Building decadent civilizations

[PhoenixPhyre]

A recurring emergent theme for me is having civilizations in decline. I use the word "decadent" quite a lot, but I'm not sure how to flesh that out in a way that makes sense. I'm looking for empires (mainly) that are stagnating, focused inward, and generally in the "bread and circuses" mode. Preferably with strange practices like the apocryphal (?) practices of the Late Roman Empire--perversions, gluttony, slavery, an aristocracy holding on by inertia but mainly occupied with knifing each other in the back.

Are there good historical parallels other than the Late Roman Empire (or good sources)?

Two examples:

Jinse is the core of what was once a half-continent-sized empire, now fallen into decay. The remains are about the size of Turkey, but the outer provinces only pay lip-service. The core piece of that is maybe 150 miles across (in a 3/4 circle against a bay). One huge city dominates Jinse.

Jinse's population are mostly humans, but tieflings and other fiend-related races are common (and form the upper class). Jinse is ruled by families of devil summoners, each one linked to a particular Arch Devil[1]; the head of each family is actually a cambion-like devil spawn. The common people know that there are devil summoners (and are fine with that), but aren't aware that the devils are really in charge.

The aesthetic here is "stereotyped late Roman Empire meets decadent China, roughly at the start of the Warring States period." So big bureaucracies, infighting, slaves, drugs, huge wasteful parties, etc.

The Sun Empire is the last remnant of the former Aelven mage empire, now only occupying one half of one continent. The aristocracy is all high elves, selected for arcane power. And not for sanity. Their specialty is breeding races for specific purposes--they're responsible for a large fraction of the "animalistic" races--the tabaxi, the lizardfolk, the kenku, etc. Ruled by an mage emperor, this empire is highly stratified and the only route up is to be a powerful wizard. But getting there is nearly impossible. They should have all the genetic problems associated with intense inbreeding and be mostly moribund, living on the glories of the past.

Anyone got good historical (or fictional) analogues I can mine for ideas for either of these two?

[1] My devils are not the stock D&D ones. Think more "immortal organized crime families", each Don handling one particular type of thing. Not all of them are evil, but the ones whose spawn rule Jinse are...not exactly family-friendly. Sex, violence, intoxication, blackmail, deception, theft, etc. are their stock in trade. Many of the devil summoners are actually enslaved and brainwashed into burning themselves out by summoning devils. Being able to summon means you're locked in a gilded cage and used up until you're gone.

[VoxRationis]

One concept to think about is the idea that the civilization, when it slides into decadence, has reached the point where expansion (whether by building, development, or by foreign conquest) has become more difficult and such efforts are seeing diminishing returns, so it becomes a better use of time and resources to try and capture existing power and wealth than to create new power and wealth. Rather than try to conquer yet another far-flung tribe somewhere, one tries to usurp one's peers with palace coups, assassinations, and civil wars. Rather than investing money into infrastructure, people gamble with financial structures, basically producing nothing but reaping, when successful, outsize rewards. Rather than acting as stalwart marcher lords, nobles gather around the royal court in order to curry favor with the monarch. The decadence isn't just a moral failing or personal flaw repeated in a few individuals. It's a dynamic that surrounds the entire culture, where doing these things, which are unproductive or even outright damaging to the civilization as a whole, are on an individual level very rational choices, to the point where not doing them would be foolish. Before a certain tipping point is reached, these bad actors who exhibit rent-seeking behavior, trying to capture existing wealth rather than create it, do not affect the overall balance of things. Sometimes they are punished, and sometimes they succeed and are rewarded, but those who choose to be productive are also successful. The decadence comes after that tipping point, where enough bad actors are about that good-faith efforts to create wealth are unlikely to be successful and will just enrich the rent-seekers. Once this is the case, most individuals, even those who see the problem with this approach, are going to give in and do the individually beneficial thing, and of course, it's easy to get distracted from these problems when your mind is occupied with lavish parties.

