Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 114 - The Cataclysm of Krynn

Episode Date: February 27, 2022

If you'll pardon the phrase, this week Jeremy gushes over an event from the Dragonlance campaign world, Krynn:  the Cataclysm.  This world-altering event was born from the pride of one man:  the Kingpriest who developed a twisted sense of the nature of good, believed the end justified the means, and made demands of the world's gods who responded with fire followed by silence.  Jeremy discusses this destruction, the events leading up to it, and the tragedy that followed.  Finally, he gives a brief tips on how to think about cataclysms and disasters in your world.

This week on the Taking 20 podcast. The sky darkens, ash rains from the sky, and the king priest makes his demand. Still blinded by his own ambition and believing himself to be an equal to the gods, he says, Behold, the gods come, as a burning mountain from the heavens crashes into the city of Istar. into the city of Istar. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to episode 114 of the Taking20 podcast, continuing the lore series, this time about the Cataclysm of Kryn. This week's sponsor, toasters.

Be careful how far you turn that doneness dial on the toaster. If you turn it too far, you may find out that you're black toast intolerant. If you like this podcast, puns aside, please consider helping us spread the word by rating this podcast and leaving a review on Spotify, iTunes, Podbean, or wherever you happen to find it. First things first, in last week's episode when I was talking about wizards in Pathfinder First Edition, I made a mistake. I know, right? Don't worry, I've already flagellated myself thoroughly for my error.

I should have said that your highest ability score should be Intelligence, and your second highest score should be Dexterity and Constitution. On a re-listen, I think I said that your second highest score should be Strength. Which, no. That's stupid. Sorry about that. I'm not sure I jacked my strength up that high as a wizard. It's very suboptimal to try to play Morgan LeFlex, but, you know, hey, try it. If it works out for you, please let me know. Oh, I've been waiting for this episode for a while now. The Cataclysm of Kryn is one of my favorite world-shaping events in any piece of fiction I've ever read. Is it complicated? No.

But it is cool as shit, and it helped form young Jeremy's love of fantasy and RPGs. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Fair warning, it is going to be so hard to keep this to 20 minutes. I'm going to do my best, but please accept my heartfelt apologies if I run long like I did last week. Also, I've noticed that I've been cursing a lot more in recent episodes. I'm going to try to scale that back just a little bit. My apologies

if anyone happened to be offended by that. Before I begin the episode proper though, I must warn you that there is no way to cover this world-shaking event without divulging some spoilers from the original Dragonlance series of books and the subsequent series of books, the Dragonlance Twins trilogy. So let's start simply. What is Kryn? Kryn is the world from the Dragonlance series of novels and later an RPG setting for advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Dragonlance Adventures and other books, and a separate rulebook released for Dungeons & Dragons version 3.5. It is a unique campaign setting equivalent to Faerun in D&D and Galarian in Pathfinder. It is a traditional fantasy setting.

Dwarves, elves, humans, halflings, but halflings were called kinder. So Kryn was a world, but what was the cataclysm of Kryn? The cataclysm was when the king-priest of the nation of Istar demanded the gods of the world make him a god as well. And for his hubris, the gods cast a mountain down on the world of Crenn, plunging the world into darkness and the disappearance of clerics from the world for 300 years. There's a lot to unpack there, so let's start at the beginning. In the world of Crenn, there were three primary deities. The good deity

named Paladine, which is close to the word paladin, I know. The neutral god, Gilean, and the evil deity, Tacitus. There were other lesser deities of each alignment, but these were the three strongest. Each of the primary gods had a representative moon that circled the planet. The white-colored mood Solanari for Paladine, the red-colored Lunatari, and the black Nuitari. These moons governed the use of magic on the planet, white for good, red for neutral, and black for evil.

