Headscratchers / Dark Sun

• So the whole concept of the Dragon's Levy seems horribly inefficient. The Dragon uses the Life Energy from 1000 slaves from each City-State to seal Rajaat's prison. Problem is, you need to transport the slaves, which means they need food and water, at least until they get where ever they need to go. They also need to be guarded so they don't escape. All the Dragon really needed was the Life Energy, which could be gotten by Preserving or Defiling, which could be gotten in advance and possible sealed away in obsidian orbs or something for when it's needed.
  • In the Prism Pentad novel series Rikus finds the remains of the slaves at some point - it wasn't in the immediate vicinity of the city states, but neither did he take them over the silt sea to Ur Draxa (his city). He just sucked the life force out of them and left their scorched corpses in the dust - a far more efficient mode of transportation.
  • Getting energy from living beings is the only way to get enough energy needed to re-power the seal on Rajaat's prison. If they used plant energy every year, Athas wouldn't look like a desert, it'd look like the moon.
  • Only if it was gotten by Defiling. The Sorceror Kings are capable of both Defiling and Preserving as a function of their transformation. Even with Defiling, plants grow back faster than humans and animals.
  • None of the Sorcerer Kings (barring Oronis, who is a special case) can preserve. Also, defiling sterilizes the soil in a fashion where life is unlikely to recuperate for years, if ever. Plus, draining the life force of living beings is also much more efficient than draining from mere plants.
  • The Sourcebook Dragon Kings mentions that Dragons can Defile or Preserve.
  • Am I the only one who thinks that the problem with the levy is less about logistics and more about scope? According to The Veiled Alliance (but IIRC also other sources), the city states have between 8000 and 40000 inhabitants - requesting 1000 human sacrificies from each every year would depopulate the Tyr Region pretty swiftly.
    • You aren't. I'd argue that the content of TVE is only semi-canon - Dark Sun wasn't really that well carved out back then, and Allen Varney came up with a lot of details that probably weren't coordinated with Troy Denning. I would assume that in Troy Denning's Athas, the Tyr Region is sufficiently populated to permanently sustain a culling of 7000 people per year.
• Speaking of slaves, why would anyone trade slaves between cities? The overhead in food and water and having to guard them must result in a very narrow profit margin when they reach their destination.
  • Probably any slave-dealer who's transporting a bunch of "stock" between cities also cuts a deal with other merchants for the slaves to haul other salable goods along for the trip. The other merchants pay enough for this service to cover the slaves' food and drink, and get their own wares to market without having to buy and manage pack animals. No reason to let all those slaves' broad backs go to waste, and the slave-dealer gets to boast about the slaves' "proven hauling capacity" when they're being auctioned off. As for guarding the slaves in transit, that's something the dealer would be paying for anyway, whether in a city (where slaves are more likely to try to escape) or out in the wilderness (where most would realize they'll only die of thirst if they try to flee).
• If there are no gods, what happens to people in Darksun after they die? Do they just disappear?
  • When people die in Athas they go to the Grey, an endless bleak and dreary afterlife. Eventually the departed fade away and become part of the Grey or endure as one of the many especially nasty types of undead that make Athas somehow even more dangerous. As if it really needed to be.
• The Halflings were the original masters of the world (with the exception of the Thri-kreen). Why were they called halflings? Half of... what?
  • They weren't called that at the time. They called themselves Rhulisti.

• Regardless of edition, the water everyone's drinking has to come from somewhere, even if it's simply summoned by magic. And even in the latter case, assuming everyone's bladders and sweat glands are functioning properly, this by itself should logically be enough to gradually repair Athas.
  • Saving spells like Conjure Water, the water isn't coming from anywhere. It's the water that's already on Athas, being endlessly reused. It's just that there's an extremely limited amount of water, and since every normal lifeform needs a certain amount of water in its body at all times, that imposes a limit on how much life can exist. Restoration is possible, but Athas won't stop being a desert on its own - the planet needs more water from elsewhere.
    • This is actually the biggest hope for the setting in the Cerulean Storm. Rajaat is now serving as a Living Macguffin who is bringing massive amounts of water from wherever and his storms will probably do a great deal to undo the damage to the world—assuming he doesn't destroy it first.

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