I bought that issue from Paizo the other day, and I am actually very pleased. I love the fact that they have made the setting much more like it was before Troy Denning killed all the SK's, and what's-her-name turned Hammanu into a Dragon. As far as I can see, the only thing that the updated stuff is missing is Borys. I guess the addition of the psionic races is a bit cheesey as well.
I'm inclined to set my next DS campaign in that setting. I seem to recall that a lot of Athas.org fans didn't like it. Is that right? What was the problem?
is it really hamanu? or is it the thing/person that took his place at the end of Rise and fall?
who is whats her name? sadira? the gloommother?
i need to find the 3e box set and other material...
i never subscribed to D&D mag, any info about Ds you ca post from the issues would be great.
Otherwise Paizo did have a couple of Dragon issues and one Dungeon issue that had their own version of rules for 3.5 DS. Though I didn't care much for it, they did work in explanations for why Elan and Maenads (Expanded Psionics) should be added to the setting.
does athas.org provide the complete 3e conversion and offical material? what i really want is the fluff, i can add rules later.
i just wish i had time to read all the DS stuff, but i am in the middle of formating my homemade camps into module form for submission.
The most fluff I find in their work were in the descriptions for their two prestige class documents.
No, Hamanu is still a lower level Dragon King per the last 2nd Ed source. (TSR last quoted him as a 23rd level dragon in 2nd Ed.) While the three Lynn Abbey novels were good, TSR never formally issued a print supplement that added them to DS canon. Thus in the converted 3.5 world, Hamanu's still around and kicking.
Though if you want crazy sorceror king ascension stuff, look into the Athas.org module series called Dregoth Ascending. Very interesting stuff, though you may not want to include its aftermaths into your own campaigns.
In all honest, fluff is something that the Athas.org people are missing. Don't get me wrong, what they've managed to produce for free is nothing short of remarkable. But their products, with exception of today's new source material release, all focus on the nuts and bolts of the DS world. These documents are under the assumption that you have all of the 2nd Ed DS stuff to supply your fluff already.
The most fluff I find in their work were in the descriptions for their two prestige class documents.
No, Hamanu is still a lower level Dragon King per the last 2nd Ed source. (TSR last quoted him as a 23rd level dragon in 2nd Ed.) While the three Lynn Abbey novels were good, TSR never formally issued a print supplement that added them to DS canon. Thus in the converted 3.5 world, Hamanu's still around and kicking.
Though if you want crazy sorceror king ascension stuff, look into the Athas.org module series called Dregoth Ascending. Very interesting stuff, though you may not want to include its aftermaths into your own campaigns.
Part of the reason for a lack of fluff in athas.org material isn't that we don't want to do it, its that it needs to be in a specific context. So the fluff comes in the new setting material (Like City State of Draj) or in the descriptions of the rules (Like in the Life Shaped Handbook or Faces of the Forgotten North).
We can't flesh out things outside of a context, and we can't advance the timeline, so pulling a piazo is out of the question. Plus, we want to make sure that the world as it was listed at the end of the run (back in 2ed) is fully fleshed out, hence the work on the Lost Cities of the Trembling Plains, or the Secrets of the Deadlands. Some of those will be out sooner than others, but we need to fill in the map we have before we create something totally new.
That said, look at the LSH or FFN. Read some of the descriptions and backstories. Lots of good nuggets in there.
I think most ppl here disliked the DS lite stuff like Templars being Clerics, Dark Sun Paladins etc. I liked the +300 years timeline alot and I liked their idea of the Dragon Kings better than Athas and I use a fleshed out varient when I create a Dragon/Avangion.
The Psionic races were also interesting.
In brief, defiler's casting does not defile per se, but defiling can add free metamagic effects within the unchanged spell slot and with no metamagic feats required.
I agree with the last sentiment. Athas.org mechanics are much better. Noonan's updated setting, however, is MUCH MUCH better than what TSR left DS with.
I would love to get my hands on some of the people responsible ... Especially for the surfing, dolphin-loving hippies...
Report on Dark Sun 3.5
Dragon Magazine #319
The articles, in toto, claim to comprise the "Dark Sun Player's Handbook."
"Setting and Races" jumps the timeline ahead by 300 years to wipe the slate clean of 1rst and 2nd edition plot elements. All the same races except two: the elan and maenads. The Elan are just humans that've been psionically reconstituted humans. I have no idea what the point of them is except to get you to buy the Expanded Psionics Handbook (which, I guess, features them in detail.) The maenads are just like humans too, only they were supposedly brought back from the demi-plane Andropinus was imprisoned in. Apparently what makes them really interesting is that they're bipolar. Again, the reader is referred to the Expanded Psionics Handbook. DS dwarves now wear beards, albeit short ones. Go figure.
"Classes" manages to account briefly for every major class in 3.5: even the ones that don't make sense. The barbarian seems superfluous, the monk seems a little implausible and the inclusion of the paladin had me shaking my head in disbelief. This smacked of WOTC trying to please everyone: one of the late stages of terminal munchkin-itis. The psion, psychic warrior, soulknife and wilder presumably come into their own in DS but I don't know enough about those 3.5 psi classes to say, really.
"Equipment and Rules" has all the stand-bys like gythkas, cahulaks and such. "Blood obsidian" is introduced: I guess it confers a natural +1 to damage. The armor is pretty interesting and includes bark, cord, shell, chitin, bronze and some others. The weapon hps are worth pirating to simulate breakage. The player is encouraged to pick a caste for his character (slaves, freemen, merchants, nobles and templars) but is then told it's mostly a roleplaying choice and not likely to effect play: indeed, there are no interaction, skill, feat or starting equipment modifiers. Aristocrat or thrall: what's the difference, really?
Dungeon Magazine #110
This issue includes a fun little adventure for DS called "Last Stand at Outpost Three." The PCs are stranded at the outpost with other travellers when wave after wave of live and undead assailants crash against the outer walls. The scenario has a lot of variety in the opponents you face and introduces the players to many of the key races and factions of DS. It's a survival adventure which eventually takes them out into the wasteland. I won't spoil it for you by going into the plot itself.
"The Dark Sun DM's Guide" advances the timeline forward by 300 years. There are nice little write-ups on the city-states which include sections on language, arts and crafts, entertainment, commerce, beliefs, power groups and typical names (e.g. Urikite names are generally Babylonian, Raamnian are Persian, etc.) Urik is still under Hammanu (who STILL can't seem to conquer Tyr and get its iron mines.) Raam is ruled by Dregoth, who's turned it into an inward looking kingdom of the dead. He seems to ignore the living subjects for the most part and is engrossed in building an obsidian spire. Draj's one-time puppet ruler Atzetuk turned the tables on the puppet masters centuries ago and is now a real, honest-to-goodness Dragon King: the druidic underground suspects the blood sacrifices he sponsors have a real, magical purpose. Nibenay still rules the roost and is kidnapping intellectual talent at an alarming rate for some secret project. Lalai-Puy still runs Gulg, but as a benevolent dictatorship: she's successfully made her worship synonymous with plant-life and her crusade has netted non-Gulgan believers including halfling tribes. Balic is once again under Andropinus' rule: he's playing catch up ever since he returned from prison at the head of an army and is trying to restore Balic to it's former glory. Tyr, surprisingly, is still an aristocratic oligarchy with no dragon-king. They have, however, relapsed into the practice of slavery and gladitorial fighting. There are a generous selection of DS monsters converted to 3.5.
There you go. Don't buy the Dragon issue. The Dungeon issue is worth looking at (it even has a nice little map of the Tablelands) ONLY if you don't have a copy of Dark Sun yourself.
I've mined the articles for the parts I liked and I would like to see some work on adventures for FY 300 or whatever or at least a conversion guideline but I don't think anyone is running a game in that timeline.
Well I'm new to this so bear with me. I'm looking for the descriptions to the feats Spear Master and Shorten Grip from Dragon magazine issues no. 330 and 331 respectively. I know, I know, buy the issues. But I just want the feats. Care to help?
Phineus
Phineus
Athas.org half giants are better for DS than the XPH.
He. Glad we agree on that much.
One thing they did do was the basic races with inherent psionic power which is kinda cool but virtually every race had a level adjustment but it reflected the 2nd ed everyones psionic part alot better.
I can see that. Trouble is that not all humans are going to be such paragons.
I've mined the articles for the parts I liked and I would like to see some work on adventures for FY 300 or whatever or at least a conversion guideline but I don't think anyone is running a game in that timeline
Which is a problem for running that version, methinks.
I never cared for the gladiator and templar classes. Seem more like occupations to me. The closest to an acceptable gladiator class that I've seen is the battle dancer from the Dragon Compendium. Otherwise, it could just as easily be someone of the barbarian or fighter class. Clerics work just fine as templars. With the advent of alternate base classes in various Complete books, I've found that the divine mind, favored soul, and dragon shaman all make good, and different, templars.
As to the timeline, I can take it or leave it. I like it because it gives a good starting point that isn't affected by anything currently coming out. The one thing that annoyed me most about the Dark Sun boxed sets was the whole metaplot aspect. Either toss the whole metaplot aspect and run the game as you wish or run it at a different time period. Ultimately, though, run the game as you want it to go. Your players are the heroes. I really disliked that everything that your players did was overshadowed by these great heroes. Running your game three hundred years later leaves what those heroes did in the history scrolls. Its a whole new world for them to enjoy.
Any ideas for your future timeline? If Athas will be uninhabitable in 300 years, what will happen in the interim?
There is a number of really big problems looming on the horizon for Athas. The Kreen Invasion, the Deadlands, Dregoth's schemes, the Messenger/Rhulisti, Rajaat's potential return, any or all of the Sorcerer-Kings reaching the "madness" phase of the metamorphosis, heck just the "natural function" of Defiling. Not to mention, I've always had the impression that Athas' sun is on it's last legs and about to go nova. Basically, there's a lot of different possible things to potentially add to the campaign. I believe they all would more or less happen, if possible, before 300 years takes place. For my Athas, it is a dying ember fading fast. too many bad things have happened to it, and it is far too late for any restoration/salvation. That ship sailed hundreds of years ago.
For my Athas, it is a dying ember fading fast. too many bad things have happened to it, and it is far too late for any restoration/salvation.
Neat. So, what happened in your Athas that ruined it?
Neat. So, what happened in your Athas that ruined it?
Everything that happened in the timeline -- the Cleansing Wars, the Age of the Sorcerer-Kings, Rajaat's freedom & imprisonment, Dregoth's Godhood spell, etc. It's just all of these things have led Athas up to the brink of death (so to speak). I just don't see Athas as having 300 years left, I'd question if it had 100 years left. I think that things are thousands of times worse than people tend to believe -- the Sun is almost all used up, the Oceans have dried, the surface of Athas is pock-marked and scarred, a massive cataclysm has resulted in a large amount of obsidian cutting through a noticeable amount of surface area.
There's things like Defilers still existing, and they are using up the little dregs of life left on the world -- every Defiler is snuffing out Athas spell by spell. Sadira doesn't help, she's doing the same thing to the Sun (however most if not all Defilers, and especially Sadira, are unwittingly doing this, they don't know, or don't care about the long-term effects of what they are doing). The Paraelements are spreading themselves in a wider and wider influence across Athas, destroying the Balance. The list of things going wrong in the world is almost endless. And any effort any group has to stop it, is too little, too late.
Everything that happened in the timeline -- the Cleansing Wars, the Age of the Sorcerer-Kings, Rajaat's freedom & imprisonment, Dregoth's Godhood spell, etc. It's just all of these things have led Athas up to the brink of death (so to speak). I just don't see Athas as having 300 years left, I'd question if it had 100 years left. I think that things are thousands of times worse than people tend to believe -- the Sun is almost all used up, the Oceans have dried, the surface of Athas is pock-marked and scarred, a massive cataclysm has resulted in a large amount of obsidian cutting through a noticeable amount of surface area.
There's things like Defilers still existing, and they are using up the little dregs of life left on the world -- every Defiler is snuffing out Athas spell by spell. Sadira doesn't help, she's doing the same thing to the Sun (however most if not all Defilers, and especially Sadira, are unwittingly doing this, they don't know, or don't care about the long-term effects of what they are doing). The Paraelements are spreading themselves in a wider and wider influence across Athas, destroying the Balance. The list of things going wrong in the world is almost endless. And any effort any group has to stop it, is too little, too late.
Is the area around the Tablelands / Crimson Savanna / Deadlands the extent of Athas in your version of Dark Sun?
p.s. I hate what Pazio did to the setting. All of it.
Is the area around the Tablelands / Crimson Savanna / Deadlands the extent of Athas in your version of Dark Sun?
Nope. However the area of the Tablelands/Jagged Cliffs region is a notable region. I've toyed with a few ideas outside the region, spurred on by some of Brian's maps in the Athasaian Planetary/Cosmology thread.
That said, I see the Deadlands as being actually a region about 3 - 5x larger than the Tablelands, it is the catastrophic result of a cataclysmic event. I tend to rule that everything west of the Jagged Cliffs (on the continent the "known" maps are a part of) is dominated by the Kreen. I believe that the rest of the oceans were lost to the ravages of all of the things that have happened to Athas. Most of Athas is uninhabitable wasteland, dead, dried up, and completely unable to support life for any length of time.
However, I'd say there are pockets of life scattered on other continents across the world. I'd rule against the idea of Green Age races necessarily being there, but there could be other vestiges of the Rhulisti, including a thought I've had for sentient descendants of Lifeshaped creatures, struggling for survival. I'm not fond of Arcane magic really reaching very far away from the "known" parts of the world (Tablelands/Jagged Cliffs region). I tend instead to have a spreading, and more open war between the Elements and Paraelements, as Silt, Magma, and Sun push their particular goals of dominance of Athas, while Earth, Air, Fire, and Water do what they can to resist the seemingly inevitable victory of the Paraelements.
p.s. I hate what Pazio did to the setting. All of it.
Not fond of a lot of their ideas. Most of the things those magazines did was just spark some curious ideas in my head about things like Paladins on Athas...
