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?
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| A golden dictator stands atop this,.. |
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…
Within the wastes of the Heart Provinces, blasted by sorcery and haunted by unchained demons, the miraculous edifices of the First Empire remain largely untouched. Among the most storied of these are the great “Tomb Peaks of the Cursed Emperors”. Raised in the Empire’s final centuries, when demon sorcery and possession were common among the powerful these huge monuments are the tombs of and temples dedicated to fallen emperors, as well as treasure houses and the necropoli for the Cursed Emperor’s followers, sacrifices, and the thousands of workers who died in their making. While the names and images of these tyrants have been erased from time, and the statuary that decorates the exteriors of these artificial mountains defaced, they represent an artificial mountain range, and their interiors have never been fully explored or plundered.
Pyramid adventures are an underused and often terribly cliched variety of site based adventures, and part of this comes from the usual subject … tombs tend to be linear and boring. The real history of Egyptian funerary practices is quite interesting, especially the history of tomb robbing. While it’s very biblical of me to suggest the ancient pharaohs were tyrants, their pyramids and tombs have every mark of megalomaniacal architecture - pushing the technology and resources available to their culture to produce lasting monuments. Monuments largely to themselves. In reality the pyramids, including the “Great Pyramid of Giza” and Egyptian rock cut tombs, tend to have a few, cramped spaces within, and most were looted in either antiquity (as with the Great Pyramid) or under the various Caliphates, who legalized and professionalized endemic grave robbing.
Both the sheer volume of valuable grave goods hidden by the ancient Egyptians and the equally long history of grave robbing are potent sources for games as ancient tomb architects actually included various traps and protections against grave robbing (including those famous curses … but everyone did that), and an ancient culture that utilized a cadre of scared grave guards. Even in the recent political unrest in Egypt during the 2010’s grave robbing became a means of survival and fast wealth. Residents of ancient neighborhoods began excavating their basements in search of antiquities to sell, while the unpaid and unsupported government guards at archaeological sites were intimidated or bribed by heavily armed gangs with excavators and little regard for the past.
Colossus of Gisberga (Motherland Calls )
The Colossus of Gisberga is a gigantic statue of “Queen Gisberga” the last independent warrior queen of Kosse Sildar, who submitted to the Empire and “brought law and culture across the mountains”. Her monument was built generations later, hundreds of feet tall and staring Southwest from the dry hills beneath the Maiden Tombs - eyes fixed over the horizon on the distant City of Fountains. The interior of the Colossi was once an archive of ancient texts on law and Imperial sorcery, built into the colonnaded base, the statue itself, and vaults below.
Once maintained by a fanatical sect of barrister priests, the library was partially sacked during the Warlock King’s rise to power, but the monks sealed much of it, locking themselves within, and leaving the plundering jinetes with little to do besides burn the ground floor of the library. Since, the ruin has largely been ignored, but if the great vault doors can be opened there is likely to be a fortune in ancient sorcery below.
“Motherland Calls” is the largest statue in Europe and when it was built it was the largest statute in the world. I wouldn’t call it a monument to tyranny, as it commemorates the citizens of the Soviet Union who died in the battle of Stalingrad. It’s not a giant statue of Stalin (that was likely the 50ft Stalin Monument in Prague that was blown up by the Czech communist party in 1963), but it’s a rather militaristic and depressing 275 foot tall colossi that was likely made possible because it was commissioned by an autocratic state. Still tyrants like making big statues of themselves almost as much as the faithful of various religions like building colossi of prophets and deities. Statues aren’t the best dungeon material, because like towers they don’t offer a huge amount of space, and they are generally vertical - meaning they suffer from linearity. One can of course remedy this by standing a colossi atop a building or underground construction, or simply by making them huge. A giant foot, broken above the ankle could make an excellent adventure location, and one doesn’t even need to reveal who the monument was originally for … it’d be very Percy Bysshe Shelly’s Ozymandius ….
Paladin’s House (Palace of Parliament)
While the neighborhood around it has not been rebuilt, one of the many delayed projects in the Bull Kingdom, many of the city’s displaced, especially those of the criminal and proscribed elements shelter within the Paladin’s House, and the government has tried to use the space for various endeavors including the storage of the nobility’s confiscated possessions and as a political prison. Darker rumors abound of course …. And attract treasure hunters: renegade Kosse Sildarian soldiers still hide in the ruin’s secret chambers protecting wealth and magical blades, that the House is the home to plague or blood cults, that the sorcerer in charge of the prison wing is using prisoners to experiment with demon summoning, and that among the confiscated goods held within are numerous military automatons … some now gone rogue.
