Café de Nuit

It's the only domain I know almost nothing about. I've searched high and low, but to no avail. Please help me.

I know it came from Athas, but I don't know the darklord. What did he/she/it/they do to deserve darklordship? What is the curse?

Funny you should say "he/she/it/they" in regards to the Kalidnay darklord: Thakok-An is the only darklord to have undergone a sex change in between published appearances (male in IoT, female in DoD).

Thakok-An was the chief templar of a sorcerer-king on Athas, meaning a cleric who received power from the ruler's near-godlike magical might. Having fallen in love with her [okay, let's go with female] king Kalid-Ma (who couldn't care less), she plotted to somehow win his affections -- not sure how, IDHTBIFOM -- against his wishes, but instead she wound up in Ravenloft. The king she'd served is now trapped in suspended animation within his temple, and she can't revive him to be with him or even explain why she did what she did; fearing a revolt by the downtrodden riffraff of RL-Kalidnay, she keeps Kalid-Ma's incapacity a secret, lest her subjects rebel and tear both herself and her sleeping king to pieces for their many decades of oppressive cruelty.

Thakok-An is a half-elven Athasian templar (cleric) with psionicist levels (meaning she'd be a psion in 3E) and the ability to raise desiccating sandstorms along her borders IIRC. My guess is that she changed sexes because, if genders in their backstory were reversed, a *male* Thakok-An would have likely been doing things to the unconscious sorcerer-queen that violated TSR's guidelines of what's acceptable for publication.

The Act was to kill all her family in order to help along the process of the king becoming a dragon but she did it wrong and caused everyone in the ziggarat to be killed. Now he sleep in a suspended animation but at the same time sucks life force from the area to sustatin him. If a sacrifice is not offered on the ziggart every few days plants start withering and soon people too will start dying. She hates all wizards as all spells cast in Kaliday suck life force from the earth (unless you are a preserver wizard from Athas) and has the chance of "starving" the king.

And it its a mirge like wall of heat that she uses to close boarders not a sandstorm

Rotipher wrote:My guess is that she changed sexes because, if genders in their backstory were reversed, a *male* Thakok-An would have likely been doing things to the unconscious sorcerer-queen that violated TSR's guidelines of what's acceptable for publication.

actually HER background changed, due to a lack of knowledge in the first publication. In the Dark Sun publications Kalid-Ma has always been male, and due to a small snafu this went unnoticed in the publication of Forbidden Lore (not IoT) and he was listed as she with a male Thakok-An, but fans from both settings noticed and the error was corrected in the next publication of the realm DoD, creating a female Thakok-An

It's an eternal mystery of the universe...

Is it Kalid-Ma or Kalid-Pa?

I prefer male Thakok-An and female Kalid-Ma, for a couple of reasons. One, it gives Athas one more Socerer Queen rather than yet another King. Two (and this is slightly better than the gender-equaty reason) the name Kalid-Ma suggests to me Kali-Ma, the Hindu goddess of murder. So, you colud think of the city as a semi-Indian setting, with deserts instead of the more typical jungles (ala Sri Raji). And for two and a half reasons, it makes the dead spirit of the elf woman Thakok-An murdered and betrayed his wife that than just the friend that the female Thakok-An murdered and betrayed. Minor, but I like the thematics better that way.