I'm not fond of Arcane magic really reaching very far away from the "known" parts of the world (Tablelands/Jagged Cliffs region).
I must say I find that odd considering that it's had 3000+ years or so to travel around the globe. That would be kinda like discoving electricity, telling people how to use it & it never leaving the city it was discovered in.
For example, Mind Lords is clear that Kovreset's people came from the area now called the Crimson Savannah, and that clearly stretches way past the farthest official map that we have.
Additionally, the land mass that many have called the "continent" east of the sea of silt is still part of the same actual continent and part of the "Tablelands," according to the WJ. And there's the fact that folks called it the "sunrise sea" rather than an "ocean." Given earth history and the number of coastal ancient cities such as Bodach, I cannot believe that the sunrise sea, an inland sea no bigger than the mediteranean, would not have had plentiful commerce and cultural exchange running across it. And during the preserver Jihad, at least some preservers would have taken a ship across the starlight sea if the Jihad was confined to the the area on the current official maps.
It very well may be that Xlor is right that most of Athas never had native preservers and defilers. But the parts of Athas that did have preservers and defilers, clearly were many times larger than the areas now on our maps. But that theory of mine doesn't actually contradict what xlor said.
What think ye, Xlor?
However, I'd say that between the continents, is where the oceans reside. Mostly, they are akin to the sea of silt, except they have large amounts of salt also mixed in (maybe making it more condensed, with two effects from it -- large continental shelf drop-offs that extend a couple miles down to the "basin", salty-silt dust constantly blowing across it in a continuous duststorm-like effect, and a complete and utter lack of water -- whatever may be found is extremely brine-filled, most likely quite toxic levels of various chemicals or bacteria or whatever in it), any could be mostly dry, barren wastes.
These huge barren wastelands that more or less are the ancient ocean floors extend incredible distances, we're talking an epic/herculean effort to try to cross them, with absolutely no knowledge about where they lead. I tend to think that quite literally, the people on the "main continent" which includes the tablelands, simply do not know of the other continents' existence, and most likely, vice-versa. as it is, the people of the Tablelands have not really ventured out into the rest of the "main continent" they live on. And yes, the land that surrounds the Sea of Silt, that land is all one continent (the Sea of Silt is an inland sea, or rather the dessicated husk of an inland sea); or at least, in my interpretation of it all.
I'd say that... the land-masses which were the continents, at the beginning of the Green Age, may have accounted for... let's say 1/8th of the surface of Athas. Through the Green Age, I tend to think that the Oceans were already dying -- I think that particular problem extends to the Rhulisti, and their efforts with the Pristine Tower to stop the Brown Tide was only "mostly" successful, and merely slowed it down rather than completely eliminating it. The loss of water was gradual, and eventually, the continents may have accounted for as much as 1/5 of the surface of Athas before the Continental Shelves were reached, and then the Oceans' levels dropping would have gone down the sides of cliffs, and not really providing more surface area for the continents. by the time the Age of the Sorcerer-Kings started int he Tablelands, I'd say most of the Oceans were completely gone.
Where did the water from the Silt Sea go? I'd say it got drained out thanks to the trace amounts of the Brown Tide left (I tend to think that a lot of the "silt" in the Silt Sea is actually the dried/dead physical "bodies" of the Brown Tide -- something I think was an algae, if memory serves). The little trace bits of water that wasn't taken away completely, are where the more muddy areas of the Silt Sea now is.
How did the water get destroyed? What if the Brown Tide simply had a basic chemical process it did to survive -- it split water molecules to base oxygen & hydrogen pairs, using the energy from that to survive. The atmosphere would begin to get a bit saturated with oxygen and hydrogen, a lot of it could have "bled off" into the surrounding space, particularly the hydrogen. Water that remains on Athas, would most likely have been uninfected by the Brown Tide -- underground reservoirs (lakes, etc) -- the things that people int he Tablelands are able to survive from.
Saragar is pretty close to the Tyr region, yet is verdant and nice. Even has a sea!So the further one travels from the Tyr region, the better the soil, and the lesser the damage from defiling, if there is any at all.
The Dragon is largely responsible for the extremely horrid condition of the Tyr region, when he went on his rampage and pretty much defiled consyytantly for a century.
The picture of Athas orbiting its sun on the DS logo is mostly green, with a little brown splotch that I believe represents the Tyr region.
The Crimson Savannah is pretty untouched, as well. Not the atrocious wasteland that the Tablelands are.
The Forest Ridge and the area of Gulg are absolutely verdant, and they're within a hundred or so miles of the decimated lands.
All in all, it seems to me that the rest of Athas must be verdant and well-watered by default, and if not, there's some really large, wide sweeping explanation. It can't just be shoehorned into the "destroyed" category because the Tablelands are like that, when it's clear that the further north or west you go, the better the terrain.
Second -- for the people to have the urge to scry/teleport somewhere, they'd have to know it existed. Lacking knowledge it exists, they'd have no reason to scry/teleport there.
First, I don't think there was "worldwide" civilizations in the Green Age. The Rebirth races would have started (by simple logistical necessity) near the Pristine Tower, and then spread out across the land. Then the cultures would have developed, and most people are rather sedentary. There would be absolutely no knowledge of anything outside of the continent, so there would be no reason to believe the people would have even known about anywhere else. Don't forget, it took thousands of years for Western civilization to stumble upon the Americas (in any real capacity) in human history. I see no reason, justification, or rationale that anyone of the Rebirth races would have any reason to wander off across the oceans like that. Exploration is well and good, but even then, the typical (logical) thing would have been staying relatively close to land.
Second -- for the people to have the urge to scry/teleport somewhere, they'd have to know it existed. Lacking knowledge it exists, they'd have no reason to scry/teleport there.
In the existing book it hints that the Green age civizations had reached a level equal to around 1850ish Europe usig Psionic trains, cards, indoor plumbing etc. I would say that if they had reached that point it is highly likely someone could have reached another continent.
Same deal with magic. Imagine what earth would be like if D&D magic actually existed.
1. Lets scry the moon.
2. Crossing the ocean wouldn't be a huge hassle via create food and water spells. Failing that just teleport
3. Does God exist? Lets just ask him or summon an avatar
4. Whats over that moutain range/ocean/jungle? Scry,Legend Lore, etc.
5. Rocketship to the moon? Lets just teleport there using magic to survive.
etc
etc
etc
Of course not everyone on Athas would have access to the required spels/psionics but some people would and knowledge is power so to speak.
And for someone to scry "hmm, I wonder if there's another continent", they'd have to be thinking about it, at least, that's what I'd believe. There would have to be a point, a purpose to it -- someone purposely wanting to observe. Now, sure, there's technically limitless possibilities with magic. Oh, wait, no, there isn't. At least not with Athasian magic. Defiling magic was taught to specific, hand-picked students of Rajaat's. Preserving magic was probably extravagant in the Green Age as well, but I'd say that Arcane Magic never fully took hold in society and permiated the Green Age cultures as much as psionics did.
But yeah, you can come up with any number of rediculous, outlandish thing and just say "it's magic". That's sort of a cop-out, and a bit weak in my mind, but by all means, if that's what you want. I'm still left with the question of "why would anyone want to cross the oceans in the first place", and there just isn't an answer coming to me. If everything the people wanted/needed was on the main continent, there would be no point in wandering out to anywhere else. The other continents existed, but nobody cared enough about them for that. Partially, perhaps, due to guidance from elder races like the Pyreen, or suggestive hints from Rajaat (heck, he may have limited Arcane magic in ways to help keep the "taint" or "cancer" of the Rebirth races on the main continent), for whatever reason.
In the existing book it hints that the Green age civizations had reached a level equal to around 1850ish Europe usig Psionic trains, cards, indoor plumbing etc.
I believe that you are in error. There are hints that *some* Green Age civilizations had *some* 19th century technologies such as what you discuss. But note that the Aztecs had indoor plumbing, hot and cold centuries before the Europeans, and yet lacked any knowledge of ironworking. So you can't reasonably impute the knowledge of a couple civilizations to Green Age civilizations generally, nor can you assume that just because a civilization has some technologies that Europeans didn't have until the 1850s, that the civilization has "reached a level equal to around 1850s Europe."
The more advanced civilizations of rebirth races seem to have been places like Giustenal, where halflings appear to have at least for some time dwelt among their Rebirth cousins, where the cities actually had been Blue Age cities before. Having the infrastructure of the tunnels, possibly life-shaped food sources, etc., would give those civilizations a great advantage for developing advanced techs. If it seems unclear how local advantages could create technology gaps between civilizations, see Jared Diamond's books or documentaries, e.g. "Guns Germs and Steel."
Why would peopel wonder if there were lands over the ocean on Atahs and want to explore them? Same reason as on Earth probably. Even ancient Greeks and Romans had well established naval trade routes. Athas also has had around 14000 years of civilization and is a psionics rich world so I would be surprised if green age Athasians couldn't cross the ocean.
By the by, the Europeans (i.e. the Romans) had indoor plumbing (this is the first I've heard of the Aztecs having it); but yes, it is fascinating the "advanced" technology ancient civilizations had access to. In particular, I'm thinking of examples like the Antikythera Device (the world's first analog computer), Greek steam engines (like the one that opened the doors of the temple of Apollo at dawn) and the Baghdad Battery (an over 2000 year old ceramic, iron-rod, copper-sheet, asphalt-plug battery, probably used for electroplating.)
That said, I was under the impression the Green Age was maybe PL2 (that is, late Middle Ages) at best. I'm no Athas historian like you guys, but it strikes me that since most of the raaigs and meortys (meorties?) are sporting plate armour and Elizabethanish clothes, wouldn't that suggest a lower progress level than mid-nineteenth century Earth?
Like I said, I'm not Athas historian. I'm really interested in the idea of the Green Age being an industrial society. So, what are the indications that it was, and what books are they in?
I've just recently read Guns Germs and Steel and Collapse by Jared Diamond.
Why would peopel wonder if there were lands over the ocean on Atahs and want to explore them? Same reason as on Earth probably. Even ancient Greeks and Romans had well established naval trade routes. Athas also has had around 14000 years of civilization and is a psionics rich world so I would be surprised if green age Athasians couldn't cross the ocean.
Assuming that there were actual oceans during the Green Age. The dissapearance of the word "Ocean" from the calendar at the end of the Blue Age, the fact that the sea of silt was called the "Sunrise Sea" (rather than ocean) during the Green Age and Time of Magic, and the fact that the WJ says explicitly that the Tablelands and Ringing Mountains surround the sea of silt, together suggest that the Green Age had large inland seas but no ocean/contintents.
But that quibble aside, I certainly agree with you that they'd probably have crossed the Starlight sea, and that all of the range that the WJ called "The Tablelands" would have been inhabited.
I'm really interested in the idea of the Green Age being an industrial society. So, what are the indications that it was, and what books are they in?
This may sound like a quibble, but it's very important: the Green Age was a time, not a society. There were many societies during the Green Age and the technology HAD to have varied from society to society, since we know that the Rhul Thaun continued their isolation, and that some cities like Bodach were multiracial while Kurn was an Elven city and Hogalay a dwarven city; Giustenal had something like subways -- rapid underground transport -- while to our knowledge nothing like that existed in Saragar.
See Mind Lords of the Lost Sea, City by the Silt Sea, Windriders of the Jagged Cliffs, and the novel "Darkness before the Dawn," to get glimpses of different advanced Green Age societies, which, as you'll see, were advanced in different ways.
water pumps (Saragar)
psioinic trains (Saragar)
telescopes (Giustanel)
steet lighting (various cities)
maybe airships and elevators and psionic cars/self propelled wagons. Also it seems there was contact with the Crimson Savanna as one of the Mindloirds came from that area IIRC (the elf one Kosverret sp?) so maybe they had potrals/airships/elevators to get past the Jaged Cliffs. Its probably a safe assumption to assume they had "normal" D&D world technology which would include caravels and galleons. The Ringing Mountains seemed to have either car/train tunnels as well.
Not sure how Thamasku would have been unnoticed though as the maps in the revised boxed set aren't that big and the terrain wasn't hostile in the green age. Its fantasy make up a reason or don't worry about it.
The revised boxed set also had some hints as to what technology they had. In various sources they seemed to have had.
water pumps (Saragar)
psioinic trains (Saragar)
telescopes (Giustanel)
steet lighting (various cities)
maybe airships and elevators and psionic cars/self propelled wagons. Also it seems there was contact with the Crimson Savanna as one of the Mindloirds came from that area IIRC (the elf one Kosverret sp?) so maybe they had potrals/airships/elevators to get past the Jaged Cliffs. Its probably a safe assumption to assume they had "normal" D&D world technology which would include caravels and galleons. The Ringing Mountains seemed to have either car/train tunnels as well.
Not sure how Thamasku would have been unnoticed though as the maps in the revised boxed set aren't that big and the terrain wasn't hostile in the green age. Its fantasy make up a reason or don't worry about it.
Saragar is a bad example, since the Mind Lords have had a long time to develop psionics, and psionic devices throughout it, and if you want to think about revisionist history... or do you think that the Mind Lords really care about accurate accountings of historical records, especially anything that could cause questions to form in the minds of anyone living in Saragar about their intentions?
Telescopes are actually a fairly old concept, long before the 1800's. when was Galileo alive again?
Street lighting is something of a mainstay in fantasy literature, especially for Dark Sun. The notion of magical lights, or torches, or whatever lighting the streets is not unheardof, especially in more "wealthy" areas. Once again, I'd have to say that's of questionable use to pinpoint any kind of real-world timeframe.
Alot of stuff matches things described in other products or implies that they are in otherproducts. IIRC the Revised Boxed set hints at subway type tuinnels in the Ringing Mountains
Which could have been built before the Green Age.
and even in Saragar the technology is treated as a relic form another time that they can barely keep running.
Now yes. But, let's see, we're talking a society which has been mind-wiped and reprogrammed on the whims of three insane lich-like psionic beings bent on some insane and individual goals that at one time were considered the pinnacle of their kind, and had a united purpose. Saragar, if memory serves, was something of a jewel of a city, with the best and brightest in the known world living there, and the Mind Lords were the creme de la creme. I still say that pointing to Saragar is like pointing to a bunch of coal, and saying it is all diamonds, because there was a diamond found in coal once.