The gods chose moons instead of constellations because it said they wanted to be as close to their creation as possible. So three primary gods, three primary alignments, and three different colors. Clerics and wizards both wore robes to match these colors. Good ones wore white, neutral red, evil black. By the way, what's to stop someone from wearing a different color robe and lying about their

alignment? Beats the crap out of me. It's been 30 years since I've read the original series, and I'm going on a lot of memory here. Author Tracy Hickman, by the way, said that the robes were, well, it's more than just an ornamentation or a sign of fealty to a particular order of magic. The color of robes reflects an entire attitude and philosophy, the entire magical way of life that they live. So robe color smells a lot like alignment choice from here, but let's set fashion aside for right now. The good and evil gods both believed in the doctrine of balance. And let me preface everything I'm about to say here by saying that the doctrine of balance is controversial and is a much discussed aspect of the novels among fans. I'm going to try to be impartial, but if I say something you disagree with, please feel free to send me some feedback.

There's the dualistic view of the doctrine of balance, which has said that good and evil were both valid choices by people on Crenn. Since each was a valid choice, each had a place in the world. With this dualistic view, each god understood the need for the other one, and while they and their believers did take action against those of the opposing alignment, neither one wanted to obliterate the other because they wanted all creatures to choose to worship them rather than being forced to by lack of other options. Another view was that one is right and the other is wrong. Good wants people to be free to choose the righteous path, but does not believe in forcing it on people.

That would be equivalent to slavery. Neutral wants people to be free to choose either side, good or evil, and evil wants people to choose them, and most of the time, that's it. But there are times when evil took a more aggressive stance in Kryn's history and wanted to enslave those that weren't evil. Regardless, most leaders on Kryn and most of the gods embraced this doctrine of balance. No one alignment should hold total sway over everyone and everything. With me so far? The goal was for the alignments to be perfectly balanced, as all things should be, to quote Thanos.

The nation of, and I believe the formal name was the Holy Empire of Istar, referred to as just Istar. It lives in the northeast portion of the continent of Ancelon and is ruled by someone known as the King Priest. Throughout most of its history, the King Priest was a cleric of the good god Paladine, but not always. At the time of the Cataclysm, the current King Priest was Baldinus Piliphero, who had held the position for almost 40 years up

to that point. He was the most powerful king-priest to ever live. Matter of fact, he was so powerful that he was surrounded by an aura of silver light that was so bright, people couldn't actually see what he looked like. In his younger years, he wore his white robes proudly and selflessly healed people whenever it was needed. He displayed considerable power even without training. People flocked to him listening to his words, and through good actions and clever diplomacy, he eventually amassed an army. The previous king-priest became corrupted, and he exposed the previous king-priest for the fraud that he was.

He conquered Istar and set himself up as the new king-priest. And that's when the problem started. He believed the Doctrine of Balance could fornicate itself with an iron stick and stated that it was no longer needed. He swore on that throne to wipe out all evil on Kryn. He formed a special order of knights called the Knights of the Divine Hammer to defend Istar and root out evil where it could be found. He ordered them to kill evil clerics, evil mages, and certain races that tended to be evil. If you're sitting at home and getting a Middle Ages Crusades kind of vibe from this, you're not wrong.

Meanwhile, the most powerful wizards in Kryn were part of the Orders of High Sorcery. The powerful wizards and Kryn were part of the Orders of High Sorcery. The Orders of High Sorcery still believed in the Doctrine of Balance and refused to comply with Istar's command to turn over and or kill all the evil mages. There's a whole set of rabbit trails we could chase that includes the wizard's tests that every wizard had to pass when they reached a certain level. Each test was unique and designed for the tester to challenge their worldviews and help them understand something about themselves. But because the orders of high sorcery told the king priest to go pound sand in his holy backside, tensions ratcheted up quickly between the two powerful groups, the clerics and

the mages. A duplicate of the cleric Suvin, a high-level cleric of Paladine, got close to the king priest. This duplicate was controlled by a black-robed mage, and that duplicate attempted to stab the king priest to death 21 years after the king priest's denunciation of the Doctrine of Balance and 19 years before the cataclysm. With that attempted assassination, the war with the mages was on. The war between Istar and the mages is called the Lost Battles or Lost Wars because no one really won the conflict. The king-priest, along with the nation of Salamnia and the empire of Urgoth, tried to wipe the mages from the planet. Most of the mages retreated to one of their five

