Alternatives to the Collapsed Empire?

[hymer]

A common fantasy RPG trope is of the fallen empire. It's very useful in explaining the many ruins, the powerful magical items lying about in tombs, and some other things depending on the setting. And much like the great sea being on the west side of the map, it's probably something that's likely to fit into many a subconscious, what with the fall of the Roman Empire and all that.
The trope can even be varied quite a bit, as you can vary the fallen civilization, have several of them, describe their histories and cultures, and so on.

Has anyone come up with something(s) that can take the place of this trope? Something you can do instead, just to mix things up a bit every now and again? It's a really useful trope, but anything gets stale with overuse.

[Nifft]

It's not just the Roman Empire, of course -- huge empires have risen & fallen across the surface of the planet. There are ruins everywhere in reality, which is at least part of why there are ruins everywhere in fantasy.

As for alternatives...

Ghost Towns caused by resource depletion / climate change / monster infestation / magical pollution. You can find some great images for modern ghost towns on the 'net.

Alien Wreck -- a fallen space ship, which might be an isolated accident, or might be just one part of a very poorly planned invasion fleet with more wrecks somewhere nearby.

Dreams of a Dead God -- not the god of a fallen empire, just a god who has fallen out of favor within recorded history. The dead god's legends are still powerful, but they're distant because the god is dead. So you invade the god's dreams through the locations of its divine legends and steal its powers and/or loot.

[Delta]

Well Earthdawn did it a bit differently and had the whole world hide underground for a century or so in magical bunkers because of a massive demonic invasions, and afterwards, of course those magical bunkers are still there, many of which were compromised during that time, some still sealed away and so on. Gives a very plausible reasons why there are dungeons filled with riches, magical treasures and dangerous beasts all over the map.

[D+1]

Well, "collapsed empire" can cover a lot of ground. WHY did it collapse/disappear?
Political collapse from civil war or revolution
economic collapse
disease
famine
plague
cataclysm (earthquakes, fire, flood, meteor swarm, global warming, global ice age, zombie apocaplypse...)
invasion (by neighbor states, general monsters, dragons, demons...)
natural migration to new/better lands

or the good old fashioned "NOBODY knows". There once were people living here. Now there aren't. Some ruins remain. If the players aren't curious you don't NEED a reason why.

And it doesn't have to be a collapsed EMPIRE. Ruins of a city are found - there may have been an empire around it but the reason the city is in ruins doesn't have to be because the empire itself collapsed. Any of the above reasons could explain an individual ruin without needing to be part and parcel of a wider issue. Depending on circumstances it may not even take long before the reasons for a ruin BECOMING a ruin or having been there in the first place are totally lost to history and made meaningless.

[VoxRationis]

Well, if you're looking for a reason to explain why large treasures and valuable magic items are found in underground complexes rather than in general circulation, tombs are another option. Often, settings have these tombs belonging to lost cultures anyway, but that's not strictly necessary. You would probably need to address the social implications of rummaging through people's burial sites and selling their valuables, though. Perhaps a change in religion or culture has made these older burials no longer worth respecting in the eyes of the public. Perhaps such ornate tombs are always associated with political elites, and once a particular dynasty falls, their tombs are accepted targets, tacitly or explicitly. Perhaps the tomb-building culture has been conquered or colonized, and the conquering power has no respect for their dead. Or perhaps your PCs are happy being social pariahs, at least if their activities become known.

[Corneel]

Are you looking for an alternative that can still explain ruins and magic items therein or an alternative setting altogether?

If the first, in addition to Nifft's suggestions I'd add

Catacombs: There has been no collapse but cities have been built and rebuilt, newer buildings often being built over older ones leading to the existence of large warrens and catacombs underneath most existing cities and large towns. Or underground cities were built for defensive reasons, but later abandoned when things were better and again built over.

Expansion on ghost towns: even without an empire collapsing, individual cities can be abandoned for environmental and/or economical reasons (shifting trade routes, rivers changing course, silting up of ports, etc.) and fortresses and castles also for politico-military reasons (border has moved, region is pacified), though sometimes they might only be partially abandoned, still leaving abandoned parts to be explored.

