything they have into do it - this does not make then naturally better, just more driven.
#13

cnahumck

Oct 26, 2006 12:16:25
they also voluntarily accept slavery, as slavery in kurn is better than freedom in eldaarich
#14

thebrax

Oct 28, 2006 19:28:43
Ah, it took me a while to see where you were coming from. Good catch, Kal; I would not have guessed that what he was referring to.

The main physical difference between Kurns and Eldaarish is that the latter are shorter, partly because for 2000 years they've been taking their tallest babies out to become Red Guards, effectively taking them out of the breeding population. But none of that has any game effect.

The Eldaarish people are raised from childhood to believe that they are physically superior to all other people, and it's possible that even some of the refugees have come in with this belief and have taught it to their children. Prodigy, the former spy who wrote "Wisdom of Terror," was the child of Kurnan refugees:
The Eldaarish refugees seem like a meek and cowardly people. Yet their children born in Kurn grow as tall as Kurnans, become prominent citizens, and often out-compete your children at contests of wit, will, and strength. How curious that the children of the meek will inherit your city.
How you must fear us. An elf, dwarf, herder, Drylander, or even child of the bandit state that puts down roots in Kurn’s foreign quarter, and finds employment in a clave, is accepted as citizen, and her child is called a child of Kurn. The child of Eldaarish parents is called Eldaarish, even though he is a citizen and a skilled artisan in his guild, even though she has served three missions as the King’s spy and now shares his bed. No one will ever call me a child of Kurn, for terror hides in my shadow.

Prodigy is sharp, and a gifted manifester, but she's not exactly objective.

When she wrote Wisdom of Terror, she did not yet know about New Kurn. What she knew is that every year there seemed to be fewer Kurnans, and a greater number of Eldaarish refugees. Hence -- How curious that the children of the meek will inherit your city.

If you want to know what makes an Eldaarish person superior to other humans, you'd have to ask an Eldaarish person. Me, I reckon they are as human as anyone else.
#15

thebrax

Oct 28, 2006 19:52:17
The Eldaarish speak the Eldaarish tongue. Other than spies, they do *not* speak any version of common. Many know the Cuurnu language of signs described in Wisdom of Terror.
#16

zombiegleemax

Oct 28, 2006 21:23:34
Aha! So the reason that they make good slaves in Kurn is due to the fact that they find a profession to better themselves at instead of rotting in misery in Eldaarich.
#17

thebrax

Oct 28, 2006 22:23:57
Eldaarish refugees tend to become slaves in Kurn and to stay slaves in Kurn, because it's difficult for them to develop trusting relationships, and all Kurnan citizens are part of a "clave" community, a cross between a guild and a clan. Historically the clave structure descends from the crew arrangements that the Kel Tas lived in during the cleansing wars while fighting the lizardmen, before Keltis brought them to Kurn. Almost all Kurnans who aren't born into nobility aspire to be artisans of some sort. Trouble is that Kurn's modest economy doesn't support that much skilled labor, so during planting and harvesting season, most of the artisans put down their tools to do day labor for the nobles. Between planting, harvesting, and their military service, they scarcely get 150 days of craft work a year, and even then in lots of professions they end up looking for side jobs. But in the Kurnan clave, it's all teamwork and cooperation. In the DS core rules, "Companion" is the Kurnan regional feat. Contrast that to the Eldaarish one: paranoia. The Eldaarish simply don't integrate well into the Kurnan professional society, so they work as slaves to the nobles (the most stable and lucrative option left to them other than leaving and becoming bandits), and raise their kids to be competitive. Kurn only allows slavery up to 7 year periods, so a person can bind themselves into slavery for a season (75 days) up to 7 years, with some money paid up front and more of it at the end of the term.

Kurnans (like many earth societies) regard apprenticeship a form of slavery, so most Kurnan citizens have actually been slaves at one time or another, but apprenticeship to a clave is generally an "upwardly mobile" sort of slavery . With slavery to a noble, you plow, you plant, you get fed, housed, sheltered, and then at the end you get paid. At best, the noble agrees to take you on for another season for a better price.

