There will be in a couple months.
How so? Info you've added to the TP sup? Whatever it is though, Penn and I could use what you've got.
Sometimes during the Jihad preservers would have started acting like a resistance movement, including cells. In a few places those cells would have come out of hiding and erected or took over great fortresses, like Dasarches and that other place.
The members of this movement would have come to be known as wind mages, either through their own PR efforts or as a name given by the populace or by their enemies.
This is different from the image we get of the Wind Mages, that of an organization of preservers that fought the defilers from several fortresses located far away from each other.
(And no I don't see the VA as owing anything in terms of creed or structure to the WM. I think the VA originated in a time when only the greatest sages, and rarest of books, remembered the WM.)
(And no I don't see the VA as owing anything in terms of creed or structure to the WM. I think the VA originated in a time when only the greatest sages, and rarest of books, remembered the WM.)
I remember the Wind Mages... *looks wistfully off into the distance*
The WM, IMO, would be more akin to a national student movement, clamoring to be heard and its ideals respected in the face of governmental oppression, with some of its members going terrorist in underground cells...or behind impregnable fortresses. I imagine that during the Jihad and first part of the CWs the existence of the WM was a well-known fact, much like the national terrorist groups active in the middle and south american countries, whose citizens are confronted daily by those groups' actions.
Basically I'm saying that when the VA meets in some dark room somewhere, and they all raise their fist in the air and speak together a rallying phrase...that that phrase is not "Remember the Wind Mages!" ;)
So when the fortresses were besieged...it meant that every other place availlable as a point of retreat was watched or already conquered/destroyed by Rajaat's forces?
No; it meant that was much later in history. Once the Wind Mages figured out, or thought they'd figured out, what Rajaat was up to, they didn't always run away anymore. Only then did they start taking in large populations as well as a few elite wizards. That's when you start seeing stands like Haakar. Although IIRC, Haakar was the last one.
The main disadvantage of the Wind Mages was that they never acheived immortality. Had to resort to fairly desparate measures to extend life. Vampiric youthfulness, etc; those are spells of their design. Rajaat and the Champions never had need of such spells.
If Haakar was not the last of the Wind Mages, then any other survivors would have simply moved very far away, after the wars ended and Borys became the Dragon. It's possible, I suppose, that some may have founded cities, far far away on Athas, and that they survived by paying tribute to Borys.
Another question someone might want to deal with, is the statement in the WC that some Pyreen opposed Rajaat. We've got a teeny hint of that in LC, and I think Will's planning to develop that in future projects like New Kurn.
Vampiric youthfulness, etc; those are spells of their design.
Thematically this makes no sense. Vampiric youthfulness is but one of two athasian life extension methods invented and printed in a DS book, the other being protection from time.
A preserver has no problem casting protection from time, while vampiric youthfulness is an evil spell (albeit preservers can cast evil spells too). Far more likely evil mages and defilers invented such a spell, while idealistic preservers invented protection from time.
Thematically this makes no sense. Vampiric youthfulness is but one of two athasian life extension methods invented and printed in a DS book, the other being protection from time.
A preserver has no problem casting protection from time, while vampiric youthfulness is an evil spell (albeit preservers can cast evil spells too). Far more likely evil mages and defilers invented such a spell, while idealistic preservers invented protection from time.
So, you think a group of preservers being driven to desparate measures in their opposition to the Champions, and some, resorting to outright evil measures, "makes no sense" on Athas?
Rajaat and at least some of the champions may have started out with idealistic motives too.
Like it or not, Penn, the question of whether the ends justify the means, is a well-established Athasian theme.
So, you think a group of preservers being driven to desparate measures in their opposition to the Champions, and some, resorting to outright evil measures, "makes no sense" on Athas?
Not me! Preserving != good
One of my favorite Athasian characters is a Lawful Evil Preserver. Who wants to rule a wasteland? Defiling is wrong, so I will torture the defilers.
:evillaugh
"Arrrrrr! Come take your chance at the game of death! One bullet or...one piece of shiny gold! Arrrrr!" /pirate talk
In fact, I have the original email Sandwolf posted and have mined it for several ideas, even though I never used them all specifically.
