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Mind Lords of the Last Sea
This accessory is the second in a series of "Wanderer's Chronicles" that explores the new areas of Athas. It features:
* A 96-page sourcebook that details the hidden valley, the Last Sea, and all the creatures and intelligent races that inhabit the region - as well as a comprehensive look at the Mind Lords and their great city, Saragar. This sourcebook also includes new monsters, new rules, and new equipment specific to this new region.
* A 32-page adventure book that provides a ready-to-play adventure set in Saragar and around the Last Sea.
* A full-color, poster-sized map of the Last Sea region complete with plenty of exciting new locations to explore.
* A 96-page sourcebook that details the hidden valley, the Last Sea, and all the creatures and intelligent races that inhabit the region - as well as a comprehensive look at the Mind Lords and their great city, Saragar. This sourcebook also includes new monsters, new rules, and new equipment specific to this new region.
* A 32-page adventure book that provides a ready-to-play adventure set in Saragar and around the Last Sea.
* A full-color, poster-sized map of the Last Sea region complete with plenty of exciting new locations to explore.
128 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1996
About the author
Matt Forbeck
217 books314 followersI'm an award-winning, New York Times-bestselling author and game designer and happily married father of five, including a set of quadruplets. For more on my work, see Forbeck.com.
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July 21, 202230/32 of the Dark Sun reread.
I cannot pinpoint a starting point for this opinion, but I vaguely feel like I don't click with Matt Forbeck's work. Maybe it was... I mean, it's lost to the mists of time, if it even happened, but I suppose it could've happened like this: I liked the horror-western mashup Deadlands, so when their published (Pinnacle) put out a game by Matt Forbeck about superheroes in an alternate history America (Brave New World), I was interested -- until I started to piece together that there was a whole other story/set of mysteries going on underneath the premise, so that you could be enjoying a game about superheroes in fascist America and then suddenly be dealing with mythological creatures, and not in a fun Alan Moore-"everything is an eternal return of an archetype" sort of way.
And then also, this year I read his other work for D&D, the book Sages and Specialists in the DMGR line (reviewed here under the The Complete Book of Villains entry), a book which makes me irate by the very concept, so I can't really say the execution was good or bad. (Though a quick check of some review on RPG.net tells me that at least one person doesn't like Forbeck's fiction as entrypoint to a section.)
So I wasn't exactly looking forward to this box -- with guide book and adventure book -- except that the setting is interesting. Also, let's take a moment to appreciate the title, which feels very pulp, along with that cover, which is cheesy as all get out.
Alack and alas, it's downhill from there.
In the revised box set, we hear that Saragar is a city stuck in time, ruled by the Mind Lords -- three incredibly powerful psionicists from the Green Age who foresaw the fate of the world and so put their minds into obsidian orbs to help live and protect Saragar forever; but of course, trying to keep a city from changing in a changing world requires some... I want to say unorthodox methods, but even in the revised box it's clear that it's basically malcontents being mindwiped by powerful psionicists. So we've got a totalitarian society with literal thought police and the dictum that "Happiness must be maintained." That could be a fun place for an adventure, although given the extreme isolation of Saragar, I wonder exactly how/why that would be breached.
So how does this book expand on that idea? Well, we get some comedic riffs on other totalitarian states, like the old "The beatings will continue until moral improves" which becomes "The mindwipes will continue..." Woof. We also hear that the people in this city and the surrounding towns that are part of the same ecosystem are generally happy even when not mindwiped into it, and why wouldn't they be: compared to the average Athasian, the people here have plenty to drink and eat, and the labor-saving devices of the past -- psionic minds put into orbs and programmed to do one job -- are still mostly functional. (More on that in a minute.) And so the people here, on the shores of the Last Sea, have a beach culture of surfing and relaxing, including the idea of there being beach druids.
Now, years ago, at an improv event in Austin, I had to do something fantasy but also dumb, and came up with the idea of an archmage's day out at the beach, so I'm either the perfect or the worst audience for the idea of beach druids. I mean, it's funny-ish -- it has the shape of a joke. But is it playable and interesting in a game? I don't know.
