The Tyrant's Hand

The Ruins of Fantasy

Every fantasy RPG world I know, or more certainly every one I want to run a dungeon crawl game in is filled with huge ruins.  Above ground, underground … that’s just an aesthetic choice… The question always comes up though about the source of these ruins.  Why is a usually pseudo-medieval world filled with massive abandoned structures … mostly haunted or infested by fell beasts. Of course crumbling ruins weren’t absent from the medieval world, and the fall of Rome - either the Western European, or mostly English conception of a sudden and apocalyptic collapse or the slow apocalypse and decline of Byzantium is the model for this idea.  Given that though, what are these ruins?  What are they filled with treasure and what does it say about our game worlds?

A golden dictator
stands atop this,..

The biggest and best ruins of both the medieval world and pulp fiction are the legacies of tyrants …  The pyramids of ancient Egypt, the ruins of Rome … both represent the legacies of absolute power and the compulsion it can levy to produce monuments.  I find this explanation of dungeons and haunted ruins for RPGs compelling, and it’s about the extent of politics and elegiac tone I want to put in my games and settings … not didactic, but perhaps inevitably political as it’s illustrative of the way I see history and the world.  This idea that bad stewardship and sick societies create enduring, if ruinous monuments is not absolute, everyone creates monuments of some kind … religious monuments for example tend to be created from far more positive and collective impulses … but the monuments of tyrants lend themselves to abandonment and fear, becoming adventure locations.  Likewise some of the most egregious of tyrant’s constructions are just so dungeon like! The goals of megalomaniacal building … maximalism, “ruin value” and building on an anti-human scale are useful ones to keep in mind for dungeon construction.

Tyrants (and of course good rulers, good systems) always fall.  Sometimes they manage to stick around for a long time, but let’s take the optimistic approach here … tyrants fall and their monuments become ruins because no one cares to preserve them. They become markers of past evil … shunned, even haunted, likely literally in a fantasy context, and are a convenient place to hide treasures and artifacts of the past … they aren’t systematically often disassembled (though blowing them up has a few fans in the 20th century).  Usually they are defaced and abandoned, broken in war or revolution, and ignored as much as possible by the survivors of their makers. It follows that years later disreputable tomb robbers, the kind of antisocial degenerates that like to call themselves “adventurers”, would come along and loot them - it’s not something polite society necessarily approves of, but by that time the treasures of the tyrant aren’t something to destroy and owning them isn’t necessarily worthy of punishment … so the market for loot exists, even if the looters aren’t welcome in polite society.

The monuments of tyrants also provide us plenty of real world examples to start from.  Here are several with their Crystal Frontier version…