The Pot of Yellow Stew, aka Lake of Golden Dreams

When I was 13 or 14, we used to play D&D in the Dark Sun campaign setting. This was a world, Athas, that had originally been the Standard Fantasy Setting, with Tolkienesque elves and dwarves and all that, but had suffered an environmental apocalypse caused by the irresponsible use of magic and had become a harsh desert world. All the Standard Fantasy races had adapted to this new environment and were now entirely different -- huge hairless dwarves, long-legged elves adapted to running, cannibalistic halflings, and so on.

In the handbook was a brief description of this place, with the details left for individual DMs to work out as they saw fit:

The Lake of Golden Dreams lies on the western side of the Smoking Crown [a volcano], where a thick yellowish steam constantly rises from its boiling waters. Where the yellow water is not too deep, it is possible to see that the bottom of the lake is laced with hundreds of tunnels and passageways. According to rumor, these tunnels lead to an incredible city that lies at the heart of the Smoking Crown. It is difficult to say whether there is any truth to this story, however; those who have survived the scalding waters long enough to swim into the tunnels have never returned.

As we developed this in our own gameplay, the Lake of Golden Dreams was the "official" name of this body of water, but locals generally referred to it as the Pot of Yellow Stew (sort of like how the "Lake Isle of Innisfree" about which Yeats waxed poetic was actually known to the locals as Rat Island). We decided that the tunnels under the lake led not to a city in the heart of a volcano but to a portal to a similar boiling yellow lake on an entirely different world. This was Dune Freak Lake on the island of New Athas, on another planet, so called because of a desert monster that had once emerged from it (such monsters having the best chance of surviving the scalding waters and getting through the portal alive).

New Athas was a frozen tundra, entirely different from common or garden Athas. The people there were descended from Athasians who had made it through the portal in the distant past, and they were thus tundra-adapted versions of desert-adapted versions of the original Standard Fantasy races.

And that's about it, really. We never really developed New Athas in any detail and there are no real stories associated with it. I'm posting about it here because of how it ties in with comments on "Mint and highlighters," about a pot of gold being connected with drinking from gilded lilies, and with the downfall of Numenor -- which involved an attempt to reach another "world" and (in Bill's version of the story) ended with Numenor being frozen and put "on ice."