Which could have been built before the Green Age.
And probably were, since the similar tunnels in Giustenal were built during the Blue Age!
I'm still left with the question of "why would anyone want to cross the oceans in the first place", and there just isn't an answer coming to me.
Considering how the early exploration of the Western Hemisphere was fueled largely by rumor and wild exaggeration, it would go something like this:
“My cousin’s best friend’s roommate knows a guy who met another guy who claimed to have been onboard a ship that was blown off course and landed in a strange land were everyone had two heads and lived in cities made of gold! Well, me and some business friends are going to go find this place and…”
Then there are all those Green Age adventures who were finding ancient Halfling ruins containing maps to great piles of treasure that just happen to have been on the other side of the world. ;)
I'm still left with the question of "why would anyone want to cross the oceans in the first place", and there just isn't an answer coming to me.
Perhaps for the same reasons the Rhulisti tried to double the output of the ocean(and screwed up the whole world) - Overpopulation and lack of resources.
In the Blue Age, it seems kind of clear that living space must have been getting scarce, if the Rhulisti had to find a way to double the ocean's capacity to support life.
In the Green Age - maybe to find a land for their own races, without the presence of other races. Maybe Dwarves wanted to get away from the Orcs, maybe one race was being militant and expansionist, and another fled in self defense. Maybe they travelled in search of Gods, Gold and Glory. Greed, Freedom, or maybe just the need to learn about the world could have inspired Green Age peoples to travel their world. Maybe some Clerics or Druids or Clairsentients had a vision of Rajaat and his madness, and directed their whole civilizations to flee.
Considering how the early exploration of the Western Hemisphere was fueled largely by rumor and wild exaggeration, it would go something like this:
“My cousin’s best friend’s roommate knows a guy who met another guy who claimed to have been onboard a ship that was blown off course and landed in a strange land were everyone had two heads and lived in cities made of gold! Well, me and some business friends are going to go find this place and…”
Actually, if memory serves, exploration of the Western Hemisphere was fueled by a few things. For the Norse, it was simply them following what they knew to be a set of islands/lands without really much recognition that it was a whole other continent, and they never really pushed "very far" into it. From the Asian side, it was... well, people are left with high speculation on what the purpose was, but let's say resettling, and they went mostly across a bridge. For the European cultures, for the most part, they were fundamentally unaware of the Western Hemisphere's continents until they ran into them.
Then there are all those Green Age adventures who were finding ancient Halfling ruins containing maps to great piles of treasure that just happen to have been on the other side of the world. ;)
So the existence of halfling ruins somehow means there is other continents? Especially considering the world was a water world, and the other continents could have been, well, mostly submerged and little more than islands at best? I don't follow this rationale.
Perhaps for the same reasons the Rhulisti tried to double the output of the ocean(and screwed up the whole world) - Overpopulation and lack of resources.
In the Blue Age, it seems kind of clear that living space must have been getting scarce, if the Rhulisti had to find a way to double the ocean's capacity to support life.
Not arguing about the Blue Age. I'd agree, the Rhulisti could have been widespread across Athas.
In the Green Age - maybe to find a land for their own races, without the presence of other races. Maybe Dwarves wanted to get away from the Orcs, maybe one race was being militant and expansionist, and another fled in self defense. Maybe they travelled in search of Gods, Gold and Glory. Greed, Freedom, or maybe just the need to learn about the world could have inspired Green Age peoples to travel their world. Maybe some Clerics or Druids or Clairsentients had a vision of Rajaat and his madness, and directed their whole civilizations to flee.
Ok, so they decide to venture off into the wild unknown ocean, to face who knows what, rather than just expand on the land that already existed? I'm a bit confused here. We're talking a period of a few thousand years, not tens of thousands of years. We're talking peoples that are relatively new to the world, expanding outward, and finding homes. We're not talking about races that had the technology to build large enough/strong enough boats to sail the open waters freely, or the ability to navigate by the stars or anything at that point. for the most part, we're talking very, very new races to the world, which most likely would have stayed on the continent. We're talking a volume of people that most likely would not have populated every square inch of the continent in question (once again, a continent that is more than just the tablelands area, but the tablelands and everything east of the now Sea of Silt).
Rajaat, in the 2E materials, wanted to eliminate all the Rebirth races. He picked a very specific number of Champions to accomplish this, and they set about their tasks on this one continent. That would suggest that the Rebirth races were on this continent.
Don't get caught up in modern concepts of travel, transportation, etc. The most likely scenario for the Green Age races is that they wouldn't even have considered, or fathomed the notion of another continent.
Finding other continents could come as an accident. Think of how North & South America would have turned out had the European Nations not tried to find a quicker route to China and Eastern Asia. Even today we humans are constantly exploring our world. Even when we think we have all we need. There will always be someone looking for the next best thing, which could lead to something unexpected.
The thing is, we're talking about a vast distance like going to China or Eastern Asia. There really is not much (read: anything) suggesting that there was a full-out interconnection of cultures across the "main continent". In fact, the odds are, even if there were groups of people spread across the continent, they were largely unaware of each other. I'd guess that the "Sunrise Sea" was an effective border as any for how far most people went East. That said, I'm sure there were groups that did trade with the East, the Nikaal somewhat spring to mind in modern Athas. There could have been groups trading across the continent, but it could easily have been localized trade, rather than full-continental trade.
There is nothing about the East in anything for the materials, so it is up to the individual DM. Personally, I question if the East really had developed much, I see it mainly being populated mostly by nomadic peoples, who wandered the lands, possibly very Native American in societies, very, very loose-knit social structures during the Green Age. No real large settlements much less cities. But that's just me, I don't like to put all of a world's societies into a very "Western-esqe" cookie-cutter design. Dark Sun has a lot of cultural references to a lot of different and diverse cultures across Earth's history. Why not some cultures that don't have large cities?
Mind you, I'd figure that modern day, there may be more cultural centers that have been established over there, out of necessity and survival in the much more hostile world/environment that Athas now is.
The lattitude principle in Jared Diamond's "Guns Germs and Steel" is even more applicable when the living unadaptable creatures include not just grain and beasts of burden, but life-shaped objects which serve as housing, transport, and provide other advantages that we'd consider "high tech." And if you've contemplated Diamond, you can gather that it's very unlikely that the most useful life-shaped creatures (e.g. houses, transports, & food producers) would thrive in both the temperate regions and the tropics.
Thus, while halflings considered themselves masters of the world, the habitable "world" by sophisticated rhulisti standards did not extend beyond the subtropics, because the tropics and subtropics offered the climate in which rhulisti life-shaped houses, transports, & other devices were designed to work.
Go far enough north, and you're into the area dominated by the zic-chil. Go far enough south, and that's the area dominated by those whip scorpion critters described in SotDL. And the rhulisti interacted with those creatures about as often as the Malinese empire interacted with Polar Bears and Penguins.
Why the equatorial zone rather than the temperate zone? Three principal reasons:
First, the halflings (who unlike Alexander the Great whose "world" was in the northern Hemisphere) had vessels capable of sailing huge distances in the sea and sky. Therefore they probably would not have considered themselves masters of an undivided "world age" if there were two halfling-habitable regions, divided from each other by an equitorial region. Temperate domination would have created two separate halfling empires, able to make occasional contact with each other but not sustained domination of each other.
Second, the halflings that we've seen so far do live and thrive in a hot area, and we know that the Thamasku devices do function in the current heat. The climate changes to the rest of the area would be muted in Thamasku because of probable winds as the heated hinterlands pull in wind from the west, from the relatively moist & somewhat cooler Crimson Savannah. So Thamasku, as depicted in WRotJC, continues to live on most of the technology that it had during the Green Age, although it has clearly lost some of its tech, possibly due to climate warming as well as to loss of knowledge.
Third, because the Pristine Tower was built to utilize energy from the sun, and therefore was probably built somewhere near what was then the planet's equator. (Planets do sometimes shift axes IIRC, and with all the calamities that Athas has been through, what was the equator during the Blue Age need not be the equator today.)
There really is not much (read: anything) suggesting that there was a full-out interconnection of cultures across the "main continent".
There is nothing about the East in anything for the materials, so it is up to the individual DM.
Lack of information just means that you can insert the scenario that you want. Even if there was anything official, you could change it.
I was just trying to point out that there are many reasons for a culture to expand, trade being one of the more obvious. I don't think that it is any less or more of a reason than any other. It is just one of many.
Harry Harrison wrote a trilogy of books (West of Eden, Winter in Eden and Return to Eden) based around the premise that dinosaurs didn't die out and evolved. They evolved into a race that utilized living technology. The reason they had to cross the ocean was because of the encroaching ice age that was pushing them out of their domain.
Lack of information just means that you can insert the scenario that you want. Even if there was anything official, you could change it.
True.
I was just trying to point out that there are many reasons for a culture to expand, trade being one of the more obvious. I don't think that it is any less or more of a reason than any other. It is just one of many.
And my point is I can't see, through a myriad of possibilities, any really justifiable reason that the Rebirth Races would have to wander across the Ocean. There usually has to be something that drives them.
That said, now that I think about it more, there is one thing that may have driven some to cross the Ocean -- survival. In particular, a race being hunted to extinction by the Armies of the Cleansing Wars would have plenty of reason to cross the Oceans. The problem is, the Oceans, at that point, had been pretty dried out and emptied (I'd reckon). the Cleansing Wars would tend to scatter a lot of the races as far as possible away from the rampaging armies of the Champions.
I personally, am stuck with the idea that the Cleansing Wars more or less really upset the development of the cultures in the Green Age. I don't think they really had very long to mature and develop fully (but all of the cultures more or less existed an equivalent length of time)
Harry Harrison wrote a trilogy of books (West of Eden, Winter in Eden and Return to Eden) based around the premise that dinosaurs didn't die out and evolved. They evolved into a race that utilized living technology. The reason they had to cross the ocean was because of the encroaching ice age that was pushing them out of their domain.
That just tends to support my statements, rather than contradict them. The dinosaur-people in his books had a particular reason to cross the ocean.
We're not talking about races that had the technology to build large enough/strong enough boats to sail the open waters freely, or the ability to navigate by the stars or anything at that point.
I can't remember exactly where I read it, but I do believe Green Age elves were supposed to have a sailing culture in some areas, I remember references to huge white ships (Kind of Silmarillion-esque)
There's a whole planet left, The tablelands and Known Regions are so tiny, like the size of Nebraska! there's so much land, something must be out there. IIRC, the same developers who said the Halfling invasion was iminent also said that a lot of the rest of the planet was crawling with Kreen. Since Kreen hate silt, and would be slaughtered with prejudice in the Deadlands, and can't climb mountains in numbers necessary for an invasion, the whole darn planet could be crawling with Tohr-Kreen, and nobody would know it until they invade through the gap in the Jagged Cliffs.
I can't remember exactly where I read it, but I do believe Green Age elves were supposed to have a sailing culture in some areas, I remember references to huge white ships (Kind of Silmarillion-esque)
There is an incredible difference between having a sailing culture, and having ships that can survive in the deep open sea for lengths of time. Not only the ships, but also the ability for food and water stores, etc.
There is an incredible difference between having a sailing culture, and having ships that can survive in the deep open sea for lengths of time. Not only the ships, but also the ability for food and water stores, etc.
True; that's the difference between Phoenecians and Norsemen, isn't it?
Still, Diamond's point remains that it's easier to move a civilization along the lattitude than along the longitude line, since grain, beasts of burden, and domestic food producing critters don't migrate well across climates. So while folks might flee north or south, their descendants are likely to either die out for a generation or two (like the initial dutch forays into the tropics), or adapt to a much less civilized life than what they'd been accustomed to before. Civilization spreads east and west. And for reasons referred to above, anything dependent on life-shaping is probably going to be at least as climate-dependent as the grains and beasts were in Earth's history. Ever notice that the most adaptive living things tend to be the least useful? Cockroaches and weeds.
True; that's the difference between Phoenecians and Norsemen, isn't it?
Still, Diamond's point remains that it's easier to move a civilization along the lattitude than along the longitude line, since grain, beasts of burden, and domestic food producing critters don't migrate well across climates. So while folks might flee north or south, their descendants are likely to either die out for a generation or two (like the initial dutch forays into the tropics), or adapt to a much less civilized life than what they'd been accustomed to before. Civilization spreads east and west. And for reasons referred to above, anything dependent on life-shaping is probably going to be at least as climate-dependent as the grains and beasts were in Earth's history. Ever notice that the most adaptive living things tend to be the least useful? Cockroaches and weeds.
No arguments there from me. I've not been saying anything about whether or not the Rhulisti had spread across the planet. I've basically assumed that they did. I just don't think that the Rebirth was a global phenomenon, and tends to have been centralized around the Pristine Tower -- the Rhulisti of the world may have mostly gathered near where the Pristine Tower was for survival due to the Brown Tide (if it was killing things in its wake, they may have retreated to their "capitol" of sorts), and thus they were transformed in the Rebirth, but I believe it was a localized effect, and the Rebirth Races are situated near or around the Pristine Tower as a result. As the oceans receded and lowered, more dry land became available, and the Rebirth races spread across the land, forming the communities that became the individual racial cultures further into the Green Age.
However, the Rebirth races seem to be incapable of Lifeshaping, or at the very least, have completely and utterly forgotten lifeshaping. They also seem to have forgotten their Rhulisti heritage... almost like the Rhulisti intentionally used the Rebirth to give Athas a second chance, without their direct interference which had led up to the Brown Tide... and to do that completely, they erased all knowledge of themselves from the Rebith races. This would include any notion of sea travel, etc, at the level the Rhulisti would have (out of necessity, being on a water world) had.
Mind you, in the Blue Age, the idea/notion of "continents" is one I'm not entirely certain was known. They'd understand islands, and such.... but continents? On a world that was mostly water? That seems a bit crazy to me. Anyway...
