Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 65 - Ruins and Ancient Civilizations

Episode Date: March 21, 2021

What is it about ruins that make them so good for DMs and players?  How do ruins come to be?  How can a GM use ruins in a campaign and what are some tips to do so?  Grab your favorite drink and let's talk about it!

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for tuning in to episode 65 of the Taking 20 podcast this week about ruins and ancient civilizations. This week's sponsor is Carol's Discount Coffins. We promise our product will be the last thing you ever need. Lost civilizations and the ruins and artifacts they leave behind tend to capture our imaginations. What happened to the colony at Roanoke? The people who lived on Easter Island? The abandoned city of Cahokia near St. Louis? And, of course, the lost city of Atlantis. Did they sink under the waves of a tsunami never to be seen again? Were they buried under the volcanic ash

of some sort of cataclysm? Did Bob from accounting pull the wrong lever, sinking the city to the bottom of the ocean? Fucking Bob. What an idiot. For the purposes of this episode, ruins are the remains of some construction, typically an old one that suffered much damage or disintegration. Also for the purposes of this episode, I'm going to use the term people to refer to any intelligent race, ancestry, or species that could live in an area that becomes ruins or move into the ruins later. I don't exclusively mean humans. It could be trolls, lizard folk, elves, duergar, fungus men, aliens, or a race of self-aware intelligent

dogs. Who's a big sweetie? Yes, you are. You are. Yes, you are. You take, yes you are, you take those ruins, yes you take, you... Anyway, so why should you include ruins in an adventure? Well, they feed the imagination first off. They make it easy to design adventures around them. A former civilization now overrun by nature, predators, or maybe even other civilizations encroaching on old territories while expanding theirs. Do you want there to be another intelligent species living there? Ruins can do it. Do you want nature to be the enemy and have the players have to deal with some aggressive plant life, oozes, mosses, and molds? Ruins got you covered. Undead? Yup. Constructs? In spades. Aberrations? Planar beasts? Fae? Fiends? Giants?

Ruins, ruins, ruins, and ruins can be their home. Ruins can be the site of lost treasure, worship of a dead or dying god, and can provide clues to how to find the MacGuffin to advance the story. And that's not all. You can also have entire dungeon complexes under the ruins, maybe carved out by creatures who moved in after it had been abandoned. Maybe the ruined courtyard used to be the temple to a dark god with hidden treasures and horrors just beneath the surface.

All the players have to do is press the stones in the right order and begin their descent into madness. Now, a personal fault of mine is that when it comes to ruins, my brain automatically wants to go big. My favorite throwaway line from the movie The Matrix was there used to be cities that spanned hundreds of miles. Huge ruins of a destroyed civilization with things to discover, you say? Well, let me get my pack and bag of holding and let's loot this shit.

But when I say ruins, it doesn't have to be whole civilizations or a big metropolis. It could be a small town on the former edge of a kingdom expansion, or a small keep or castle that was left behind when it no longer guarded anything important. It could be a village that ran afoul of a local beast or was cursed by something living in the land. Ruins could even be a single building. A remote disused hunting cabin, an abandoned farmstead, a crashed sailing ship or starship. a crashed sailing ship or starship. Whether you're talking about ruins where 50,000 people could have lived or three cows in a stable hand, either one of them can be a great source of adventures. Ruins by their very nature evoke all three pillars of RPG adventuring, combat,

exploration, and role-playing. Ruins scream monsters and treasure, risk and reward, danger and daring, and that's what adventuring's all about. To boldly go where no one's been for a long time, kill the monsters that are there, and come home with their stuff. So one of the questions I always ask is why ruins exist. You don't have to determine exactly what happened to leave a ruin at a location. As a DM, you could just hand wave it and say, Dwarves used to live

here, now they don't. Shit ton of lizard folk have moved in and they fucking hate you. Nothing wrong with that at all. If you're not doing a lot of world building and role playing, no point in digging deeper. Grab a map of ruins, stock it full of bull-worshipping kobolds, drop a minotaur boss fight in a maze-like area in the middle and run the players through it. Where the building came from, who built it, who cares? Kobolds and Minotaurs are here now. But if the history of an area plays a role in your campaign, or is an important part of your world, you at least need to give it some thought. Why are these ruins here? What happened to the people who used to call this home, or at least treat it as important? Why hasn't the area been reclaimed? Existing campaign settings have lost civilizations baked in and plenty of adventure seeds that can come