If it's not so much ruins, but places of interest and loot, then there are alternatives like shipwrecks, the warrens of goblins, orcs or similar plundering humanoids, lost caravans in the desert or in a typical D&D world, the Underdark.

Last alternative is to turn away from typical dungeon crawling and go for another focus (and there the scope becomes very wide).

[SirBellias]

Easy - just loot the current empire. Or the sewers. People throw all sorts of fun things in the sewer systems. Cut open a few rats and you're bound to find a +1 toothpick of cleanliness or three.

[Telok]

I did the massive burecratic opressive empire shortly before it's collapse in one game.

[Segev]

You're raiding actual wizards' towers to get their latest magic items and spells, instead of forgotten wizards' towers filled only with traps and really persistent creature types?

You're using a time machine to travel 1000 years into the future, raiding the great accomplishments of your own civilization as it lies in ruins in that far-off time, while trying to solve the mystery as to what happened so that you can prevent it?

You're exploring the Shadowfell or the Ethereal Plane reflections of the real world, where things are more fantastical and dangerous, but more empty of...civilized...things.

[Amaril]

Another explanation for the abundant dungeon complexes full of danger and magical treasure: they're various eldritch locations built by the fallen angels who have enslaved humanity as fortresses, vaults, armories, pleasure palaces, etc., and you're a group of resistance fighters/self-serving thieves breaking in to rob and/or trash them. (You can't use that one, though, it's mine :smalltongue:)

I notice, though, that everyone seems to be addressing that one virtue of collapsed empire settings, when there's another one I feel is more essential: societal instability. There's not a whole lot of room for ragtag bands of adventurers solving problems and/or doing crimes when you're in a thriving civilization with established problem-solving institutions and/or strong law enforcement, respectively. On the other hand, if that civilization has collapsed, suddenly there are a lot more cracks for people to fall through and become wayward misfits, a lot more need for them to go adventuring, and a lot more room for them to get away with stuff. A related concept is the unknown: advanced civilizations will tend to map out their territories in great detail, leaving not much undiscovered. But if that accumulated knowledge has been lost, there's lots of blank spots that might hold cool stuff.

One alternative setup that offers both of those immediately comes to mind: the frontier. There is an empire, a thriving one in fact, and you're on the forefront of its expansion into the unknown. Of course, out there on the fringes, far from the law, things are a lot more chaotic and dangerous, leaving plenty of opening for risk-takers and fortune-seekers who might not be welcome anywhere else.

[Andor13]

I haven't tried this, but try making a world where there are ruins everywhere, but they don't match. The ages don't match, the styles don't match, the contents don't match. Nobody knows why.

The secret is, it's a pastiche world. The gods built it out of pieces of other worlds (this is a great way to explain 12,756.8 sentient races btw.) What happened to those other worlds, and why the gods needed to build this one, is up to you.

[johnbragg]

This is a tweak to the "frontier of the empire" theme--proxy warfare in a fantasy setting.

There is a formal peace arrangement between the Kingdom of Goodygoodness and the half-dozen Big Bads that plague the frontier. The Kingdom of Goodygoodness doesn't use its full power to crush the Big Bads, and the Big Bads don't go openly murdering frontier peasants and trashing villages.

That leaves plenty of room for both sides to employ mercenaries, actual and nominal, who are not "legally" under the command of the Kingdom or of any of the various Big Bads. "Independent contractors" in contemporary American business parlance. Bands of freelance murderhobos trying to murder the Big Bads and plunder their lairs don't break the convention--it's just an unfortunate thing that happens, it's a dangerous world outside the kingdom, etc. On the other side of the coin, Big Bads kidnapping villagers isn't against the Convention (as long as no one can easily prove it), placing nonlethal curses on villagers isn't really important enough to start a war over. And sheltering humanoid raiders and bandits--well, nobody's exactly responsible for them, are they?