In the Green Age, I'd imagine that each race had to develop its own culture... and that they did. If the Elves were a seafaring race, they'd not necessarily be an ocean-crossing seafaring race. Especially as the Sea was the Sunrise Sea, something of an inland sea, like the Mediterranean Sea. That would be the "sea". The oceans may have been discovered (I'd guess they were over time), but it is a completely different animal crossing the great unknown and crossing the Sunrise Sea. The Sunrise Sea's expanse would have been traversed, first along the coastline, and then further out. It would have been known that there was land, definitely land, on the other side.
The oceans would have been an unknown. Nobody would know if there was land on the other side. If the coastline was traversed, it would have gone around the continent, and not connected to land beyond the continent. All they would know is that there is vast leagues of water, as far as the eye can see, in every direction past the coast. You'd have to travel for weeks, nay, months, in completely open water, hoping that you might find something. It wouldn't have been something people would just rush to go do. And of those that tried, I'd say none returned. This is something of the equivalent of "certain death" to cross the vast oceans.
Even the ancient Norse stayed relatively close to coastlines, there would have been a point where they'd turn around, if it took too long. When your supplies start to run thin, and your crew gets a bit antsy, do you push forward and hope that you find more food and water, or do you turn back before you end up killing everyone on your ship (or they mutiny and kill you?).
Before you suggest something like magic being used... There is no rules in place for handling what Arcane Magic would have worked like on an ocean. And if you even take into account the idea of using seaweed and the like, it would not be very much life to quicken spells with. Divine spellcasters... you'd need a water cleric, definitely, an air cleric, and possibly a rain cleric would be nice. Druids may not have been inclined to go out to sea, unless their Spirits desired it. So magic... is less of an option for Athasian seas. Psionics is more of an option, but there is strong evidence that advanced psionics studies was something for nobility, even in the Green Age... and with nobility comes politics, and would it present the correct... appearances... for a noble to go off on some crazy crusade to cross the oceans (in a medieval-like setting)?
No, I'm still firmly entrenched in the idea that any other continents would most likely have never been "colonized" or even encountered by the Rebirth races (or if it was, it was a very, very brief encounter at that). The other continents are wide open for ideas outside of the Rebirth, things like sentient lifeshaped creatures that have developed/evolved over the millenia, or other factions/descendants of the Rhulisti, etc. There may have been a few of the Rebirth races that escaped and found another continent in a last-ditch effort to avoid extermination by the Cleansing Wars, but that's about it.
No arguments there from me. I've not been saying anything about whether or not the Rhulisti had spread across the planet. I've basically assumed that they did. I just don't think that the Rebirth was a global phenomenon, and tends to have been centralized around the Pristine Tower -- the Rhulisti of the world may have mostly gathered near where the Pristine Tower was for survival due to the Brown Tide (if it was killing things in its wake, they may have retreated to their "capitol" of sorts), and thus they were transformed in the Rebirth, but I believe it was a localized effect, and the Rebirth Races are situated near or around the Pristine Tower as a result. As the oceans receded and lowered, more dry land became available, and the Rebirth races spread across the land, forming the communities that became the individual racial cultures further into the Green Age.
However, the Rebirth races seem to be incapable of Lifeshaping, or at the very least, have completely and utterly forgotten lifeshaping.
Most, yes, except for the individuals living in cities such as Giustenal, which appear, at least for a time, to have had Rebirth races living alongside halflings in cities that included life-shaped buildings.
There may have been other cities like that on the eastern Tablelands (see the WJ) on the other side of the Sunrise sea (now the sea of silt): former underwater cities, now coastal cities., that evolved like Giustenal, and my guess is that Bodach was like that as well, since the sources say it was mixed race and since it's on the coast. These Multiracial Cities would have probably been influential city-states, like Renaisance Venice or classical Carthage, exerting an influence over long distances but not actually holding lands. And they'd probably have viewed other civilizations as barbaric. Other civilizations may have been warlike, giving the mixed cities a reason to hoard their technologies, since Ral only knows what those barbarians at the gates would do if they knew how to do X Y or Z.
Plus there would probably be no nature masters left even in the mixed cities -- they would have been the most xenophobic, right? So the big cities would have had a major advantage by tending the life-shaped techs, but not developing new ones, and eventually stuff breaks down, but they've had that extra time to hone psionics and replace some of the earlier stuff with psionics. So you have a handful of ancient mixed cities living with high technology, and halfling cities living at least that high, but most of the globe is Rebirth Races or Kreen living at best in a much lower state.
Even without life-shaping, you're going to see substantial movement east and west, because of the Jared Diamond stuff that I said. Less movement North and South for agricultural peoples. Hunters aren't as limited with North-South movement, though; the kreen probably sweep south into the Crimson Savannah during the Time of Magic -- remember how the elf Kovreset comes originally from the area now called the Crimson Savannah?
They also seem to have forgotten their Rhulisti heritage... almost like the Rhulisti intentionally used the Rebirth to give Athas a second chance, without their direct interference which had led up to the Brown Tide... and to do that completely, they erased all knowledge of themselves from the Rebith races. This would include any notion of sea travel, etc, at the level the Rhulisti would have (out of necessity, being on a water world) had.
As stated above, I agree with you with respect to most of the Rebirth people, with the exceptions of the denizens of the Adapted Blue Age cities such as Giustenal etc., and for purposes of this discussion (spreading of civilization) those cities don't matter.
But you've not taken a couple key facts into account with respect to sea travel: Seafaring Elves, Aquatic Lizardmen, and the nature of the planet. If the Green Age involved oceans and continents (doubtful given the calendar info that I mentioned earlier) then aquatic critters such as lizardmen would have had a major spread advantage. If the physical structure of the Jade Marquess looks anything like a Green Age elven ship, then the elves would have had easy access to every ocean shore on the globe and elven civilization would have been more or less worldwide before the time of magic.
OTOH, if the Green Age (as I now suspect) was a landlocked world of long prairies and forests punctuated by mediteranean-sized inland seas, then the faraway places would have soon been dominated by fast-moving hunters such as the Kreen and the Wemic. Rebirth Race civilization would have spread more slowly, in a more or less oval shape, long on the east to west axis and short on the north-south axis. I doubt that Rebirth civilization could have spread across a landlocked globe, even by the end of the cleansing wars.
Off-hand, does anyone recall any official Green Age reference to the word "OCEAN"? Because the only mentions that I've seen suggest that there weren't oceans during the Green Age, just "seas." The word Ocean disappears from the calendar after the Rebirth. The timeline said that the oceans dried up to land. The sea of silt was then called "the sunrise sea." And the WJ says that the sea of silt is *surrounded* by the tablelands, meaning that the "other continent" that some folks talk about, the land appearing on the map beyond Ur-Draxa, is probably something that you can reach by moving on land by heading North, East, and then South again.
And it would suggest the idea of prairies/etc. It also would lend to the notion that the Jagged Cliffs might actually be a continental shelf of sorts. If the Brown Tide had destroyed 90% of the water on Athas, that would make very little left for anything. It would also seriously screw up the ecology, throw everything out of balance, and the Green Age would have simply be (ecologically/geologically speaking) the withering of Athas. Basically, the Pristine Tower bought time to Athas and its inhabitants, but it was "too late", the majority of the damage was already done. Which could lend credence to the idea that Rajaat's plan really has no chance of working... there just isn't enough water to remake the Blue Age, period.
your idea of a land-locked world is quite intriguing.
It's incredibly inconvenient to me, since it debunks a lot of my unpublished historical work, not to mention the global maps (athas foldable into a duodecahedron) that Esme and I worked up so carefully. But Flip pointed out that pesky little passage in the WJ, and all my research in the matter hasn't turned up anything to contradict it. I don't see any other way to interpret the evidence.
Among other things, a landlocked Green Age would explain observation of the total absence of the word "continent": Athas never had continents. The Blue Age had islands, the Green Age & Time of Magic had landlocked inland seas, and now all but one of those inland seas has dried up (at least as far as we know).
It also would explain why Rajaat and the halflings would be so hell-bent on restoring the Blue Age. You ever wonder about that? After all, if the ocean's just fallen and new lands exposed, what's the big deal -- most of the ancient rhulisti cities were in what are now the mountaintops. What had they lost? If it's a landlocked world, then the Green Age would feel totally shattering to them. Their world government completely broken apart into isolated little communities.
On Athas, there's an even greater source of spreading plant and animal species: the Pristine Tower. If new plant and animal species were being produced at Pristine Tower after the Rebirth, then there would have been a much greater variety of plant and animal life at the latitude of the Pristine Tower.
The creatures and plants living in the Green Age Arctic, sub-arctic, and probably temperate areas would be the descendants of the creatures who lived on the islands at those lattitudes during the Blue Age. (For example, if the PT coughs out a family of polar bears, or a bunch of plants adapted for sub-arctic growth, they are probably not going to survive to establish themselves far north or far south; they'll die in the hostile tropics. :D )
The creatures living in the Green age tropical and subtropical zones would include a much greater variety, due to the mutations of the Pristine Tower.
It's incredibly inconvenient to me, since it debunks a lot of my unpublished historical work, not to mention the global maps (athas foldable into a duodecahedron) that Esme and I worked up so carefully.
I can understand that. It definitely is a somewhat shocking concept.
But Flip pointed out that pesky little passage in the WJ, and all my research in the matter hasn't turned up anything to contradict it. I don't see any other way to interpret the evidence.
Interesting... off the top of my head, it does seem to mesh with the ideas more.
Among other things, a landlocked Green Age would explain observation of the total absence of the word "continent": Athas never had continents. The Blue Age had islands, the Green Age & Time of Magic had landlocked inland seas, and now all but one of those inland seas has dried up (at least as far as we know).
Good points. The idea/notion of continents would be foreign to an Athasian, even a Green Age Athasian.
It also would explain why Rajaat and the halflings would be so hell-bent on restoring the Blue Age. You ever wonder about that? After all, if the ocean's just fallen and new lands exposed, what's the big deal -- most of the ancient rhulisti cities were in what are now the mountaintops. What had they lost? If it's a landlocked world, then the Green Age would feel totally shattering to them. Their world government completely broken apart into isolated little communities.
That's very true as well.
On Earth, for some reason there was an unusually high number of native grain crop plants and domesticable animals living in a small area called the Fertile Crescent, and most European, Asian, and North African cultures came into existence by moving those plants and animals across lattitude lines.
On Athas, there's an even greater source of spreading plant and animal species: the Pristine Tower. If new plant and animal species were being produced at Pristine Tower after the Rebirth, then there would have been a much greater variety of plant and animal life at the latitude of the Pristine Tower.
The creatures and plants living in the Green Age Arctic, sub-arctic, and probably temperate areas would be the descendants of the creatures who lived on the islands at those lattitudes during the Blue Age. (For example, if the PT coughs out a family of polar bears, or a bunch of plants adapted for sub-arctic growth, they are probably not going to survive to establish themselves far north or far south; they'll die in the hostile tropics. :D )
The creatures living in the Green age tropical and subtropical zones would include a much greater variety, due to the mutations of the Pristine Tower.
True. as much as it basically throws out pretty much most of my ideas on the climate and design of the Green Age... I definitely am finding a land-locked Green Age appealing. I think I even like it -- but in part because I like Athas to not ever really fit into the mold of a typical fantasy setting. And a Land-Locked Green Age would produce... an intriguing concept, to be sure.
It would also seriously screw up the ecology, throw everything out of balance, and the Green Age would have simply be (ecologically/geologically speaking) the withering of Athas.
From the halfling point of view, yes, and certainly for a few generations as the first set of plants grew in the much that had once been ocean, I imagine that the Rebirth races who weren't in the lucky mixed cities, mostly ate each other. But as the forests grew, it really was a Green Age, I think, the ecosystem was as far as we know marginally stable until Rajaat started messing with it.
Basically, the Pristine Tower bought time to Athas and its inhabitants, but it was "too late", the majority of the damage was already done.
I don't the Rebirth was the beginning of the end for Athas, just the end of Athas as the halflings had known it. I think that the ecosystem, although fragile, could have survived, with care But certainly a few dozen thousand years between global calamities wasn't enough to absorb the shock. Dumping a few million gallons of boiling obsidian into the Starlight Sea was probably the tipping point for Athas' ecosystem. Massive Scale defiling probably accelerated the process beyond the point of no return.
Still, the WC indicates that Oronis seems to think he can restore the Green Age. I think he's probably wrong, and that you're probably correct that Athas is irredeemably terminal. But hope is a dangerous thing on Athas, and it is not going down without a fight.
Which could lend credence to the idea that Rajaat's plan really has no chance of working... there just isn't enough water to remake the Blue Age, period.
As for whether Athas really could have been restored to the Blue Age, that's a question for you epic folks, and Jared Diamond AFAIK has nothing to say on that whatsoever :D
From the halfling point of view, yes, and certainly for a few generations as the first set of plants grew in the much that had once been ocean, I imagine that the Rebirth races who weren't in the lucky mixed cities, mostly ate each other. But as the forests grew, it really was a Green Age, I think, the ecosystem was as far as we know marginally stable until Rajaat started messing with it.
Good point.
I don't the Rebirth was the beginning of the end for Athas, just the end of Athas as the halflings had known it. I think that the ecosystem, although fragile, could have survived, with care But certainly a few dozen thousand years between global calamities wasn't enough to absorb the shock. Dumping a few million gallons of boiling obsidian into the Starlight Sea was probably the tipping point for Athas' ecosystem. Massive Scale defiling probably accelerated the process beyond the point of no return.
True, I can see that.
Still, the WC indicates that Oronis seems to think he can restore the Green Age. I think he's probably wrong, and that you're probably correct that Athas is irredeemably terminal. But hope is a dangerous thing on Athas, and it is not going down without a fight.
I think Oronis has a lot of hope, but he's just as prone to error and mistakes as everyone else. I do think he'd die if he thought it could restore the Green Age.
I personally, am stuck with the idea that the Cleansing Wars more or less really upset the development of the cultures in the Green Age. I don't think they really had very long to mature and develop fully (but all of the cultures more or less existed an equivalent length of time)
- Rebirth: 8th world's age, some 14,000 years ago.
