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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The 1 and the Prime" data-source="post: 5215780" data-attributes="member: 91434">Ok, ok, ok... (cracks knuckles)This actually makes more sense than the retconned by committee history of Athas in 2e canon, and probably was close to the original intent of the creator of the setting. I think they needed a long time degradation time scale to explain the unusual prevalence of psionics.Based on the cover art and the fact that A dragon was running around (and only ONE dragon) I assumed the blasted landscape BECAUSE of the dragon. It would be cool to run the campaign as "What happens when someone summons a big evil outsider and SuperPCs aren't around to squash him?"This sends the masses running to the protection of the few small enclaves left where powerful arcanists have developed ways to deter the dragon. Little do they know that the dragon is simply biding its time as there are easier targets to be had: the city-states will make a nice dessert. Of course, being a highly intelligent creature the first thing it did was seek out and destroy the centers of magical knowledge in the civilization, ensuring that the greatest threats were eliminated. A few high level wizards squirrelled themselves away for the initial onslaught in the high fantasy equivalent of a bomb shelter, and now there are so few left that they must spend all their time preparing for the dragon rather than teaching new mages.I guess the most important thing left out of Canon Athas is its Illithid age. They never explain all those half retarded Githyanki running around. Athas was an outpost in the Spelljammer setting Illithid Empire, which would also explain the culture of slavery and psionics: the planet was chosen for its special affinity for psionics as an experiment with various slave races (this makes it kinda like Tantooine where all the most powerful Jedi come from apparently). This could be used to explain the unusual absence of certain races from Athas: the Illithids never brought them. The Illithids could be the guys who summoned the Outsider/Dragon. A few or all of the City State heads could possibly be Illithids (and this explains why the Dragon wants to get rid of water). There are interesting interactions between former slaves and former masters in some of these cities where the balance of power has shifted away from the Illithids, still others manage to preserve the dominion of Illithids. Some other city states could be these new societies of composed entirely of former Illithid slaves, trying to cobble something new together but also falling into the patterns of domination imprinted on them by the Illithids (Never mind the powerful life-draining magics required to deter the Dragon).The absence of the deities is due to the oppression of the Illithids over their slaves (we could throw metal working in as another deprivation on the part of the Illithids, making it a knowledge deficit rather than a resource deficit). No sophisticated religions were ever allowed to develop. Now the humanoids are slowly building up a pantheon from the ground floor, gluing together parts of spirits and abstract conceptions formerly only patronized by animals and other lower life forms that were beneath the notice of the Illithids. This explains why these deities seem like elementals and nature spirits.An interesting conflict inherent in this setting would be that there was a destruction of a world, but an evil world to begin with, and now there is a (somewhat terrible) chance of a new beginning.</blockquote>

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