And most of this book has that feeling. There's pirates on the Last Sea! There's the last tribes of amphibious lizardmen, who have a king but have several factions! The three Mind Lords are all incurably insane! The great psionic academy has lost the ability to create obsidian orbs so the infrastructure is falling apart! There's an underground resistance, which has its name dropped throughout and only gets a few pages at the end of the book! There's dolphins and sharks and a squark, which is a squid-shark mix (and probably not at all like that other squid-shark mix, the sharg)!
I just... I don't know, there's a lot here, but it doesn't feel like it adds up, it actually feels like the more you throw in, the less you have.
So let's pare back: a totalitarian but well-run city is interesting and different from the rest of Athas — a totalitarian city that has lost its power and has crumbling infrastructure is just the halfling life-shapers again, and almost not a problem: just wait a while and it will destroy itself. I guess there's an underground here so that the PCs have some secret society to liaise with, but there's so little there there. Or: most of Athas is thematically about the struggle to survive, how many little people you're willing to sacrifice for power, and how the world is dying when everyone is sacrificing each other and no one is making hard decisions for themselves. You can give that thematic a twist and still be interesting, like: a tyrannical city where everyone is basically happy, except for the brains being enslaved to provide the infrastructure.
Besides the basic premise of this city being mis-done -- an error I cannot blame Forbeck for, as this goes all the way up to the editorial decisions -- I just feel like there's a whole mindset here that, again, I cannot click with. For instance, Athasian characters have never seen so much water, and so Forbeck adds some rules about getting sick from the saltwater, but why do we need rules for that? Just have the PCs drink the water, realize it's bad -- if they're from elsewhere on Athas, they'll be surprised by that much water, but they'll have experience with bad water -- and spit it out. Boom, now they have that twin feeling of wonder and anxiety of things not being what they seem.
Also, the whole Mind Lords story is basically: the old lawgiver got a weird message from a time-traveling messenger with the faces of his trusted psionic advisors who warned him not to let someone do something; so of course, the lawgiver gave the advisors the job of figuring out what that message meant, which let them see the future, which led them to taking over the city; and of course, you don't get points for realizing that the message was from their future selves. Or more particularly, maybe, one of them, who realizes they made a mistake and wants to stop them. Ho-hum, but that's the included adventure: one of the mad lords is sucking out brains to gain the power to send a message back in time, but don't worry, we get this line in the intro, about whether the PCs succeed in stopping him from sucking enough brains to send the message:
“In either case, the general status of the valley of the Last Sea remains unchanged.”
You know, I used to be sad that TSR went bankrupt, but reading that line, I'm cured of that.
I cannot pinpoint a starting point for this opinion, but I vaguely feel like I don't click with Matt Forbeck's work. Maybe it was... I mean, it's lost to the mists of time, if it even happened, but I suppose it could've happened like this: I liked the horror-western mashup Deadlands, so when their published (Pinnacle) put out a game by Matt Forbeck about superheroes in an alternate history America (Brave New World), I was interested -- until I started to piece together that there was a whole other story/set of mysteries going on underneath the premise, so that you could be enjoying a game about superheroes in fascist America and then suddenly be dealing with mythological creatures, and not in a fun Alan Moore-"everything is an eternal return of an archetype" sort of way.
And then also, this year I read his other work for D&D, the book Sages and Specialists in the DMGR line (reviewed here under the The Complete Book of Villains entry), a book which makes me irate by the very concept, so I can't really say the execution was good or bad. (Though a quick check of some review on RPG.net tells me that at least one person doesn't like Forbeck's fiction as entrypoint to a section.)
So I wasn't exactly looking forward to this box -- with guide book and adventure book -- except that the setting is interesting. Also, let's take a moment to appreciate the title, which feels very pulp, along with that cover, which is cheesy as all get out.
Alack and alas, it's downhill from there.
In the revised box set, we hear that Saragar is a city stuck in time, ruled by the Mind Lords -- three incredibly powerful psionicists from the Green Age who foresaw the fate of the world and so put their minds into obsidian orbs to help live and protect Saragar forever; but of course, trying to keep a city from changing in a changing world requires some... I want to say unorthodox methods, but even in the revised box it's clear that it's basically malcontents being mindwiped by powerful psionicists. So we've got a totalitarian society with literal thought police and the dictum that "Happiness must be maintained." That could be a fun place for an adventure, although given the extreme isolation of Saragar, I wonder exactly how/why that would be breached.