towers of high sorcery scattered throughout the continent. So since that's where the mages were, the Knights of the Divine Hammer, along with the other troops, attacked the towers. Now think about this for a minute. If you've played any RPG, you know how freaking powerful high-level wizards are. Sure, if you can get close to one, you can ruin their day, but these are dozens, maybe even hundreds of high-level wizards holed up in a defensible position with guardian magic and creatures. What you think would happen, happened. The knights of Salamnia laid siege to the talor in the town of Palanthas, but never attacked. They held their ground, but were honorable and chose not to attack until they were commanded to do so. The tower at Daltagoth was surrounded by a forest that made unwanted visitors fall asleep as soon as they entered it.

The Urgothean cavaliers surrounded the tower and waited for the order to attack. This was supposed to be the second tower attacked, but the leaders of the battle launched their own attack five days early. They wanted the glory of the first victory. The troops were able to penetrate the towers at Daltagoth, which is the capital city of Urgoth, who had joined the fight against the mages, and rather than die by the sword, 30 wizards met in the heart of the tower and destroyed their own tower, killing themselves, most of the attacking army, and destroying one quarter of the city. Meanwhile, at the tower of Losserkam, the mages did one better. When they were cornered, they destroyed themselves, the tower, the entire attacking army, and the entire city. Remnants of the guardian magical forest still remain, and they inflame the passage of anyone who enters them. It makes them fly into

a blind rage. The kinder who still live in the area like to play with the forest because they think it's hilarious when people get angry. Meanwhile, there's a tower of high sorcery in the city of Istar, and after the decimation of the first two towers, the king priest decided it was time to negotiate. The wizards were allowed to take their magic items and artifacts and leave peacefully, turning the empty tower over to the king priest and fleeing to the companion tower of Weyrith. The king-priest would turn this tower into a display for evil and later neutral magic items and called it the Hall of Sacrilege. The honorable knights of Salamnia surrounding the tower at Palanthas allowed the wizards the same peaceful exit as Istar, and the vast majority of the

wizards left peacefully. But one black-robed wizard, driven insane by what he was seeing happen to his beloved magic, threw himself from the battlements and cursed the tower, such that only someone named the Master of Past and Present could enter it. The curse corrupted the guardian forest, called the Shoykan Grove, which became twisted and evil, teeming with undead, creating a fear effect so strong that even Kinder were scared of it, and they have a racial immunity to fear. The last remaining tower was the one at Weyreth, and that's where wizards fled for protection and to study. It and its forest exist in another dimension

and can appear anywhere on Kryn in a 500-mile radius. That's a ton of background to get to the cataclysm, and we're not done. So the king-priest proclaimed this herding of magic users of all alignments into a single tower as a victory. His power, ego, and paranoia grew with each passing year. He legalized slavery for neutral and evil peoples and races. He saw evil everywhere, and by three years before the cataclysm, he even started attacking good faiths that weren't worshippers of Paladine, believing them to be blasphemers and enablers of evil acts. His paranoia continued to grow, and one year before the cataclysm,

he created a group called the Erypha, or the Thought Readers, and gave them free reign to be judge and executioner over anyone that they found thinking impure thoughts. Remember that silvery glowing aura that King Priest Baldinus had that prevented nearly anyone from looking at him? The few who could pierce the bright light saw him for what he was, an old, weak, paranoid man who thought evil was constantly out to get him. He didn't actually have the faith that he projected to the public. Hell, he enabled the thought police. At this point, the other good clerics had had enough of his crap and attempted to kill the king priest, but he was able to escape and put

