Just discovered Dark Sun -- have questions!

[AdmundfortGeographer]

What's the nature of the cataclysm that shook up the setting during it's initial run, which supposedly was set 300 years prior to this new take on it?

Well, you'll probably discover the information eventually. But I'll put it in spoiler tags.

Spoiler

To begin, the Sorcerer Kings of the Tablelands region are some of the victors over Rajaat. In defeating Rajaat by imprisioning him in an extradimensional prison, the victors need to have one of their number eternally guard and renew the prison. The Sorcerer Kings make one of their number, Borys, into a full fledged dragon. The most powerful entity on the planet. He is simply known as "The Dragon" in the Tablelands. All Sorcerer Kings are all slowly evolving into full dragonhood, but Borys was "rushed" into the end stage for the task of guarding and renewing the prison of Rajaat.

It begins with one of the Sorcerer Kings, Kalak, a low-rank "dragon", scheming to concoct a ritual that will elevate him to full dragon status, jumping the middle stages right to the end. As noted, arcane magic in Dark Sun destroys life to fuel it. Mortal arcane casters merely drain plants. The Sorcerer Kings can drain life from sentient beings to cast their magic.

Kalak's ritual will involve draining a stadium full of people. Essentially, most of his own city-state will die to make him a end-stage dragon. It fails, as the secret society of preservers, the Veiled Alliance, learn of Kalak's scheme and get an artifact weapon (a spear) of halfling make into the hands of one of the stadium gladiators, who throws the spear through Kalak's heart. Kalak barely survives, but is eventually put down in rear chambers by his own chief Templar and a powerful senator backed by the heroes who flung the spear. The chief Templar is elevated to the seat of "king" of the city, and the senator wrings the clause that all slaves are to be freed.

The event sets a chain reaction into motion.

Unbeknownst to non-Sorcerer Kings, Borys requires a yearly tithe of 1,000 people (slaves as it is) from each city-state of the Tablelands to help him renew the magic imprisoning Rajaat. Suddenly one city-state is now not meeting its quota, and the other Sorcerer Kings realize that they will have to make up the slack... and they aren't pleased. If Borys doesn't get his allotted sacrifices, he rampages through the lands of the city-state who come up short, and also then grabs more from the other cities. So there was an equilibrium of sorts to keep the Dragon from rampaging.

One Sorcerer King makes a move to conquer the newly freed city of Tyr, primarily for resources. His army is turned back by the same heroes. For the time being, the Dragon is taking his tithe out of the other Sorcerer Kings. The heroes believe it is only a matter of time before the Dragon comes for his tithe from the Free City. The heroes are set in motion again. They decide the best option is to kill Dragon to stop the sacrifices. They succeed in killing the Dragon in a showdown.

The other Sorcerer Kings are freaked out now, they know that it could be a matter of time when Rajaat breaks out. The heroes learn even more of the truth things. Learning that the Dragon was simple a glorified "prison guard" with a need for lives to power the magic imprisoning an even greater evil. They learn that there was an artifact of an elder age which might help them. Called the Dark Lens, it was used by Rajaat to make the Sorcerer Kings into the new creature that is evolving into "dragonhood". The Dark Lens was also used by the rebel Sorcerer Kings victorious over Rajaat to metamorphose Borys into the endstage Dragon.

Borys was Rajaat's Champion tasked with killing all dwarves. With the Cleansing Wars over, a pair of dwarves get revenge on Borys by stealing the Dark Lens from him and going into hiding.

The heroes now venture to find the Dark Lens, some under different reasons. The new "king" of the Free City is under the impression that if he gets the Dark Lens, we will bring it to Rajaat, and have Rajaat make him a Sorcerer King. The other heroes want the Dark Lens to use again Rajaat, hopefully to create a new prison that will not require life-sacrificing magic.

The Dark Lens is found in the company of giants. The "king" of the Free City gets the Dark Lens and races to where the Dragon once stood guard. The rest of the heroes chase him. Getting there, the heroes meet up with the rest of the Sorcerer Kings, and they all decide to call a "truce" so as to prevent Rajaat from being freed. Unfortunately, the "king" got there first, and Rajaat breaks out. Bunches of Sorcerer Kings are slain by Rajaat. One of the heroes, a human sorceress who had travelled to the Pristine Tower for a solution to keep Rajaat imprisoned, was transformed into a unique powerful spellcaster that now draws energy from the sun itself, rather than life. The human sorceress gets hold of the Dark Lens and puts the "king" into his own prison, and sends Rajaat back to his prison.