The WM were founded very early in the preserver Jihad, but for centuries they watched and laid low, and just worked on saving the very most powerful preservers. They wanted to understand what Rajaat was after before they struck, and wanted to lull his warlords into a false sense of completion before they attacked. They gained the name the wind mages because for King's Ages, every time the Warlords came to battle them, they found an empty fortress that looked like it had been empty for decades.
Lest anyone accuse me of citing my own unpublished as "authority," that quoted bit is not an appeal to authority; it's my preview of some of the ideas that Sandwolf and I developed (some independently, some together), weaving a story from the handful of clues, and trying to follow what we see as general themes in Dark Sun. Others may disagree, but I'm startled that Penn disagrees with me here. I've had more strongly worded disagreements with Penn before, but never over something fundamental, like basic Dark Sun themes. I suspect there's some misunderstanding here.
Picture you're a high powered preserver, in a desparate struggle to survive Rajaat's onslaught. Others look to you for leadership, and rely on your strength for protection. You're old, and when you die, you know your followers don't have a chance. Do you search for means to prolong your life?
Let's say your extensive research turns up something like the Vampiric Youth spell. You hoped it would work by draining years from animals, but turns out you need sentient subjects to make it work. You've got followers, powerful warriors, who will willingly give up 10 years of their life to just make you 1 year younger. It's worth that to them. Without you, everyone dies. Could a person with good intentions say yes to that?
Now say decades have gone by and you're used to prolonging your life at the expense of others. The generation of people that prolonged your life are dead, but you owe their children big time. You've got no more followers high level enough to make it work for you. Your followers capture a powerful warlord, many of them dying in the process in order to take him alive. They urge you to take years off this warlord's life, to prolong your own.
I'm startled that Penn disagrees with me here.
I'm not, that's what so funny! :D
Its only natural that preservers would develop a nice safe spell, and the defilers would develop an evil cruel one.
Nothing's to stop it to be the reverse though, I totally agree on it. I'm saying I might not have made it so that it was the preservers who invented the evil and cruel spell, but there's nothing wrong with it per say. This is Athas after all. I guess I must be a bit on the traditional sire (real world-speaking, that is) with these matters, i.e. stories usually have the bad guys, and not the good guys, invent bad things.
Picture you're a high powered preserver, in a desparate struggle to survive Rajaat's onslaught. Others look to you for leadership, and rely on your strength for protection. You're old, and when you die, you know your followers don't have a chance. Do you search for means to prolong your life?
I like this and see something more that could be added to it:
Hakaar developped his botched epic spell by trying to mirror, on the theory level, what the Champions could do with life force. Its what Dragon's Crown says anyway.
But!
What if prior to this mirroring attempt, Hakaar had already developped something else from a previous mirroring attempt? What if he theorized that, if he used the life-draining methods of the defilers, he could extend his own life? He developped this life-draining method, called Vampiric Youthfulness, with the idea of using it on volunteers and captured enemies sentenced to death.By explicitly saying Hakaar first developped Vampiric Youthfulness through observations of defilers and defiler warlords, and then later developped his botched epic spell by observing the Champions at work, then Hakaar no longer has this aura of loose morals and ethics, but rather gains an aura of "the ends justifies the means" (heh, maybe that's the same and I simply don't have the right words) because he decided to use the enemy's own weapons against him, sincerly believing the defilers had special qualities that gave them an edge and that he should thus strive to rip off...adapted for preservers, of course, since no actual defiling takes place.
And this enhances the canon idea that Hakaar tried this botched epic spell, since now that spell is one step higher in the ladder of experimentation from Vampiric Youthfulness.
I like this and see something more that could be added to it:
Hakaar developped his botched epic spell by trying to mirror, on the theory level, what the Champions could do with life force. Its what Dragon's Crown says anyway.
But!
By explicitly saying Hakaar first developped Vampiric Youthfulness through observations of defilers and defiler warlords, and then later developped his botched epic spell by observing the Champions at work, then Hakaar no longer has this aura of loose morals and ethics, but rather gains an aura of "the ends justifies the means" (heh, maybe that's the same and I simply don't have the right words) because he decided to use the enemy's own weapons against him, sincerly believing the defilers had special qualities that gave them an edge and that he should thus strive to rip off...adapted for preservers, of course, since no actual defiling takes place.
