NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="humble minion" data-source="post: 8327493" data-attributes="member: 5948">I've always assumed fires on Athas were primarily coal-burning.  Pretty much other plausible fuel, from wood to dried dung, is more valuable as a raw material or as a fertiliser.  But other than a source of carbon for steelmaking (NOT a high-volume industry on Athas) there's not much else you can do with coal.  Besides, on a meta level I kinda like the bleak irony of Athasians being forced by environmental devastation to burn polluting fossil fuels, which in the long run, will contribute to further global warming.Hang on, let me find my big document of Dark Sun headcanon/flavour, there's some relevant stuff there...Found it.Cookery on Athas is largely solar-powered, due to shortages of fuel.  Firewood is unknown and dried animal dung is not available in sufficient quantities, but the sun is always there.  Most families own at least one flat slab of basalt and other dark stone.  These cooking stones are placed on the roof, heat up over the course of the day, and once heated can be used to as cooking surfaces to bake flat breads and other staple foods.  More wealthy homes, or city or military granaries, may own an array of glass lenses to focus the sun and heat the stones faster, or even glazed ceramic pots that seal water-tight and are used to slow-cook meats and stews and other foodstuffs that are moist enough for such a cooking method.There is one group of unlikely people who know without a shadow of a doubt that Athas was once lush and green.  These are coalmine slaves, who often find impressions of leaves, ferns, great trees, or even animals or fish in the coal that they hew.  Most miners are labouring slaves, and will live short and brutal lives in the appalling mines, but knowledgable foremen and surveyors last longer.  In some mines, small secret societies have formed of miners who have made the connection between defiling magic and the destuction of Athas's greenery and seek to understand more or find a method that the process might be reversed.  Educated or talented slaves may be protected by being placed into privileged positions, or falsely reported dead and hidden deep in secret chambers in the mines so that they can devote their abilities to the cause.  Some of these cells work completely alone, some are in contact with the Veiled Alliance, some are centred around earth or water priests.  And some listen to darker voices coming from deep within the earth.Borys and Oronis/Keltis were lovers, of a sort, from way back before the rebellion against Rajaat.  Keltis, as he was then, had long since won his war and wiped out the lizardmen, and was withering from ennui and the nagging guilt of his own atrocities that he was still millennia way from facing up to.  None but one of Rajaat's Champions could survive intimacy with another champion, and Borys, with his compulsion to rule and dominate, was not gentle.  But the pain made Keltis feel alive once more, and he subconsciously welcomed it as punishment.  Once Borys became the Dragon, this dynamic of intimacy, dominion, and pain transcended the physical and entered the realms of the mind and the Way.  Borys the Dragon spent centuries raking his claws through every tender spot in Keltis' quivering psyche, and Keltis abased himself in thanks for it.  When Keltis renounced defiling, remade himself, founded New Kurn, and transformed from larval dragon to young avangion, Borys knew, and it amused him.  Borys knew every single dream, wish, and thought Keltis has ever had, and Oronis is just another one of Keltis's dreams, his latest attempt to atone for the death of the lizardfolk and the desolation of Athas.  Nothing changed between them.  Although he still plans for a green Athas freed of defilers and sorcerer-kings, Oronis has never been able to break free of Borys - he is weighed down with chains wrought of thousands of years of guilt, submission, and co-dependence.  When Borys the Dragon calls, Oronis the avangion still answers, and face to face, all of his defiance withers.  The one change has been in the matter of the tithe.  Keltis the dragon sacrificed thousands of slaves to Borys' hunger, to fuel with their deaths the spells that bind Rajaat.  Oronis the avangion does not sacrifice innocents.  Instead, in the years when the tithe falls upon Kurn, he feeds Borys with his own ancient, arcane life-force.  He knows that this terrible drain upon his soul is crippling his progression towards maturing as an avangion.  He does it anyway, at least partly because the pain is so incomparable.  Borys knows this.  Oronis knows that he knows.  Borys knows that Oronis knows that he knows, and this amuses Borys more than anything else.Glassblowing is unknown on Athas, but glassmaking is not.  Brigandine armour is often manufactured by sewing thick, flattened disks of glass between layers of fabric, although it is so uncomfortable to wear in the day's heat that most warriors will only don it in the immediate expectation of battle. Djeha the Left-Handed, an itinerant air cleric originally hailing from Nibenay, invented the windmill nearly a decade before the death of Kalak.  She believes it a sacred inspiration, a blessing by which the wind's gifts may be brought tangibly home to those dwelling on the earth.  And more importantly, a windmill can do the brutal manual labour of turning a millstone or an archimedes screw, or driving a pulley to shift buckets of earth or sand.  On Athas these are the most feared tasks of any slave, terrible unrelenting work that breaks the body and tortures the mind.  Djeha hoped that the windmill would change the lives of slaves forever, and perhaps even be a step towards the institution no longer being required.  Predictably on Athas, it didn't work out well.  Djeha found herself hunted by both a faction of air priests for who chaining the wind via a device was an abomination, and also by slave traders out to extinguish a threat to their business.  Her whereabouts and wellbeing are currently unknown.  The use of windmills is restricted to some small isolated villages.  Many traders deal in slaves part time, or at least have business dealings with those who do, and refuse on principle to trade with any village using one.  For a village, cessation of trade is death.  Some slave traders take even more direct action.  No large cities have yet adopted the device, although Urik and Tyr might if it became more widely known.  Djeha refused to frequent such places, and of those few who know its secrets, none have yet braved the desert and the wrath of the great trading houses to spread the word.Unlike most metals, gold is found on Athas in moderate quantities.  Unfortunately its softness and extreme weight make it impractical for most everyday purposes, and so it is mostly used decoratively, for coinage, or jewelery.  Due to how closely it can resemble iron pyrite when found in its granular form in ancient creekbeds, gold is referred to as 'fool's iron' in many places across the Tyr valley.</blockquote>

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