from them. For 5th edition, if you're adventuring in Faerun, Ancient Chult has the city of Omu with the Tomb of the Nine Gods and goodness knows what else is buried there in that forested hell. The lost elven civilization of Korminthor south of the Moon Sea. The gold dwarven civilization near the Great Rift. Even relatively populous countries like Kormir have ruins aplenty like Tilverton. A little digging online, you can find out more about the lost civilizations of the Netheril, Mulhorrand, Unthur, Narfel, Ramathar, and many others. If you're adventuring in Galarian, Ancient Aslan was wiped out by Earthfall. Thassilon, the Divided Empire, was similarly wiped out by Earthfall, except for the parts that weren't, long story involving multiple adventure paths and runelords.

The northern nation of Sarkoris, where the veil between the plains was very thin to begin with, was torn asunder and demons poured in from the world wound. Ancient Assyrian and her many desert ruins that lie waiting to be discovered. In those worlds, ruins and adventures within them are ready-made. You can use published materials and wikis to quickly discover more about the peoples of these various fallen kingdoms and what might be left behind in the ruins. Netheril, for example, was a kingdom run by magic users. They had flying cities and they were brought low by their own hubris. They unraveled the weave and brought death and destruction to themselves. Adventuring in one of their ruined flying cities

could be trying to prevent, I don't know, a big bad from finding some magical who's a what's it that he or she needs to bring about death and destruction on a wide scale. The adventurers are called in to make sure that doesn't happen. Osirian and Galarian is ready for an Egyptian-style adventure with ruins plagued by locusts, giant scorpions, blue dragons, and forgotten tombs filled with mummies and other undead. But Jeremy, you're saying, I'm not adventuring in Faerun or Galarian. Good. Read about them and steal the best ideas and drop them into your world. In general, ruins are where, if you'll pardon the term, a civilization of some sort once was but now isn't, and there's evidence of their existence in an area that survived the test of time.

Civilizations, countries, cities, even families rise and fall, grow and shrink, expand power and lose it. To make your world feel more realistic and lived in with a real history, you just need to figure out why an area was left to ruin. So what causes a civilization to vacate an area? While I'll be talking macro scale in this section, these same concepts could be applied to smaller areas like towns and even individual buildings. In doing some research as to why societies collapse and empires fall, I found three main categories of reasons why an area or civilization might be abandoned.

Environmental changes, societal issues, and external forces. Environmental changes, something about the climate, soil, or weather in the area changed to make living there no longer viable. Maybe it was starvation. It could be that the staple crops get infected by some disease that wipes out not only the growing crops, but the stored crops as well. Or livestock die en masse and the population can no longer feed itself. Environmental change that would cause this could be gradual, like the planet slowly warming or cooling or changing in such a way that the staple crops simply don't grow there anymore. Or it could be very sudden, a sudden change in environment caused by anything from a tidal shift or planetary axis change to a volcano or other calamity that suddenly alters the environmental landscape. Maybe it's a disease that affects the people. Instead of crop disease or starvation, it's a disease that affects the people. Instead of crop disease or starvation,

it's a disease that infects large portions of the population. Maybe it was a society without access to antibiotics, or in a magical world, maybe the disease was resistant to divine healing. Or maybe it was a rapid-onset disease that attacked the population before anyone could organize a resistance to it. Another environmental cause for the collapse of a civilization could be an apocalypse or catastrophe of some sort, some event that dramatically alters the planet or a large portion of it. In the world of Kryn, you had the cataclysm, when the gods cast the burning mountain down upon the land, because the king priest's pride demanded he be made a god himself. On Galerion, you had Earthfall, where the Aboleths brought a meteorite down upon the planet for their own inscrutable reasons.

