What're some good plot hooks for a country being more or less abandoned in a medium fantasy setting? I've already used "dug too deep" and "oh fuck plague" in my lore, and dragons don't really work - so... What's something not too cliche but interesting?
>>46490296
A plague of locusts.
>>46490296
The place is remote, and simply does not have enough natural resources to sustain any sort of large population.
The founders of the kingdoms/cities/whatever were unaware of this, and they were forced to flee back home, or risk starvation.
A few desperate groups still survive in the old land, but not without struggling greatly.
If you want this to be plot related, I suppose you could say that some sort of magic is destroying all the crops/metals in the land, or something similar.
>>46490296
PLAGUE BABY
>>46490296
Curses are classic. Drop enough general misfortune on a nation, and it'll collapse. Or maybe a ruler did something horrible, and the gods forsook the land, causing the faithful to flee and everyone else to want nothing to do with those that remained.
>>46490361
Plague of babies?
Every union produces triplets all year.
Just how many abandoned towns do your PCs find anyway?
A curse of some sort, but that's pretty similar to plague
A particularly gruesome story and possible haunting, though that could arguably not be considered abandoned if there's ghosts there
A complete stoppage of the means to support life. As in their supply of food stopped one day or maybe their crops just crapped out on them, but that would probably have to be a pretty isolated place
Superstitious neighbors kill anyone who moves in for reasons
>>46490323
>>46490362
>>46490420
What're some good curses? First born son dies? Earth turns to flesh?
>>46490296
Economic collapse. Maybe the economy was based on mining and the mines dried up. Or it was once a major trade hub and war/politics stripped it of importance. Either way, everyone who can has moved on to greener pastures and only crumbling remnants. Everyone's who left is either a poor, a criminal, or just to stubborn to leave.
>>46490485
Food rots at a faster rate
>>46490296
Magical pollution/contamination renders the land unusable.
>>46490485
No combustion
>>46490296
A martyr's death caused an exodus? Infrastructure could not be maintained and the remaining populace migrated to a smaller city closer to a border.
I'm actually doing something like this for my campaign, only instead of it being a country or section of land, it's a whole continent.
For my game, I am having it be a combination of things: overpopulation, magical and natural overpollution without proper ways of cleaning/filtering the waste, soil no longer farmable, and the (now-dead) goddess of posion, disease, and assassins successfully tainted the land with her death wish.
The faithful and those who saw the failing lands fled to the other continent across the sea, and soon all history of the old continent was wiped from history.
Fast forward about 10,000 years, following natural healing and slow, divine healing from the god of the
earth, and the other continent of survivors have "suddenly" found a 'New World' full of ancient ruins containing wonders and artifacts beyond belief.
It's kinda like instead of a semi-magical Europe re-discovering the Americas, they instead found the ruins of Faerun.
>>46490296
Historically, several civilizations have died out or shrunk in size due to changing climate. Towns in Mesopotamia would be abandoned after centuries because the river they depended on shifted course twelve miles to the side. The Classic Mayan cities were abandoned due to a famine caused by drought and overpopulation. In modern times cities in Russia and Japan have been evacuated and abandoned because of radiation from nuclear accidents.
>>46490296
Direct meteor strike
Don't explain it. Everybody is gone, and nobody knows where or why.
>>46490909
Ha, already used that too. The reason the world is low magic currently is because the god of magic's avatar (a giant well of energy within a mountain) was killed when an old god flung a meteor from his realm onto the mountain, thereby killing that god and most of the world's magic.
A mad druid unleashed a terraforming explosion of wildlife that instantenously also happened to eliminate all non-herbivores in a radius.
You now have overgrown harmless streets in a matter of <short-time span>.
Whoever lived there discovered some uranium, thinks it's pretty so it's being used to decorate everything, people die of radiation poisoning, people who go investigate die of radiation poisoning, people suddenly lose interest in the area.
