Dragon 338: Returning to Athas, part1

[Wik]

Would that be the same design that dictates that clerics, paladins, invokers, and avengers need to be added in some way?

owait...

-O

Here is kind of a good point. The designers did a good thing by cutting out the power source - in fact, I'm amazed they did it. It was a great step, and was a bigger step than I thought they'd take. Kudos to them for doing it.

That being said, read what Rich Baker had to say, here:

Now, some of you Dark Sun purists might be inclined to say “High elves don’t have any place in my Athas!” But we think it’s important for someone who’s new to the D&D game with 4th Edition to find many/most of the things they regard as being in the core of the D&D game in the Dark Sun setting. If someone out there is a huge eladrin fan – you know, the guy or gal at the table who *always* plays an eladrin – we don’t want to give him or her a reason not to give Dark Sun a try. So that means we’d want to find a place for the eladrin to appear in Dark Sun.

So, it's important for someone that's new to the game to have Eladrin, so we need to fit them in somehow. But to hell with the people that like playing the Divine Classes... god knows there's no one out there who *always* plays a Paladin, right?

What about the people who always play a tiefling? Or the people that always play a half-orc? Should those be accomodated? I hope not. Because it leads to the "kitchen sink syndrome", which I think is universally decried to be a "bad thing" when it comes to Dark Sun.

My two cents? WotC knows that the Feywild sells. It's an interesting new 4eism, and it generally works. My current campaign is set in the feywild, and I do like it. And I know a lot of 4ers like it, too. I believe there's talk of a feywild planar book coming out, too, right? Not to mention a lot of fey-themed monsters out there. Putting in a feywild helps GMs access that material.

Which makes me wonder - and this is an honest question here, no snark or anything intended - why is it okay to say "these races do not exist, or if they do, it's in tiny amounts" for most of the races/classes that shouldn't be in Dark Sun... but they have to shoehorn in Eladrin and the Feywild?

Why can't they just throw in a sidebar explaining this, rather than trying to tie it all into the core setting?

Seriously - what does the feywild ADD to the setting? Especially when everyone is making a point of saying it only exists in a small amount? The way I see it, when someone says "hey, it's barely in existence on Athas!" I hear "We had to find a way to put it in, but we kind of think maybe it'll annoy the purists a bit too much, so we deliberately gimped it and pushed it off to the side".

Again, though, it's all academic to me. I'm buying my Dark Sun book the day it comes out. I've been planning my campaign for a year. The guys at WotC are doing great work, and I'm sure it's going to be a perfectly fine product. I just personally believe they made two poorly thought out design decisions that I will not be using in my own game.

Let it be said now, though, that if the one Dark Sun adventure that gets released prominently features an Athasian feywild, I may have to go on strike.

 

[Obryn]

Seriously - what does the feywild ADD to the setting? Especially when everyone is making a point of saying it only exists in a small amount? The way I see it, when someone says "hey, it's barely in existence on Athas!" I hear "We had to find a way to put it in, but we kind of think maybe it'll annoy the purists a bit too much, so we deliberately gimped it and pushed it off to the side".

I have rather the opposite reaction. I look at it as: This is a 4e version of Dark Sun, so we're starting with the assumption that Green Athas was basically a 4e setting, rather than a 2e setting. As such, the Feywild existed. What happened to it? Is it still there? Is there a way to make it cool and interesting, while keeping true to the basic ideas of Dark Sun?

If you start from this world-building perspective, rather than from the assumption that 4e designers must "shoehorn" in 4e concepts... having Eladrin and the Feywild, but no Divine classes, makes perfect sense.

-O

 

[Wik]

I have rather the opposite reaction. I look at it as: This is a 4e version of Dark Sun, so we're starting with the assumption that Green Athas was basically a 4e setting, rather than a 2e setting. As such, the Feywild existed. What happened to it? Is it still there? Is there a way to make it cool and interesting, while keeping true to the basic ideas of Dark Sun?

If you start from this world-building perspective, rather than from the assumption that 4e designers must "shoehorn" in 4e concepts... having Eladrin and the Feywild, but no Divine classes, makes perfect sense.