- Tyr, Bodach, Guistinal and other cities are founded to house the rebirth races
- First use of Psionic Powers: end of the 8th world's age.
- Rajaat is born: 11th King's Age. (-13,783)
- Rajaat starts experementing with magic: 81st kings age (-8,393)
- Rajaat discovers magic: 84th kings age (-8,162)
- Rajaat starts teaching magic: 125th kings age (-5,005)
- Preserver Jihad: 134th kings' age (-4,312)
- Champions created, Cleansing Wars begin: 144th kings age (-3,542)
- Rebellion against Rajaat: 164th kings age (-2,002)
That's a course of 11 thousand years between the rebirth and the cleansing wars. In our world, Summeria is identified the first civilization, and is belived to have started about 3500 BC. The whole of human civilization spans half the time between the rebirth and the start of the cleansing wars.
Now, if Wikipedia's entry on civilization is to belived, the first settlement is belived to be Jericho, about 9000 BC. That's about an equivalanet length of time, in which we've gone from, literally, sticks and stones, to our current level of technology.
Tyr and Bodach aren't described as rough settlements with the first known granaries; they're cities. The green age civilizations have Psionics nearly from day one. Could you explain to me why the pressures that existed in our world, that have taken us from a few tiny cities between the Tigris and Euphreties to where we are now, would not have come into play on Green Age Athas?
Personally, I find it extremly hard to belive that the Green Age cultures did not span the entirety of the planet by the time the cleansing wars started. There's just too much time, and no compelling reason for it not to have happened.
Actually, if memory serves, exploration of the Western Hemisphere was fueled by a few things. For the Norse, it was simply them following what they knew to be a set of islands/lands without really much recognition that it was a whole other continent, and they never really pushed "very far" into it. From the Asian side, it was... well, people are left with high speculation on what the purpose was, but let's say resettling, and they went mostly across a bridge. For the European cultures, for the most part, they were fundamentally unaware of the Western Hemisphere's continents until they ran into them.
I was thinking more along the lines of all the adventurers who streamed into the west after Columbus looking for things like the Seven Cities and the Fountain of Youth. Coronado’s whole expedition through the South West was based on the word of one man who claimed to have seen one of the Seven Cities of Gold and that only from a distance.
So the existence of halfling ruins somehow means there is other continents? Especially considering the world was a water world, and the other continents could have been, well, mostly submerged and little more than islands at best? I don't follow this rationale.
Again, I was referring to was the idea that adventurers tend to take off on wild quests on fairly flimsy information. I can see a group of Green Age adventurers traveling to other side of the world after they find a map that seems to lead to a large treasure trove.
Ok, so they decide to venture off into the wild unknown ocean, to face who knows what, rather than just expand on the land that already existed? I'm a bit confused here. We're talking a period of a few thousand years, not tens of thousands of years.
We're also talking about a time period that is three times as long as the recorded history of Earth. In that time the Western continents were discovered not once but multiple times; including some that may have been in the Iron Age, if you believe that idea that the Carthagians discovered and traded with South America, something I have problems with myself, but the possibility exists.
We're talking peoples that are relatively new to the world, expanding outward, and finding homes. We're not talking about races that had the technology to build large enough/strong enough boats to sail the open waters freely, or the ability to navigate by the stars or anything at that point. for the most part, we're talking very, very new races to the world, which most likely would have stayed on the continent. We're talking a volume of people that most likely would not have populated every square inch of the continent in question (once again, a continent that is more than just the tablelands area, but the tablelands and everything east of the now Sea of Silt).
You are assuming that overpopulation is the only reason that people migrate. War, famine, and a search for better economic conditions are more common motivators for population shifts. If/when other continents were discovered on Athas (if they exist) it would only be natural for at least a small percentage of the population to begin shifting to the “new world”; especially if it was rich in a resource in high demand.
As far as the technological problems that Green Age peoples may have faced, there are several options they may have had available. Both Air and Water priests would have had resources to draw on that the explorers of this world could have not. Who knows how much information the priests of Water had about the oceans of Athas. They also would have been religiously bound to discover new ways of traveling on water. After all how better to understand the true power of Water then to be out in the middle of the ocean.
Priests of Air on the other hand may have considered the oceans to be an restriction to travel, something that their chaotic nature would have found unacceptable, so they would have been duty bound to find a way to overcome that obstacle.
Also consider the possibility of serendipity . A nomad psion has a teleportation or plane shift accident and suddenly she is somewhere no one has ever been before. Whether she can get back to her starting point or repeat the process are open questions, but it is a possibility.
Finally there is the possibility of aquatic races. The only water based race mentioned in the source material is the lizard people. Were they limited to what would became the Sea of Silt region? Did they know about other continents? Would they have told their land based neighbors about them? Maybe, maybe not. But if they did, that little part of the human brain that demands to see the unseen would have switched on and somebody would have found a way to cross the ocean.
Rajaat, in the 2E materials, wanted to eliminate all the Rebirth races. He picked a very specific number of Champions to accomplish this, and they set about their tasks on this one continent. That would suggest that the Rebirth races were on this continent.
That is also a reason for someone to try and cross the oceans in search of safety. If a genocidal army is bearing down on me, I would be willing to jump in the nearest boat and try my luck elsewhere, anywhere.
Also, while the number of Champions was limited, we don’t know how many warlords and “Hands of Rajaat” there were. We don’t know (at least I don’t) where the “Right Hand of Rajaat” was or what he was doing. May be he was given the task of wiping out the colonies on the other continent(s), which could have been small and therefore not “deserving” of a full Champion’s attention.
After all that, let me say that whether there are other inhabited continents or not is obviously up to the individual DM and how he or she wants to run a campaign. I’m just spitballing here, trying to put out some ideas that others may not have considered.
- Rebirth: 8th world's age, some 14,000 years ago.
- Tyr, Bodach, Guistinal and other cities are founded to house the rebirth races
- First use of Psionic Powers: end of the 8th world's age.
- Rajaat is born: 11th King's Age. (-13,783)
- Rajaat starts experementing with magic: 81st kings age (-8,393)
- Rajaat discovers magic: 84th kings age (-8,162)
- Rajaat starts teaching magic: 125th kings age (-5,005)
- Preserver Jihad: 134th kings' age (-4,312)
- Champions created, Cleansing Wars begin: 144th kings age (-3,542)
- Rebellion against Rajaat: 164th kings age (-2,002)
That's a course of 11 thousand years between the rebirth and the cleansing wars. In our world, Summeria is identified the first civilization, and is belived to have started about 3500 BC. The whole of human civilization spans half the time between the rebirth and the start of the cleansing wars.
Now, if Wikipedia's entry on civilization is to belived, the first settlement is belived to be Jericho, about 9000 BC. That's about an equivalanet length of time, in which we've gone from, literally, sticks and stones, to our current level of technology.
Tyr and Bodach aren't described as rough settlements with the first known granaries; they're cities. The green age civilizations have Psionics nearly from day one. Could you explain to me why the pressures that existed in our world, that have taken us from a few tiny cities between the Tigris and Euphreties to where we are now, would not have come into play on Green Age Athas?
Personally, I find it extremly hard to belive that the Green Age cultures did not span the entirety of the planet by the time the cleansing wars started. There's just too much time, and no compelling reason for it not to have happened.
Ok, point taken. I guess, given the length of time, it is possible. See what happens when I'm rusty on the timeline? Been a while since I looked at the books.
Edit: if there is 11,000 years span, and if we think along the lines of a land-locked world, I'd still question the idea that Green Age people had really expanded everywhere... They'd spread out, to be sure, but that's a *lot* of land to cover.
- Rebirth: 8th world's age, some 14,000 years ago.
- Tyr, Bodach, Guistinal and other cities are founded to house the rebirth races
- First use of Psionic Powers: end of the 8th world's age.
- Rajaat is born: 11th King's Age. (-13,783)
- Rajaat starts experementing with magic: 81st kings age (-8,393)
- Rajaat discovers magic: 84th kings age (-8,162)
- Rajaat starts teaching magic: 125th kings age (-5,005)
- Preserver Jihad: 134th kings' age (-4,312)
- Champions created, Cleansing Wars begin: 144th kings age (-3,542)
- Rebellion against Rajaat: 164th kings age (-2,002)
That's a course of 11 thousand years between the rebirth and the cleansing wars. In our world, Summeria is identified the first civilization, and is belived to have started about 3500 BC. The whole of human civilization spans half the time between the rebirth and the start of the cleansing wars.
Now, if Wikipedia's entry on civilization is to belived, the first settlement is belived to be Jericho, about 9000 BC. That's about an equivalanet length of time, in which we've gone from, literally, sticks and stones, to our current level of technology.
Tyr and Bodach aren't described as rough settlements with the first known granaries; they're cities. The green age civilizations have Psionics nearly from day one. Could you explain to me why the pressures that existed in our world, that have taken us from a few tiny cities between the Tigris and Euphreties to where we are now, would not have come into play on Green Age Athas?
Yes, I did already, above, on this thread. You might as well ask why Thamasku and Saragar haven't spread their empire across the face of the tablelands. I gave the examples of Venice and Carthage, other city-states that had a massive influence over their known worlds while never actually taking & holding land in the empirial sense. Precisely because they started, BEFORE day one of the Green Age, with a way of life that's probably better than most of the world today, while everyone outside those walls was living in impoverished savagery. We know that even as late as the time of magic that Bodach had the arrogance to imagine that it could remain "neutral" in the face of the preserver Jihad. The old cities didn't really see themselves as part of the rest of the world. Perhaps their cultural aloofness resembled the rhul-thaun racial xenophobia.
Look at Manu's story in RoFaoDK. Yes, that's cleansing wars time, but it's still pretty clear that not everyone during the Green Age was living like those in Tyr, Bodach and Giustenal.
Another thing to answer your question:
Athas: the facts here tell us that Bodach and Giustenal WERE actually still around from the Rebirth all the way through the Green Age until at least the Preserver Jihad. Tyr lasted even longer.
Earth: In contrast, Flip, where are the great earth cities of Ur and Eridu?
Again, Jared Diamond provides the answer. Hell, I don't even agree with him about everything, but some of Diamond's arguments like lattitudes are stuff that you can't even argue with. The civilization of Europe, Africa, and Asia are directly tied to the DRY-UP OF THE FERTILE CRESCENT millenia ago. Thousands of people were simply starved out, and took their writing ability and their goats and cows and wheat, etc, west across North Africa, West across Europe, and East across Asia.
In contrast, Tyr, Bodach, and Giustenal weren't starved out; we know the cities survived all through the Green Age.
On Earth, Western Europe enjoyed a "rennaisance" when once of its ancient cities, Constantinople, was sacked and folks came out with their books and knowledge. But when Bodach was sacked, Rajaat was probably careful to have Irikos exterminate the survivors. After all, Rajaat was probably setting up for the Cleansing Wars, and the last thing Rajaat wanted was ideas and stories of high-tech multiracial harmony being disseminated through the human "heartland" north of Bodach. Alternately, perhaps the survivors made it south and founded Balic, another coastal city where they could stay aloof from the less civilized hordes.
Personally, I find it extremly hard to belive that the Green Age cultures did not span the entirety of the planet by the time the cleansing wars started. There's just too much time, and no compelling reason for it not to have happened.
There are four reasons, one that you raised here, one that you told me by phone, and one that's in the published 2e sources, and one that's in the still unpublished SotDL notes. Together, these reasons may or may not ammount to a compelling argument:
1. As you raised here, the ancient Rebirth cities (although if Tyr and Giustenal are any indication, they were previously Blue Age cities before the Rebirth) remained strong for tens of thousands of years. This is significant because
(a) Cities that set out to conquer don't last that long. Babylon, Troy, and Jericoare ruins, only recently rediscovered. Titangel's location is a controversy and we can't even agree on the continent where Shebawas located. Rome and Alexandriaonly stand because they ceased to be military power centers. Two centuries of wounded Gallic pride and curiousity haven't managed to uncover a trace of Alesia. And let's not even pretend that Istanbulis the continuation of Byzantium
! If Bodach and Giustenal and Tyr had been conquest-driven rather than smugly isolationist, they'd never have survived. Pull Rome out of Earth's history, and the development of Europe changes considerably, don't you think?(b) Cities that remain intact, don't disseminate their knowledge and technology in the way that Constantinople or Ur et all did when they fell.
(c) When you have a few cities that are lights of fine living and civilization shining in the midst of barbarism and want, then if you're smart, resourceful, etc., then you find a way into those cities. That's how it was with Constantinople, and after that for a while, Paris and Venice. It would be far more true where the cities were that much more advanced and ancient than the rest of the world. Much easier for clever people to figure a way into the civilized cities than to figure out a way to civilize the folks around them.
2. As you pointed out last year by phone, the WJ draws the tablelands around the sea of silt, which suggests strongly that the Green Age involved landlocked seas, and has no ocean. Lack of any coastline to sail along is going to slow down the spread of civilization.
3. The published 2e sources make clear that the Green Age peoples included at least two species of sentient nomadic superpredators: wemics and kreen. While these guys would have been nomadic hunters and probably not high tech, there's no reason they'd not have been as dangerous psionically as the more settled races. I submit to you that clearing the praeries of these folks would have been far more difficult for Green Age colonists than anything that European colonists ran into in Africa or the Americas. And unlike Africa and the Americas, Green Age Athas has no oceans (see above) so no way the colonists can get a foothold on the coast before venturing inland.
4. The unpublished SotDL notes, partly officialised in TotDL, mention an empire of sorts far to the south, not of rebirth races. What did Timothy Brown call them? Scarlet Warden, or S'thag Zagath? Those massive whip scorpion guys. They look like meat eaters to me, Flip. And smart ones, IIRC.