If you want historical decadence, the Hellenistic period is pretty archetypal. It both inspired and disgusted the Romans during their rise. You have people building colossal monuments, competing to see who can pointlessly throw away the most money on parties, constant internal and external wars, assassinations, and dynamics like the Ptolemies turning from cunning and cautious strategists to inbred, fratricidal petty kings with a fraction of their earlier wealth and power, squabbling over their dwindling kingdom and powerless to halt the rise of Rome. I'm not too familiar with specific historical examples outside of the European sphere, but I believe the concept of corruption and decadence setting into previously robust regimes was common in China as well.

[brian 333]

Melnibone comes to mind, if you've ever read the Michael Moorcock's Elric books.

Some features:

Dream Couches - allow astral travel and timeless voyaging through the planes. Sorcerers use them to learn the dark arts from fiends while foppish nobles use them to live out meaningless fantasy lives in imaginary realms.

Convert them for your devils to use as a power source: when someone lies on such a couch, force a will save to control the dream. Failure indicates the person will drift aimlessly through the Astral Plane, doing whatever strikes his fancy, with no perception of time as his body withers and dies. The devils then collect the soul, regardless of its alignment. Success indicates the person can gain knowledge of magic, whether an increase in Spellcraft or a new spell, or a new alchemical recipe, or instructions on magic item creation, or whatever.

Sentient Magic Items - usually minor devils bound into an item for the purpose of corrupting souls. Some, instead, drain life force from their victims and then claim the souls of the dead rather than try to corrupt their wielders. Some few are not evil, and even rarer are items into which mortal spirits are bound.

Evil magic items will attempt to persuade characters into acts of depravity to corrupt them. Devils will constantly attempt to make deals, such as, small amounts of time in Hell in exchange for power or temporary benefits.

Bound mortal spirits are typically attempting to do penance for a life of evil, with the goal of cheating Hell out of their souls.Still, some few are slaves of evil, bound as a means of extending their usefulness on the mortal plane. A PC who becomes a bound spirit is considered dead, regardless of the condition of the body, and is thereafter an NPC unless restored to life by some means. Raise Dead, Resurrection, and other such magics do not work on bound spirits.

Other cultures:

Arenas and Circuses - One feature of decadent cultures is games of some kind, which are typically blood-sports. Although largely composed of slaves whose lives are virtually meaningless to their owners, some games create cadres of professional gamesters who may become icons. Their urine will be sold for use as 'male enhancers' and both men and women will buy their services for an evening of entertainment.

Chess, Go, and other board games will be played out using live 'pieces' which may be killed as a part of the game. Seldom is the gamer actually on the board, though there may be rules, such as in Chess where the King forfeits rather than takes a turn when checkmated, thus denying his opponent the opportunity to kill him.

One sign of decadence is the presence of outlandish and impractical fashions. The long fingernails of the Chinese Emperors, signifying they had never worked a day in their lives, was considered a status symbol. Indeed, it is one which has returned with the rise of the middle-class in today's China where men commonly sport nails which would make a teenaged American cuticle-chewer jealous.

Clothes make the man or woman. Excessively expensive clothing designed by famous designers are one way to demonstrate your decadence. Fashion is fickle, and your very expensive wardrobe may become obsolete overnight. Indeed, one way to determine one's status is to determine how out-of-date his hand-me-down garments are. If he wears last season's style he is a highly placed servant. Two or three seasons out of date and he's a skilled laborer. Four or more seasons out of date and he's an unskilled laborer. (Slave or free servants, the result is the same.)

Exotic travel beasts. Why ride mundane horses when griffons will pull a wagon with more style? Forget Roman zebras. Get yourself an ankylosaurus with a howdah on its back and travel in style!

Lavish funerals are common. Indeed, funeral parties for the decadent departed may last days, weeks, or even a month, depending on the person's wealth and the desire of his heirs to be seen as 'the most devoted.'

