If you’re wondering what’s happened with the Ashes of Athas home / non-convention play, it seems there’s been some kind of snag with distribution permission.
There’s a thread on the WotC site acting as a sort of petition, asking Wizards to prioritize resolving the confusion. If you’re interested in playing Ashes of Athas, and you can’t make the conventions, this is where you want to weigh in. Please remember that hostility just makes the overseers mad.
I do not remember leaving the palace. For all I know, my lord and husband might have teleported me through the Grey – he has done that before when he wanted something done quickly. More likely, my mind was simply too preoccupied to take notice of the route my legs took through those shadowy halls.
A new Eye on Dark Sun article by Rodney Thompson is up today:
In the deserts of Athas, mirages are as uncommon as the travelers that witness them. Images that appear are often lures into greater danger, generated by malicious creatures or simply the byproduct of a ravaged world. Even so, it is rare for two people to have the same vision. The lone exception to this rule is the Ghost Caravan, which seems as though it could not be real . . . yet is a phenomenon that has been reported too many times to be dismissed as a mere trick of the mind.
My lord and husband's private chambers, deep inside his stone palace, are windowless. No torches line the walls. The Shadow King himself needs no light to see by, and many of his magical experiments require total darkness. Even the most favoured of his wives are not permitted to bring their own illumination into these halls.
The stone halls of the palace of the Shadow King are never truly silent, filled with the endless susurration of whispered voices even in the dead of night. The carved templars lining its twisting, labyrinthine corridors in high relief seem trapped in an endless dance, stone limbs writhing in tranced ecstasies as the flickering torchlight plays upon them. One is left with the disturbing impression that these stone women are the source of the endlessly echoing murmurs, the true living inhabitants of the palace. When I first came to the Naggaramakam, a confused and wistful child plucked from my dying mother’s mud-brick hovel to become yet another bride of the Shadow King, I wondered for a time whether those stone women waited only for us flesh-and-blood women to leave or to die, so that they might live and serve our Lord and Husband in our place.
For a massive book of his art: “This Brom hardcover art book will be the largest, most comprehensive retrospective ever published on this renowned dark fantasy artist. “
Take a look at the kickstarter. There are a couple of levels for signed prints and sketches, if you’re interested in that. It’s already funded, with well over a month to go. Book delivery set for June 2013, about 10 months from now.
The ancient road to the Mekillot Gate is straight and wide enough for three argosies to pass side by side with room to spare. The paving slabs, each some four yards across, are irregularly shaped, yet fit together so closely you could not slide even a hair between them. Even after countless millennia of heavy traffic, the wagon ruts that mar their dark blue-grey surface are at most a quarter-inch deep. Like the fort and causeway in Bremil Pass, the Caravan Road was built to last out the ages.
