Just when you probably thought we were finally, finally headed into Fifth Edition D&D, i.e. the material people are actually familiar with and want to read about, it’s time to take yet another journey into a missed release from the beforetimes. Reader of the site Nathan Blanton recently wrote in about a Second Edition release that should’ve been covered, one that I’d skipped past completely without realizing it because the module was part of the Dark Sun product line. Now, there are plenty of tangentially planar releases from this period of time, but that’s because it’s when Ravenloft was in full swing. However, Ravenloft, despite existing in a weird demiplane (until Fourth Edition retconned that horribly), played by the rule of not really interacting with the other planes. It was a prison, or series of prisons, by design, and as such it was essentially not part of the game’s greater cosmology except in theory. Oh it was there, but since you couldn’t really use it in a Planescape Campaign unless you were doing something ridiculous—and running Die, Vecna, Die! certainly counts as ridiculous—I largely ignored it. The scope was just too much. And in my head, Athas and its miserable inhabitants, had a similar issue. This particular part of the Prime was inaccessible to most of the greater cosmology, and so I could skip over the entire campaign setting without much of a thought.
Whoops.
To understand why I fallaciously believed this, it’s probably worth delving into the particulars of this weird Prime Material Plane. Rather than the usual planar connections, Athas was only connected with the rest of the multiverse by two, somewhat unique transitory planes, neither of which actually helped much with getting out of the miserable place (its crystal sphere is impassable as well). First is The Black, which is essentially the Demiplane of Shadow on a much larger scale. I am no expert in this campaign setting and have no plans of ever becoming one (its aesthetic and overwhelming amount of slavery never appealed to me), but my basic understanding is that The Black connects only to an even bleaker area called The Hollow, which is basically the Negative Energy Plane. None of this helps at all with leaving Athas, which leads us to the Grey, the more well-known and only slightly more useful transitory plane.
While it functions a bit like the Ethereal Plane, the Gray’s most notable feature is how it acts as a barrier to interplanar travel. To quote the Dark Sun wiki:
One of the most prominent effects the Gray has on Athas is how it functions as a barrier between the Material and Astral Planes, as the Gray impedes planar travel in both directions, making any such ventures extremely difficult. This has resulted in the Outer Planes seeming nearly unreachable to Athasian mages. What few Athasians who have traversed beyond the Gray to the Outer Planes have reportedly found little more than desolate ruins and terrible abominations. The Ethereal Plane, on the other hand, is far more easily reached from Athas, as are the Inner Planes.
Those who attempt to travel to or from Athas via magical means run the risk of getting lost in the Gray, unable to pass through to the plane they intended to reach. In such cases, a person has a limited amount of time to try and find their way back to their plane of origin, or be lost to the Gray forever, as the life-sapping powers of the Gray begin to take its toll. A person who fails to return to the plane where they began their journey will ultimately succumb to the deathly energies, and be absorbed by the Gray. Those who do manage to return are nearly irreversibly weakened, and only powerful magic is able to return their lifeforce to them.
The reason behind these factors are unknown to most Athasians, but the most learned have reached the conclusion that the spiritual conduits that connect the Outer Planes to Athas have long-since been shattered, if they ever existed at all, while the elemental conduits connecting Athas to the four Elemental Planes remain intact. Because of this, elemental clerics are still able to draw power from their patrons on the Elemental Planes.
The Gray has other noteworthy features, such as functioning as a plane of the dead for Athas (presumably because spirits can’t make it to the Outer Planes), but its work as a barrier is what it’s primarily known for. Which isn’t to say that Athas is completely disconnected from the rest of the D&D multiverse, just that it’s more difficult to leave than most planes. Faction War even includes a neighborhood in the Hive named New Tyr, where “a bunch of Primes from the world of Athas have settled.” A Guide to the Ethereal Plane goes into more detail about trying to get in or out of the plane (as does Defilers and Preservers p. 10), though really the odds aren’t actually as bad as the prose up above makes things out to be. Page 16 features this chart below, which would mean that there’s a one-third chance of making it through the Gray on any given attempt, which is to say that there would definitely be a few people who made it out just fine.
There’s even a direct portal to Athas in “Of Sigil and the Sea,” and I recollect another source mentioning that portals between the planes are rare, but certainly existent, though which one that might be I’m unable to recall.
The point of all this nattering on about Dark Sun’s particular links with ye olde Great Wheel cosmology is simply to say that the intention of the setting’s designers was that Athas stand alone. Let’s be honest, no setting seemed to love Spelljammer and Planescape mixing things up like they did, as it could only lead to contradictions and contortions in order to make things fit together that really shouldn’t (e.g. think of Dragonlance’s version of “The Abyss”)… but that didn’t mean that plenty of other designers didn’t really love connecting things in order to create strange adventures that broke the rules of their settings. And Black Spine is a good example of how this type of rule breaking could feed designers as inspiration.
