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Message: <blockquote data-quote="reanjr" data-source="post: 1956310" data-attributes="member: 20740">It's been a while, but I'll try to be accurate.Rajaat the Warbringer was a pyreen, one of a rightous peaceful race that... did something or other... not really important.  Anyway, in his studies of Athas he discovered much of the history of the Blue Age, when the only intelligent race (there is an implied supposition that this only applies to the humanoid races, so Thri-Kreen don't count for instance) was the halflings, who were high masters of psionics.At some point, the halflings tried some uber-psionic experiment meant to do good, but it ended up changing the world for the worse and ushered in the Green Age and the other races.  This is when the sun went dark.Rajaat was also the first sorcerer; the first to discover how to harness magic.  He discovered the two primary paths of sorcery, Preserving and Defiling, though he only taught Preserving publicly.  Privately, he brought ambitious people to him to study Defiling.Sometime during this era, he also discovered a way to harness great energies by combining psionics and magic together, but he found humans were the only ones with the aptitude to do so (due to level limits in 2e; technically half-elves could do it to), so he chose 15 champions from among his most devoted human followers.Why was he doing this?  Because somehow his insane mind had decided that it was his duty to return the world to its former splendor (the Blue Age).  And he believed it was the unfit races that were the cause.  So he planned a mass genocide of all races, planning to leave the world to the halflings.He created the Dark Lens (I think, this may have come later) to focus energy to transform his 15 champions into what would later be called sorcerer-kings.  At first, they were physically changed little, but over time, as their powers in psionics and magic grew, they began to change by using rituals sometimes requiring the deaths of hundreds or thousands of people.  He assigned a single race to each of his champions and sent them on their way.Each of the champions ammassed armies, though each champion was practically an army in and of himself.  They spread across the land and systematically eradicated entire races (gnomes, pixies, orcs, lizardmen [almost], etc.)  Their powerful defiling is what turned the planet into the waste it became.Eventually (and I don't know how it took them this long to figure out that the only race left out of the genocide was halflings and they were all of genius intelligence), they surmised Rajaat's plan and deemed him mad (this was after some races had been wiped out, though).  They decided to fight back, but they needed someone even more powerful than themselves to do so.  So they harnessed their energy to complete the transformation each of them had only begun on a single one of their number (Borys of Ebe, Butcher of Dwarves, 13th Champion of Rajaat).  This turned Borys into the Dragon of Tyr (which by the way could have mopped the floor with two great wyrm golds without batting an eye).  They subsequently imprisoned Rajaat in the Black (a plane analagous to the plane of shadow and negative energy combined; Athas had a very different and simplified cosmology), in a region called the Hollow.So, that's Rajaat in a nutshell.As for the cataclysm, I suppose they are referring to the events surrounding the heroes of the city-state of tyr.  To put it very shortly, a group of slaves (Rikus, Neeva, ... and a couple of others), a sympathetic noble (Agis of Asticles), and a ruthless, power-hungry traitor named Tithian toppled their sorcerer-king, Kalak, killing him during an ambitious transformation ritual.  They then, through happenstance, ended up killing another sorcerer-queen and Borys the Dragon and releasing Rajaat from his imprisonment briefly.  Rajaat, before being reimprisoned, killed another of the sorcerer-kings, imprisoned another, and did something else to another one.  So basically, the entire power structure shifted due to their actions.They might also be referring to something only hinted at in official material, which is the return of a sorcerer-king (also called dragon-kings, especially when further along in the transformation) named Dregoth (Giants were his assigned task, and anyone familiar with Athasian giants knows he must have pulled the short straw), the most advanced of the dragon-kings save Borys himself and also a Kaisharga (sort of a lich).  These events never transpired in the published material, though an adventure was started (Dregoth Ascending) and I believe eventually released by the official fansite athas.org.</blockquote>

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