The new prisons hold, but are unstable and leak elemental energy into its surroundings as a colossal violent storm.

There you go. In a large nutshell. That's from memory, so some bits may be off.


Regards,
Eric Anondson

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

Josh,

I read the novels. My advice, stay away from them. They were less than impressive.

With the exception of the Lynn Abbey novels ("The Brazen Gambit", "Cinnabar Shadows", "The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King"), which I thought were brilliant for depicting a broken land filled with broken people. And it also helps you understand what will make a dragon king tick...

 

[Desdichado]

Huh. Very strong echos of Rajaat as the Dominator and the Dragon-kings as Taken there. I can't believe that Glen Cook wasn't a major influence on the author of the setting.

Which is good, as I'm incorporating a lot of that same influence! I guess that explains a lot of the parallels between my homebrew and Dark Sun.

Can I get a bit more detail on the start of the Green Age; where did the other races come from?

 

[Mark Hope]

Other posters have pretty much covered the plot elements that you asked about. One point that might be worth mentioning is that the halflings of the Blue Age weren't masters of psionics (which didn't arise until the Green Age), but were masters of lifeshaped technology (an organic technology that works similar to grafts and symbionts in 3e).

I'll second the recommendation of Lynn Abbey's novels. Some readers disagree with her plot elements (much as they do with the initial Prism Pentad series) but she captures the Dark Sun flavour excellently.

Anyway, if you're keen on DS, please drop by www.athas.org - which is the official Dark Sun website. You'll find a whole set of rules and supplementary material including monster manuals and adventures as well as setting information. There's also a thriving DS community who frequent the WotC Dark Sun Discussion Boards, which is also a good place to go for up-to-the-minute DS news and chat.

 

[Mark Hope]

Can I get a bit more detail on the start of the Green Age; where did the other races come from?

The Blue Age came to an end as a result of the halfling nature masters (the rhulisti) attempting to correct a lifeshaped experiment/accident that got out of hand. While attempting to expand the powers of the ocean, they instead created a "brown tide" which began to devour the oceans. Their response was to create the Pristine Tower and use its powers to destroy the Brown Tide. This caused a change in the nature of the sun (the Tower is somehow linked into Athas' sun itself) and turned the sun from blue to yellow.

As a result of these cataclysmic global changes, the Blue Age came to an end with the shrinking of the oceans and the rhulisti civilisation fell. The surviving rhulisti nature-masters then used the Pristine Tower to convert themselves (and the majority of the rhulisti species) into new races. These "Rebirth" races became the new races of Athas - elves, dwarves, humans as well as the aforementioned pyreen, of which Rajaat was a member. So the races of Athas are all descended from the initial rhulisti stock. Some rhulisti degenerated into barbaric savagery, forgetting their past, and a small group (isolated on islands that later became the Jagged Cliffs) managed to preserve fragments of rhulisti wisdom and rudimentary life-shaping technologies. There are also rhulisti sleeping in suspended animation in at least on location beneath the surface of Athas. An unrealised plot development from late 2e days also features rhulisti returning to Athas from an orbiting vessel commonly believed to be a comet, but mentioning this in most DS circles tends to produce, er, varied responses

It was later use of the Pristine Tower by Rajaat and his Champions that turned the yellow sun to crimson and ended Green Age (along with, oh, a few millenia of apocalyptic warfare), bringing about the state of the world as it now stands.

Oh, and welcome to Athas, btw .

 

[Desdichado]

Thanks! I did go poke around athas.org a bit yesterday, but like all the official setting fanpages, it seems to assume that you already own and are familiar with the setting rather than actually providing good overviews of them. This history of Athas, which is gradually shaping up here in this thread, is a big part of what interests me about it. Fascinating stuff! Is there a good resource -- a book to read, or otherwise, that would cover that pretty well?

 

[Christopher Lambert]

Anyway, I'm still pretty much only familiar with the setting from the Noonan (and Paizo editors) version of the setting, not the original. I've picked up from a number of places that there was not really a great fan reaction to the new version of the setting, which made a number of compromises to accomodate the core rules more at the expense of what many obviously thought were integral changes to the rules in the setting. Anyone who's a fan care to chime in and have a little discussion on the differences?

There's also a lot of things that clearly weren't explored in any depth in the articles that I had questions about; like this chap who created the sorceror-kings; who is he? What's the nature of the cataclysm that shook up the setting during it's initial run, which supposedly was set 300 years prior to this new take on it?

