In many fantasy games, you get really ancient lost civilizations (or "forgotten realms", if you will.. get it?).  What kind of impressive things do you put in faraway lonely places as the last remnants of these mighty empires, to get your "Ozymandias" moments out of the party?

RPGPundit

Dusty, fallow functioning spaceport with robot staff.

In my OD&D game, the ruins of Sakhura Ahmen stretch far into the west and no human knows how far the ruins may go. Also, the ruins seems to change as expeditions report that buildings, landmarks and their locations come and go. Sages claims some of the ruins have mystical ties to the phases of the moon, sacrifices of blood by demon worshipers, and even the events at the other end of the earth that may control their cycles of vanishing and return.

The appearance of a new ruin will often set off a flurry of caravans full of treasure hunters in hopes that the new ruin will be filled with gold like a old ship brought in by the tide. More often than not, such ruins are full of death for the unwary.

In Warhammer, I have used a sky - high cursed High Elf tower, ruled by a man who has sold the city it once stood amongst to the Chaos Gods.

Quote from: Spinachcat;645455In my OD&D game, the ruins of Sakhura Ahmen stretch far into the west and no human knows how far the ruins may go. Also, the ruins seems to change as expeditions report that buildings, landmarks and their locations come and go. Sages claims some of the ruins have mystical ties to the phases of the moon, sacrifices of blood by demon worshipers, and even the events at the other end of the earth that may control their cycles of vanishing and return.

The appearance of a new ruin will often set off a flurry of caravans full of treasure hunters in hopes that the new ruin will be filled with gold like a old ship brought in by the tide. More often than not, such ruins are full of death for the unwary.

All of that? Pure awesome.

I'd love to play in a game like this.

Quote from: RPGPundit;645408In many fantasy games, you get really ancient lost civilizations (or "forgotten realms", if you will.. get it?).  What kind of impressive things do you put in faraway lonely places as the last remnants of these mighty empires, to get your "Ozymandias" moments out of the party?

RPGPundit

Excellent topic.

I've used tropical jungles with ruined stone cities and gleaming waterfalls hidden therein.

In my setting that I keep going back to like a battered spouse, which is detailed on this very forum...

I have the mythical Titans, who had to be destroyed by the Gods before they wrecked all of Reality by wiping out every previous civilization that existed, and their contemporaries, the lizardmen (who's stone temples still exist in distant swamps, but their decendants are all savage primatives).

Then I have the Golden Age, when Elves and Dwarves lived on the Surface, before the first schism of the Elvish Race into tribes (the one that went badly), when magic still shaped the face of the earth. The Golden Age saw the Dwarves driven underground, to be forgotten for an age, the destruction of a fabulous Orcish Empire in teh far north (and the raising of Mountains by the Elves, to wipe out their cities), and included things like Elves crossing the sea by magic seashells or something.

The Silver age saw the rise of the first fabulous civilizations that are notable, mostly elvish, some orcish and some unknown 'other' that I have yet to properly work into the setting.  The rise of the Danu Elvish Civilization falls here, along with the Hru'tha orcs. It ended when the Goblins breached the surface in their hordes and wiped out these and other, less detailed civilizations, or more accurately with the return of the Dwarves, who destroyed the Goblin Hordes.

Then you have the First Age of Man, noted more for the rise of Human civilizations than for other races. The Tabor Dragon Kings, who demanded and recived tribute from teh entire world, yet held only one (long lost...) city deep in the south. The Irem Alchemists who destroyed themselves and their entire civilization in a war against the Elves so terrible even the Gods got involved.  I've detailed roughly half a dozen other civilizations from that era as well, the only one I'm comfortable citing from memory is the Tuathan Elves, who had taken up the Mantle of the Danu elves, and where all but wiped out fighting the Iremi.  Of the First Age Civilizations, one remains, but horribly altered, the Spada, all but forgotten by everyone but their enemies.  (The Hesh might count as well, if you don't mind a few centuries of non-existance (their people transformed into giant, magic, crocodiles to ride out the Banality, then upon their return finding their number too few to sustain their civilization they intermingled with mere human tribes to rebuild their forgotten civilization...)