In due course, some of those murderhobos set themselves up as petty lords, either in a dead Big Bad's castle, or build a new one BX/BECMI "name level" style. And fresh muderhobos set out against them, and the process continues.

And, from time to time, someone feels powerful and secure enough, or desperate enough, to break the Convention and start an all-out conflict.

[Mendicant]

It's hard to get away from collapsed empires entirely if the place has a real sense of history, but my most successful, longest-running campaign was much less about ancient ruin delving than the slow-motion collapse of an empire that formed the whole campaign's background. They started dealing with a border war between various internal factions before getting sick of it and taking off for a sunnier part of the dying empire to be privateers. Except they ended up on their own, legally, because their noble benefactor got wiped out by a different noble house. They did two major dungeon delves in that game that had no historical relationship to each other and were at least 1000 miles apart.

My other campaigns I'm running are in the same world.

One is a West Marches--a type campaign several hundred years previous, where the empire is at its peak and the game takes place in a border region that's been devestated by a recently-routed monstrous army. The scattered remnants of a monster army squatting in the ruins they created has been perfect for creating a classic d&d setting. I still have ancient ruins sprinkled in though, mostly populated by undead or elementals and not really hooked into the main backstory.

The other one is set about 120 years after my long one ended, and there are three great powers vying to shape the world in the wake of the full collapse of the old order. The game is again taking place in a border region, but this time it's a lucrative foreign colony. Not a lot of ruins here but several ways to get whisked into the realm of the fey, and there are major industrial centers and dreadnoughts that are big enough to be mini dungeons.

[JoeJ]

Another possibility is to take the collapsed empire idea to the extreme limit. It wasn't the end of an empire, it was the end of the world. A worldwide flood/fire/war/etc. destroyed everything. Everyone was killed except for one couple who were rescued by the gods. In the thousands of years since then, the descendants of that one couple diverged into the various intelligent races of today.

[Nifft]

Another possibility is to take the collapsed empire idea to the extreme limit. It wasn't the end of an empire, it was the end of the world. A worldwide flood/fire/war/etc. destroyed everything. Everyone was killed except for one couple who were rescued by the gods. In the thousands of years since then, the descendants of that one couple diverged into the various intelligent races of today.

Inbreeding caused Elves!

[Xuc Xac]

Magical tech boom :
All the old magic of the ancients is weak. If you find a magic sword over 100 years old, it'll never be better than a simple +1. Until recently, magic was useful but not incredibly powerful. There were only two kinds of spells: "half spells" (cantrips) and "full spells" (1st level). They took 10 times as long to cast.

Then about 20 years ago, everything changed. The cosmic calendar flipped a page to a new Age; there was a grand conjunction and the stars were right; some genius wizard had a sudden insight and invented the somatic component; or whatever. Suddenly, magic was unleashed. You could cast cantrips with a simple gesture instead of a minute-long incantation. "Full spells" were just the tip of the iceberg.

There was an explosion of research as wizards started creating 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and higher spell levels. Sometimes the explosions were literal catastrophic detonations (especially in the case of poor Zargothrax the Wise and "Zargothrax's Catastrophic Detonation" spell). Wizards started making magic items in greater quantities and with greater potency. They looked at the hippogriff and the platypus and wondered "What else can we jam together?" All kinds of freakish things appeared in the wild after escaping their masters or being released into the wild for testing.

Many wizards moved out into the middle of nowhere to do their research in isolated and hardened facilities to contain their experiments, conceal them from spying rivals, and avoid confrontations with pitchfork-and-torch-wielding villagers with NIMBYism.

"Exploring ancient ruins" is replaced by "exploring modern ruins in the aftermath of industrial accidents" or "being hired by a rival wizard to engage in industrial espionage or sabotage" like a pseudo-medieval Shadowrun.

[Anonymouswizard]

A common fantasy RPG trope is of the fallen empire. It's very useful in explaining the many ruins, the powerful magical items lying about in tombs, and some other things depending on the setting.