Because of the massive timespan of the Green Age. I'd guess that a large portion if not most of the globe would be inhabited by Rebirth races by the beginning of the Preserver Jihad. But civilized? I doubt it. The civilizers would have been drawn to the ancient cities, which never broke up during the Green Age, and nomads were many times stronger than they ever were on Earth. Even if you gave the settlers guns (and I've seen no evidence that they had them), I don't know how they'd have had a chance to take land from kreen psychic warriors, or even to hold their fragile homesteads against kreen and wemic nomads. In the timeline, Green age cities had flirted with letting Kreen live with them, and then the King of Urik kicked the kreen out, right? And it says that other cities followed course. Why do you think that was? Chitin prejudice? Or fear of an alien creature that's stronger, naturally armored, and breeds, well, like an insect?
And my guess is that in those final ages before the Cleansing Wars, that the domain of rebirth races was shrinking, not growing, that the insect superpredators, Kreen and those Scarlet Wardens would have been pushing against the margins of human and demihuman civilization.
If that's how it played out, then Rajaat's genius was to pick the perfect timing to set the Rebirth races at each others throats, at a time that they most needed to stand together.
Like I said, I'm not sure if it's a compelling argument against global civilization of some sort, but I have a very hard time believing that technology could possibly have been uniform across Athas during the Green Age.
And don't forget, at some point, there was a growing population of feral/predatorial Halflings in the mix. If, let's say, the wids were the domains of the sperpredators, and these halflings represent isolated groups of former Rhulisti, cut off from all civilization and everything, forced to survive day in and day out against constant assaults from Wemics, Kreen, and possibly Scarlet Wardens, wouldn't it suggest that such people would end up becoming very aggressive, warlike, and potentially become quite like the predators they were fighting against? What kind of effects would be left on a society which the only contact it has with other, outsider sentients is aggressive, murdering, psionic predators? What if that's all they had to deal with for thousands of years?
wouldn't it suggest that such people would end up becoming very aggressive, warlike, and potentially become quite like the predators they were fighting against?
Assuming that they didn't start out that way. An awful lot of halflings much have been changed of Rebirth races, and while cities were originally founded to house the inhabitants, the fact that other new cities came into existence suggests that sentient creatures also lived outside the cities. Perhaps the cities simply could not sustain a growing population, and had to leak some folks out, or perhaps they expelled dangerous criminals and predatorial races that just could not get along. But either way, when folks leave or get forced out of the cities, chances are that they are the individuals that don't get along with the others, and the races & subgroups that don't adapt well to city life. Were these outlanders expelled undesirables from the cities?
Seems to me that there's a reason why we separate that first age out as the Rebirth, before the Green Age (which technically IIRC starts with the psionic event). The greening of Athas could not possibly have occurred overnight at the Rebirth. When folks left the safe cities or left the Pristine Tower without going to the safe cities, was there enough plant life and game to sustain life? How many of them even recalled their prior lives as halflings? The cities were on the coast of the new Sunrise Sea, and probably dominated the fishing. A few might live for the first week by pulling rotten fish off of the muddy ground. (Can you imagine the stink of that dried up sea?). But beyond that, Rebirth people who survived outside the cities, probably did so by eating more than one or two other Rebirth people. At least for a few years until the animal and plant population of isolated islands managed to expand itself across the surface of the world.
The (sadly cancelled) TV show "Firefly" is pretty good at depicting how high tech high-resource sophisticated civilizations could coexist with low-resource uneducated people who struggle for survival in a land with few resources. It's a useful picture, since in Firefly, the poor areas are planets where the teraforming is incomplete," and that had to be the state of most of Athas during the Rebirth, few plants and very little game. The social aspects of it still apply, I think, during the early Green Age, except that there's no record of any Green Age equivalent of Firefly's "Unification." Unlike Firefly's "core worlds," the high resource Tyrian and Bodach-ites weren't interested in global domination, but rather city-states where the people are more interested in protecting their way of life and advancement within the only society that they care about. Like Romeo said when threatened with banishment, "there is no world without Verona Walls."
My evidence that Bodach and Giustenal and Tyr never unified under a single government? The fact that they all survived from the Rebirth until the Time of Magic. During those tens of thousands of years, three independently powerful cities like Tyr, Bodach and Giustenal, would eventually waged terrible war on each other, like Rome with Carthage, if they were ambitious to expand their dominion.
Actually, those arguments are kind of where I've been thinking today... But yeah, a global civilization, unlikely. Especially when you have sentient predators ("superpredators") that have a taste for the flesh of other sentients.
I don't think anyone is saying that there would have been one global civilization. While our world has one dominant race, it is made up of many different cultures, which I would equate to the many races of Athas. No one culture dominates the Earth. You have hi-tech cultures like those of Japan and the US, advanced cultures like those of Europe, low-tech cultures like the many tribes living in the Amazon, long-lived cultures like those of the Middle East, and many others in between. And yet, humans still spread over the Earth, through exploration, wars, escaping persecution, or for whatever reason. While some cultures thrive in isolation, others need to be expanding. I will grant you that some races of Athas would be content with their lot, others most certainly would not be.
Look how quickly civilization expanded from the east coast of the US to the west coast. Once North America was discovered, it didn't take long to traverse it. The world of Athas being mostly land-locked would make moving on that much easier. Even with super-predators. If they were that much of a threat, they would have removed the other races. They were probably a problem in the beginning, as most unknowns can be, but, eventually the expanding races would organise and push back. Eventually you will reach an impasse, and the groups will either learn to tolerate or avoid each other (or maybe even exterminate one or the other).
Ultimately, though, it is a fantasy world. While trying to model it on real world civilizations may help in fleshing it out, it will only help. Being able to use psionics or magic will affect things drastically. I think that the many races would have expanded across Athas, but not to the point of one global civilization.
The (sadly cancelled) TV show "Firefly" is pretty good at depicting how high tech high-resource sophisticated civilizations could coexist with low-resource uneducated people who struggle for survival in a land with few resources. It's a useful picture, since in Firefly, the poor areas are planets where the teraforming is incomplete," and that had to be the state of most of Athas during the Rebirth, few plants and very little game. The social aspects of it still apply, I think, during the early Green Age, except that there's no record of any Green Age equivalent of Firefly's "Unification." Unlike Firefly's "core worlds," the high resource Tyrian and Bodach-ites weren't interested in global domination, but rather city-states where the people are more interested in protecting their way of life and advancement within the only society that they care about. Like Romeo said when threatened with banishment, "there is no world without Verona Walls."
Funny you mention this, because I was thinking about Firefly a bit when I was writing all of that. The concept of the Reavers, actually. What if... the Rebirth didn't quite work completely as intended.... what if part of the Rhulisti that were in the Rebirth, a relatively small part.... didn't actually become a new species, but rather became feral, primitive, extremely violent and bloodthirsty? What if the feral halflings were a side-effect of the Rebirth?
Being able to use psionics or magic will affect things drastically.
I think that supports my argument, Merc, since it emphasizes that magic did actually take down all of that technology.
If Green Age military technology was as powerful as the stuff on earth today, I don't think that magic would have made that much difference in Athasian history. Consider the time when Rajaat uses Irikos to destroy the ancient "neutral" supercity of Bodach. It seems to me that if magic that big a splash, that Green Age technology, nifty as it may have been, probably had nothing to compare militarily with our machine guns or cruise missiles.
You have hi-tech cultures like those of Japan and the US, advanced cultures like those of Europe, low-tech cultures like the many tribes living in the Amazon, long-lived cultures like those of the Middle East, and many others in between.
Yes, but at current rates that some folks are killing them off, I doubt very much that there will be tribes living in the Amazon 200 years from now, let alone 20,000 years (see what Flip said above about the duration of the Green Age). Like you said, magic and psionics changes the equasion. Remember, the Athasian uncivilized races are as apt to psionic mastery in their own way as the civilized races, and more likely to have PC class levels since they live by hunting and fighting. I reckon that if the tribes of the Amazon had psionic powers, that civilization would probably not be encroaching on them, enslaving and killing them, and razing their forests to make temporary ranches to put beef in our burgers. On earth we don't need magic to defile, to exchange life for power. We do that perfectly well through technology.
The Middle East involves pockets of high tech surrounded by low tech. China is an even more stark example. I visited my family in Shanghai, and saw some buildings down by the river there that make the Seattle Space Needle look primitive. But there are other homes in China without running water or electricity, and southern China's primitive unsanitary methods of raising ducks and pigs together in close confines with human habitations continues to breed new strains of swineflu, afflicting the whole civilized world.
Look how quickly civilization expanded from the east coast of the US to the west coast.
Ah, but then look at how many centuries civilization lingered on the North American East coast without spreading west! What specific techs spread that technology west in North America? The timeframe suggests that repeating rifle, the revolver, dynamite, and the train were some of the biggies.
Trains: As far as we know, the mass transit systems operating during the Green Age were all built during the Blue Age or possibly during the Rebirth. Green Age folks may have replaced life shaped movers with psionic movers, but the routes, always tunnels, were dug during the Blue Age. (Can anyone cite me an exception?)
Guns: For reasons stated above (impact of arcane magic on war) it seems clear that Athasians never had an offensive technology weapon as powerful as repeating rifles, revolvers, or dynamite.
They doubtlessly had good steel at some point during the Green Age. But they spend a lot of time developing psionic systems (resources that otherwise would be spent on techs) and the fact that the movers and protective devices in Saragar and Giustenal are so often psionic rather than technological shows that this is where they placed their focus.
Now picture the settlement of the Americas that you just described, but take out the repeating guns and bombs, and give the colonists and the natives alike psionic powers -- powers more applicable to offensive war than any of the highest tech weapons available. See how the equasion changes?
Consider also that European colonists benefitted from Jared Diamond's "Germ" factor. Eurasia lies east-west, and endured wave after wave of plagues to toughen the people's immune systems over the centuries. The Americas lay north-south, and isolated from Eurasia, so there were much fewer native deadly germs in America than in Eurasia. So whenever Europeans showed up in America, the majority of natives of the cultures they contact, just dropped dead of something that had probably started up on a Chinese pig-duck farm and worked its way to Spain through a dozen European plagues. Well in land-locked Green-Age Athas, germs would not give the colonists an advantage.
By the end of the Green Age, you've got a handful of Uber-advanced old mixed-race supercities that date back to early Rebirth, some harmonious late-renaisance-tech dominions like the Saragar area, one-race city-states like Hogalay, Kurn, or Urik (amazing that back when it was a village that it had a "king" according to the timeline). But I'd bet that most of the civilized lands were still stuck in Roman-level or Medieval level culture and techs. The old mixed-race supercities had to be way more advanced than anyone else, otherwise Bodach would never have imagined that it could remain "neutral" in the Preserver Jihad. And beyond "civilization," there's the wild, dominated by the superpredators, the intelligent (and psionic) Kreen, Wemics, and Scarlet Wardens, and probably others. Europeans forayed into the lands of less civilized using "guns, germs, and steel." For reasons I explained above, the civilized Athasians had steel, but not guns or germs. Besides, over the thousands of years of contact, the nomads would probably have steel as well, one way or another. It would be a more even contest, until magic came around.
Funny you mention this, because I was thinking about Firefly a bit when I was writing all of that. The concept of the Reavers, actually. What if... the Rebirth didn't quite work completely as intended.... what if part of the Rhulisti that were in the Rebirth, a relatively small part.... didn't actually become a new species, but rather became feral, primitive, extremely violent and bloodthirsty? What if the feral halflings were a side-effect of the Rebirth?
I see it as an indirect side-effect. In the White Mountains history, we said that many feral halflings of the Rohorind were descended from the ruined halfling citied of Basrai, but that this ruin didn't occur until the cleansing wars. From what we've seen in Yugoslavia (whose "ethnic cleansing" probably inspired Denning's term "cleansing wars"), civilized people thrown into chaos can behave an awful lot like reavers. I imagine that from the Rebirth on, various Rhul-thaun have for various reasons, lost their tech. Maybe they got tossed out of their cities for crimes. Maybe a whole rhul-thaun city here and there loses its life-shaped food supply, through an earthquake or a plague or climate change that kills off the life-shaped critters. Or maybe the tenders die, or their supply of cahm-ran (sp?) runs out. It's the same scenario that plays out in Steven King's "The Stand" -- some folks go feral once there's no cops watching them, others, in order to survive, while some try to band together and set up some lower-tech similitude of civilization. Since the New Orleans stories, we Americans don't need to look as far as Rwanda and Yugoslavia to see the monster in the mirror. Since this is low fantasy, I don't think that we need some magical or technological excuse for explaining why some people behave the way they do when the lights go out and when they think there's no one watching.
Back to the Firefly story, the movie "Serenity," did provide that technological explanation for the origin of the Reaver group, but even there Wheaton labored to explain that this was just a human reaction against a chemical that made other people lay down and die of lethargy. I think we get a better look at the makings of a reaver in "Bushwhacked," episode 4 of Firefly. Kind of parallels how I described the Red Guard are prepared, now that I think of it, although I wrote that stuff years ago. I think that deep down, we can all guess at the ways that humans could be made into monsters. Isn't that how they prepare the child-soldiers of the eastern African civil wars -- force them to witness atrocities?
That's my explanation for the feral halfling renegades. The original ones were the survivors of civilizations that collapsed, and went feral like the gang that captured Dana in the book The Stand. They've propagated their ferality by raising their children to witness atrocity, and perhaps occasionally by capturing and sadistically brainwashing captured halflings from rhul-thaun cities and semicivilized villages, plus their ranks may be occasionally increased by individual sadistic halflings cast off from those cities and villages.
By the end of the Green Age, you've got a handful of Uber-advanced old mixed-race supercities that date back to early Rebirth, some harmonious late-renaisance-tech dominions like the Saragar area, one-race city-states like Hogalay, Kurn, or Urik (amazing that back when it was a village that it had a "king" according to the timeline). But I'd bet that most of the civilized lands were still stuck in Roman-level or Medieval level culture and techs. The old mixed-race supercities had to be way more advanced than anyone else, otherwise Bodach would never have imagined that it could remain "neutral" in the Preserver Jihad. And beyond "civilization," there's the wild, dominated by the superpredators, the intelligent (and psionic) Kreen, Wemics, and Scarlet Wardens, and probably others. Europeans forayed into the lands of less civilized using "guns, germs, and steel." For reasons I explained above, the civilized Athasians had steel, but not guns or germs. Besides, over the thousands of years of contact, the nomads would probably have steel as well, one way or another. It would be a more even contest, until magic came around.