down the rebellion quite forcefully, but not before losing an artifact called the Disks of Mishakal, which contained words of all the good gods and merely reading them would set a person on the path of becoming a good aligned cleric. The king priest didn't care about the loss of those discs though. He had been long planning a ceremony, the culmination of which would be his demanding that the other gods make him a good aligned god as well. And that went exactly how you'd expect. It's important to know that this wasn't a spur-of-the-moment decision by the king priest. His ego had ramped up over the years until he thought he was equivalent to a god. The gods knew what was coming and sent 13

warnings to the world of Kryn, including a storm that battered the nation of Istar for 13 days, Kryn, including a storm that battered the nation of Istar for 13 days, trees started weeping blood in the elven forests, destruction of the king-priest tower, a double eclipse where the black moon hid the other two. No fires would burn in the nation of Salamnia, while in another nation, fire spread out of control. An ancient beast of darkness started slaughtering the dwarves, forest animals turned savage, oceans turned blood-red, volcanoes erupted, and most importantly, the priests of all faiths disappeared from the world. There one minute, gone the next, no clerics. The gods were trying to warn him, but the king priest interpreted these as evil attempting to thwart his plans. Evil is desperate to stop me, he would say. Meanwhile, Salamnic Knight of the Rose, Lord Soth,

was given the opportunity to prevent the cataclysm and was charged with confronting the king-priest and demanding that he abdicate the throne. Soth had murdered his wife and child over jealousy and had taken an elven woman as his lover. She prayed that Soth would have the opportunity to redeem his soul, and so the good goddess Mishakal, of Disks of Mishakal fame, gave Soth the information he needed to stop the cataclysm. On his way to Istar to do so,

he was stopped by three other elf maidens who planted seeds in his head that his lover was being unfaithful. Once again overcome by jealousy, he abandoned his quest to stop the king priest. He returned to his lover and killed her just as the cataclysm struck. If the name Lord Soth sounds familiar, I mentioned him in the Strahd episode as another dark lord who's a peer of Strahd and has his own realm in prison. See episode 109 for more about that vampire lord of Barovia. Anyway, the king priest is careening madly towards destruction. He believed he was infallible and would not be stopped and would not be deterred. He believed the good god Paladine had become weak and with the king priest by his side, they would wipe out evil and usher in a new age of Kryn.

The sky darkens, ash rains from the sky, and the king-priest makes his demand. Still blinded by his own ambition and believing himself to be an equal to the gods, he says, Behold, the gods come, as a burning mountain from the heavens crashes into the city of Istar.

While it's called the Cataclysm, other groups call it by different names. The Plainsmen tribes call it the Rending of the World, while the Elves call it either the Great Shattering or the Great Sundering. The world Kryn is forever changed. What once was a solid continent now has seas and oceans rush in where the land level drops suddenly. The Bay of Balifor, the Blood Cup Sea, Haltagoth Bay, and New Sea all form in the aftermath of the destruction. The nation of Istar is utterly destroyed. It sinks beneath the waters of the ocean that rushes in to fill it. A permanent maelstrom hundreds of miles wide forms where the capital city and the king

priest once stood. The seas there become permanently red, leading it to be renamed the Blood Sea of Istar. Waters rush in and split the nation of Urgoth into two islands. The sun goes dark and the entire climate is changed for years. Snows and ash fall all over the planet. Earthquakes rock the world. Life disappears from large sections of the ocean. In a twisted way, the king priest succeeded. He wanted to usher in a new age for Kryn and he did. The cataclysm began what was known as the Age of Despair. As bad as the cataclysm was, and believe me, it was devastating to the world. Thousands died, millions of lives

affected. The fallout from the event would last for centuries. Humans and dwarves banded together to try to get into the dwarven city of Thorbarden for food, and thus began the Dwarfgate Wars. The worst was that the gods no longer answered prayers. None of them provided spells to clerics. Magical healing in the world was gone. Kryn believed that the gods had turned their back on the world, and all the races began the search for new gods. These supposed new gods, though, that they found were