So how does this book expand on that idea? Well, we get some comedic riffs on other totalitarian states, like the old "The beatings will continue until moral improves" which becomes "The mindwipes will continue..." Woof. We also hear that the people in this city and the surrounding towns that are part of the same ecosystem are generally happy even when not mindwiped into it, and why wouldn't they be: compared to the average Athasian, the people here have plenty to drink and eat, and the labor-saving devices of the past -- psionic minds put into orbs and programmed to do one job -- are still mostly functional. (More on that in a minute.) And so the people here, on the shores of the Last Sea, have a beach culture of surfing and relaxing, including the idea of there being beach druids.
Now, years ago, at an improv event in Austin, I had to do something fantasy but also dumb, and came up with the idea of an archmage's day out at the beach, so I'm either the perfect or the worst audience for the idea of beach druids. I mean, it's funny-ish -- it has the shape of a joke. But is it playable and interesting in a game? I don't know.
And most of this book has that feeling. There's pirates on the Last Sea! There's the last tribes of amphibious lizardmen, who have a king but have several factions! The three Mind Lords are all incurably insane! The great psionic academy has lost the ability to create obsidian orbs so the infrastructure is falling apart! There's an underground resistance, which has its name dropped throughout and only gets a few pages at the end of the book! There's dolphins and sharks and a squark, which is a squid-shark mix (and probably not at all like that other squid-shark mix, the sharg)!
I just... I don't know, there's a lot here, but it doesn't feel like it adds up, it actually feels like the more you throw in, the less you have.
So let's pare back: a totalitarian but well-run city is interesting and different from the rest of Athas — a totalitarian city that has lost its power and has crumbling infrastructure is just the halfling life-shapers again, and almost not a problem: just wait a while and it will destroy itself. I guess there's an underground here so that the PCs have some secret society to liaise with, but there's so little there there. Or: most of Athas is thematically about the struggle to survive, how many little people you're willing to sacrifice for power, and how the world is dying when everyone is sacrificing each other and no one is making hard decisions for themselves. You can give that thematic a twist and still be interesting, like: a tyrannical city where everyone is basically happy, except for the brains being enslaved to provide the infrastructure.
Besides the basic premise of this city being mis-done -- an error I cannot blame Forbeck for, as this goes all the way up to the editorial decisions -- I just feel like there's a whole mindset here that, again, I cannot click with. For instance, Athasian characters have never seen so much water, and so Forbeck adds some rules about getting sick from the saltwater, but why do we need rules for that? Just have the PCs drink the water, realize it's bad -- if they're from elsewhere on Athas, they'll be surprised by that much water, but they'll have experience with bad water -- and spit it out. Boom, now they have that twin feeling of wonder and anxiety of things not being what they seem.
Also, the whole Mind Lords story is basically: the old lawgiver got a weird message from a time-traveling messenger with the faces of his trusted psionic advisors who warned him not to let someone do something; so of course, the lawgiver gave the advisors the job of figuring out what that message meant, which let them see the future, which led them to taking over the city; and of course, you don't get points for realizing that the message was from their future selves. Or more particularly, maybe, one of them, who realizes they made a mistake and wants to stop them. Ho-hum, but that's the included adventure: one of the mad lords is sucking out brains to gain the power to send a message back in time, but don't worry, we get this line in the intro, about whether the PCs succeed in stopping him from sucking enough brains to send the message:
“In either case, the general status of the valley of the Last Sea remains unchanged.”
You know, I used to be sad that TSR went bankrupt, but reading that line, I'm cured of that.
January 15, 2015
My rating here is not because I hate the very idea of the Last Sea--as I mentioned in my review of the revised campaign setting, I think the themes are great--but rather because I think the implementation falls down in several major ways. I'll get to those.