Enormous, poorly built and ½ empty palaces are not actually rare, and one of the best of them is fairly recent, from the regime of the Ceaușescus. There are a lot of reasons to despise Nicolae Ceaușescu, dictator of Romania from 1965 to his execution in 1989. A visit to Bucharest will give you another (mostly petty) one - terrible urban planning impulses. The People’s House, now the “Palace of Parliament" is a huge concrete building, in decaying neoclassical style with a lot of molded modernistic flourishes. It’s enormous, sitting atop a lovely hill in central Bucharest … an ancient city with a lovely collection of medieval religious buildings and art nouveau “old town” inspired by Paris. One imagines it was a bit like parts of Prague, or Belgrade - but Nicolae and his North Korean inspired monumentalism has wrecked most of that. The construction of the House, starting in 1984, required the destruction of an old neighborhood and some ancient monasteries. Apartment blocks in the same style and multi-tank wide boulevards around it required more destruction … It's a desecration that helps make Bucharest one of the less walkable European capitals. A gigantic, neighborhood-sized building in a sort of brutalist concrete neo-classicism that is now suffering from the impossibility of properly maintaining something its size. Romania has at least used the space within as best it can, but the thing is larger than the US Pentagon and serves a country of 19 million … not the USA’s 341 Million … and a military that is 1/10 the the size of the USA’s. The important bit is that the Palace of Parliament is excessive, and it was always vast beyond usefulness or any reason beyond monumental aggrandizement of a dictator’s vanity.
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| It has been noted that the fascist taste is unimaginative (Italy excepted) and tends towards the most petite bourgeoise of ideas like ... Rome, but huge and concrete... |
The Ghost City of Hy-Ember (Saint Petersburg, Welthauptstadt Germania or Brasilia)
At the edge of the province of Blackacre, near the border of the Imperial Canton of Blue Meadows stands the empty city of Hy-Ember, an unfinished project of the Imperial See meant to become a new religious capital for the Successor Empire. Even the wealth of the See and the forced labor of Blackacre’s prison population faltered after forty years of draining salt marshes and struggling to prevent monumental buildings from sinking into the soft wet earth. The city is half buried, partially submerged and generally ignored. There is even a bull that makes its mention a lesser heresy. As much as the city is now a sunken and mud choked ruin, for a brief period it was home to several high temples, a dozen archimandrites, their retinues, and militias. Much of the wealth and magic used to construct the religious capital was never recovered, especially towards the end of its decline, when floods, infighting among the metropolite, and waves of raftborne raiders besieged Hy-Ember.
Monumental cities, planned and built at the whim of despots or juntas are not strictly vanity projects. St. Petersburg was built to create a warm water port, while Brasilia was carved out of the highlands as a centralized administrative capitol … Welthauptstadt Germania of course was the never completed megalomaniacal dream of a genocidal dictator and his pet architect. The interesting thing for RPG adventures is the way that planned monument cities tend to be placed in unpleasant terrain, and like most tyrant’s monuments aim to be bigger and grander than anything that could possibly be of use to people. Generally there’s a lot of lost lives associated with their construction.
Interestingly both St. Petersburg and Germania were troubled by issues with ground density … You can’t build huge concrete piles on the soft swampy ground of Berlin and it’s not much easier in the Neva marshes. This problem was so severe that only a test construction for Germania, known as the Schwerbelastungskörper (heavy load-exerting body), this ugly test construction was built with forced labor (of course) and proved that nature abhorred National Socialist urban planning as much as everyone else. St. Petersburg was of course constructed at the cost of thousands of Russian and Swedish lives as serfs and prisoners of war toiled to shore up the marshes.
While in the real world modern monumental cities have endured, because they are ultimately functional, it is easy to imagine that in a world where cities are abandoned and lost with some regularity (something not uncommon prior to the modern era), that the ruins of a monumental city would make a good subject for a ruined city adventure, and the idea of building one on bad ground provides the opportunity to make much of the city a buried ruin.
There are of course plenty more monuments to tyrannical excess, and all provide inspiration to location design. For example, the Belgrade Fortress ... sprawling, built atop itself from the stone age to renaissance ... and allegedly haunted by the mangled ghosts of Ottoman cruelties. The tombs of the early Chinese Emperors (are monarchs tyrants? I suppose it depends) with it's terracotta armies or alleged room sized maps using mercury seas. The Arc d' Triumph. The "Buzludzha" - a difficult to access brutalist headquarters for the Bulgarian Communist Party filled with decaying frescos. The list is endless and inspiration is easy as the history of most of these places is full of bizarre stories, architectural oddities and atrocity that lends itself to fleshing out fantasy in an interesting way. Even if you want to design another "hole full of orcs", isn't it more interesting if that hole was once the last ditch efforts of a crumbling despotism to build an underground fortress full of super weapons ... such as the various V-2 super bunkers 1/2 built in Normandy ... Coupole d'Helfaut-Wizernes is likely the most insane example.
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