I've very rarely used the 'powerful ancient empire we can't match today' trope in my settings. I do have one I'm trying to develop where an ancient Empire both exploited sacrificing folk for power and managed to develop the most versatile magic in history, but most of the human sacrifice stuff has been rendered near useless with properly made wizard's staffs and mana stores so when people raid ancient tombs they're mainly looking for pointers about where to look to find new spells. Although this setting also has early modern firearms (revolvers and repeating rifles, the original version just had rifled flintlocks but I decided to add more history and technological development) and decent medical knowledge that they've stubbornly kept hold of despite having healing magic (I mean, it's not to the levels of modern medicine, but they accept germ theory and perform surgery in aseptic environments if possible).

I'm still very much running with 'if an ancient made it, it's probably less useful than if it was made today, and we can probably make a better one with some reverse engineering. The ancients didn't even have steel for Bahamut's sake!' I just find it feels more believable, and it doesn't stop dungeon delving from being possible if I want to run that. You're just looking for gold and gems instead of magic stuff.

[Arbane]

How about post-invasion?

Your setting is digging themselves out of the rubble after a brutal invasion from across the seas/beyond the stars/another dimension/whatever, where the invaders were narrowly driven off at enormous cost. They left behind fortresses, weapons, supplies, war machines... oh yeah, and autonomous terror-weapons (aka 'monsters') and troopers who got left behind enemy lines ('orcs').

And booby traps. LOTS of booby traps.

[Dr paradox]

My first thought is to make the ruins full of cool stuff be outsider enclaves - they were essentially part of an interplanar exploration and maybe early colonization effort that got mothballed due to ballooning budgets or shifting cultural priorities. They didn't get conquered or overrun - just shuttered as the exploration and research staff portaled back home, leaving behind security and supplies in case they ever decided to resume the initiative.

This offers a lot of potential variety - simple barracks and maybe cultural outreach structures for communicating with the locals, who were bronze-age at the time, research outposts built around unique magical or geological phenomena, warehouses and distribution centers meant to supply the other outposts, and so on. Even better, you can have some of these outposts have been broken into and re-purposed decades or centuries ago as monster lairs, with others still sealed and pristine.

Ideally, the civilization that built them is still out there someplace, possibly even reachable, though they probably don't find much worth talking to us about.

[Beneath]

Fallen empires and frontiers give the advantage of not having to play politics to get anything done; you can make a fortune on the tip of your sword and if someone tries to tax it from you, just skip town; the law doesn't reach that far. That's in addition to leaving all sorts of cool ruins everywhere.

Another option I saw to get that was to set the game before civilization has really formed and spread everywhere (so like, the Bronze Age or Heroic Age (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Heroic_Age)), with dungeons being the realms of malevolent deities, or the leftover parts that were left unfinished when the world was made, now home to things that never were meant to be part of it.

My current project (link in my sig; it's moving toward becoming a campaign) the general gist is that The Dungeon is a magical passage to the land of the dead, where ghosts are meant to pass on, but the passage was stopped up at the height of a recent war, and then various necromancers moved in to try to take advantage. This doesn't work if you need more than one dungeon, and notably the world outside has moved to a sort of peace (which means the taxman problem is an issue), though I haven't explored that in as much depth in published material. You also don't get more than one dungeon out of that backstory, but really you're gonna be playing each dungeon long enough that it deserves the prep time to think of a backstory for each one anyway.

I do like the idea that most adventuring happens in otherworlds, too; the real world is civilized and mundane, but the otherworlds (shadow, faerie, dream, whatever) are wondrous and full of danger and treasure. Arguably you could even set that in the modern day, provided you have a reason why your heroes can't just bring assault rifles in (making your heroes children is a popular one).

[Celestia]

You don't need total societal collapse to have ruins, just change. Maybe some noble families moved to knew estates or died out, leaving the old one ripe for the picking. Maybe the kingdom built a bunch of military forts during a past war that have long since been abandoned. Maybe a castle was in the middle of construction when something drastic happened, and it was never completed. Maybe the big city has an old, mostly abandoned ghetto. There are all sorts of reasons why things fall into ruin without the typical ancient empire scenario.