just as silent as the old ones, and the last few healing wands and potions gradually disappeared from the world. Charlatans, fakers, snake oil salesmen rose up into the vacuum and found plenty of victims as they sold fake cures and fake healing for various ailments. Fake clerics arose who claimed to be representatives of gods old and new alike, but their powers were sleight of hand, illusions, or outright lies. Many stopped looking to the gods at all. Attendance at temples dwindled and faded like candles of all the gods' presence in the world gradually extinguishing. the gods' presence in the world gradually extinguishing. No hints, prophecies, or indications remained of the gods' existence until more than three centuries later when a young tribeswoman and her love happened to enter the town of Solace in the inn of the last home,

bearing a blue crystal staff with the long-lost ability to heal. So how can you use an event like this in your world? Later on, I want to do an entire episode of world-shaping events like this as a background for a campaign, but consider this a brief preview. Even if you're not basing your campaign on the planet of Kryn, you can still use the story of the cataclysm in your world. If you want to have a world-shaping event like a global earthquake, tsunami, planet cracks open, a massive volcano, or other similar disaster in your gaming world, think about how much it would affect your world and how it would affect your campaign.

If this cataclysm is still unfolding, are the characters in the middle of it, or is it a distant event that the players are seeing the subsequent after-effects of? And if they are in the middle of it, the most important plan for your adventure is, how the heck are your characters going to possibly survive it? And if it's distant, what are the ramifications of the event that the PCs would need to deal with? Are there refugees? Is the weather changing? Is the geography of the nation changing? Are monsters and creatures relocating to new areas and it's disrupting existing food webs? Were there warnings, omens, portents of what was to come?

Did some people prepare? If the cataclysm was a moment in history, whether distant or recent, how has the world changed and how are the peoples dealing with whatever the new normal is? Is the world recovering? If so, how? The book Dragons of Autumn Twilight takes place 348 years after the cataclysm. The disaster is ancient history, still discussed, but more people focus on how to live in the current world

than are obsessed with the event of the past. Mid- and post-cataclysmic campaigns can become grimdark really fast. Dwarves struggle to survive surrounded by an ocean of zombies, the rending of the mountain, the great flood of the year 284, the dusting where all the crops withered and died, the era of rock rain or whatever your cataclysm happens to be. What nuggets of happiness and joy can people cling to? Also, what's going to be the scope of your disaster campaign? Sure, post-cataclysm campaigns could be global in scope to try to get the world back to the way it once was. But consider a campaign with a smaller scope. The world can't be saved, but this town can, this family can, this area can be renewed, and everyone can at least learn how to survive in the shadow of this disaster.

There is so much I didn't have time to get to. The Archmage Fistandantilus, the War of the Lance, the different ages of Kryn, stealing dragon eggs to make a new race of creatures to keep the good dragons from entering the war. Zac Seroth, the mage Raistlin changing alignment and attempting to become a god himself. The recycling of Christian, Greek, and other religious symbolism in the Legends of Kryn, but I'm already over time for this episode. The Cataclysm is the major event in the history of Kryn. It helped shape the campaign world as defined in the books

and the campaign setting. It cast a shadow over two full ages of the planet and sows the siege for amazing adventures that can be had in a game world. If you'd like to include an apocalypse in your game world, read more about the Cataclysm, its lead-up, and its eventual aftermath. Borrow the ideas that you'd like to include in your game world, and hopefully you and your players will have fun doing it. Did this pique your interest? Would you like to know more about Kryn? Do you have another lore topic you'd like me to cover in a future episode? If so, please reach out to me at feedback at taking20podcast.com. I have really taken to these lore episodes, and I would love to do another one

about a topic that interests you. Tune in next week, where I'll talk about lessons learned from the How to GM chapter of The Witcher RPG, published in the 90s. Before I go, though, I want to thank this week's sponsor, Toasters,

the world's first pop-up notifications. This has been episode 113, continuing the lore series, this time about the cataclysm of Kryn. My name is Jeremy Shelley, and I hope that your next game is your best game. The Taking 20 Podcast

is a Publishing Cube media production. Copyright 2022. References to game system content are copyrighted by their respective publishers.