Conan's Father: Fire and wind come from the sky, from the gods of the sky. But Crom is your god, Crom and he lives in the earth. Once, giants lived in the Earth, Conan. And in the darkness of chaos, they fooled Crom, and they took from him the enigma of steel. Crom was angered. And the Earth shook. Fire and wind struck down these giants, and they threw their bodies into the waters, but in their rage, the gods forgot the secret of steel and left it on the battlefield. We who found it are just men. Not gods. Not giants. Just men. The secret of steel has always carried with it a mystery. You must learn its riddle, Conan. You must learn its discipline. For no one – no one in this world can you trust. Not men, not women, not beasts.
[Points to sword]
Conan's Father: This you can trust.

Is it me, or was Crom a dwarven king?

Ah well.  That said, in order for the adventurers to have dungeons to rummage around in, and magic weapons lost to the ages, someone had to have been there before.  How much depth do you typically put into it?  Any twists?  Knowing my players, I world build wider and more shallow than I used to, but I try to have a 'few layers' for verisimilitude.

My Folia campaign, the PCs are slowly finding out that the (High) Elves that 'nuked' their own kingdom were at best assholes, who came in an knocked off even BIGGER assholes, the feather-wearing, blood and heart sacrificing, mezzoamerican themed (wood) elves, and in doing so, created the Dragonborn from stolen Chromatic dragon eggs.

They're starting to see that the high elves 'soul gems' that they used in lieu of any uncontrollable afterlife nonsense (a la Adam Warlock-y pocket dimensions) are what lead to the liches and are about to find out that a small army of formerly-dead elves are being rebuilt by enslaved modrons (a damaged one of whom is a NPC follower of the Kenku Bard) into Warforged... and they're quite insane because of the process.  

Next session we'll see them being hunted by a Spider Climbing insane warforged that keeps taking scalps because he misses his beautiful hair... so he bolts it on until it tears off again... so he has to have spares.

Quote from: LiferGamer;1143489Ah well.  That said, in order for the adventurers to have dungeons to rummage around in, and magic weapons lost to the ages, someone had to have been there before.  How much depth do you typically put into it?  Any twists?  Knowing my players, I world build wider and more shallow than I used to, but I try to have a 'few layers' for verisimilitude.

Well, the campaign setting of the game I'm working on has a couple of past ages from which ruins exist.

First, the setting itself is Post-Apocalyptic... the globe-spanning magictech utopia of The Praetorian Empire was destroyed in The Cataclysm, a wave of magical destruction that wiped out 99% of the population (and 90% of those survivors starved, fell to violence or just killed themselves), mutated many of those who did survive and ripped holes into other realms not quite 200 years ago.

Yes, I fully appreciate those numbers... the intention is that the global population fell to about 8 million in isolated pockets scattered across the globe (and where two centuries later a collection of walled fortress cities and towns totaling 35,000 people can be considered a major power). Most of civilization is back in the stone age and the only reason some aren't is by lucky circumstance and determination, a large enough group either had or acquired some edge that allowed them to keep an ember of civilization burning.

But those embers NEED people to go out and explore the ruins, risk the monsters unleashed by the Cataclysm that dwell there, and bring back wonders of the past age if they have any hope of surviving. Which is where adventurers come in.

There are also ruins of civilizations even older than the Praetorian Empire (which itself only lasted about 500 years); the Beast Kingdom of Bestia (fell about 1000 years ago), the near mythical First Empire of Man (fell 2000 years ago), the Demon Empire before it (fell 3500 years ago) and finally the Monoliths that all evidence suggests predate even humanity itself. And those are just the major one spoken of the way we would kingdoms of the Middle Ages, the Roman Empire and ancient Egypt.

But those are mostly buried deep beneath the ruins of the Praetorian Empire (essentially you run into one of those when you run into the ruin of a Pre-Cataclysm archaeological dig site).

So yeah, there's layers upon layers of history to be unearthed.

For a change this time, I did a very mild collapse in the campaign area--so mild it is misleading to call it post-apocalyptic.  Granted, it is only mild because the area is a backwater that wasn't involved in the complete collapse of a central empire, that bordered on something worse than the fall of Rome compressed into a handful of years, but you get the idea.

Though the trick is that I'm lying.  The mild collapse distracts from an earlier post-apocalyptic event in the current region that happened many centuries earlier in the campaign region.  It is more gods and magic than imperial collapse.  It is the one that left the magic in ruins, nasty traps that make no sense, and strange monsters bred out of genetic/magical experimentation. Net effect is that a lot of people don't know the history of all that stuff, because the later collapse destroyed a lot of the knowledge.

In my own RPG setting published wayyy back. The setting is actually not someone elses post apoc.

The Moon is.

It is all that is left of the original world created for a perfect race created by elder cosmic forces. Younger cosmic forces squabbled over them while the elders rested after that. And in the resulting conflict the planet was razed to its current size and state. The elder cosmic forces awoke too late. But laid the beat down on all the kids and created a new world and set the dead one in orbit as a reminder. So the new world is relatively young fresh. By cosmic standards at least.

Quote from: LiferGamer;1143489Ah well.  That said, in order for the adventurers to have dungeons to rummage around in, and magic weapons lost to the ages, someone had to have been there before.  How much depth do you typically put into it?  Any twists?  Knowing my players, I world build wider and more shallow than I used to, but I try to have a 'few layers' for verisimilitude.

We put a lot of depth and tagged "the people before" on a post-apocalyptic scale, with 1 "a setback" and 10 "Armageddon." Here's what we did with our Lothmar setting:

Post-Apocalyptic (10): The hierophants of old had a great, but unknown civilization. They had power and used elemental magic in such a way they did not build anything because structured didn't need to be made. The cultures that came after know little about them, but their occasional artifacts and odd nature-based phenomena are current mysteries. And super dangerous. They advanced their civilization to the point of "becoming one with the world," and faded away.