[Pleh]

Well, if you're looking for a reason to explain why large treasures and valuable magic items are found in underground complexes rather than in general circulation, tombs are another option. Often, settings have these tombs belonging to lost cultures anyway, but that's not strictly necessary. You would probably need to address the social implications of rummaging through people's burial sites and selling their valuables, though.

I recently did a variation on this:

A race of viking dwarves that superstitiously worship their ancestors.

Similar to the egyptians, a dwarf of this culture must have in their tomb anything they want to have with them in the next life. Similar to nordic-viking cultures, they value fighting and conquest above all, so bare minimum a dwarven descendent must keep their dead ancestor equipped for the Great Hunt in Valhalla.

But really, as conquerers themselves, they really ought to be gradually adding wealth to their ancestor's horde, so a portion of everything they pillage is given to the ancestors. Finally, like in Avatar, The Last Airbender, the winter solstice brings the spirit world close to the mortal world, so the souls of the ancestors return home from their hunt to check in on their family and count up their relative wealth increase. If they are pleased with the year's offerings, they bless their descendents and go back to the great hunt with increased prestige among the dead. If merely satisfied, they admonish the descendants to do better next year and depart peacefully. If the spirit comes back to find their tomb looted, they will curse their descendants, even up to the point of haunting whichever descendant they hold directly responsible for their care ("I guess I'll have to stay home this year and help you do your job, idiot.")

This leads to a Reverse Christmas with the Dwarven Vikings, who annually descend just before the winter solstice to pillage en mass the lowlands below the mountains, stealing from the poor to give to the dead before they come home to see what's waiting for them "under the tree."

This also creates a compelling reason for the tombs to be filled to the teeth with traps and monsters caged within to function as guard dogs.

Edit: why isn't stealing from the dwarven tombs evil in this setting? It's neutral because the dwarves rather enjoy the job of beating/killing peasants and taking their stuff (imagine a dark version of legolas and gimli's kill count game, but on a massive scale), so stealing from the tombs may be somewhat cruel, but certainly not much more than the dwarves themselves are.

[hymer]

Thanks everyone for your thoughts and ideas. As for why I'm asking, mostly out of idle curiosity of what people would answer. I'm not actively planning a campaign, but the Playground seldom fails to put some interesting thoughts in mind. :smallsmile:

[Socratov]

If you want to read an interesting take on the fallen empire trope you should check out Asimov's Foundation Trilogy which plays with and undermines this trope. the synopsis is that the galactic empire is in decline, one guy foresees it, dies and leaves behind a foundation to not prevent the fall of the empire, but to shorten the periode between empires form a thousand years to about 200-300 years. it also gives great reasons why an empire would wax or wane.

[hymer]

If you want to read an interesting take on the fallen empire trope you should check out Asimov's Foundation Trilogy which plays with and undermines this trope. the synopsis is that the galactic empire is in decline, one guy foresees it, dies and leaves behind a foundation to not prevent the fall of the empire, but to shorten the periode between empires form a thousand years to about 200-300 years. it also gives great reasons why an empire would wax or wane.

Bo-ring!
Actually, I own the trilogy, but I couldn't get through the second book last I tried. I don't give a [expletive deleted] about the characters or the culture, so I couldn't finish it.

[Anonymouswizard]

If you want to read an interesting take on the fallen empire trope you should check out Asimov's Foundation Trilogy which plays with and undermines this trope. the synopsis is that the galactic empire is in decline, one guy foresees it, dies and leaves behind a foundation to not prevent the fall of the empire, but to shorten the periode between empires form a thousand years to about 200-300 years. it also gives great reasons why an empire would wax or wane.

As I remember doesn't it also take something like four hundred years for the Empire to actually die? It's death is a slow process caused by incompetent leadership, while also falling far behind Terminus in technology (early on it makes up the difference by just having more resources, eventually it becomes clear that Foundation technology is just so much more advanced it's become funny). Very different from your standard cataclysm.

[Scripten]

Bo-ring!
Actually, I own the trilogy, but I couldn't get through the second book last I tried. I don't give a [expletive deleted] about the characters or the culture, so I couldn't finish it.