Published in 1994, Black Spine by Walter Baas, Dustin Browder, Tom Prusa, and Jonathan Tweet was the second and final “epic” adventure for Dark Sun, consisting of three 96-page books plus two accompanying fold-out maps and a folder (did anyone really like the whole folder thing for Second Edition?). It is truly epic in scope, though having been playing a lot of Fifth Edition lately, I find myself amused that this should take players only from level 10-13, which is something a modern adventure would do in the course of like four sessions rather than this truly immense, perhaps multiple years-long undertaking. Only its final chapter can be truly called interplanar, but there is noteworthy material up until then, and I’ll do my best to summarize an adventure that I enjoyed reading all the way through—after spending so long in Fourth Edition, I can’t tell you just how refreshing it felt to go back to something good from the 90s again.
In essence, Black Spine is seven linked adventures, some of which are further subdivided into many smaller parts. It begins simply enough, with the PCs asked to defend an ex-slave group from a band of gith with strangely metallic weapons. Oh, and if you’re not familiar with the setting, then let me add that metal is rare on Athas, and that here there are no githyanki or githzerai, just a sort of degraded offshoot race known simply as the gith, who are also not the same as the Pirates of Gith from Spelljammer—TSR was really into gith back in second edition. How they came to exist like this on Athas will be one of the adventure’s primary concerns, but for now that’s unimportant. The rest of this first adventure will likely involve a lot of politicking with the 11(!) detailed major NPCs consisting of the ex-slave group’s leadership, all of whom have their own motivations, backgrounds, and secrets. I cannot imagine anything like this being released in a modern D&D release, and it’s a shame because despite the obvious difficulty this poses for DMs, it’s a rich, wonderful place to roleplay and offers a ton of openness for how players wish to deal with their upcoming threat. I can’t help but imagine all of this role playing and negotiating being turned into one dumb skill check in a modern release, and am so glad that isn’t the case here.
Eventually, players scout out the gith camp and then make preparations for their upcoming battle. This is recommended to be run through TSR’s old Battlesystem, thus making this the most difficult part of the entire adventure to include today because I’m not sure this would really work through strictly D&D—maybe that Fifth Edition Dragonlance supplement has details on how to run this sort of large scale battle? Anyhow, although the specifics of what happens will be determined by player choices, there’s pretty much no chance of winning this battle, instead it’s just about mitigating losses. Once PCs retreat into their fortifications, they discover tunnels beneath the ancient temple they’ve been using as a base, and with this some dungeon crawling ensues. Fortunately, this leads players to discover an artifact of immense power, which can be used to completely annihilate the gith, though if used in the future it will also almost certainly destroy whoever takes it, as it’s pretty damn evil. The gith are on the run, and the players finally have a bit of breathing room as they’re no longer on the defensive.
The second adventure, “Cry Vengeance,” picks up just after this big battle. The ex-slave group worry about the gith survivors bringing in reinforcements, plus they’re very curious where all of these metal weapons came from. Eventually the PCs find the gith camp, a stolen mine, leading directly into adventure three, the aptly titled “Into the Mines.” That’s right, the PCs go… into the mines, where they will murderize many gith along the way (plus the previous owners of the mines, unless they’re enlisted to help fight). But the answer as to where the gith were getting their metal won’t arrive until the next book, which introduces them to the most interesting part of the whole adventure, the city of Yathazor.
As detailed in “The City of Calamity,” Yathazor is an ancient githyanki city from so long ago that the race’s very existence has been forgotten in Athas. It was always intended as impossible to get to for anyone else, to the point that the only method of reaching it required plane shifting, making it a cinch for githyanki and nearly impossible to even locate for most anyone else.
When the city was functioning, they plugged the tunnel with stone and disguised its mouth. This blocked almost all access to the city. To get into Yathazor, the githyanki would simply plane shift (as the spell). Githyanki who lived on Athas would plane shift to the Astral Plane as a stepping stone into or out of Yathazor (since they couldn’t directly move from one location to another on the same world). By plugging the tunnel, the githyanki made Yathazor very hard to reach.
In addition, the githyanki created a magical barrier against plane shifting around Yathazor. Called the Planar Shield. This enchantment surrounded the city with a magical barrier that prevented most plane shifting. Only those who held special keys (which looked like small, metal tuning forks) could plane shift through the Planar Shield, into Yathazor. This precaution prevented assaults by githzerai, the long-time enemies of the githyanki.
It turns out that back then it was no big deal to reach the Astral Plane from Athas, which means that this must’ve happened a long time ago indeed. The entire chapter is devoted to detailing Yathazor as a strange, wondrous, and treacherous location that contrasts in particular with the bleak deserts of Athas through its tropical setting.