And this enhances the canon idea that Hakaar tried this botched epic spell, since now that spell is one step higher in the ladder of experimentation from Vampiric Youthfulness.
I think the story you describe probably fits a number of Wind Mages perfectly, but I'm not sure about Haakar. I think that Hakaar as described in the Dragon's Crown story seems more innocent than that particularly. I get the impression that he didn't understand what he was dealing with. If he'd been routinely draining life from enemy foes, I don't think the decision to use the enemy spell would have been as dramatic as described in DC.
As one storyteller to another, I appreciate what you're doing in terms of foreshadowing. You might take it the other direction... even have Hakaar one of the weaker wind mages because unlike others, he refused to take the vampiric youthfulness route. That he refused to do it for himself, but in the end, dabbled in defiling in a vain hope to save his people.
Similarly, I suspect that the Veiled Alliance has a number of good-aligned idealistic preservers who might balk at some of the baldly evil innovations of the VA. It was preservers who invented the concept of "Requital," and I'd argue that requital is far more evil than vampiric youthfulness.
I think I like your idea about the Wind Mages not being a structured organization.
BTW, do you have issue with the presence of preservers and druids within Eldaarich's Red Guards, or with the fact that the RG they kill anyone that defiles in the Dim Lands outside the walls of Eldaarich itself?
BTW, do you have issue with the presence of preservers and druids within Eldaarich's Red Guards, or with the fact that the RG they kill anyone that defiles in the Dim Lands outside the walls of Eldaarich itself?
None. I think the material that supports such a setup is just as strange, that of Gulg's druids, and that thus its an open house. That those druids are deceived or not, they are better off helping the land and the Queen than dying. The same applies to preservers and druids in the RG. Besides, mentalities, beliefs, and doctrines are as strong as any enchantments, so these guys may fit the bill of the druid and preserver classes (alignment, take on defiling in general, etc) yet ride the limit of the fluff boundaries for those classes.
Anyway, I think I read somewhere in Slave Tribes of a powerful wizard that is a preserver only by lack of knowing better. Maybe if he knew the power he could get from defiling he'd switch. Not saying the RG doesn't know better, but that they may require their wizards to be "preservers" by Law, no questions asked. So the scum that would become greedy defilers actualy becomes preservers.
A yellow translucent cone, 15 feet wide and 12 feet tall, juts up from the southwestern edge of the Blood Prairie. The cone is the tip of the horn of a great forgotten creature that found itself beached on drying land with no where to go at the end of the blue age, beached on drying land with no where to go.
Although no windows appear in the sides of the horn tip, the horn has been hollowed out so that a single medium-sized creature can stand where the point of the horn used to be, or descend into the narrow staircase deep into the horn of a green age structure known as the Ivory Palace, only surviving ancient ruin that has not completely sunk into the Trembling Plains.
Rajaat's sudden jihad against the preservers, his former students, took them completely by surprise. When Rajaat's favorite students began to slaughter them, the preservers were slow to recognize the hand of their own teacher, and slower yet to rally together, share information, and coordinate a defense. Rajaat's disciples, took full advantage of this time of confusion: hundreds of preservers perished daily, and the greater part of the survivors hid themselves and gave up the art. Of the few preservers that rallied to confront Rajaat's lackeys, fewer yet survived, although casualties among the defilers were also high. One of these survivors was named Ankhor of Ryaan.
Ankhor dedicated the rest of his long life to regather the jihad survivors. By Guthay's Defiance, in the 135th World's Age, he had located fifty of them, and invited them to meet him in the palace of an elven king on the last day of the year. Thirty Preservers arrived, wary and expecting some sort of trap by Rajaat's lackeys. Disappointed but not discouraged, Ankhor presented his theory
"Rajaat is planning something, something greater than simply eliminating the competitors to his new brand of magic. I do not believe his purpose to be good, since this purpose evidently requires the elimination of all of the old students who have learned restrain themselves from damaging nature. Together, we have the power to avoid Rajaat's magical and psionic searches. But let us not be satisfied with survival. This meeting is about more than creating a league of preservers disposed to protecting each other. Since Rajaat's schemes require that we be eliminated and scattered, I can only infer that we pose some threat to his plans. In other words, Rajaat believes that a united group of preservers has the power to discover and thwart his plans. Let us give our enemy what he most fears. Let us discover and expose Rajaat's sordid plots, and save our world from his schemes."