[Max_Killjoy]

Double-ninjed on the things I was going to suggest.

Ennui will be common among the elites, and discontent among the "lower classes", as the opportunities and challenges once offered by expansion are curtailed, as the society stagnates and stratifies. Stringent caste structures set in, and strict enforcement of limits and norms develops with retro-justification and appears to "tradition".

Many people look for ever more elaborate and extreme distractions, as each new excess seems bland and normal over time.

[Trask]

Real decadence involves a sense of total separation from the real world. Elites endlessly pleasuring themselves with fine things while avoiding all hard work and the fact that their empire is decaying around them.

In a fantasy world, this has unlimited potential. You can have sycophants all abandoning the virtuous religious practices and the gods that blessed their empire at its founding to instead worship gods of darkness, evil, chaos. And in a fantasy world where the Gods have a tangible presence this could mean extremely heretical things like capturing and torturing celestial beings for fun or to drain them of their celestial essence and tearing down temples and statues of the gods to replace them with dark, twisted, grotesque monoliths. People are using magical drugs to walk among the planes and increasingly are distanced from society in general.

A very common aspect of a decadent society in the real world is when the native population of an empire is content to let others fight for them. In the late empire the Romans became increasingly happy to let barbarian germans, alans, and huns do their fighting for them and very few actual roman gentry ever went into the legions any more. The result was not only a barbaricization of the common soldier, but also the upper crust generals. Several of the most influential men in the late empire were barbarian goths who controlled spineless puppet emperors. In a fantasy world this can be ratcheted up. Not just barbaric humans, but orcs, ogres, trolls, goblins, all sorts of horrible grotesque and chaotic monsters are being enlisted wholesale alongside regular soldiers. Imagine if the commander of the cavalry force was an Orc worg rider? Imagine if there was a troll in the palace creating and deposing puppet emperors as he wished? And the only thing that the decadent imperials can do is just grumble about it, scheme and plot, maybe perform a few assassinations and grisly sacrifices, but they are too weak to fight directly.

[Lleban]

Decadence isn't really a thing you apply to real world situations when studying history because it has orientalist overtones. However, if you want a real world example to exaggerate and twist, I'd recommend the looking at the Fatimid caliphate. Their capital, Cairo, originally started out as a walled palace city reserved for the elites while the neighboring city ,Al-Fustat, housed commoners. In addition their army consisted almost entirely of slave soldiers of various ethnicities, each ethnic group playing a specific role.

[Trask]

Decadence isn't really a thing you apply to real world situations when studying history because it has orientalist overtones.

I disagree. One of the first historical example of one culture considering another "decadent" is Roman commentary on Greece during and after the Macedonian wars, hardly an "oriental" nation. Yes the concept of decadence has been linked to oriental nations, but I dont think its intrinsically linked to them, as one of the prime examples of a decadent nation in our own culture of the West is late Rome.

I do think however the classical asian nations (asia minor, the levant, arabia, persia) are a good source to plunder for conceptions of decadence due to how old the region is leading to high levels of urbanization and how much wealthier it was in precious minerals, but its hardly exclusive to the traditionally orient and I would go so far as to say that suggesting the term and concept of decadence be abandoned as a lens of historical perception is unecessesarily limiting.

[Whiskeyjack8044]

The French Revolution may be a rich vein of inspiration to mine. A common theme in history is that of people struggling through great adversity to succeed, the adversity insures that if the person or persons are unequal to the task, they fall. These capable people build a machine out of the experiences that they have had, a machine that will keep working even after they are gone. All machines require maintenance, but since the machine is designed to prevent adversity, few people are qualified to fix it when it starts to break down. They do not have the experience that the creator of the machine had. That's why things go to hell pretty quickly after your Augustuses and Alexanders die. We love to be in awe of Rome's accomplishments, but if you read its history, it's pretty clear that the whole Empire was basicly a game of Hot Potato from the death of Augustus on.