The Fall of Irem resulted in a period of extremely low magic, which destroyed the foundations of most high civilizations of the previous era (very similar to what destroyed the Titans, though in that case the loss of magic was very specific and confined, rather than world-wide).  After a century or more of the Banality, during which magic only slowly returned, we have the Second Age of Man, which is now well over a thousand years old. As such we have a few 'lost' civilizations, some complete with ruins, we can name.

The original Tenebrian Empire was built on the back of the old Kingdom of Bovard (a sort of Aurthurian mythic king), and itself largely collapsed, leaving ruined civilizations across the North, while it slowly rebuilt itself anew in teh South.  The Original Nornsan Empire lasted only a century and covered less ground, but is more central to modern civilization.  There are unnamed civilizations wiped out by the Tenebrian Horde, of course, replaced by their own bastardized culture.

And more recently the lost Kingdom of Ys, where Man and Dwarf and Elf all worked together in harmony, destroyed by Dragons in a night of fire and death.


That is the KNOWN history of Haven, but I have more or less canonically established that there were thousands upon thousands of years PRIOR to the Titans, and have scattered the faintest hints of their existance around, to include the Barrows of the Hydenimoi Forest (which indicates a lost civilization of Necromancers of some sort, based on the few powerful artifacts that have been recovered), the as yet unused ruins in the East mentioned on one of my prior posts, and the Temple to Death on the Island at the Edge of the World, which might indicate a sort of terrestrial Divine Civilization that must have existed to build such a structure.

It is established that Pre-Titanic races (Elves and Dwarves and Orcs are considered the big three Titanic Races (in D&D based games, the Gnomes are also Titanic, while Halflings are 'Titanic Era' holdouts. Men are 'new'.) were... potentially... weird. HPL weird even.  For some reason the various powerful immortal beings that could talk about them, don't. (possibly no one asks. Or asks and survives to spread the tale. We are talking Demonic Lords and Elder Gods who are literally part of the landscape).  Even the exact 'faces' of the Titans are unknown, but are assumed to have been somewhat elf-like (seeing as how Elves represented their aesthetic standard of beauty, more or less).



The tl;dr version:  I have layers upon layers of lost civilzations to draw upon, and if my players ever get too comfortable with their knowledge of one civilization, and one version of the history of hte world and it loses its majesty, I can always draw upon another....

In Vendeval: The Storm Shattered Lands. The ruins of civilization dot the landscape as if cast from the sky. Littering the world with their alien shapes and titantic size.

Vendeval has suffered through terrible eldritch storms, earthquakes, tectonic upheavals, and more many times through its long history dating back to the Ten Thousand Kingdoms.  

The Ten Thousand Kingdoms  created such weapons that in using them they warped the very fabric of existence, rocks bled from its wounds, water screamed in agony, fire froze stilled forever in an instant, and air devoured everything it touched. The most terrible of those weapon were alive and they live still. These weapons have taken it upon "themselves" to act before a civilization rises up to threaten the gods, again.

 So cycles of devastation and rebirth have left ancient monuments to those civilizations that failed. Epic monuments to hubris and splendor, tainted by the failures of their creators and the magics that laid them low.

Heh. I used a 'fire frozen in an instant' precursor civilization doohicky once to introduce a new player to the game, an adventurer caught in a trap of that sort a century or so before the players stumbled across him and managed to free him.

I believe my players praised me for coming up with coolest way to intro a new character ever for that one.

No, wait; They cursed me to the blackest hells for the god-damn puzzle trap they had to solve to free him (and get a cool magic items in the bargin).

Huge abandoned monuments.

In the second Conan movie, the party is heading out across some desolate terrain and pass through a series of dustbowl columns and statues easily a hundred feet high. They pay no attention to them because they are just part of the landscape.

In the first Lord of the Rings movie, the party passes through a river mouth with two giant statues of kings past. Birds fly from nests made on the crowns of them.

