Athasian Geographic

Well due to the popularity of this project I have doubled the number of pictures and fleshed out the descriptions a bit. I judge popularity by number of hits ... but if you want to see more of my photo collection (and it is big -- I've been saving them for years and only now have had the space to mount them, thanks to Chad) then you will need to write me and respond to this. 

Click on the thumbnails to view the larger photo:

Here's my shot of the worn walls of Giustenal with a little of the silt sea on the left. It doesn't get much clearer than this of Giustenal, what with the silt sea and the tar pits. Lucky day, I guess. Except for my poor half-giant baggage carrier, who hopped into the tar pits for no apparent reason.

I managed to catch this shot of a couple elves in the stony barrens. Just my luck I didn't notice the dust stirring behind them -- I was chased by a rather large number ... but I won't bore you with the story.

If I read the Wanderer's map right, this one is Desverendi's valley. Not sure though, since the mountainside is riddled with little valleys in that area, but this is the only one I found with an actual waterfall.

Here's some of that ubiquitous, dry desert terrain. I guess you call this stony barrens?  Or is they sandy wastes?

Are THESE the stony barrens? Help!

Here are a couple shots of the Black Waters. One shot is taken from North of Yaramuke facing south,--

 -- and here is another taken from the South, facing North:

WhiteMountainsNearKurn.JPG (110908 bytes)Here's an interesting shot of the White Mountains -- the halfling side. According to Will's accounts, these mountains are the scenes of running small-scale, secretive battles between Kurn's templars (aided by Aarakokran) and the halflings. Apparently the steeper the mountains, the better trapped and tunneled the Templars have it.  Extraordinary that they keep such tight defenses so many miles from the nearest Kurn households.

This one is an artist's rendition of the city of Balic. Good winds and possibly enchantments leave Balic generally much less dusty than Giustenal (one rarely has to wear a silter in Balic), but this artist for some reason has chosen to depict a rather silty day.

I believe I took this one between Gulg and Altaruk. It's hard to remember to take pictures of consistent terrain -- I tend to click the camera when I see contrasts.

Here is the same area, mesa.jpg (100000 bytes)viewed from above. Bad luck with a defiler's Reverse Gravity spell -- Long painful story that I don't want to talk about.

 

redrock.jpg (135227 bytes)Thanks to a very long lasting potion of feather-falling, I was blown around by the winds by hours, and managed to catch this shot of the Altaruk road on the way down, about mid-day. I also managed to catch a serious case of second- degree sunburn.

Here's a bandit's eye-view of the road to Altaruk. Actually you can't see the road too well -- I didn't want to get too near that edge.

 

Barrens-Badlands.jpg (90382 bytes)This one shows a cloudy, overcast night with both moons full.  Rare and beautiful.

 

moon.jpg (89685 bytes)Rumish Rock -- some trade outpost out in the middle of nowhere. Very nervous, defensive guards.

 

SunriseOnTorturedLand.jpg (157157 bytes)Potion of Sunblock, anyone?

Hard to believe this land ever held so much water, but I can't figure out what else could have left the marks on those rocks. Note that no one has ever designed an adequate lens for taking a shot of Athas' red sun. Then again, I would not know, I am just an amature.

TrickyBadlands.jpg (137078 bytes)More badlands near the Ringing Mountains.

 

neartyr.jpg (152093 bytes)Fruit trees on the far fringes of Tyr's farmlands. I tried to ask the farmers what kind of fruit they were, but they chased me off with some sort of obsidian pruning hooks. Any ideas?

Corsons1024.gif (322734 bytes)

Maximum1024.GIF (477393 bytes)These two shots come to me from Christian Petersen. Christian appears to be using some sort of time lapse method -- I find his work with the skies particularly interesting. To the left we have a desert sunset from the southlands, to the right, an astonishing shot of what appears to be the preliminaries to a Tyr storm over the rocky badlands. I can't think of a more dangerous place to be. How the photographer escaped escapes me!

Monolith2.jpg (19888 bytes)Here's a shot of the famous monolith from the endless sand dunes in the south. A disturbing sight if you ask me. That is about the worst land for mirages other than the obsidian wastes during the heat of the day. I don't care if the gladiators make fun of you: bring a parasol!

These just in: Some of you have asked me about the Reman continent. Currently information on Remaan is rather sparse, and time is too short for me to make a detailed account. But for what it is worth, here are my photos of Remaan's unusual geography. As you may recall, the Reman civilization was the source of the cultures that founded Tyr and Balic. The Remans were the most racially united of the nation-states; Remans included Elves, Humans, Orcs, Dwarves, and Pterrans. Thus Remaan took the brunt of Rajaat's anger -- The faraway continent of Remaan (almost opposite the globe from the pristine tower) was the only land where Rajaat personally led the attack.  Remaan.jpg (16895 bytes)

Rajaat stirred up the bowels of the earth, turning Remaan into a volcanic wasteland. For weeks, volcanoes belch ash into the sky, Dismal.jpg (23021 bytes)until a few hours of rain temporarily clear the ash from the air. The ash turns into a sort of cement, and dries in the sun, creating a rough, mostly flat landscape, broken only by rough trenches and ever-belching volcanoes. The cycle repeats, so that the land is mostly flat with puddles of wet cement. 

During the brief times when the air is clear, moss and plants, especially water lilies and bamboo clusters, thrive and grow rapidly.prettycliff.jpg (36759 bytes)

Right is a rare shot of Remaan while the sky is clear. Usually the air is either filled with ash or with water mist. Note the gully -- earthquakes frequently shake the land and split the cement land to its foundations. Naturally, the water/cement slop of the rain tends to fill up these ravines

RemaanCliffs.jpg (29016 bytes)

Here is a shot taken from inside one of these ravines. Remaan contains at least one large but shallow bodies of water, although the precise borders shift. Although flat, Remaan's plains are at a high altitude after millenia of level after level of cement. Old volcanoes go extinct and new ones occasionally break through the ground and fathoms of cement.

Citations on the Color of the Athasian Sky

From The Crimson Legion, Chapter Seven, page 140. 

'Before climbing out of the trough, Rikus paused to look at the crimson sun.  It hung at its zenith, a fiery orb that hovered in the exact centre of the blazing white bowl of the midday sky. '"White sky," Neeva said, also studying the sun.'

If anyone has any other cool Athasian Photos they would like to share, or any other citations of official information on the Athasian sky, please send them over to technobabel@juno.com --my maximum attachment download is 1MB, I think, so try to keep it under that.