History tangent aside, a "decadent" Empire doesn't have to be evil, just ruled by a select few who are unwilling to accept a new reality and unable to adapt.

[Izzyboshi]

A recurring emergent theme for me is having civilizations in decline. I use the word "decadent" quite a lot, but I'm not sure how to flesh that out in a way that makes sense. I'm looking for empires (mainly) that are stagnating, focused inward, and generally in the "bread and circuses" mode. Preferably with strange practices like the apocryphal (?) practices of the Late Roman Empire--perversions, gluttony, slavery, an aristocracy holding on by inertia but mainly occupied with knifing each other in the back.

Are there good historical parallels other than the Late Roman Empire (or good sources)?

There are a wonderful number of parallels. The main components of a Decadent Civilization is that power has aggregated at the top of a power structure which stops actively working to help the vast majority of it's citizens while consolidating power at the top. If this structure is militaristic it generally overextends itself and ends up taking more land then it can control given it's resources or it hits a wall with a bad campaign and starts to go into remission by. If it is strictly class based then the lack of upward mobility and aggregation of wealth creates a society within a society who loses touch of what the average person requires but is running the system none-the-less.

Your average person on the bottom of this pyramid generally will let this go on until their lives and welfare are actively impeded. Once enough people are suffering some mutually share hardship then the pyramid flips and the small narrow point that society has whittled itself too at the top snaps and the whole thing comes crashing down. Another outcome is that a militaristic culture beneath or completely outside the elites (like another country) can rise up and overturn the foppish class based elites who lack enough support from the bottom and take their place.

For real life examples people have already mentioned a few good ones like :

- the French Revolution (Sparked when unequal representation met a famine)
- Heian Period Japan ( A culture of sophisticated but isolated and disinterested nobility were subsumed by a military class)
-The Incan Empire ( Components of the empire were not all uniformly loyal, and the the local cultures not fully integrated. Luxury goods became the main focus of it's taxation and a succession war amongst the elites weakened the whole before he Spanish swooped in and finished it off)
- Europe WW1 ( A new and powerful emerging nation (Germany) challenges a bunch of old empires who already have carved up large portions of the world to feed their homelands. Military stockpiles and alliances thicken amoungst governing bodies that are largely made up of wealthy old nobility. The conflagration is sparked by a small incident and the resulting war of attrition eventually weakens the power base of a bunch of countries simultaneously. Most of the Crown heads of Europe are eventually toppled from the overtaxing of resources and an entire generation is thrown into a meat grinder for basically no good reason.)
-Russian Revolution (A country of steep divide between the ruling elite and the average person was sparked into revolution by Food and fuel shortages caused by World War One. The Tsar abdicates but a rising faction of the discontent populace executes the entire family.)

Anyone got good historical (or fictional) analogues I can mine for ideas for either of these two?

Soooo.... This is where it's kinda funny. I've been building my own Decadent civilization. The game is Exalted, the setting is Great Forks which is also called.... wait for it.... Decadence. I'm building it as a wiki that I will eventually give my players access to allowing them to explore the wiki and as long as they can spin me a good reason for knowing what they've read ( I overheard someone on the street/ I spent a few days touring the city, I'm an occult specialist of course I would know this) I will count it as exploration in game

The Campaign is called A Moth in the Butterfly Court and you are completely welcome to take a look. I was thinking of posting this here in the World Building forum anyway because I'm trying to figure out how to improve my layout and what people think of my setting.

[jjordan]

Anyone got good historical (or fictional) analogues I can mine for ideas for either of these two?

All of them? I mean, Vox Rationis does a good job of talking about the general conditions that occur when any civilization starts to decline. You could look at the court of Louis XVI prior to the French Revolution. You could look at Post WWI Germany. You could look at the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate. You could look at the Ming Dynasty which sent exploratory vessels as far West as Mecca and then made a conscious decision to pull back from the outside world. There are lots of examples.