Post-Apocalyptic (7): The elves who then came where all this nice empty land was were then trashed by creatures who landed on their shores and kicked their asses due to the elves' lack of divine magic and the gekk, the baddies, resistance to arcane magic.

Post-Apocalyptic (9): The gekk, four-armed lizardman, were, in turn, defeated by the Empire for worshiping eldar things. Genocide.

Stable/Non-Progressing (0): The Empire, ruled by the Immortal Emperor, neither progress nor regresses. So far.

Pre-Apocalyptic (1): Lothmar, splintered from the Empire and currently similar to medieval Europe if neighboring Rome didn't collapse (the Empire).

So now we can build something like this:

The hierophants for reasons unknown built a gate to the Shadow World in an oubliette-like structure. The elves came along and saw this dangerous gate and sealed it off. They then built a warding statue over it. The gekk, finding the elven guardians, killed them all, but liked the naked elf maiden statue, so they had their dwarf slaves build a castle around it. When the Empire destroyed the gekk, they rebuilt the upper part of the castle in their architectural style, leaving the dungeon as the gekk built it. One of the Imperial historians decided that perhaps they should do an archaeological dig, and gathered Imperial clockwork machines to start excavation. However, before that could start, there was a religious schism in the Empire, and during that conflict, Lothmar split from the Empire, and the Emperor reluctantly let them go. The Lothmari did little to the castle but did add a grand-gatekeep entrance, mainly as a show of force to house additional troops.

And that's why there's an old elf statue in the garden in the middle of a big castle that won't let you touch it (zap!), and if you take the wrong turn in the creepy dungeon with disturbing artwork on the walls and open the wrong door, clockwork will try to eat your face.

I like to have a few layers of fallen empires. I tend to use published settings, and I prefer at least a couple fallen empires in the play area. Running FR set in Damara I had to change the history a little so that modern Damara had been part of the ancient demon-worshipping Narfell empire, rather than under solid ice until 300 years ago. That way I can have some cool old dungeons, mostly Nar but also some ruined dwarven halls.

My Wilderlands Altanis campaign is the extreme case, with more fallen empires than I can easily count up, probably getting into double figures over the last 12,000 years or so. My Primeval Thule is a bit more moderate; it's mostly the Serpentmen, Elves and Atlanteans, with some more recent human ruins of collapsed Kalayan city states & such. Modern human civilisation is itself beginning to decline before the Great Doom of the Coming Ice, creating its own ruined cities.

In my setting, at least two.

The oldest, the collapse of an ancient human empire on the southern continent, refugees from which settled the island subcontinent which is the campaign area. This was about 3500 years before the current year, so corresponds to the Late Bronze Age Collapse for us.

The more recent, when the beastmen drove humans off of the subcontinent for a time. Current day in the campaign is after the Reclaiming, when humans returned and reclaimed and rebuilt the coastal cities. The Reclaiming was no more than a couple of centuries ago, so nothing corresponding in real history that I can think of.

Modern humans moved to Sundaland (Southeast Asia) 60 - 70,000 years ago and my setting takes place somewhere in the 10,000 years before the great floods that submerged much of the land.

There's been enough time for many different cultures to rise and fall. Perhaps the earliest civilisations were created by the Denisovans and other early human species?

And maybe there were even earlier non-human societies?

I take inspiration from the Mesopotamian and Central American civilisations that succeeded each other rapidly.

There are many ruins to be found across the land, in high mountains, deep jungles and on isolated islands.

Quote from: LiferGamer on August 05, 2020, 07:23:56 PM
Conan's Father: Fire and wind come from the sky, from the gods of the sky. But Crom is your god, Crom and he lives in the earth. Once, giants lived in the Earth, Conan. And in the darkness of chaos, they fooled Crom, and they took from him the enigma of steel. Crom was angered. And the Earth shook. Fire and wind struck down these giants, and they threw their bodies into the waters, but in their rage, the gods forgot the secret of steel and left it on the battlefield. We who found it are just men. Not gods. Not giants. Just men. The secret of steel has always carried with it a mystery. You must learn its riddle, Conan. You must learn its discipline. For no one – no one in this world can you trust. Not men, not women, not beasts.
[Points to sword]
Conan's Father: This you can trust.

Is it me, or was Crom a dwarven king?

Ah well.  That said, in order for the adventurers to have dungeons to rummage around in, and magic weapons lost to the ages, someone had to have been there before.  How much depth do you typically put into it?  Any twists?  Knowing my players, I world build wider and more shallow than I used to, but I try to have a 'few layers' for verisimilitude.

My Folia campaign, the PCs are slowly finding out that the (High) Elves that 'nuked' their own kingdom were at best assholes, who came in an knocked off even BIGGER assholes, the feather-wearing, blood and heart sacrificing, mezzoamerican themed (wood) elves, and in doing so, created the Dragonborn from stolen Chromatic dragon eggs.

They're starting to see that the high elves 'soul gems' that they used in lieu of any uncontrollable afterlife nonsense (a la Adam Warlock-y pocket dimensions) are what lead to the liches and are about to find out that a small army of formerly-dead elves are being rebuilt by enslaved modrons (a damaged one of whom is a NPC follower of the Kenku Bard) into Warforged... and they're quite insane because of the process. 

Next session we'll see them being hunted by a Spider Climbing insane warforged that keeps taking scalps because he misses his beautiful hair... so he bolts it on until it tears off again... so he has to have spares.

I eventually wrote a blog post on this topic: Megadungeon Julia! Layer Your Dungeon Using History