-O

That would be the crux of where we differ, then. I'm seeing it as an adaptation of a 2e setting into 4e rules, with 4eisms added on for marketing purposes. So, we're coming at it from different perspectives. Fair enough.

Still, I'd like to think that if Dark Sun had never been released, and that this was the first time Athas had ever seen the light of day, I'd still look at the feywild and say "why does this need to be here?"

To be honest, though, I probably wouldn't. So, fair enough.

But I really don't see the point of a feywild on Athas. "Desert cranked to 11" implies that the Athasian deserts are NOT the worst place to be. "Super Magical Desert" implies that it is a more serene place, which also doesn't work. Which basically means Athasian Desert = Feywild Desert... in which case, why include the latter at all?

 

[Ahnirades]

But I really don't see the point of a feywild on Athas. "Desert cranked to 11" implies that the Athasian deserts are NOT the worst place to be. "Super Magical Desert" implies that it is a more serene place, which also doesn't work. Which basically means Athasian Desert = Feywild Desert... in which case, why include the latter at all?

Magical doesn't necessarily mean serene.

As a theoretical example of difference, the Athasian Feywild might be the place where mirages become real, and hunger for those who behold them.

 

[Wik]

Magical doesn't necessarily mean serene.

As a theoretical example of difference, the Athasian Feywild might be the place where mirages become real, and hunger for those who behold them.

I understand that.

However, both of those examples do not scream "athas" to me. They scream "ravenloft". And yes, they're cool ideas, I'm not faulting you that. But they would break the "feel" of the setting were I to present them at my table.

Athas is a place where the natural world has been corrupted, and is now dying. It is not a place where the are magical analogs - anything of the sort simply dilutes the fact that it is a dying realm, but it's the only realm you got.

For what it's worth, there is only one "plane" in any Athas I've ever run - a hodgepodge of the ethereal and the place where psionic combat takes place. A sort of shadow realm. And it's only really reached through your psyche - there are no physical forms there. It was thrown in simply to allow many D&D spells to make sense.... in 4e, where that requirement no longer applies, I'll be dropping it.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I think that's a pretty big exaggeration. Having a few tiny pockets of magic desert scattered across the world is hardly what I'd call "a place of magic and nature that you can run away to."

I think there's a large distance between "magic desert scattered across the world" and "Feywild."

The first is part and parcel of Athas, a place any PC or NPC can wander into. It's like the mythic deserts that Rich cited on the blog. Those are cool and deserve to be part of a "desert world" setting.

The second is a magical place that PC creatures move in and out of basically whenever they need to.

The first is a place of mystery and adventure that can be right next door. As in "the magic desert is a day's travel away and lies between us and the nearest city-state."

The second is a sidebar world, and a known quantity, a tool the PC's use.

The first reaction many players have to Athas is "how do I escape this brooding land of doom?" If some shiny guy in our party can do it every 5 minutes or so, it implies that it can't be really that hard, and then the game becomes about finding and running away to the place that is Not Athas, rather than on dealing with the troubles of Athas itself. It's not about Dark Sun anymore. It's about the Feywild. And I can do that adventure in any campaign.

That's an effect, created at the table, by players themselves, in the course of play. It's not just an academic distinction between "loyalty to the 2e set" and "fresh new 4e toys." It's a problem with how the setting behaves.

I get the impression, KM, that you would be happy with nothing other than the total eradication of the Feywild and eladrin in Dark Sun. I guess I don't have anything to say that would make you feel better.

I'm sorry if I gave that impression. That's not really accurate.

I could have been OK with an Eladrin race, really. Back in an earlier thread talking about this, I speculated that an Eladrin without the Feywild on Dark Sun might look something like a PC-version Bralani (refluff planar teleport into a whirlwind of sand -- done! Heck, the shardminds are halfway there already!) and be totally cool. There's certainly other ways you could've gone too (maybe they become more Primal-oriented to protect their homes after the world started collapsing; perhaps they are Preservers who master illusion rituals to protect their cities from the sorcerer-kings with mirages; whatever). Some solutions might've involved swapping out a racial power or something, but cross-planar teleportation is fairly inappropriate for Athas, in my book.