I agree. I think psionics and magic would change the dynamic of the expansion, as would the fact that the world is land-locked. I don't think that it would stop expansion, though. The results can and would vary. City-states here, small kingdoms there, or just small tribes elsewhere. It's all possible. In our world of no magic, technology was/is the magic. Guns and trains are our fireballs/energy blasts and teleportation devices. But, when you can create these effects without the devices, you also do not need the industry that is behind them. I would expect that a world that can do these things without all the business that goes into it, would evolve with some, if not a lot, of differences.
Anyways, are we arguing here or just telling the same story from different angles?
I was thinking more along the lines of all the adventurers who streamed into the west after Columbus looking for things like the Seven Cities and the Fountain of Youth. Coronado’s whole expedition through the South West was based on the word of one man who claimed to have seen one of the Seven Cities of Gold and that only from a distance.
OK, you’ve persuaded me: Coronado was definitely a player character. ;)
Again, I was referring to was the idea that adventurers tend to take off on wild quests on fairly flimsy information. I can see a group of Green Age adventurers traveling to other side of the world after they find a map that seems to lead to a large treasure trove.
Yes indeed! Every area in Athas is probably dotted with the bones of adventurers. Some may date to the Blue Age, some to last Tuesday.
We're also talking about a time period that is three times as long as the recorded history of Earth. In that time the Western continents were discovered not once but multiple times; including some that may have been in the Iron Age, if you believe that idea that the Carthagians discovered and traded with South America, something I have problems with myself, but the possibility exists.
Hadn’t heard that, but heard that cocaine and tobacco had been discovered in an Egyptian tomb. But that rediscovery thing is an important point – will revisit below.
You are assuming that overpopulation is the only reason that people migrate. War, famine, and a search for better economic conditions are more common motivators for population shifts.
Well, in my experience, war, famine, and search for better economic conditions correlate very strongly to armchair academics later summing the whole problem up as “overpopulation.” ;)
[snipping reference to continents, which I don’t think ever existed on Athas, and oceans, which I don’t think existed during the Green Age – reasoning provided above on this thread]
Also consider the possibility of serendipity . A nomad psion has a teleportation or plane shift accident and suddenly she is somewhere no one has ever been before. Whether she can get back to her starting point or repeat the process are open questions, but it is a possibility.
IIRC, combined with anchored navigation or something like that, you can TP back to a starting point.
That is also a reason for someone to try and cross the oceans in search of safety. If a genocidal army is bearing down on me, I would be willing to jump in the nearest boat and try my luck elsewhere, anywhere.
And if the nearest boat is the Jade Marquess, you may actually get somewhere. Otherwise you’re stuck in the seas and rivers of landlocked Green Age Athas. Now if I’m wrong about that, well, I think we all agree at this point that if Green Age Athas had oceans and contintents, like Earth, that most of globe would have been pretty much civilized/settled by the time of the age of magic, 11,000 years after the rebirth – although tech levels would have varied.
Also, while the number of Champions was limited, we don’t know how many warlords and “Hands of Rajaat” there were. We don’t know (at least I don’t) where the “Right Hand of Rajaat” was or what he was doing. May be he was given the task of wiping out the colonies on the other continent(s), which could have been small and therefore not “deserving” of a full Champion’s attention.
The Warlords and the preserver jihad in general seem to have had goals related to preparing Athas for the cleansing wars:
(1) eliminate possible inter-racial alliances by destroying preservers, and by destroying powerful ancient multiracial cities like Bodach before anyone knew that Rajaat was planning a racial xeno-war.
(2) General breakdown of civilization and elimination of resources, preparing the Rebirth Races to wage long-term total wars that would lead to their annihilation.
After all that, let me say that whether there are other inhabited continents or not is obviously up to the individual DM and how he or she wants to run a campaign.
Well, everything’s up to the DM, but it’s possible in the long term that we might put out official maps – we’ve certainly got the talent for it in the community. If the maps happen, I’d like to see them consistent with the sources, assuming that the sources are consistent with each other.
But back to the story stuff that you started with Coronado, I’d like to offer the selling points of the theories above (Athas being landlocked seas rather than Oceans surrounding continents, and isolated high tech cities, mid-tech city-states, and lower tech countries and empires – and never any repeating guns or powerful bombs or anything that would supplant magic as a means of mass warfare).
The theories laid out above give a pretty believable framework for explaining almost any level of technology, dating to almost any time during the Green Age or later. If it’s uber-tech, then it’s probably a blue age city that was founded as a rebirth city. Etc. No need for the DM to map other supporting villages & neighboring cities – there were huge cities sitting in the middle of nowhere, because of possible life-shaped food-sources. Or the food sources could have died and it might have surrounding farms or villages.
For one thing, it means that most Green Age ruins you find, like most ruins that have ever been in a Dark Sun product, aren't like the Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. Yes, there will be medeival level and earlier castles. There will also be some cool and strange buildings, but tech relics will be rare, and those that do exist are usually not portable. This remains a world where the coolest treasure is magic and psionic.
Uber-cities might be in the mountains, like ancient Tyr, or they might be on the coast, like Bodach & Giustenal (in which case they’d have started as underwater cities, possibly in underground caves like the Blue Age ruins in Giustenal.) Most of them were probably destroyed late during the Preserved Jihad. These Ubercities would be the crown-jewels of adventure treasure-hauls – compare the treasures attributed in legends to Bodach by the WJ or by Simon Hawke’s books, or attributed to Giustenal in CBTSS. Tyr’s different because it’s had an SK and thousands of locals picking over its bones for millennia, but Undertyr still stirs treasure-hunters and T’liz. Imagine what promised treasures one would expect from an untouched Ubercity ruin way out in the middle of nowhere, say, in the middle of Kano swamp?
In fact, merely the rumor of an untouched ubercity ruin might be enough to send your little Coronado PCs trecking across thousands of miles of uncharted desert. And Ral only knows what they might encounter on the way. Back to your rediscovery issue, they might discover the bones and unpicked gear of other adventurers that had gone chasing the same false rumor, and that in itself might be reward worth the journey.
I agree. I think psionics and magic would change the dynamic of the expansion, as would the fact that the world is land-locked. I don't think that it would stop expansion, though. The results can and would vary. City-states here, small kingdoms there, or just small tribes elsewhere. It's all possible. In our world of no magic, technology was/is the magic. Guns and trains are our fireballs/energy blasts and teleportation devices. But, when you can create these effects without the devices, you also do not need the industry that is behind them. I would expect that a world that can do these things without all the business that goes into it, would evolve with some, if not a lot, of differences.
Anyways, are we arguing here or just telling the same story from different angles?
Looks like different angles. My angle is that as far as we know, Tyr, Giustenal, and Bodach were probably continuously in operation for at least 12,000 years, from the Rebirth until late in the Preserver Jihad (when Bodach was the first to fall). As a fictional comparison, imagine the tech level of New York City (which settled in 1624 as New Amsterdam) in the year AD 13,624.
As a real life comparison, Ur is one of the oldest cities whose names we still remember on Earth; it was founded at the earliest as a mere village in 5300 BC. Ur was never AFAIK ran as a major city for more than a few hundred years at a time, and today there's not even a village on the site where Ur stood today. And yet most of the basis of civilization as we know it today began in Ur and its sister-cities; our writing system and our most significant food crops and domestic animals trace back to that fertile crescent. Given those facts, Flip asks (if I understand him correctly), how can we imagine that Bodach and its sister cities would not have dominated the politics and culture of Green Age civilizations?
My reply to Flip's question is that
(1) the most powerful Blue Age and Green Age techs for colonization and military conquest (weapons, armor, etc.) were not as powerful as European guns, germs and steel, otherwise magic would not have changed the course of world history.
(2) the most powerful Blue Age and Green Age city-building advantages of the ubercities (life-shaped buildings, mass transport, etc.) were virtually impossible to transport, unless those who were probably the most important persons in society (tenders of life-shaped objects, and later of psionic objects and other high technology) were to leave to help settle dangerous barbaric and dirty areas.
(3) The most powerful Blue Age and green Age city-sustaining advantages of the ubercities (food sources, crops, possibly life-shaped domestic creatures & Cam-Rahn production, etc.) had to be at least as limited in transportability as the crops and domestic animals of the fertile crescent, i.e. they'd die off if you moved them far north or south to a different climate, but would live if you moved them east to west in the same general climate. And they were probably even more limited based on the same factors as in (2).
(4) The ubercities were so safe, and the surrounding areas so uncivilized in comparison, that those with power would generally prefer to stay, and the limited history (see above) suggests that the cities were extremely insular when it came to conflicts in the world outside those safe city walls.
(5) If the whole world had ever been at Green Age ubercity Bodach/Giustenal tech levels, then one would expect a lot more tech objects littering the ground all over the Tablelands and elsewhere.
(6) The people could not run off and create new cities or even live as nomads in areas that had no plant life and/or game, and after the Rebirth, it would have taken time for this life to spread across the barren land. This may be why we see the word "desert" appear so early in the World Calendar, replacing the word "Ocean."
(7) Once plants and game did spread to previous desert area, usually the first sentient beings to stake out those areas would be the fast moving superpredators such as Kreen, Wemics, and Scarlet Wardens.
(8) Since the superpredators had as much psionic potential as the humans, elves, etc., and since psionics were probably more potent than mobile offensive military techs available during the Green Age, Athasian settlers and nomads were on a much more even footing than the colonists and nomads of the Earth's history. Additionally, if there were no oceans to sail, then colonizers could not cross the globe and gain a strong coastal foothold as occurred in the Americas and in South Africa. The best military techs available were probably defensive, e.g. very high walls, tunnels dug deep into stone, etc. This probably helped keep the Ubercities as stable as they were for 15000 years, but would have done little to protect settlers and fringe colonists from superpredator Kreen, Wemics, and Scarlet Wardens.
If my theories are correct, then
- You'd see the most ruins of Green Age civilizations in an east-west oval centered on the Pristine Tower.
- Blue Age ruins, Ruined Green Age ubercities, and ruined or living Rhul Thaun cities could possibly appear anywhere along the rough latitude (say as far as 1600 miles north or south) of the Pristine Tower, but there were probably few of them outside the Tyr region.
- There probably aren't any surviving supercities operating like they used to, but some, like Tyr, could have been taken over and operating like other Athasian cities, with the old stuff mostly picked over long ago.
- Areas farther than 4-5000 miles north or South of the Pristine Tower, will have few if any ruins from Green Age Rebirth Races (except perhaps hunters like Aarakocra & Wemics), but may have ruins from that period built by Zic-Chil or Scarlet Wardens. However, such ruins may have later been lived in by Rebirth races escaped from the cleansing wars, etc.
- As you get more than 1000 miles north or south of the PT, or perhaps many thousands of miles east or west of the PT, the few ruins that you find (other than ubercities) will most likely be in naturally isolated areas such as mountains, islands in the middle of what used to be Green Age lakes, volcanoes, etc. -- places where the Kreen and Wemic suprepredators would not normally hunt. Big open praeries far away from the PT would tend to be unsettled hunting grounds for the superpredators.
- A document purporting to be a "map of the green age" will probably be either very vague (identifying only the most permanent geological features and the ubercities) or woefully innacurate. Other than the ubercities, the settlements that appear on a map cannot accurately be referred to generically as "Green Age Cities" since only a handful of cities, if that, could possibly have lasted more than a tiny fraction of the Green Age, which was a very very long time. Urik is probably like Ur, inhabited, abandoned, and later rebuilt, since the timeline says that "Urik" had a king at one time during the Green Age, and yet in RoFoaDK Urik was a dusty village, and now it's a city again. Assuming that it's even in the same location as the historical Urik.
Hadn’t heard that, but heard that cocaine and tobacco had been discovered in an Egyptian tomb. But that rediscovery thing is an important point – will revisit below.
The whole idea of Carthage discovering SA is based off of a bronze plaque found in the Brazil (if I remember right), written in Phoenician, describing how a Carthagian ship had been blown off course and had wrecked on the shores of SA. The crew apparently founded a trade colony before returning home. No one has been able to authenticate the plaque, but neither have they been able to prove it a fake.
Well, in my experience, war, famine, and search for better economic conditions correlate very strongly to armchair academics later summing the whole problem up as “overpopulation.” ;)
That's true. If it hasn't rained in five years and you can't grow any food, you suddenly have too many people.
If the neighboring country wants your land and is willing to kill you for it, there are suddenly too many people living on that land.:P The theories laid out above give a pretty believable framework for explaining almost any level of technology, dating to almost any time during the Green Age or later. If it’s uber-tech, then it’s probably a blue age city that was founded as a rebirth city. Etc. No need for the DM to map other supporting villages & neighboring cities – there were huge cities sitting in the middle of nowhere, because of possible life-shaped food-sources. Or the food sources could have died and it might have surrounding farms or villages.
I’ve always though of Green Age tech as being something similar to Eberron’s tech. Ninety percent of the people live a quasi-medieval/renaissance life-style, but there are also things like trains and air ships powered by bound elementals. (Although, I wonder how the elemental priests would have reacted to elementals being used in such a way.) Most of the technology is actually magic applied to everyday uses. There are thousands of so called magewrights (working class spell casters) who spend all day casting spells like ever burning torch and levitation just to keep the street lights and elevators working. Substitute psionics for magic and such a system could fit right into a Green Age city.
That's true. If it hasn't rained in five years and you can't grow any food, you suddenly have too many people.
Exactly. I'm surprised that they don't extend the logic to show that overpopulation is always the cause of divorce, since at least one party to the marriage appears to feel that there are too many people in that marriage. ;)
I’ve always though of Green Age tech as being something similar to Eberron’s tech. Ninety percent of the people live a quasi-medieval/renaissance life-style, but there are also things like trains and air ships powered by bound elementals. (Although, I wonder how the elemental priests would have reacted to elementals being used in such a way.) Most of the technology is actually magic applied to everyday uses. There are thousands of so called magewrights (working class spell casters) who spend all day casting spells like ever burning torch and levitation just to keep the street lights and elevators working. Substitute psionics for magic and such a system could fit right into a Green Age city.
