Green Hell, Dark Sun
Athas is dying, but not because it's drying up, but because it's been choked out by a dreadful fecundity. Torrid jungles have swallowed most of the former civilization. The roads between city states must be cut anew every few weeks. Metal armor and weapons quickly corrode and rust away. The jungle is not just alive, but hungry. With the dimmer sunlight, plants have been forced to become predatory. Athas more as some versions of Pulp Venus, Weinbaum's "Parasite Planet" being particular useful, perhaps.
Frozen Beneath A Dark Sun
The sun isn't just dark, but dim, and Athas is frozen in its final Ice Age. There are deserts, true, but deserts of trackless white. The sorcerer-kings' main drawn would be their ability to create magical warmth in the cities to keep people alive. We'd have to forego that Brom barbaric costuming...Well, maybe not if we believe Joe Jusko:
9 comments:
First one reminds me of that book Hothouse by Brian Aldiss
Alan Dean Foster's Midworld books would also be good inspiration for a green hell Athas. Perhaps the Iceworld novels could offer some inspiration too, although that world's much less hostile, at least for the natives who've evolved to deal with the conditions.
Occurs to me that a drowned Atahas could also work. An ocean is easily as inhospitable as a desert if sources of fresh water are few and far between, and the city-states (and i suppose the cannibal halflings) could be in control of the only decent sized dry land remaining. You could have sargasso mats as a rough cognate for the silt sea - you can't just sail across them in a normal ship, so you have to find other ways to cross.
They could always pave it.
@Tanner - I used a Hothouse cover illustration!
@Dick - Oceanic Athas would definitely work.
@bombasticus - They paved post-apocalypse and put up a parking lot.
I kind of like bombasticus's suggestion as a third option here. "Coruscant in disrepair" as it were.
A few years ago I made a pitch for a cold Dark Sun setting called "Black Ice". The pitch went like this:
What if the designers of Dark Sun stuck to their original premise of a war-torn, dying ice world? What if, instead of despotic templar-run states, the seven city-states were centers of industry and light and magic? What if magic was a finite resource, and using it draws the cold closer? Welcome to the world of Black Ice.
The decadent, magic-powered industries of the seven city-states are failing. Points of light in a dark and frozen landscape. The bloated witch-kings’ greedy and tyrannical grip on their subjects stands or falls by the supply of magic. Outside the walls of the city-states, warbands of wild tribesmen and monsters roam. The raging Tarrasque devours all. Survivors in the icy wastes rely on their physical fitness and magical abilities to stay alive.
Adventurers hunt for exotic black icecrystals to power the magitech machines of the witch-kings. Underneath the ice, deep dungeons seal away the mysteries of the ancients and their undead remains. And in a deep dark Pit, ancient and petty gods slumber.
The light is fading from (Ante-Arctica) and each spell cast weakens the sun and drains the magic of the world further. Welcome to the land of black ice.
Me likey. I guess my Athas as Mad Max post last year didn't go far enough...
@Peter Taken great enough futureward, Black Ice becomes Hodgson's The Night Land.
I think Green Hell Dark Sun is going into my post post apocalyptic Earth homebrew world.
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