I am trying to figure out if Cyclops ruins are Large or Huge? I am leaning towards Huge but I am not sure. Average Cyclops height is 9' and greater cyclops is 30'. One of the ruins state that it is about 100' high and humans recut the stairs to make it easier to occupy. This is where I get confused, maybe it is because I am in construction and I am overthinking it....but.
Stairs rise is between 6.25"-7.875". For easy math lets call it 6". If the Cyclops ruins are large and made for 9' creatures then everything would be about 33% larger or about 8". The stairs would be a little big but nothing you could not just deal with. Like going to have dinner at Shaq's house. I have never heard that Kevin Heart needed to build a ramp to get in Shaq's house. On the Other hand if the ruins are Huge for 30' tall Cyclops the stairs would be about 20" tall. I see wanting to cut these stairs down as that would be a hell of a leg workout. As I am an electrician and not a carpenter my numbers may be a little off but I think they are in the ball park.
I think the most likely explanation is simply that the writer didn't have a good context for how much bigger something should or shouldn't be.
Cyclops are only large size.
So I imagine, medium size creatures would struggle about as much as small size creatures would in a medium size place. Stairs probably aren't a big deal. But chairs and tables might be frustrating.
Based on the description of greater cyclops, they don't sound like the type to build large settlements, so I doubt the ruins would have been designed for them.
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Yeah, it's just one of those 'when-real-world-confuses' instances. The designer didn't know 'real-world' but it sounded logical and the publisher felt it would add more appearance of realism -- even though it doesn't (like when designers who have never studied ethics publish garbage on Alignment, like 'CG = Freedom, but not necessarily LG'.) They're designing something in the game they know nothing about in real life, but maybe it sounds good to people not specifically trained or educated in that arena.
The purpose of the design was to make it sound logical, make it seem real. So perhaps stay true to the purpose even if that's changing canonical design.
If you have real-life knowledge, change it to what would seem real in real-life. Maybe, uh,... Before Earthfall Humans were a bit smaller and Cyclops were a bit bigger -- not necessarily different Size Categories, but a Human was 4'9 and a Cyclops was 11'3. So the 4'9 Humans recut the stairs. Nowadays Humans are 5'9 and Cyclops are 9' so they wouldn't have to,... But 10 millennia ago--
Or, maybe they never cut the stairs at all and you can delete it from your own canon.
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You could also assign some of the blame for stairs needing to be recut on age and different construction standards. I've been on stairs in human ruins that I wish were recut to make things easier.
As far as I know, no, Cyclopes haven't gotten smaller. They're just slowly using their oracular abilities, and losing touch with their mental faculties. But there are any number of ways you can justify building on that scale. Just look at Greek and Roman temples, or modern cathedrals, massive structures much larger than anything we would need, but where the size serves a theological purpose. Or you could assume that what you see is simply all that has survived - there may have been wooden inner structures filling out the outer stone shell, but that has rotted away thousands of years ago, leaving what looks like cavernous stone hallways.
Or perhaps the ancient Cyclopes simply had a taste for massive construction, to show off their wealth and power? The Gol-Ghan empire fell into decline due to its own corruption, perhaps the ostentatiousness of it can tie into that, buildings deliberately built to be ridiculously showy and wasteful to appease some enigmatic urge or serve some unknown purpose, perhaps something the dark masters they turned to demanded of them?
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Cyclops aren't getting smaller. If anything, cyclops are getting bigger. Great cyclops, the ones that are Huge at 30 feet tall, are postulated to be a result of degeneration and mutation of normal cyclops, and the ultimate fate of the cyclops now that their empires have fallen.
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What ruin is that, specifically?
The description reminds me of the andenes in South America; terraced guardens built into the sides of mountains by indigenous peoples to make up for the lack of usable land for farming in the mountains.
Because of the stepped design they "look like" giant stairs so you have a lot of modern conspiracy theorists who believe that there was an actual race of giants in prehistory citing them as proof or at least evidence of that, and that the actual stairs built alongside them were cut in by humans occupying the area later.
I'm wondering if the writer wasn't playing off of those ideas but admittedly it doesn't make a lot of sense with cyclops specifically.
What ruin is that, specifically?
Fralros Can be found on the PathfinderWiki or the Iobaria Gazetteer