Those two scenes are what I try to evoke.

In a T4 game years ago, the Players found an asteroid a kilometer in diameter that had one side carved in the face of an ancient planetary leader. At the back of it was a single use maneuver drive and the remains of a pitched battle. They figured out that that one group was stopped by another who wanted to drop the sculpture on the leader's homeworld capital.

Most recently I have had the campaign set upon the shattered remains of world blown apart from some unknowable and ancient cataclysmic event and every now and again another piece of the world from that pre-history will come floating close by in the void (or even crash into).

Flying across the dark and starry void can take you to untouched ruins for adventuring and/or bring in new plagues of strange creatures that have been adversely effected by their journey through the darkness.

A bay with russet flakes floating all over the water.  The shoreline is lined with 200' tall ancient and junked robots-the only parts which move are the heads, which slowly turn to follow the party as the enter the area. This causes showers of rust and the mournful shriek of metal on metal, which resounds out to sea.

(Shamelessly stolen from Book of the New Sun)

In a Dark Sun setting campaign, I had a grand temple buried in the sand. It still had artwork and maps from the green age when the world was lush, and statues to the long dead gods. One last deity, the god of valor was lingering in the temple, a shadow of what he one was, not quite able to die until all valor had left the world.

In my rewritten Torg campaing, the Living Land is exactly this: the Lost Worlds Reality.

In Torg, invading realities transform parts of the area they invade. In Aysle, the medieval fantasy Reality, a squat apartment building can be transformed into a keep. A car can become a carriage (w/out horses).

The Living Land transforms places into crumbling ruins of ancient worlds the Living Land invaded and destroyed. In the basic version, that's all they are.

In the gonzo version, they actually maintain the Reality of the destroyed universe. Let me be more explicit: the Living Land actually tore a chunk off the univers it invaded and destroyed and made it into a pocket dimension, that sometimes comes back into phase with this plane.

I have the Detroit Dead Zone, a chunk of 1925 France in a world where WWI was fought with necromantic magics and is still going on. Then there's New Amsterdam, in Central Park, a remnant of a world of Georgian-era fantasy, complete with 8,000 survivors (Dutch and English alike).

It's extremely weird, but (IMHO) very cool.

In my Amherth/Labyrinth Lord campaign the world has been rocked by seven Great Cataclysms and several smaller ones, most of which were brought about by magic or magitech. After years of playing my players have only figured out the nature of one of the cataclyms (a nuclear war) after much exploring and sifting through legends. They frequently come across typical ancient ruins in remote places (lost temples in swamps, overgrown palaces in distant jungles, pyramids rising out of the shifting sands, etc.) but occasionally they stumble onto remnants of more advanced civilizations.

They have fought warmachten which are basically unique giant war robots and have spoken with a malfunctioning record keeping robot (a zalku) and have used the defenses of an ancient ruined military base to rain missiles down upon enemies that had trapped them inside.

One thing I am careful to do is use fantasy terms as much as possible when describing these things. So the nuclear war was actually relayed to them as "the day the five great kingdoms took fire from the heavens and cast it over the earth. The smoke from this destruction blotted out the sun and the world entered the Time of the Great Winter." The robots are usually described as "golems of steel that are powered by magical fire".

The missile strike came from a bunker where an ancient religious cult once lived. In this adventure there were effigies and scrolls laying about as well as the "ritual" needed to call down the wrath of the gods to defend the holy shrine (which the cult had to do several times) . A character had to "give himself to the god" by placing his hand into a sensor and reciting an incantation. Then the character had to recite a second  incantation to call forth the god's wrath. The incantations actually contained the hidden command words that gave the character control of the bunkers defense system. Again I used fantasy terms as much as possible but they eventually figured it out. I'm still trying to find a way to write this up as a "generic fantasy adventure".

The reason I'm so careful with the terminology is that I don't want to lose the feel of playing a fantasy game. Otherwise we'd just be playing Mutant Future. This way allows me to introduce advanced tech but within the context of a magical society.

Pete