Help me destroy my homebrew civilization.


Homebrew and House Rules

Liberty's Edge

I posted once before about creating a Western Marches style campaign. I never really went anywhere with it because I didn't have a theme beyond exploration.

My thought is that the players are, more or less, hired explorers to map and investigate a newly discovered land that seems to be void of "modern" civilization. Through exploration, the players uncover evidence of an unknown kingdom in which everyone appears to have simply vanished: cities are abandoned and crumbling, roads are overgrown, structures collapsed, etc. The previous inhabitants (good guy races—humans, elves, dwarves, etc.) are no where to be found, and the disappearance seems to have occurred within relatively recent (100-200 years) history. The traditional fantasy bad guys (orcs, goblins, Giants, etc.) have begun to spread throughout and occupy some of the structures that still stand. The intent would be that through exploration, the players would be able to piece together information about who "they" were and why they disappeared.

Where I fall is that I don't come up with good stories that don't feel contrived. I need help coming up with plausible suggestions on why this civilization vanished. Anyone have any fun suggestions?

My overarching theme is standard fantasy with a post-apocalyptic feel (DayZ, Walking Dead, etc. minus the hordes of zombies).

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A botched time travel experiment or the plane of time collided with the kingdom, causing it to suddenly age as if thousands of years passed within an instant. One of the clues includes surviving records all indicating the event happened only 100 years ago despite the ruins showing thousands of years of disrepair. Some of the elder bad guy races recall suddenly finding the homes of their enemies like this.


Lost civilizations are a trope I include in every setting I make. The last one I had actually wiped itself out intentionally. A god of corruption had been slowly gaining control of the entire population. The elders knew of this, but could not know who was under his control and who was not, and given the state the world was in, realized that it was already too late. They loaded thousands of embryos onto a space station and launched themselves into orbit, then wiped out all intelligent life on the planet. Since the corruption could be passed from one generation to the next, they only grew a handful of embryos at a time, raised them, and if there was any sign of the corrupting influence, they incinerate the entire batch. Those who survived got put into suspended animation for their eventual return. Meanwhile, life returned to the world below, which eventually turned into the setting for the campaign and the homeland of the party.

Other suggestions:

A deal with a devil gone horribly wrong.
Experiments with magic wiped them out.
They created the orcs, giants, etc. as slaves, only to be killed in a revolt.
They are the new races, transformed by a curse or something.
They learned of the impending doom of this world, and escaped to another plane.


-The Divs plotted to ruin the civilization and succeed. The Divs did this behind the scene. They migh have helped a druidic order who believed civilization was a sin against nature. Maybe they also aided the developpement of magic so that at some point a device that vaporize living people was created and used.

-They inhabitants have reached enlightenment and elevated themselves to a new state of conciousness, leaving their material bodies and possessions behind. A similar trope is that they formed a collective hivemind or a deity.

-Planar migration. Mages found a new plane or create a demiplane that was rich and bountyful. No diseases, no orcs, summer all the time, etc. They just created a portal to go there.

-A death cult actually manage to briefly summon a vestige of Atropus Harbinger of Death, siphoning the live force of everyone in the city in seconds.


Disease, War, Famine, Pestilence... Sound familiar?
In a game I ran a few years back, the dwarves fought a war that eventually ended in them enslaving all humans, interbreeding them with dwarves and sterilizing all the pure bred humans. So, a huge continent, with no humans.
Personally, I'd like a scenario where there was major war that weakened the "good" society and then the "evil" races wipe out what's left. Hobgoblins are the new dominant race of the region.


goldomark wrote:
-A death cult actually manage to briefly summon a vestige of Atropus Harbinger of Death, siphoning the live force of everyone in the city in seconds.

completely forgot that one, time to dust it off and throw it in somewhere.


Makes me think of the Red Sea object, actually (warning, very long).

Fetchlings are an option. Either everybody was sucked into the plane of shadow to escape some horror (and couldn't find their way back) or was infected with a mass shadow plague which did the same thing. They push and poke at the edges of reality, sometimes managing to slide back to a world they no longer belong to.

Shades of The Dig, if you ever read the novel or played the game, including the "everyone went to a heavenly demiplane of non-physical ecstasy and can't/won't come back" if you so choose.

Society was advanced, SO advanced that they had created clinical immortality via magic and the youngest generation had around 30 people in it. Magic stopped working (because that totally happens all the time) and everybody that was past a natural lifespan snuffed it. The last 20-30 died out from lack of numbers, went into hibernation, or just left for other realms.