[sblock]Rajaat created the sorcerer kings. He was a pyreen, an "uber-race" (think Chosen of Mystra, but without stealing the player's thunder) which combines the best aspects of halflings, humans, elves, dwarves and maybe some other races. They're all druid/psions and very beautiful... except Rajaat. They're also immortal, or close to it.

Rajaat was twisted and ugly, and if he was a druid I've never heard of it. As the first sorcerer, he invented arcane magic, both preserving and defiling. He seemed to be particularly fond of Transmutation and water magic.

He wanted to undo the disaster that ended the Blue Age (it was now the Green Age... instead of being covered with water, Athas was covered with forests) and wipe out all the races except the halflings (they and the kreen were the original inhabitants of the Blue Age). Rajaat didn't seem to notice the existence of the kreen; he didn't like or hate them, probably not even realizing they were sentient.

His plans were foiled, however, when his attempts to teach halflings arcane magic utterly failed. Maybe they couldn't handle it, or they weren't good at it. Indeed, most halflings who saw him simply ran from his face.

So he tested the other races and found out that humans made really good defilers. He trained at least 14 Champions in arcane magic and psionics. He also taught them the secrets of dragon metamorphosis, a process which changed the color of the sun to a bloated red and started the hellish transformatioin of Athas.

Each Champion was assigned a race to wipe out. Rajaat said he would kill off the halflings but hid them instead; his job was to kill the humans (but of course that was a secret). During this time at least one Champion (Myron) was turned against him and was killed. Rajaat's new Champion was the warlike Hamanu. Wiping out the other races, their defiling magic destroyed most of the planet, turning it into a desert.

Eventually his secret was leaked, and Rajaat tried to kill his Champions. He failed, and got locked up in another dimension. However, he was so strong it took a lot of life force to keep Rajaat in; the life force of thousands of sentient beings.

Borys, the leader of the revolt, was given enough power to become a high-level dragon. Unfortunately, dragons of 25th to 28th level go insane, and since Borys got all this power all at once... he went insane. Calming him was a difficult, long process that involved a lot of running away by the other Champions.

Eventually, Borys calmed down, but by then his defiling magic had destroyed much of the world (well, what was left of it). Each sorcerer king took a city of their own, and their numbers were slowly whittled down.[/sblock]

 

[Desdichado]

Cool. So, a few questions still: this Blue Age; if it was mostly water, what the heck did the halflings do? Were they essentially something like Pacific Islanders in culture?

This changing of the sun from Blue to Yellow to Red; what effects did that have on the world?

 

[Christopher Lambert]

Cool. So, a few questions still: this Blue Age; if it was mostly water, what the heck did the halflings do? Were they essentially something like Pacific Islanders in culture?

This changing of the sun from Blue to Yellow to Red; what effects did that have on the world?

[sblock]The halfling civilization during the Blue Age used lots of life-shaping, including huge ships. Basically, you make protoplasm into whatever shape you want. Some of their creations had some intelligence to them, too.

The kreen could survive in a moist environment, but at the time were only semi-sentient. They looked like thri-trin, but you'll need the DSMC II or, better yet, Thri-kreen of Athas to know what one looks like. Basically, they had two claws and four legs. They also had wings, letting them move from one island to another.

Druids and possibly elemental clerics came into existence during this era. There was also a war between the life-shapers and nature-benders, but that didn't seem to have much effect.

Psionics didn't exist yet.

The halflings tried an experiment to double the productivity of the ocean, creating the Brown Tide. Obviously, that was bad. Indeed, it caused the fall of their civilization. In a desperate effort to keep things as they were, halflings used the Pristine Tower to fix things. This gigantic artifact was probably made through a combo of life-shaping and druidic magic, and it drew power from the sun (changing it's color for the first time). In addition to ending the Brown Tide (and starting the Green Age ... where did all that water go?) it also caused lots of mutations.

Halflings began to transform into other races, including the pyreen. Psionics also started to appear. The kreen were also transformed into thri-trin, six kreen subraces, and zik-chil. The kreen founded a civilization far to the west.

No, I don't know what effect changing the color of the sun had, other than to say it was a bad thing.[/sblock]

 

[Droid101]

Josh,

I read the novels. My advice, stay away from them. They were less than impressive.

Not to sound harsh, but this guy is nuts.

The novels are great.

If you want to read mind-blowing psionic combat, get the novels.