That's because adding the Planes to Athas is something that is more problematic for me, and the Feywild specifically seems redundant at best. It ruins the isolation that makes the place special and dangerous. Escaping the world for another one is unsatisfying when I've chosen to play in a given world. I've described why that is quite a bit by this point.

The only thing I can do now is understand why it was so important to have these things, and to have them be like this. What would the setting be missing, if they weren't there, in this way? Why was it OK to boot out Bane and Pelor and Tiamat, but it was important to preserve the Feywild? The reasoning that you guys wanted to cleave fairly close to the 4e PH is a little unsatisfying, since part of what I, at least, want in a new setting, is something that is non-standard, and also that the Feywild isn't (or shouldn't be) an inextricable part of the rules of the game. Nothing about the Eladrin demands a Feywild. And being non-standard isn't something that I would expect from Eberron or Forgotten Realms, which are pretty inclusive by definition (and pretty cool because of that inclusion!) but it is absolutely something I would expect from Dark Sun, which is made cool, in part, by its exclusion.

And perhaps, in turn, I can help you understand why cosmology is kind of a big deal in settings, at least for me.

It's not about excluding anything, per se. It's about the effects that including certain things has on the emotion I'm trying to get out of players at the table.

Personally, I think that having defiling destroy 99.9% of an entire plane of existence, having the people of that plane becoming near-mythical anti-magic zealots, and having places in the desert where the vestiges of an ancient civilization periodically appear and disappear is perfectly in keeping with Dark Sun's motifs, and lead to some really great story possibilities in the Dark Sun milieu. For example:

The party joins up with an elf tribe to make the trip to a nearby city-state. During the journey, they discover that some of these elves aren't elves at all, but eladrin, and the party's Veiled Alliance member is a target for execution.

This plot is entirely possible and likely without the Feywild, and without wizard-hating Eladrin. Largely because no one really likes the Veiled Alliance, and that member could be targeted for execution by any number of, heck, normal elves.

After their caravan is raided, the PCs stumble through the desert. Parched and dying, they come across the ruins of an ancient sand-blasted building where they take refuge and even delve into the ruins in search of treasure. After recovering, they depart, only to find that once a few hundred yards away from the ruins the entire structure has vanished.

This doesn't require another plane of existence. It maybe requires an epic-level conceal city ritual or something, if you want to get mechanical about it. Which fits in with the idea of Preserver eladrin who are going into hiding.

A dune trader the PCs have worked with before returns to Nibenay to sell his goods, but the PCs notice that he is acting oddly. When one of Nibenay's templars approaches the dune trader for her normal bride, the dune trader attacks and slays her. The party discovers that the dune trader's mind was tinkered with by a powerful psion, turning him into an anti-spellcaster time bomb. To restore the dune trader's mind, they must find and slay this psion, whose tower only appears when you approach it from the west at sunset.

This goes in hand with the first thing: you don't need Eladrin or the Feywild to have wizard-hating enemies in Dark Sun. Pretty much anything will fit that niche.

And, to show that my ideas are meant to be constructive criticism, here's some adventures they could construct:

• Defiling to Preserve [Paragon Tier]: An area of desert is only marked on maps with a skull and crossbones. The PC's are forced to explore the region when a young Noble man goes missing, and the city-state is put under a draconian crack-down. Returning the son of this powerful noble will ease the pressures on the city. The PC's discover that the son ran away into the unmarked area of desert seemingly following elven rumors of an astoundingly beautiful princess. The trail disappears in an otherwise empty region of the desert, but with a Skill Challenge, the party can discover a persistent, and slowly-widening, aura of defilement, as well as an opening simply in the air around them, revealing an opulent palace and verdant grounds, with copious green plants, and flowing water from fountains. This place of unparalleled beauty is, as the party can notice, an illusion, maintained by that widening aura of defiling magic. In the palace, they find the noble's son, and the lone "princess," a near-immortal eladrin Queen who resorted to defiling magic to protect her castle millennia ago, when the Feywild was being destroyed. She is living a persistent lie, half-insane, and the noble, smitten with her enchantment rituals, has largely become enslaved to her, unaware of the low-key defiling happening to his body as he lays with her. If the PC's can throw some harsh reality into this persistent fantasy, they can perhaps save the noble's son, though they will also be responsible for destroying a place of true beauty by slaying the Queen and her guards. This may leave them questioning the lengths they would go to themselves, to have what they took from the Queen.
• Ashes, Ashes, We All Fall Down: The Eladrin city of Balvinir has fallen. The guild of preservers that sustained the city's illusory walls was weakened when one died, after hundreds of thousands of years, making it impossible to maintain the rituals that hid the city from the Sorcerer-Kings in the region. Now, their armies attack, in concert, this lovely, but tragic, place, which has suddenly become exposed. The Eladrin are determined to fight to the last of them, but the PC's might be able to save a few, by fighting against the Sorcerer-Kings themselves, by amassing armies of those opposed, by playing off the always-suspicious Kings against each other, or by finding a preserver to take the dead one's place, restoring the protections on the city, at least for now. Of course, they're likely to make new enemies from this. And the party may decide not to help the Eladrin at all, to simply profit themselves off of this dying civilization. The Eladrin may not be so pure, after all, either: part of their final appearance involves a massive, desperate, suicide assault on one particular city-state (perhaps that of the PC's, or their allies). Heedless of the destruction they cause in their wake, the eladrin are mad with mourning.
• City of the Wind: Eladrin on Athas are known to be connected to the new natural order: harsh and unforgiving, largely avatars of flaying sand-storms and brutal solar light. People live in fear of their horrible natural powers, wielded personally and intelligently, rather than the mere callous destruction the natural world generally turns on the people here. Thus, the appearance of the migratory, mobile, City of the Wind on the horizon, has the people in this city-state terrified. They have no love for their sorcerer-king, but they do love their lives, and as the sandstorms begin to give way to static-electicity thunder, and alternate with searing drought and blistering solar light, the people here become panicked. Which is entirely in the favor of the current Sorcerer-King. Using the fear of the populace to usher in an age of human sacrifice, the sorcerer-king wages war against his enemies, using the City of the Wind as a buffer. In the chaos, the PC's can stop the sacrifices, save the city from both natural disasters, and Sorcerer-King made disasters, and perhaps even liberate the town. Or, they could all be buried beneath enemy armies and natural disasters both. The choice is largely up to the party: what they fight, who they irk, and who they make peace with.

Which is just a sampling of the different ways Eladrin could have been used, without involving the Feywild as a "plane of existence" that PC's can flee to, to get away from Athas's suffering.

Gotta go rock-climbing with the girl now, but we can hash this out more later, if you'd like to maybe try for some mutual understanding.

 

[The Little Raven]

Which is just a sampling of the different ways Eladrin could have been used, without involving the Feywild as a "plane of existence" that PC's can flee to, to get away from Athas's suffering.

You can't flee to the Feywild to get away from Athas' suffering. Why? It's the mortal world dialed up to 11... and the mortal world is dying. That means that the remnants of the Feywild (since, as stated, 99.9% of it has been destroyed by defiling, until only small pockets remain) are dying too... and if its death throes are turned up to 11, that doesn't sound like a shiny, happy place to go and hide out. That sounds like a deathtrap that would hypnotize you while draining the vital essence from your body.

 

[Wik]

You can't flee to the Feywild to get away from Athas' suffering. Why? It's the mortal world dialed up to 11... and the mortal world is dying. That means that the remnants of the Feywild (since, as stated, 99.9% of it has been destroyed by defiling, until only small pockets remain) are dying too... and if its death throes are turned up to 11, that doesn't sound like a shiny, happy place to go and hide out. That sounds like a deathtrap that would hypnotize you while draining the vital essence from your body.