BEEEEEEEES!!!! Sorry.

There was a campaign a friend of mind made a decade ago that included a civilization (and class/race) called the Firebinders. They story was that some fellow made a deal with a REALLY powerful Efreeti lord that he and his descendants would all have amazing fire-powers (think double-sorcerer, but fire-themed) but after 40 generations everything they owned (worded as "the ground they stood upon") would be taken by Efreeti. Fast-forward 40 generations and the fire-binder nation (he had a lotta kids) takes to the sky via giant semi-magic geodesic spheres. They're basically giant hot-air balloons (magic super-glass, shut up it's fantasy) with cities inside of them and a ruling race of fire-binders that literally never touch the ground, because if they do demonic-looking monsters from the plane of fire show up and nab them and anything they might happen to have a claim on. Anyways, the point is having a society that just packed up and left can be done, too.

Forbidden Planet is an old-time classic of the "lost civilization" variety.

An entire civilization of ninja. You just can't see 'em.

Longevity/rejuvenation experiment went wrong, everyone reverse-aged to nothing.

The Rapture.


It was the vampires wot did it governor, descended on each city in turn and enthralled all the people before dragging them down to their underground lairs. And did the ghouls who helped them get anything out if it, no, just the bodies of those who resisted.

Scarab Sages

Ever played Neverwinter Nights 2? Maybe it's a bit like the plot of that, except there was no hero to turn back the King of Shadows.


Perhaps in your setting, magical energy is born of mixing negative and positive energies into one, creating a neutral energy as the particles that make each of the other negative or positive are pushed away.

This functions in the same way as anti-matter and matter creating simply space in which things can be done.

Then, say, the demonic plane is also the negative energy plane while the angelic plane is also the positive energy plane.

Perhaps in his magical escapades, a great wizard opened the portal to hell, expecting great powers and mysteries to be revealed to him. The result, however, was a giant influx of negative energy and demons.

With his dying breath, he was able to extract the crystal powering the portal, causing all the demons to be sucked back into their plane of existence.

However the massive exposure to negative energy has left the place entirely devoid of life. In fact, it is so devoid of life that it even lacks death.

Within the city, you will find large piles of corpses, some whole, some torn apart. None of them seem to decompose and the blood seems to never dry, always in a liquid state.

Within the city lives a clan of feral tiefling survivors, who live in the ruins of the city, unable to leave because of, perhaps, some curse or being bound to the corrupted land with their nature. These creatures would make up the bulk up of encounters for the party, as well as a big demon who managed to resist the pull of the portal, but found himself unable to leave the corrupted land. He now spends his days wandering the city, consuming the stagnated corpses of those who were once the great civilization.

You could use the demon as an excuse for the corpses to simply not be there and have the tieflings carry some of them daily to his lair for him to feed upon. This allows the party some level of comfort and mystery for a good period of time, before they actually find said corpses and descend into a horror atmosphere.

--------------

Something along those lines!

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What if the monsters living there now were the descendants of the original humanoid inhabitants? They unearthed an evil artifact or the local cultists resurrected an evil god, who transformed the locals into monsters. What degree of humanity (or elfity, or dwarfity, or halflingity) was lost is up in the air, but you don't have to offer redemption as a plot hook. They were changed, and there's no going back. The monsters the party encounters are a few generations later, so they have no memory of the previous civilization. The god or artifact has gone dormant again, so there's no worry that the PCs will be transformed.

Not sure how you'd get that out into the narrative, but that could be the cause of the collapse of the civilization.


knightstar4 wrote:

Disease, War, Famine, Pestilence... Sound familiar?

In a game I ran a few years back, the dwarves fought a war that eventually ended in them enslaving all humans, interbreeding them with dwarves and sterilizing all the pure bred humans. So, a huge continent, with no humans.
Personally, I'd like a scenario where there was major war that weakened the "good" society and then the "evil" races wipe out what's left. Hobgoblins are the new dominant race of the region.

What were your part-dwarf part humans like? Dark sun muls or something else?


A giant meteorite will do the trick.

Better yet, world wide meteor showers.


There was a thriving elven civilization on the continent. They created structures that were environmentally friendly; the structures were designed to start to crumble quickly once abandoned so that the natural state of the world would be restored. However, while maintained the structures were enduring and not easily weathered or corroded.

The elves began experimenting with magics from another plane, one where the forces of nature are powerful. They hoped to study them and use them to better help them gain understanding of the natural world. They also started taking in orc babies from various tribes that still existed on the continent. Their hope was that they could raise these orcs to be good rather than evil and end the senseless bloodshed.