A well meaning but inexperienced wizard/Druid/magic user tries to better everyone's lives, pouring over old texts and ruins, using ancient and long forgotten or misused ritualistic sites he was trying to bestow the people of the area with luck or good fortune.
The magic user did not understand or read the fine print about these old ways, they were slightly less good than average people.
I'm thinking the spell shifted the people to a plane between dimensions.
They are trapped there mostly unable to interact with the world, sometimes they can appear in a mirror or have their words carry on a breaze.
It gives the impression that the entire town/country side is cursed. So regular folk avoid it, magic users and psychics who travel through don't feel the presence.
People who study old worldly occult or live with death stuff are a bit more sensitive to it.
But every time the people manage to get someone to hear them normally they are yelling for help which, you know voices in the night on the breaze screaming for help creeps out most people.
With lack of people nature has moved in and taken over a bit.
Bandits and looters brave it occasionally but normally get a bit spooked.
Have your players explore the Wizards workshop (he offed himself after not being able to figure out how and where everyone went, thinks he killed them, he was only trying to help)
Find notes and journals about the other old sites and forgotten shrines around the land you have to find.
And try and figure a way to cross over and release the people. (Who side note, are a tad mad from being trapped there undying for a few years)
Include ghost hunters who are sure they know what's going on, but are really con artists oblivious to what's going on
>>46490296
Nothing their just gone, nothing happened. Food still on tables, animals still penned, but make some weird shit happen too like every forth spoon is gone but have no explanation leave the players to that
>>46490947
>>46492399
Did both of thses for a Victorian call of cthulu game except mine was everything that had a reflection is draped in black cloth, everything
>>46490485
Insatiable hunger and thirst
>>46490296
A curse that turns the denizens of the kingdom mad and undying, inflicted upon them by gods who feared their growing numbers?
>>46490296
Don't explain it.
Place just fucking empty.
Not everything in the setting NEEDS an outright explanation. Leave gaps for the players to speculate, get interested.
>>46490400
That's not a plague. That's slightly less than the average number of children a woman gave birth to back them (and survived).
>>46492880
Yeah, maybe litter the occasional unexplainable object. I pulled a Dark Souls once and left an entire sprawling metropolis abandoned, all the archetecture was designed for both Humans and centaurs instead, centaurs not being a a thing whatsoever in my game world.
Didn't explain shit. They spend 4 sessions just looking around and trying to figure out what happened.
>>46492828
>fear their growing numbers
>they keep reproducing
>they can't die either
>>46490296
Magical war.
Two or more nations employed their most powerful mages to fight for them in wars, resulting in the summoning of powerful demons and casting of cataclysmic spells that eventually rendered the land unlivable, forcing the former inhabitants to migrate elsewhere.
People still make journeys to this abandoned wasteland to recover artifacts of a lost age, but doing so comes with great risks.
>>46494559
Pretty sure the undead are sterile.
>>46494588
He means they multiply quickly by raising newly killed corpses as more undead, anon.
>>46494559
Seems like the gods to me.
"Oh fuck, there are a lot of those humans down there. Look at them breed. It's disgusting!"
"Let's curse them with MORE HUMANS!"
"Ooh, how delightfully ironic."
>>46494623
Fuck, that thing is awesome.
>>46494588
In DS, I'm pretty sure it depends on how hollowed they are. Many wouldn't WANT to reproduce, either.
>>46494623
Well, yeah, that's some god business going around
>>46490347
Someone knocked over the aqueducts.
This pretty much happened with Rome. Huge city, mostly unlivable due to lack of water for several centuries. It's a great way to get a Dark Souls esque city of abandoned ruins.
>>46494658
Yup.
"And they're always bitching an moaning about dying. 'Oh help, I don't want to be tossed into the firey pit. Help help, I'm old and afraid.' "
"I know. Awful creatures."
"So I've also made them immortal."
"Did you increase their capacity for memory, or give them patience and good taste to survive more than a century of life?"