That is true, and athas.org has the psionic adept now, which can help with these applications. One thing that I use (often, ask my PC's) is the Guardian template. With it, you have everything you need, psionic trains, elevators, sewage treatment, street cleaning, lights and whatever else you need for domestic purposes.
Then there are the military applications of the guardians. Take a psion or wilder, train them up, drop them into an orb: instant weapon's platform. Want protection, take any psionic creature with a psi-like detection ability that is long lasting an keep it around. While in general it was only the larger cities that were able to produce these things, it would not be hard to come across the process (at least during the Green Age). And the fact that they are based on obsidian (and destroyable with the right sonic effects) means that they are not too uber. a 5th level kineticist guardian can unleash a lot of damage.
I have been thinking about the CW a lot, and the tech taken to war examples I have are seriously dangerous.
Of course, even the Champion's wanted to have land to farm and live off of, so defiling wouldn't have been super rampant (even Rajaat's followers investigating the inner planes used massive trees of life rather than defile.) The Champion's could have dropped epic spell nukes, but that would have been unwise, in the grand scheme.
I can't picture anything analogous to a nuke in Athas' past, but I see something even more destructive -- whatever caused those enormous open lava ruptures across the planet surface. OTOH, it's possible that those might have been caused by a "defending" race during the CWs -- I very much doubt that Abbey's trolls were the only ones that turned around and sought an aggressive solution to the Cleansing Wars.
Sorry, I was using the term nuke in the "nova" use of the term. That is: using up all your resources in one destructive effect.
So in this case, a Champion's Epic Spell Nuke would be something that would do 100d6 damage to a 1 square mile radius or something. Don't have the math in front of me, but... You know. Check the CarOp Boards for ideas...
10d6 isn't alot for PCs at that level but its a minimum of 340 miles diameter and most creatures are low in level. As an epic spell the DC would be huge but the Epic Spell feat is really bad at making boom spells and really good at broken as hell fortify seed spells.
Apocalypse From the Sky is the closest thing to a nuke in D&D. Book of Vile Darkness but its something like 10d6 damage in a 10 mile radius/level of the caster. Level 9 spell and requires an artifact as a focus.
10d6 isn't alot for PCs at that level but its a minimum of 340 miles diameter and most creatures are low in level. As an epic spell the DC would be huge but the Epic Spell feat is really bad at making boom spells and really good at broken as hell fortify seed spells.
I was thinking of other things, but I am working on an Epic Raze spell that uses it's victims to fuel itself. Still working out the kinks though.
Regardless, If you have a Champion (let's say Egendo :P) They can cast Time Stop, then drop a ton of spells that do damage (quickened then empowered and whatnot) as well as using temporal acceleration to then drop a bunch of psionic powers too. It has the effect of carpet bombing, and is something everyone can do. The problem is that your resources are then spent for the day.
Regardless, If you have a Champion (let's say Egendo ) They can cast Time Stop, then drop a ton of spells that do damage (quickened then empowered and whatnot) as well as using temporal acceleration to then drop a bunch of psionic powers too. It has the effect of carpet bombing, and is something everyone can do. The problem is that your resources are then spent for the day.
And it wouldn't be that inconsistent with what we saw in RaFoaDK for some SKs to rush in and blitz like that, using the cleansing war army more as a *defensive* backup.
Check out the Wikipedia's account of Caesar's final battle in Gaul, the seige of Alesia that finally defeated Versengetorix. The Romans were as entrenched as Versengetorix was -- in fact at one point in the battle, another army came from the outside and the beseigers were themselves beseiged -- it was like a donut battle, if you can picture that, with the Romans being attacked from inside Alesia and from outside the seige fortifications. The object of the Gaulish attackers was to get food and water in to Versengetorix and his people, and they almost succeeded. I think that scenarios like that, where the attackers need to be able to defend as well, become even more critical in a war of annihilation. Not to mention that the champions distrusted each other, and might have feared to use up their epic spells or to become personally weak lest a rival take advantage.
Another interesting idea from RaFoaDK is the way that the SKs use their own armies to fuel their spells. Egendo's story was early in the cleansing wars, so it's consistent to have him be a bit horrified about doing that, but I think that many of the surviving SKs generally have become somewhat inured to that.
Since the core mechanic changes every few years, and is about to change again, I see more value in reconstructing CW magic that created the effects that we see today on Athas, and those described in the various official sources, than trying to figure what could be done from the current epic spell mechanics.
I wasn't proposing anything that we haven't already seen. For instance, an Epic Raze City would be nothing more than the 2ed Wall of Ash 10th level spell, that would snake though a city and add the life force of the people it killed to it as it went through the streets. Nothing crazy, just (IMO) normal extensions of existing things. Like Epic Earthquakes or a Acidic Rain storm that has a larger area of effect and longer duration. With defiling, you can augment things upwards and make things harder to dispel.
And it wouldn't be that inconsistent with what we saw in RaFoaDK for some SKs to rush in and blitz like that, using the cleansing war army more as a *defensive* backup.
I see CW armies as defensive and convetional troops, and the "core" of the army would be the support casters and the Champion. I also see many destructive magical rituals to take advantage of various styles of fighting. See Eberron's Forge of War for interesting ideas (summonable armies, among other things). Again, using DS canon and DS theme is the way to go, but also allowing us to tap into that horror that made Borys himself say it was a time best forgotten.
Check out the Wikipedia's account of Caesar's final battle in Gaul, the seige of Alesia that finally defeated Versengetorix. The Romans were as entrenched as Versengetorix was -- in fact at one point in the battle, another army came from the outside and the beseigers were themselves beseiged -- it was like a donut battle, if you can picture that, with the Romans being attacked from inside Alesia and from outside the seige fortifications. The object of the Gaulish attackers was to get food and water in to Versengetorix and his people, and they almost succeeded. I think that scenarios like that, where the attackers need to be able to defend as well, become even more critical in a war of annihilation. Not to mention that the champions distrusted each other, and might have feared to use up their epic spells or to become personally weak lest a rival take advantage.
Totally agree. I'll have to look at that.
Another interesting idea from RaFoaDK is the way that the SKs use their own armies to fuel their spells. Egendo's story was early in the cleansing wars, so it's consistent to have him be a bit horrified about doing that, but I think that many of the surviving SKs generally have become somewhat inured to that.
I think Egendo's reliance on undead soldiers as his bodyguard tell the story of his reluctance to use his troops in such a way. That said, he did that because he killed his own troops. He may, in fact, be the first Champion to really take advantage of that, and his replacement (Boyrs) could have learned that this was a viable tactic from those initial interactions with Egendo.
I can also see Champions capturing enemies and using them to fuel their spells. IIRC, Champion Magic turned people to ash and made them unresurrectable (though I may be off on that).
I tend to use alot of houserules in my game and I think you need to tweak the epic spellcasting feat/seeds alot and say no alot to potential epic abuse. Nova tricks with Timestop have been known about going back to the early days of 3.0 (we had a Sorcerer cast 19 spells in 1 round). The 3.5 version of timestop is better but is still broken as hell.
Even a spellcaster going nova with Timestop isn't as weak as one would think as they normally have a few spells left over or at worst more than a few scrolls/wands/staves etc to help carry them through until they rest up again.
Its one reason why high/epic level combats usually an initiative roll and "fighters" suck kinda attitude.
I wasn't proposing anything that we haven't already seen.
I didn't mean to suggest you had; I apologize if it came off that way. From my enthusiastic support of your Preserver Jihad ideas, both in FFN and on the boards, I assumed you realize that we're pretty much in synch here.
For instance, an Epic Raze City would be nothing more than the 2ed Wall of Ash 10th level spell, that would snake though a city and add the life force of the people it killed to it as it went through the streets. Nothing crazy, just (IMO) normal extensions of existing things. Like Epic Earthquakes or a Acidic Rain storm that has a larger area of effect and longer duration. With defiling, you can augment things upwards and make things harder to dispel.
Excellent!
In my less is more philosophy (ie use epic magic where needed) epic spells are really bad at creating blasting type spells. In 3.0 WoTC vastly overrated damage dealing spells and underated the true culprits- 3.0 Haste, Timestop, and the animal buff spells (cats grace, bulls strength etc).
Drawing on your experience from designing epic spells, what seeds do you think were involved in the epic magicks that created the huge lava rifts between Saragar and the bandit states?
Drawing on your experience from designing epic spells, what seeds do you think were involved in the epic magicks that created the huge lava rifts between Saragar and the bandit states?
Hard to say but epic magic may not have even been involved. I also use seeds from various Forgotten Realms products- Mythal seed for the wards of Ur Draxa and Saragar. In my personal notes I extended the hints of ancient Kurn being an elven city into an elven kingdom where Lava Gorge is which was created by Elven High Magic towards the end of the Cleansing Wars (as hinted at in Mindlords of the Last Sea). To be honest I hate the Epic Spellcasting feat. None of the seeds really fit the effect of creating Lava Gorge.
Non epic magic may have also been invoved- a ritual or multiple spellcasters being involved or even an unknown level 9 spell on par with Apocalypse from the Sky may have created the gorge- the equivilent of the San Andreas fault may have been there and the wrong spell at the wrong time/place could have set it off.
I didn't mean to suggest you had; I apologize if it came off that way. From my enthusiastic support of your Preserver Jihad ideas, both in FFN and on the boards, I assumed you realize that we're pretty much in synch here.
That was more for the group than you, I suppose. No need to apologize. Wouldn't want people thinking I am advocating summoning an army of gnolls from Ral or something silly. For me, pushing what exists is better than something new. Hence my (possible ab)use of Guardians IMC.
Drawing on your experience from designing epic spells, what seeds do you think were involved in the epic magicks that created the huge lava rifts between Saragar and the bandit states?
Well... Hmmm... Conjure, Energy, Transform are what I'd start with. One of the problems is the size of the rift. Something that big would need some massive mitigating factors...
That said, it may be easier to create a malformed volcano that collapses than to "break the earth" like that. You could use magma clerics for that too. I think that might be a good way of doing it. Plus, you could sacrifice earth clerics during the casting to create Krags, and this should net you some good ad hoc modifiers. Either way, a pact with the powers of magma will lower those costs.
That's the problem with epic spells though. Too fast and loose. I still need a way to reduce the costs on my Shadow Shifter AB, as some of the mitigating factors are... rather high.
It's an interesting question, since if we go with the theory that Green Age Athas had landlocked seas rather than worldwide oceans, the opening of those lava gorges probably did even more to destroy the climate of the Green Age than anything else on Athas, even more than the obsidian cataclysm. Volcanic fumes really screw with a planet's climate, IIRC.
I'm not sure life would even be possable on a world with volcanic rifts the size of the Athasian ones. Or life like Earth/Athas anyway.
I suppose the conjure seed could be used to conjure the Magma up (see Raise Island epic spell) but the sheer size of Lava Gorge seems against it.
To be honest I feel effects like this should be left off the game rules mechanically or should be used in ritual effects that are near impossable to duplicate. Imagine having a PC with a epic spell called Rend Land or something similar and they could go around and use it every day if they wanted once the epic spell is developed.
They've used epic spells to duplicate level 10 and 11 spells in the Realms from the 2nd ed boxed set Netheril Empire of Magic. Such converisons tend to be rather clunky/unplayable at best. It wan't that hard in 2nd ed to create a flying mountain (level 21+) but the spell in 3.5 IIRC the spellcraft check is over 200 which is kinda difficult even for epic PCs unless you research another epic spoell granting you a very big modifier on your skill check.
I'm not sure life would even be possable on a world with volcanic rifts the size of the Athasian ones. Or life like Earth/Athas anyway.
Perhaps. When our extrapolations from science etc. contradict the canonical facts, we stick with canonical facts, but the extrapolations remain useful to fill in the gaps. Alternately, we might posit that there's some supernatural mechanism allowing life on Athas to survive. For example, perhaps the trauma of that rifting is what caused an original spirit of Athas to fragment into Spirits of the Land, giving different land patches more isolation and protection from planetary climate shifts.
The possibilities are endless. But now that I have thought of it, an epic spell that brought the Plane of Magma closer, similar to the Rift spell, combined with a dormant or Yosemite style super volcano caldera could do the trick. One trigger the other, and the explosion was massive, or it wasn't, and a bunch of crap was released. Given the extreme nature of the CW, if there was a city there, no one would remember it now. The few that would certainly wouldn't be talking about it.
Just ideas. And, your comment about collision does open up the idea that a meteor or something could also have been "called" by an epic spell. The question I have is what is the story surrounding the Lava Gorge. I know what is in the WC, but I don't have the Dungeon mag that has the adventure in it.
Could be any effect leading to its creation- even the destruction of an artifact.
Not only would multiple epic spells "help," but using one to open a planar rift intentionally to the plane of Magma, and doing it in a way that would help the Lords there in the Eternal War would solidify that as a location. If there was already a volcano there, a vengeful druid of sufficient level could do it, especially in a siege style "I'll take you out with me" attitude.
The possibilities are endless. But now that I have thought of it, an epic spell that brought the Plane of Magma closer, similar to the Rift spell, combined with a dormant or Yosemite style super volcano caldera could do the trick. One trigger the other, and the explosion was massive, or it wasn't, and a bunch of crap was released. Given the extreme nature of the CW, if there was a city there, no one would remember it now. The few that would certainly wouldn't be talking about it.
Just ideas. And, your comment about collision does open up the idea that a meteor or something could also have been "called" by an epic spell. The question I have is what is the story surrounding the Lava Gorge. I know what is in the WC, but I don't have the Dungeon mag that has the adventure in it.
I have the Dungeonmag adventure that takes place in the Troll Grave Chasm, but I'd never heard of one that took place in the lava gorge. Are you certain there was one in the lava gorge?
I have the Dungeonmag adventure that takes place in the Troll Grave Chasm, but I'd never heard of one that took place in the lava gorge. Are you certain there was one in the lava gorge?
No. The Troll Grave Chasm is what I was thinking.