Whatever the apocalypse is, the area is changed forever, rendering the area no longer suitable for habitation. So what if it's a societal issue that causes the collapse? Like infertility or reduced fertility? There could be some biological or environmental factors that causes a group to become infertile. Think the movie City of Men where at the time the story starts no baby had been born on earth in 18 years. Reduced fertility can have a similar effect over a longer time scale. Imagine the U.S. population of 500 million over 70 years becomes 450 million and 70 years past that, it's down to 400 million. That much of a reduction in population, there'd be a lot of formerly urban

sprawl that would either be abandoned or would need to be destroyed or removed. If we don't have the resources to destroy them, bam, we got some ruins. Loss of fertility or gradual reduction in the number of little ones running around can cause a population to shrink and areas to become abandoned to ruin. Another societal issue to think about is unsustainable complexity. A city that dominated an area that was the center of trade, well what happens if the trade goes elsewhere? Maybe other trading hubs open or things decentralized. Suddenly the people of that city don't have access to the resources they once did. decentralized. Suddenly the people of that city don't have access to the resources they once did.

What if society collapsed because there's a leader who called for an end to his own race or a mass migration? Some sort of charismatic political or religious figure who leads her followers out of the area or convinces them to end their lives. What once was a bustling, thriving city suddenly is without the people who can maintain and defend it. Perhaps it's a decay of social cohesion and rising inequality, some sort of event that turns the societal norms on their ear. A slave revolt and a significant portion of the ruling class is executed. The problem that's left is that most slaves in this civilization were uneducated, so they don't know how to keep a city running. The city is gradually abandoned as people seek stability elsewhere. Religious or social beliefs change,

and large sections of the population reject the previous norms, like the sacrosanct caste system. Another potential societal upheaval could be the loss of adaptability. As societies become more stagnant, we don't use the survival portions of our brain nearly as much. If we're having to scrap for every calorie, humans must keep their minds sharp and adaptable so that we don't miss out on an opportunity to feed our tribe. But if I can call a food delivery service and get tacos dropped at

my door, that just doesn't take the cognitive ability to point and click on an app. By the way, don't think for a second I'm suggesting we go back to hunting our own food. I am not the fittest, so I would most definitely not survive. I would have to sit near a sign that says we'll DM for food. But more than one anthropologist put forth this theory that as civilizations become more structured and comfortable, that their cognitive ability to adapt to changing environments declines. Consequently, that makes us not as able to adapt to natural diminishing returns of our method of survival. Confronted with the sudden need to adapt to a problem, maybe we won't be able to solve it. Another reason for a potential loss of civilization is

depletion of resources and industry. Besides the loss of food resources we covered earlier, what if a critical resource the town supplies to the region suddenly becomes unavailable, or a major employer that supports the town dries up? Maybe a town exports important reagents that it collects from a nearby lake, but suddenly the harvestable quantity of reagents disappears, or diminishes so greatly that the town can't export enough to survive. For a real-world comparison, think of the gold and silver rush towns in the western United States like Bodie, California, Ruby, Arizona, or South Pass City, Wyoming. The ore veins dried up, so the miners moved away, along with all the supporting industries, leaving behind a ghost town. Or it could be the loss of a critical industry to an area. Newton, Iowa, after a major Maytag manufacturing left the area. Detroit, Michigan with the changes to the

American auto industry. Cairo, Illinois with the movement away from shipping items via rivers. A major technology shift or loss of a source of raw material can dramatically affect the size of a settlement or the presence of people there at all. The people move on, the buildings are abandoned, hundred years later you got some tasty, tasty ruins left behind. The third reason for abandonment of an area could be external factors, like a predator arrives. A vampire, a devil lord, a colossal golem, or locusts the size of double-decker buses. The people were frightened away when a green dragon layered close by. It kept raiding the town for food, and when the people couldn't fight back,

they left. Ladies and gentlemen, fear not! We can fight this dragon! We need to take up spears and track it to its lair, and... it's right behind me, isn't it? So as I was saying, get your kids and get your shit, we are leaving. Anyone staying behind is dragon kibble and may the gods have mercy on your soul. The external factor could be a conquest by an enemy, causing a total loss. The conquering army killed or enslaved everyone and looted the place. The conquerors saw little value in trying to commit personnel there to defend it or have people live there at all. The conquered never got the chance to build the population back up again, so it became an abandoned ruin. A last external factor could be some sort of temptation to pull people away,