In Eldaarich, the only slaves you will ever see on the streets are naked dwarves, muls and halfgiant slaves, forbidden even to wear silters. The only human slaves are either outside the city (e.g. in the mines in the huuros islands, in the craft villages, in South Guard, or Camp Zero), under the city (in what Prodigy called the "undervillages"). There are also condemned human prisoners kept in the city for "entertainment" purposes, to die in the arenas or in the slave brothels.

The Eldaarish also don't like the Kurnan claves because all that clannishness reminds them of the cults of their own cities.
#18

zombiegleemax

Nov 01, 2006 17:56:50
So now what do the Eldaarich do when they become free? I am pretty sure that most do not want to go back to their third-world dictatorship.
#19

kalthandrix

Nov 01, 2006 19:25:54
So now what do the Eldaarich do when they become free? I am pretty sure that most do not want to go back to their third-world dictatorship.

For those answers, you will have to wait for the Trembling Plains and Prison State of Eldaarich to come out :P

Soon...maybe...
#20

zombiegleemax

Nov 02, 2006 2:24:29
Eldaarich is the North Korea of Athas.
#21

thebrax

Nov 02, 2006 12:50:11
I'll admit that Big Kim and Little Kim were inspirational, but to take more than 4% of our inspiration from any one country would have turned our work into a political tract. Imagination can only go so far, though. George Orwell had some interesting points, but when you're describing something like Eldaarich, fiction is simply too weak and watered down. No work of fiction has ever delivered a twisted spirit on the scale of Caligula, Idi Amin Dada, Nero, Pol Pot, Hitler, Robespierre, Mao, Robert Mugabe, Mullah Omar, Bloody Mary, Jim Jones, Joseph Stalin, David Koresh, the Man of the Mountain (master of the hashishins), or big and little Kim. The human race has a long and proud history of placing absolute power in the hands of the mentally ill. We would be fools to ignore the stories of this world, but we would be political hacks to focus on on big kim and little kim at the expense of the the killing fields, the holocaust, the cultural revolution, the reign of terror, the kkk, and all the other unforgettable examples of cowardice cloaking itself in the terror of others.


THE STORIES THAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO READ ARE TRUE. ONLY THE FACTS HAVE BEEN CHANGED, TO PROTECT SOCIETY.

-Brax Istman, senior templar of the Haleban Order, Sub-minister of History in the Entertainment Bureau.
#22

jon_oracle_of_athas

Nov 04, 2006 10:29:52
Brilliant quote. ;)
#23

Pennarin

Nov 05, 2006 17:00:24
Wow Brax, you sure know your stuff! I don't know a single DS book or novel well enough to have written a comprehensive analysis like that.

It'll take me years to read and reread LCotTB to know it as well as you.

Mmmm...there's also another explanation: I never played, or GMed, a game of DS, so the importance of all that campaing lore is rather low for me. What can I say. Give me smart players that don't have pimples and that don't imitate the charging dwarf and his battleaxe and I won't kill anyone :D

If I want to know something, I look it up. Mostly.
#24

thebrax

Nov 05, 2006 22:09:52
You mean Lost Cities of the Trembling Plains? I was referiring to Prison-State of Eldaarich (not LCotTP), but that wasn't an analysis of the piece; that's just a description of some of the persons and organizations that Will and I discussed while we were figuring out how the Eldaarish government worked. You have to give us credit -- we were talking about the kims and Omar back in 1999; we had to re-tool and take some stuff out afterward. Back in 1999, not that many people knew there was a living breathing bunch of folks who would performed public executions in stadiums between sports events and then beat the audience if they did not applaud. But leaving that in after 2001 would have made us look like a couple of lemmings. That, and the fact that the whole D&D system got overhauled twice, plus Will got called up to war, and I had 3 kids and went back to school, explain why this whole thing has taken so long to write

We started with a couple pages in the WC that painted Daskinor as a mentally ill totalitarian, so it made sense to look at a bunch of historical ones, look for common threads, and try to find historical events that weren't simply too unbelievable for fiction.