Most of the set is a history of Marnita, the Last Sea, and Saragar, the last survivor of the Green Age. Nine millennia ago, the leader of the city had a visitor who warned that "they" had gone mad and would destroy everything while changing its appearance, then vanished. The leader recognized two of the people the apparition had impersonated as members of the Psionic Academy, Kosveret and Thesik, and charged them with finding a way to cast their minds forward into the future and learn the source of the vision. To cut most of the story out, they pick up a third member of their group named Barani, figure out how to go forward, see the Cleansing Wars, mind control the leader of the city because obviously only they know what to do, and make Marnita more and more isolationist. Eventually, they put the Border of Guardians in place, using enslaved psyches in obsidian orbs around the whole border of their kingdom, transfer their own minds into orbs, and fast forward to the modern day where the Mind Lords are half-insane (or all-insane, in Kosveret's case), the Border of Guardians is collapsing, and things could collapse completely soon. Enter the PCs.
The problem I have here is that the reasons its collapsing don't make sense. Everything is failing because the art of making obsidian orbs is lost, but I find that so unlikely that it knocked off two stars by itself. Early on, the book states that enslaved psyches pretty much were the infrastructure of the Green Age. They provided heat, light, transportation, water, police action, street cleaning, and basically every possible convenience, and to find all those psyches the Green Age authorities condemned most criminals to eternal psychic slavery and would occasionally just go round up some poor or homeless people and chuck them in orbs too, so that rich people could have hot running water in the morning.
Incidentally, this makes the Green Age a horrific dystopia that's possibly worse than modern Athas, which is quite the achievement.
The entire Green Age society was built on this practice, so how could the people of the Last Sea lose it? They still have the same Psionic Academy in their city that Kosveret, Barani, and Thesik trained at, so it's not like there was a collapse of knowledge. They have every incentive to keep the practice up, since there's a huge demand for orb-based technology around the Last Sea and since the Border requires orbs to function. It makes no sense and it pretty much ruined the book.
Other than the history section, most of Mind Lords of the Last Sea is a gazetteer of places around Marnita, some of which are pretty neat. I liked the elves of Sylvandretta, which are called "ghost elves" for their incredibly pale skin, blond hair, and reclusiveness. They're also so incredibly inbred they only live to around ~60 at max. There's a city of dwarves that still lives underground, a bunch of surfer bum druids who care only about catching waves, a nature preserve mesa with an ecosystem dating back to the Blue Age, and Athas's last surviving lizardmen, living in a city beneath the waves.
Though that brings up something else that's kind of silly--all this talk about Saragar being the last Green Age city, or Marnita having the last lizardmen and the last dolphins, or any kind of statement about the whole planet runs into the fact that the entire map in the revised campaign setting covers an area smaller than the Four Corners states. The sorcerer kings destroyed the entire planet and then decided to all go live in an area the size of New York state for...reasons. There could be dozens of other pockets like Marnita out there. Most of them would be literally half a world away from the sorcerer kings and thus in no danger at all. None of the books deal with this at all, of course. Not even to mention that the rest of the planet is completely lifeless, which would at least be in character.
There's an adventure included, but I'd never run it because it's likely to lead to player revolt. People getting murdered offscreen is a great literary device as long as there are enough hints, but doing it in an RPG feels cheap regardless of how plausible it is. The adventure also explicitly makes text the (admittedly extremely blatant) subtext that the vision those millennia ago was from one of the modern Mind Lords going back in time to warn the leader about them and what they would do to the city, not the sorcerer kings. And while I like that this shows that Marnita exists because of a stable time loop, it's better to leave things ambiguous, I think.
The plot is Kosveret teleporting brains out of people's heads to get the psychic power to go far enough back in time, which has no reflection in any psionics rules at all so who knows why he's doing it. Admittedly he's totally mad, so maybe it's his madness convincing him that that's why it's the necessary course. Anyway, he does it to a PC and the other PCs have to track him down and stop him. Though stopping him screws up the time loop, so getting their friend's brain back destroys Marnita, and then Thesik shows up and fixes their "mistake" by going back himself.
All in all, it's kind of a disappointment, which pretty much fits the whole book. So much potential, and so much of it wasted.