Except, "The mortal world dialed to 11" is not a good thing in Dark Sun.

To say "The Feywild is an even more deadly and dangerous place than the deserts of athas" is essentially saying "hey, the deserts of athas aren't all that bad". It sets up a precedent in the game, that the wilderness is not the worst place to be - there are worse places.

plus, there are plenty of places in athas that "hypnotize you and drain you of your vital essences". There are also pools that suck the moisture from your skin, psionic beings that make you kill all your friends and then go for a silt bath, and so on and so forth.

Dialling those real-world critters "up to 11" kind of belittles their own creepiness, right? What's the point of the real world if everything in the feywild is bigger and stronger? What winds up happening then goes something like this:

Heroic Tier: PCs explore the athasian deserts.
Paragon: The GM realizes many of the tough monsters are feywild critters. PCs move to the Dark Sun Feywild.
Epic: PCs fully explore the feywild, and then go back to the material plane, which they have had little contact with. The campaign makes little sense now, so the game dissolves. This causes frustration in the players, who eventually relieve that frustration by killing everyone at a local sunday school.

Now, you for one may be up for flagrant baby-killing, but I happen to have morals. And I will not stand by and listen as you preach mass infanticide.

Or something.

On a more serious note, the feywild can be cool. But it does not fit in with the athasian philosophy. KM makes many very good points on why that is. Now, both of us have not said "OMG I HAET DARK SUN NOW! FLAME FLAME FLAME!" or anything like that. But we have expressed some concerns that that original statement of "we're not just going to do a kitchen sink!" is not being adhered to. Because there is a sense that some designers are trying to find some way to shoehorn in something that does not fit, because they feel it has to be there for some reason.

 

[keterys]

Wik/Kamikaze, the feywild you seem to be assuming is at odds with the description we were given. Ie, that there are small spots on the map - not connected to each other - that touch the athasian feywild.

There's no ability to go into the feywild for a tier. It's not a plane. It's a single tower here, a single oasis there, etc.

There's a very big difference in flavor between - "Here's the Athasian version of a race" and "The gods are dead. Divine power source isn't available*. If they seem equivalent to you, then I suspect it might be built more on a dislike for one or more specific races.

I mean - is it more a dislike of Fey Step? ("blink elves" sounds pretty loaded, Kamikaze...)

* with implicit "but check out this psionic one that people have turned towards instead"

 

[Obryn]

But I really don't see the point of a feywild on Athas. "Desert cranked to 11" implies that the Athasian deserts are NOT the worst place to be. "Super Magical Desert" implies that it is a more serene place, which also doesn't work. Which basically means Athasian Desert = Feywild Desert... in which case, why include the latter at all?

I dunno yet. But from what I've seen, I think it could be an excellent addition.

Which is why I'm going to wait until the book is actually released and we have actual, substantive information on the role of the feywild.

I think there's a large distance between "magic desert scattered across the world" and "Feywild."

The first is part and parcel of Athas, a place any PC or NPC can wander into. It's like the mythic deserts that Rich cited on the blog. Those are cool and deserve to be part of a "desert world" setting.

The second is a magical place that PC creatures move in and out of basically whenever they need to.

The first is a place of mystery and adventure that can be right next door. As in "the magic desert is a day's travel away and lies between us and the nearest city-state."

The second is a sidebar world, and a known quantity, a tool the PC's use.

The first reaction many players have to Athas is "how do I escape this brooding land of doom?" If some shiny guy in our party can do it every 5 minutes or so, it implies that it can't be really that hard, and then the game becomes about finding and running away to the place that is Not Athas, rather than on dealing with the troubles of Athas itself. It's not about Dark Sun anymore. It's about the Feywild. And I can do that adventure in any campaign.

That's an effect, created at the table, by players themselves, in the course of play. It's not just an academic distinction between "loyalty to the 2e set" and "fresh new 4e toys." It's a problem with how the setting behaves.

What makes you think it's going to be any of those things? A sidebar world, a known quantity, usable by the PCs, and available for escape from Athas?

-O