There was general agreement that Rajaat's plans went farther than anyone suspected, but many present questioned that they could thwart Rajaat, who seemed to be immortal, and as far as anyone knew, had always existed. Surely the plans of an immortal could take ages to bring to pass. Perhaps none present would live to the time when Rajaat would show his hand. Some suggested that each of the thirty should prepare a successor, but others pointed out that even if they managed to recruit and train successors to the sufficient level, without being caught by Rajaat's lackeys, that the mages that finally faced Rajaat would face an opponent that they had never knew and could never hope to understand: Many of the preservers present had trained personally from Rajaat, and this sort of knowledge, some argued, could never be handed down.
Finally they came to an agreement, and made a pact. They chose the fifteen most powerful among them that had studied at Rajaat's hand, and placed them into a magical stasis until Rajaat's true plans should be revealed. The remaining preservers would create a secret circle (The brotherhood of the Ivory Palace), in honor of the place of the first meeting. This circle was placed in charge of watching Rajaat, and waiting until the precise moment to wake their "The Great Wizards". Over the ages as the waiting preservers hid themselves, watched, and waited, they developed their magical art, especially in the areas of divination and abjuration, and preserving magic itself became inextricably connected to these spell spheres. They learned to conceal the signs of spellcasting; They hid themselves so effectively that Rajaat's lackeys, and even Rajaat himself, came to believe that they had extinguished Preserving magic on Athas. When these Preservers finally showed their hand after ages of waiting and watching, they became known as the "Wind Mages," because of their elusive and invisible power.
There's more of it, not translated yet, and I'm not sure just how much to use, since my purpose for it is quite different from SW's. But our purposes aren't incompatible; I'm not undercutting what he did with this, and I think he'll be pleased to see what I'm doing with it. Wish I knew where SW was.
Austin asked me for my stuff on the Wind Mages, saying that he and Penn would find it useful, and here's what I've got that's presentable.
After a really quick read I just want to say that the number of mages shouldn't be 15. Too much of a mirror of the champions, or the known champions or whatever we want to call them. Love the rest though.
Also, if what I helped with in LC is accepted, then a little more insight into the jihad might come to light.
Then again, it might not be accepted, so I won't discuss it here.
A yellow translucent cone [...]
I'll read that at work tomorrow, but sounds interesting!
What I like about the Wind Mages, among other things, is that in the canon they already occupy far away locals, and probably time periods, so you can use them as story devices for the Jihad/CWs period in pretty much any way you can. Its rare to find such a plastic group.
After a really quick read I just want to say that the number of mages shouldn't be 15. Too much of a mirror of the champions, or the known champions or whatever we want to call them. Love the rest though.
Also, if what I helped with in LC is accepted, then a little more insight into the jihad might come to light.
Then again, it might not be accepted, so I won't discuss it here.
Good point about the 15. Wish SW was here to defend it.
I like what you did with the Jihad. It needs to go by others once Will and Nelson finally get done with Hogalay, but other than the time issues that we spoke about, I didn't see problems. I will probably make some subtle modifications to the above to fit with what you said about the Jihad starting subtly, but that also will need to go by the Paper Nest.
Good point about the 15. Wish SW was here to defend it.
I like what you did with the Jihad. It needs to go by others once Will and Nelson finally get done with Hogalay, but other than the time issues that we spoke about, I didn't see problems. I will probably make some subtle modifications to the above to fit with what you said about the Jihad starting subtly, but that also will need to go by the Paper Nest.
Cool, I know that at this point I have my space to play in, but not final approval. So I put out my ideas, and others take them or not. Good of the community, and all that.
The number 15 has special meaning in Athas, in very similar way to number 12 on our planet. The Athasian year is divided in 25 weeks of 15 days, or in 15 months of 25 days; The old cities numbered 15, the messenger visits (it visited) the planet every 45 years (3 times 15). It is no coincidence that there were as many Champions as Defenders, both of 15.