Players will likely wander this city quite a bit, but one way or another they’ll eventually come into conflict with a group of earth clerics who stumbled upon Yathazor first. I found this cult fascinating to read about, in particular when it came to the story of inducting new clerics into the order:
When the eager young Harno was initiated as an earth cleric, his mentor buried him in the earth (as is normal for the ritual). Unfortunately, the elemental entity that came to initiate Harno was not a standard creature of the Elemental Plane of Earth. Instead, it was some unknown and insane creature from that plane. It slew Harno’s mentor and ravaged Harno’s mind, but it did grant him the powers of an earth cleric. When Harno clawed his way to the surface, he was changed. He no longer remembered his name, his former master, or his past. When he stumbled into the nearest village, he found that others reacted to him with fear. Looking in a mirror, he saw the reason: His face was gray and stony. Thus, he took the name Slate and began his career as a wandering earth cleric.
Slate called the entity that initiated him Gurdek, for reasons only he knows.
What’s particularly wonderful about Yathazor isn’t just the location, but also the adventure format. What players do here is extremely open, and 17 entire pages are devoted to describing the earth cleric NPCs for proper roleplaying between them and the characters. And you know what, it’s quite possible that practically none of these pages come into use, depending upon what the PCs actually do, but it’s there if needed. That’s the type of thing I really love about these old TSR works, filling them with a richness you just won’t see from Wizards of the Coast today.
One way or another, the PCs find a secret tunnel leading them further into the mountain. Following some encounters, they will finally stumble upon a large mining and smelting operation, and with this learn that githyanki have been supplying the gith with metal. Players have the option of freeing slaves or sneaking past, but eventually they’ll end up in the sixth adventure, “The Nightmare Gate,” which largely concerns two locations: the Garden of Gith and the City of Gith. Of these, the Garden is far more interesting, as it’s full of plant life where the githyanki grow their food. The City is essentially a centralized location where the gith are undergoing a ritual at the titular Nightmare Gate, trying to open a portal between Athas and a githyanki base in the Astral Plane. Players will be unable to stop the ritual from completing, and with it devouring the souls of 200 hapless gith, but the gate itself will end up struck and exploding (yes, it’s railroaded here, but not in a way that bothers me as the actual events leading up to this are quite open). Which can only mean that it’s time for these Athas PCs to arrive in the Astral Plane.e
“City of Spires” is the final adventure of the book, and unfortunately it’s not as detailed as what came before it. “City” feels like it was rushed and folded into one adventure when it should’ve really been much longer; one of the fold-out maps covers just the city of Galnaki where this final adventure is set, but its specifics will barely come into play. What the PCs will actually do here is also pretty rote. They begin in a prison, which they’ll escape with the help of a githzerai spy. The spy wants them to help destroy the ruler of this city, Trinth, whose evil plan is to first take over Athas, then use the power of its psionically imbued people to help her depose the Lich Queen. The plan is both dumb and hackneyed, feeling very Saturdaday-morning-cartoon villainy. Likewise, why are the characters just arrested and not, you know, murdered when they arrive unconscious in the city? There’s also some other odd bits, like the spy teleporting the PCs to a nearby asteroid where a beholder just happened to have laid waste to every other githzerai in the nearby vicinity. Eventually, the PCs are dropped into an arena a la Jabba’s palace (much prose is spent detailing Trinth’s evil villain trapdoor button) and forced to do some ridiculous fights before facing off against Trinth herself. *yawn*.
I do wish that Galnaki received a lot more attention, because it’s an odd location with only a couple pages of description. Githyanki apparently love music and the arts, to the point that Galnkaki feels a lot like a fancy liberal arts college. There is an entire theater district, for instance, and an artisan’s district where “A walk through this section of the city rivals a trip to almost any museum. The quality and variety of artwork displayed here is unequalled.” There are only six districts in the city total, and now that I think of it that means that more of this city is devoted to the arts than the actual college I received my undergraduate degree in or last taught at.
But the biggest issue of all with this Astral Plane chapter is that it just doesn’t feel planar. Gilnaki has normal gravity and is completely cut off from the rest of the plane. While these decisions are explained by the text, the gravity issue in particular feels like a real stretch, a decision awkwardly shoehorned in so as to not require anyone to have to think about how absolutely alien the Astral Plane is supposed to be. Here, while it is another plane of existence in theory, Trinth “recreated the conditions that her army would encounter on Athas. She duplicated the atmosphere of that world, the gravity, and even the temperature.” As a result, it’s essentially just a githyanki city on Athas, and the planar aspects barely play a role. Trinth’s area of the Astral Plane is undifferentiated from the Prime, which means an unmemorable conclusion for this otherwise stunningly creative adventure.
As far as Dark Sun players are concerned, there’s likely a lot of interesting lore to be found within Black Spine. For instance, the profusion of psionics found on this Prime is explained as likely the result of a psionic bomb detonated by the githzerai as part of their ancient attack on their enemies. But for anyone looking to find otherworldly action, you’re going to be sorely disappointed. It seems like a fun adventure, but its final chapter is by far the weakest, and is the only one I would take the time to rewrite almost completely, even if the broader strokes of the plot—githyanki civil war infecting Athas—are strong and important to leave in place for the rest of Black Spine. I found myself impressed by the overall adventure, but still wouldn’t’ recommend any other planewalkers read through it just for the Astral content.