That's a shame. The series gets better the further you go. I personally found the "prequel" books (the last two) to be the most compelling. None of them quite touch the Robots series, however. Their early neo-Noir themes are really interesting.

But hey, different strokes.

[Libertad]

Has anyone come up with something(s) that can take the place of this trope? Something you can do instead, just to mix things up a bit every now and again? It's a really useful trope, but anything gets stale with overuse.

The Transformed Empire, aka the Eastern Roman/Byzantine Empire. Or the Islamic Caliphate being absorbed into the Ottoman Empire. In this case, the empire is still around as a notable power. But due to loss of territory, foreign coups, or merely a major political/religious shift it is unrecognizable as the original.

[Dargaron]

+1 to Beneath's idea for setting your world before the collapse of the First Empire(TM). That's my general approach: my last three settings have been(in reverse order):

-An India-sized subcontinent where political centralization has never risen above the level of city-state leagues. There's one semi-industrialized state that's managed to become a unitary state in all but name, one feudal confederacy based around an Elven/Eladrin aristocracy, and one traditional city-state league, where the leading city-state is a theocracy ruled by the priests of the Goddess of Death with copious advice from the "ancestors." The players generally didn't do much tomb raiding: instead they either disrupted "facilities" that were operated by hostile forces (criminal dens, outposts of monstrous creatures, etc) or dealt with a localized anomaly (their first adventure was going into the local wizard's tower when his apprentice came back from an errand and found the place trashed by animated objects on a rampage).

-An island nation (Britain-sized, because why not?) where the island was united some two hundred years ago, and the ruling dynasty had just died out. The PCs were the close confidants of the dude who was technically king, but after her got murdered, they linked up with his heir to deal with the conspiracy that killed him. The PCs were generally a strike force used against specialized targets (one of the PCs was a mountain barbarian, so the party was sent to neutralize the new king's enemies among the tribes and sway them to his side).

-The latest one technically did contain a ruined, ancient civilization, but it didn't overlap with the area the PCs came from. The PCs were from a large floodplain/river valley, where the First Empire had been running for three hundred years, but it never had particularly good control over the periphery, where Wild Things still roamed. Most of the adventures would've alternated between hunting down MacGuffins in the "civilized" part of the Empire (which means sneaking around interspersed with conflicts with criminal "muscle") and "Monster-of-the-week" stories where something from Out There was causing trouble for the local people.

Basically, as folks who've played Skyrim will tell you, while ancient ruins are a pretty good source of ill-gotten gains, bandit camps contain quite a bit of loot as well, and don't need a fallen empire to justify.

[Tvtyrant]

The adventuring area is a frontier to a functioning empire.

One I did on that theme was a nation was invaded from Space! and while the invasion was eventually defeated several provinces are mangled and filled with alien bioweapons. The surrounding nations were too cheap to send in more armies to clean it up, so they put a scalp bounty adventurers could collect and declared the province temporarily lawless.

[Socratov]

Bo-ring!
Actually, I own the trilogy, but I couldn't get through the second book last I tried. I don't give a [expletive deleted] about the characters or the culture, so I couldn't finish it.
Well, the second book is actually a pretty big deal, especially if you consider that culture is a pretty big deal in why Seldon's plan works... Plus at it happens the second book really sets up the neccessity of book 3... The best imo. (though I agree that 2 is by far the weakest of the trilogy)

As I remember doesn't it also take something like four hundred years for the Empire to actually die? It's death is a slow process caused by incompetent leadership, while also falling far behind Terminus in technology (early on it makes up the difference by just having more resources, eventually it becomes clear that Foundation technology is just so much more advanced it's become funny). Very different from your standard cataclysm.
Well, that is the whole premise of the trilogy: a realms inertia the very reason its death is so slow, but also why its rise form its ashes takes so long.

Basically Seldon's plan is to:


make people aware the end is nigh
make people apathetic towards it
speed it up by establishing the second foundation
to speed up the formation of the next iteration of the galactic empire (i.e. the empire for which the Foundation is the, well, foundation) through establishing the second foundation.