Though they had some successes, the elves soon realized that they needed to alter the fundamental nature of orcs in order to rid them of their fundamentally evil nature. They tried to use the energies from the plane to cleanse the orcs. They succeeded, in part, but in doing so they also created a plague that swept through their civilization. Those that were not killed were transformed into this new form of orc - their minds and memories altered by the magic as well.

The plague has long since died out. What remains is a type of orc that makes use of the old structures, but who keep closer to nature than other orcs. They are chaotic in nature but tend neither towards good nor evil. They will fight the PCs over the invasion of their lands.

Liberty's Edge

Wow, lots of awesome suggestions!

The intentional self-destruction angle does strike a chord with me.

The civilization comes under the influence of a corrupting entity (Godly? Extra Planar? Aboleth? Illithid? Beholder?). The powers-that-be realize that the only way to contain the corrupting entity (perhaps because a group of adventurers failed to stop the BBEG) was to commit self-genocide (disease? parasitic? magic? force of arms?).

I imagine that through the course of sandbox exploration, the PCs would discover who the civilization was, their decline, what was causing the decline, the self-inflicted tragedy, why they did it, and learn more about the corrupting influence. I would imagine that at some point, the PCs would awaken or come to the attention of the corrupting influence and have to deal with it.

Perhaps the powers-that-be managed to seal themselves off and stay alive to try and stop the PCs from learning about the corruption and letting that information spread. Perhaps they left behind an assassin brotherhood who's sworn purpose is to kill anyone with knowledge of the corrupting influence to insure it doesn't spread (doing a very bad thing for what they think are good reasons).

I would imagine that there would be groups of the civilization that did run away to the hills to survive and they eventually evolved into the campaign's "barbarian" tribes.

Hmmmmmmm...so much to do.


Sounds like you've got a plan. Any other ideas need refining/expansion?

Liberty's Edge

boring7 wrote:
Sounds like you've got a plan. Any other ideas need refining/expansion?

Hmmm...probably a viable method of extermination. Does using magic to poison the food stock seem plausible?

The bigger question is what entity would have such a corrupting influence that the leaders felt that their only course was to murder everyone?


Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber

When I wanted to rework my homebrew, I created a storyline where the once mortal god of magic went mad, and actually fragmented into two beings, who warred with each other and began to "break the world" wheel of time style.
The PCs had to figure out what was going on and why, and try to mitigate it (it could not be stopped).


HangarFlying wrote:
boring7 wrote:
Sounds like you've got a plan. Any other ideas need refining/expansion?

Hmmm...probably a viable method of extermination. Does using magic to poison the food stock seem plausible?

The bigger question is what entity would have such a corrupting influence that the leaders felt that their only course was to murder everyone?

A high-magic/tech society will have ways of surviving an overtly tainted food supply (they'll lose people, but a healthy percentage will survive). A more insidious taint that involves "out-of-phase" molecular poisons that can be activated all at once after it has spread throughout society works. For bonus points it's the same kind of "insidious and slow corruption" method that the big-bad was doing, for a tasty "he who fights monsters/abyss gazes also" trope.

A corrupting influence to which genocide is the only answer? Well ultimately you have 5 options:
-Fiendish horrors
-Lovecraftian horrors
-Dark-magic addiction (blood magic, necromancy)
-Affluenza-based Moral Decay (real or imagined)
-Affluenza-based Motivational Decay (real or imagined)

Moral decay usually means demons ANYWAY, but sometimes just means everyone went crazy. Especially if the people who kicked off the genocide turn out to have been the real bad guys who were just religious extremists. This plot twist also annoys some folk, so it might not be the best bet.

Motivational decay is any society that's so advanced in tech/power that they wen't post-scarcity. Everybody lives in VR (or something like it) and nobody can take care of themselves or deal with challenges anymore because society is stagnant and terrible.

Dark-magic addiction is like the above, but with fatal consequences for both the people that are constantly being kidnapped/murdered to keep it going and the people that ever try to quit the blood-magic/necromancy.

Personally, I'd just go with fiendish horrors. Lamashtu is all about sex and violence and pumping out deadly dangerous kids who are just as corrupt as the previous generation. She's also straightforward, she's a demon god. None of this "beyond time and space" stuff or complicated plot twists or questions of where all the hyper-tech that ruined everything is for the PCs to abuse. She doesn't get traction with the "savage" races because they already have their own chaotic evil blood gods.