like an alluring portal to the Feywild opens and large numbers of people are lured through the portal or even willingly go to the land beyond. Buildings, villages, and especially cities are expensive, so why would they be abandoned and not occupied or rebuilt? It could be remote, beyond the borders of civilization, far enough that the risk to moving to the location simply isn't worth the potential reward. Maybe the owner abandoned it, the only people who wanted to live there are wiped out and no one else wants the property and what comes along with it. The ruins could be treated as a memorial. The building or area is kept as a memorial to those who perished and no one wanted to live there because it felt like living in a graveyard. Maybe the area is no longer economically viable, there's no financial reason to try to rebuild, or the cost to rebuild would not be recouped in any reasonable

time period. The area could be unsafe, there could be environmental dangers, a monster lives there, access to support resources like backup is no longer available. Ruins will be different depending on whether the occupants had to leave in a hurry or had time to make a planned exit. If in a hurry, more stuff is going to be left behind. Everyday items, plates, clothes, sentimental items like pictures and paintings and heirlooms, survival items like food, water, travel supplies, maybe even magic and technology. Hauling treasure out likely wouldn't be an option for most. But if the abandonment or migration is planned and can happen over time, valuable caches of treasure may be more rare. Survival items may not be present at all. Sentimental items may not be there either, and the ruins will have a more picked-over feel to them

as soon as everyone gets out of the area. But lost civilizations and ruins are a mystery that can pique the interest of certain types of players. So what are some tips for using ruins? A wise former DM I had once said that civilizations don't set out to make ruins, they make buildings which become ruined. So if you're designing ruins, take 10 minutes and figure out the history of these particular ruins. Determine what the building was used for in its heyday. Was it grain storage? Someone's home? Was it a sailing ship? Was it the teleportation gateway to Avernus? The building's purpose can help you stock it with loot and potentially creatures. I mean, imagine there's a sealed off bathroom that no one's opened the door for decades and there's an ooze that's been living there feeding on the muck that's down at the bottom, but its

food supply ran out long ago and it is hangry. Tip number two. If you want the history of the ruin to feature in the adventure, have the ruins tell a story. Give hints within the ruins as to what happened there. We're starting to excavate ruins like Pompeii, which of course was buried when Mount Vesuvius erupted. People are being found clutching loved ones, protecting items, and it's almost a moment forever frozen in time. Paintings and frescoes have been preserved,

if not perfectly, then well enough to determine what they were. If I were designing an adventure around a town like Pompeii that was rapidly destroyed, I'd gradually reveal the damage, giving hints to what happened by the people and the scarring in the ruins, burns on the wall, pyroclastic blast damage, and so forth. Have the PCs find messages written on the walls hastily in ink or even blood. We have angered the gods, the fire monster comes, whatever the cause of the destruction was. Have the PCs find underground shelters where people took refuge only to succumb to environmental effects like lack of oxygen, heat, or loss of food and water. The story told by the ruins doesn't have to be tied to the greater narrative, but a gradual reveal that the former occupants did this to themselves

or ran afoul of a powerful beast, that serves as a great story beat and it foreshadows whenever you unleash the beast on the party later. But you could tie this to the story arc of your campaign, reinforce the central pillar of the story. The danger of greed, the hubris of dwarves, the man is not meant to meddle with creatures from the great beyond. Third tip, have something waiting to be discovered. Whether that's a monster, treasure, a secret, lost knowledge, all of the above. Have it behind a locked door on the other side of a resetting trap. Have an object of value that's not obvious. Stuff made of gemstones and gold are obvious and anyone's been there before they'll

likely pick stuff like that up. But imagine something of historical importance or magical use. Ruins can scratch all the itches for adventuring parties. There is lost or unknown lore to discover and areas to explore. There's monsters to kill. There could be role-playing opportunities as the party discovers a lost tribe or has unexpectedly friendly relations with the current occupants. They can be self-contained adventures or support a greater story you'd like to tell. You can fully flesh them out and have known reasons for the presence of the ruins, which you can gradually reveal to the PCs, or they're just ruins.

They're just a convenient trope for an adventuring location. Ruins speak of recovering the lost, discovering the forgotten, and excitement of the unknown. Drop some in front of your players and have fun doing it. Thank you so much for listening, by the way. Don't forget to subscribe and give us a rating and or feedback. I'd love to hear from you. This has been episode 65, all about ruins and ancient civilizations. I once again want to thank our sponsor, Carol's Discount Coffins. Try our new plexiglass coffins. Will they be a hit?

Remains to be seen. My name is Jeremy Shelley, and I hope that your next game is your best game.