The whole problem with laying a quick foundation: it is fragile. It has lost a lot of inertia, but with it the ability to really take a couple of punches without getting into trouble real quick. And considering the real puppetmaster at play here: R. Daneel Olivaw, it's really funny that one robot controlling humanity did not see it coming that one not-entirely-human could do as he did for his own ends. This reinforces the point that cataclysms don't end civilizations, but civilizations do. Even if said civilizaion is being poiwered by such a cataclysm (see Mule vs Olivaw)

But I digress...




That's a shame. The series gets better the further you go. I personally found the "prequel" books (the last two) to be the most compelling. None of them quite touch the Robots series, however. Their early neo-Noir themes are really interesting.

But hey, different strokes.

I kept to the original trilogy (oh man this is just one step away from Star Wars, as Star Wars was one step away from the Foundation). And as a contained series I think it works very well. It has a clear start, premise, appropriate conflicts and end. It's perfectly self-contained imo. But I might give them a nod once I can free up head time, though to be fair, I'd need to re-read them since I last read them around my 14th (non-native English speaker here) to practise my English reading comprehension (step 2 was Arthur C. Clarke's Songs of Distant Earth and 3 the Complete Hitchhiker's Guide). Seeing how that was quite literally half my life ago i could do with a refresher...

[Sigreid]

Empire doesn't actually have to collapse. Perfectly stable civilizations abandon territory in the pursuit of resources and prosperity. If you have an empire lasting long enough there will be entire cities that are abandoned and all but forgotten.

[Dargaron]

Empire doesn't actually have to collapse. Perfectly stable civilizations abandon territory in the pursuit of resources and prosperity. If you have an empire lasting long enough there will be entire cities that are abandoned and all but forgotten.


On this note, pre-20th century states often had a much looser control over their home territories than we're used to: according to Dr. Jonathan Roth, during the 1850s Dead Rabbit riots in New York, at least one cannon was confiscated from a gang hideout by New York National Guard. Basically, as long as a criminal organization doesn't actively challenge state power in an open way, it can be quite easy to use armed force against other such organizations. This is likely even more pronounced in traditional fantasy worlds, where the "thieves' guild" is often a semi-legitimate organization, a la Elder Scrolls.

[BeerMug Paladin]

How about a post-scarcity unified empire slowly declining in its effectiveness? There's no incentive to learn how to do anything practical because it's all done automatically for everyone. There's a huge boom in art and culture, but underneath that, the old systems are static and fail now and then with nobody competent around to rebuild/replace. Eventually, on the current path it will collapse. But for the time being everyone is content.

Adventurers are those people who are willing to put in the hard work and potential risk to explore the abandoned/unknown/strange magical factories, wreckages or vaults and hope to discover forgotten knowledge and perhaps forestall the coming societal collapse. Plus, earn themselves a great deal of personal wealth, understanding and power in society.

You could have individual regions starting to fail, exhibiting signs of civil strife and open warfare, or you could just have someone point the party in the direction of a resource-manufactory plant that has gone haywire and figure out how to fix it. There's no "ruins", exactly, there's just those condemned large structures dotting the towns which are unsafe. You're cautioned against venturing inside, but nobody will stop you if you enter.

Effectively, in some hundreds of years, this world will be the collapsed empire.

[johnbragg]

There's no "ruins", exactly, there's just those condemned large structures dotting the towns which are unsafe. You're cautioned against venturing inside, but nobody will stop you if you enter.

Throw in maintenance droids who interpret you as trespassers who need to be removed; on deeper levels, security droids who interpret you as threats to be destroyed. Deeper than that, cracked AIs who are rebuilding the complex to suit their cracked AI agendas...

[Florian]

Bo-ring!
Actually, I own the trilogy, but I couldn't get through the second book last I tried. I don't give a [expletive deleted] about the characters or the culture, so I couldn't finish it.

Sure, stuff like that is "boring".