Liberty's Edge

boring7 wrote:

A more insidious taint that involves "out-of-phase" molecular poisons that can be activated all at once after it has spread throughout society works. For bonus points it's the same kind of "insidious and slow corruption" method that the big-bad was doing, for a tasty "he who fights monsters/abyss gazes also" trope.

Personally, I'd just go with fiendish horrors. Lamashtu is all about sex and violence and pumping out deadly dangerous kids who are just as corrupt as the previous generation. She's also straightforward, she's a demon god. None of this "beyond time and space" stuff or complicated plot twists or questions of where all the hyper-tech that ruined everything is for the PCs to abuse. She doesn't get traction with the "savage" races because they already have their own chaotic evil blood gods.

Good stuff!

So, to build upon this, the demon god needed these mortals to use as pawns in its battle to gain influence and power. The demon god passes itself off as a goodly deity, and worship of it does seem to have a positive affect, though once the demon's influence has hit a critical mass, people begin to lose their individuality and start acting like drones connected to a hive-mind (living zombies, I guess--I've been watching a lot of Star Trek Voyager and their dealings with the Borg. The concept of the Borg scares the crap out of me).

The masses clamber for a cure. Even those not influenced by the demon, not realizing that the demon "religion" is the root cause, want a cure so they don't get affected. A cure is developed, but the leaders hide the fact that while the cure does fix the symptoms, it also sterilizes the individual that takes it. Everyone jumps on the bandwagon to get innoculated, and it would sort itself out in 60 or so years.

The other angle would be that instead of sterilization, the leaders built a "fail safe" into the cure. Everyone gets inoculated (except the leaders because they know what it will really do). The "disease" doesn't go away and adapts. Leaders freak out and trigger the fail safe, killing everyone instantly.


Stargate.

That's all I really have to say about it.

Liberty's Edge

As in my post reminds you of Stargate, or that I should go the Stargate route?


Edit: Presumably CalethosVB is referring to these guys.

Any fiend that can keep it together playing "goodly deity" that long is probably lawful, so it' a devil-lord. Asmodeus is the top-billed player in Hell's politics, but perhaps it should be a lower-level player that tries the creative side-plots.

Baalzebul, lord of lies and flies, a disgusting slug-like monster who rules over the frozen prison-realm of Cocytus. He hates Mephistopheles (who is higher-ranking than him), is skilled in deception, and generally horrible. His blood-plague was fairly literal (think the blood plague from dishonored, the fail-safe that killed everyone also turned their bodies into anti-vermin poison which killed off most of the plague carriers. Baalzebul still makes appearances in large swarms of biting flies (use stats for a swarm of BEEEEEES!!!! perhaps?) occasionally and maybe there's still a bit of a shadow-war going on between his monstrous pawns, magical traps/leftovers, the "monstrous races" still around, and a clan of somewhat-maligned werebats who may or may not be descendants of the leaders but are definitely killing people to keep secrets.

Outsider groups include chaotic Orcs ("our blood god's FIRE burns the plague from our veins!"), Lawful hobgoblins ("we haven't been suckered in...yet"), Hill giants ("some us follow slug god, he tell us things we no understand, then he get angry and we no understand, then he go away and we find new god") and other assorted, fun-loving monsters.

Also, a poisoner who helped make the "cure" is still floating around plying his trade and experimenting. A dark elf male doesn't have a lot of opportunities back home and there are so many interesting compounds and chemicals here on the surface that they don't have in the Darklands. It also helps that without a strongly-established ecclesiastical structure his wizardry is actually respected as a power. Not that there are many intelligent folk left to appreciate that, but explorers *do* come, and without constant threat of assassination he's got a long lifespan...

Liberty's Edge

Excellent information!


Guang wrote:
knightstar4 wrote:

Disease, War, Famine, Pestilence... Sound familiar?

In a game I ran a few years back, the dwarves fought a war that eventually ended in them enslaving all humans, interbreeding them with dwarves and sterilizing all the pure bred humans. So, a huge continent, with no humans.
Personally, I'd like a scenario where there was major war that weakened the "good" society and then the "evil" races wipe out what's left. Hobgoblins are the new dominant race of the region.
What were your part-dwarf part humans like? Dark sun muls or something else?

I drew inspiration from the Dark Sun Muls. They could lift alot more than humans and had dwarven stat bonuses. They tended to be hardier and stronger than humans, with low light instead of dark vision. It was a fun campaign with alot of development that I won't get into here.


Llamias of various power levels may have worked with Baal on the premise that only humans would be affected. They are not happy with deity loving humans coming back. That wasn't part of the deal!

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