Most of the set is a history of Marnita, the Last Sea, and Saragar, the last survivor of the Green Age. Nine millennia ago, the leader of the city had a visitor who warned that "they" had gone mad and would destroy everything while changing its appearance, then vanished. The leader recognized two of the people the apparition had impersonated as members of the Psionic Academy, Kosveret and Thesik, and charged them with finding a way to cast their minds forward into the future and learn the source of the vision. To cut most of the story out, they pick up a third member of their group named Barani, figure out how to go forward, see the Cleansing Wars, mind control the leader of the city because obviously only they know what to do, and make Marnita more and more isolationist. Eventually, they put the Border of Guardians in place, using enslaved psyches in obsidian orbs around the whole border of their kingdom, transfer their own minds into orbs, and fast forward to the modern day where the Mind Lords are half-insane (or all-insane, in Kosveret's case), the Border of Guardians is collapsing, and things could collapse completely soon. Enter the PCs.
The problem I have here is that the reasons its collapsing don't make sense. Everything is failing because the art of making obsidian orbs is lost, but I find that so unlikely that it knocked off two stars by itself. Early on, the book states that enslaved psyches pretty much were the infrastructure of the Green Age. They provided heat, light, transportation, water, police action, street cleaning, and basically every possible convenience, and to find all those psyches the Green Age authorities condemned most criminals to eternal psychic slavery and would occasionally just go round up some poor or homeless people and chuck them in orbs too, so that rich people could have hot running water in the morning.
Incidentally, this makes the Green Age a horrific dystopia that's possibly worse than modern Athas, which is quite the achievement.
The entire Green Age society was built on this practice, so how could the people of the Last Sea lose it? They still have the same Psionic Academy in their city that Kosveret, Barani, and Thesik trained at, so it's not like there was a collapse of knowledge. They have every incentive to keep the practice up, since there's a huge demand for orb-based technology around the Last Sea and since the Border requires orbs to function. It makes no sense and it pretty much ruined the book.
Other than the history section, most of Mind Lords of the Last Sea is a gazetteer of places around Marnita, some of which are pretty neat. I liked the elves of Sylvandretta, which are called "ghost elves" for their incredibly pale skin, blond hair, and reclusiveness. They're also so incredibly inbred they only live to around ~60 at max. There's a city of dwarves that still lives underground, a bunch of surfer bum druids who care only about catching waves, a nature preserve mesa with an ecosystem dating back to the Blue Age, and Athas's last surviving lizardmen, living in a city beneath the waves.
Though that brings up something else that's kind of silly--all this talk about Saragar being the last Green Age city, or Marnita having the last lizardmen and the last dolphins, or any kind of statement about the whole planet runs into the fact that the entire map in the revised campaign setting covers an area smaller than the Four Corners states. The sorcerer kings destroyed the entire planet and then decided to all go live in an area the size of New York state for...reasons. There could be dozens of other pockets like Marnita out there. Most of them would be literally half a world away from the sorcerer kings and thus in no danger at all. None of the books deal with this at all, of course. Not even to mention that the rest of the planet is completely lifeless, which would at least be in character.
There's an adventure included, but I'd never run it because it's likely to lead to player revolt. People getting murdered offscreen is a great literary device as long as there are enough hints, but doing it in an RPG feels cheap regardless of how plausible it is. The adventure also explicitly makes text the (admittedly extremely blatant) subtext that the vision those millennia ago was from one of the modern Mind Lords going back in time to warn the leader about them and what they would do to the city, not the sorcerer kings. And while I like that this shows that Marnita exists because of a stable time loop, it's better to leave things ambiguous, I think.
The plot is Kosveret teleporting brains out of people's heads to get the psychic power to go far enough back in time, which has no reflection in any psionics rules at all so who knows why he's doing it. Admittedly he's totally mad, so maybe it's his madness convincing him that that's why it's the necessary course. Anyway, he does it to a PC and the other PCs have to track him down and stop him. Though stopping him screws up the time loop, so getting their friend's brain back destroys Marnita, and then Thesik shows up and fixes their "mistake" by going back himself.
All in all, it's kind of a disappointment, which pretty much fits the whole book. So much potential, and so much of it wasted.
February 3, 2022
Even though it falls short in several aspects, I still rate it highly because even in its seemingly quite hopeful setting (a whole body of water! on a desert planet nonetheless!) it carries a bleak and grim tone what with millennia long domination by a triumvirate of gone-crazy-by-being-cooped-up-in-an-obsidian-ball-for-thousands-of-years psionicists. The included adventure is maybe a bit too retconning, over-explanatory, and on-the-nose, but you can fix those aspects easily. As a story to tell it's actually quite wicked.
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