Aasimov and related fictional writers are pretty good at extrapolating our actual current development and, telling about that and holding up a mirror for all of us to see how it really is.

I really like the honesty of your response, but that should actually give you pause to reflect on how we, as a race, should best take the next step, going off planet? Is it a concentrated and orchestrated act or is it something that follows how we profit and have aligned our society towards?

[Cosi]

One thing that's worth considering is the difference between how magic works and how technology works. Technology is mostly independent of the behavior of any particular person. Henry Ford invented the mass-produced automobile, but if he had suddenly died in 1907 or decided to become a hermit or something, we wouldn't have lost our ability to make cars. Magic (particularly powerful magic), on the other hand is often the purview of a small number of powerful individuals. Imagine you built your empire on the back of some enchanted roads created by a geomancer. If she dies (or simply decides to go explore the outer planes), you lose the ability to build or maintain your road system. So instead of a fallen empire, you might get one that's totally static. They have the magical infrastructure to maintain their current holdings and standards of living, but they can't expand and any population growth will drive standards of living down as more people have to use the same infrastructure, and eventually have to stop relying on magic. That's a pretty cool piece of world-building IMO, and if you postulate that the now-departed high level casters left behind towers or labs that might allow the empire to replicate their work if they can get past the automated defenses, you have a source of dungeons too. And of course the possibility that someone comes back.

[Jay R]

In my most recent game, the doorways to other planes exist in the underworld, and only open occasionally. While they are open, the goblins, orcs, gnolls, giants, etc, come through and raid. These are the great ages of heroes, and there have been several. With an influx of monsters to destroy, it's possible to gain very high experience levels.

When they are closed off, experience is much harder to come by. Yes, wars happen, but it takes killing many, many enemy soldiers for a single soldier to rise to second level.

In many of these ages, the human cultures successfully defeat the invading hordes, and their civil structures survive. But other times, the monsters win for awhile, and cities, kingdoms, or empires crumble.

As the PCs appeared, the gateways were starting to open again, for the first time in 200 years. This means that there are almost no high-level NPCs. When they arrived at a town siege as second levels characters, they were the highest levels there, and quickly became the heroes of the town when they broke the siege from outside.

This background gives the advantages of collapsed empires in the past (mostly ruins full of dangers and treasures), as well s the advantages of a fully functioning society today.

[The PCs had not yet figured out that fortresses are built on top of the locations of the gates, and so any old, ruined locations they find are also being found from underneath, by the aforementioned monsters.]

[Dalinale]

Instead of a collapsed empire, consider a collapsed horde; a vast nomadic army once steamrolled through the area, possibly with Extraplanar backing, once occupied most of the relevant setting and collapsed into fragments that have since been rendered irrelevant, which leaves a great deal of functionally unclaimed or unsettled land. This horde could've consist of anything from a massive orc band with goblin fodder to ogres on dire rhinos to just plain humans on horses, but the fact of the matter is that the local 'natives' hadn't developed beyond city-states and organized tribes before being wiped out and subjugated by the outsiders.

However, the local destroyed societies could have been firmly evil on the alignment chart and were headed by local native outsiders with malevolent intentions towards uniting into a single empire, and the invading horse lords were led by paladins and clerics and had the mission to basically destroy the machinations of said native outsiders. A background tidbit for the setting could be that the ancient conflict that caused the fall of the local kingdoms was due to intervention by solidly CG/CN outsiders, and as such the apparent horrors caused by the destruction of the ancient kingdoms and the apparent void caused by the invading tribes in terms of establishing a global power was the invasion working as intended.

[Bohandas]

*How about it being in the early stages of such an empire, and things are rare because not a lot of them have been made yet, and some of the most powerful things are inside of ruins because the people who made or invented them recently blew themselves up(/opened a dimensional rift/aged everythig 1000 years/summoned a horde of maraudig monsters) due to an experiment gone wrong or a magical industrial accident

*Alternately, how about instead of a past empire there's some sort of retrocausal echo of a future empire. Like a solid prophecy you can touch. Or alternately like things that uave been flung back in time by some sort of magical accident.