"Pppfft, hell no. I also made sure they go leathery and weird eventually."
"Nice."
>>46490485
Winter forever. Everyone likes snowmen, but eventually food becomes too scarce and society collapses.
I am extremely interested in this thread.
I'm planning a game where each of the usual races was cursed in a different way, and effectively removed from the world (and playablility).
The Dwarves were stricken with a Sickness that kills them if they leave their homes without full enclosed suits
The Gnomes were cursed into Comas until they died
The Halflings were cursed with Degeneration, turning them into something worthless and disgusting
The Humans and Elves are just plain gone. Need to work on them.
Someone released by accident an old demon, who was rather chill, but held a grudge against the settlement.
It stood on a way of bicenturial migration of ghouls.
There were no humans there at all, the settlement is just a mockery of a wild magic. Players can discover it by looking for subtle hints.
>>46494790
You could've come up with better curses, imo. Something like the gnomes getting lost in their own illusions or something.
>>46490296
Scorched-earth retreat from an invading army. The army caught a lot of them in the retreat though. Sold them into slavery, the rest gradually faded away, and the army left with nothing to take.
>>46494814
Not playing D&D, gnomes aren't illusion masters.
>>46494844
Still, I seriously doubt that there's poetic justice or irony in comas.
>>46494869
Commas are known for being part ofirony punctuation
>>46494869
Plus, unless it's a sweet fukken magical sleep, they're going to rot pretty fast. Comas are only feasible if you've got medical care. If you've got bugbears and slimes, you've really just got snacks.
>>46490296
Is 'environmental collapse' too close to either of those two options?
Fey keep stealing all the babies
>>46490296
Drought and/or famine
Pollution or some sort of magical nuclear meltdown if that's not included in "dug too deep"
"Brain drain" caused by political instability followed by a reversion to nomadic or agricultural society
All males were castrated by conquering totally-not-mongols
People finally left after generations of heavy metal poisoning from lead plumbing
>>46490296
Go with a curse, maybe something that makes people batshit crazy or maybe everyone is just ridiculously unlucky, like tripping over a penny and breaking there neck unlucky.
Petrification
if they find it and cure it fast enough, maybe they can get some friends or answers
if they don't, they crumble to dust
>>46490296
Planeshifting. Or rather, the entire region has begun to slide into another realm or dimension. I like the Fae, so we'll use that as an example. Picture France, without humans. Now, fill it with monsters. Got it? Good.All of those monsters you've been killing are actually the human populace who were shape-changed by the merge with the Fae kingdoms.
>>46490296
The nation was subverted by a cult who planned to mass sacrifice the populace for their own nefarious purposes.
Some heroic guy managed to stop the "use/consume/sell the souls of the people" but not the "kill everybody" part of the ritual.
>>46490296
There's a place like that in my setting. It used to be another human kingdom that was conquered by another, but when the native populace turned out to be extremely difficult to pacify and perform guerrilla raids on the occupiers all the time, things kind of slipped out of hand by degrees when both the occupiers and the resistance began resorting to more and more extreme measures, until the invading forces basically holocaust'd most of the native populace. Those who survived, fled and became roaming, river-faring nomads. The invading kingdom's empire fell some decades later and they left as well, and since that, nobody has settled in there except for some scattered frontiersmen.
>>46494790
How 'bout..
>Dwarves became so greedy and xenophobic that their ancient, mighty mountain homes are now horrifying sites where inbred, monstrous descendants of the dwarves jealously guard their fabulous treasures, killing mercilessly any who set foot in their territory. Really up the Lovecraftian inbred hicks that are now monsters vibe. Maybe call them kobolds or goblins to throw players off.
>Gnomes, depending on whatever the fuck they are in your setting, could be something to do with nature as they usually do in folklore. Maybe they became so reclusive and had to retreat from the push of civilization into deeper parts of the forests and swamps that they became somehow twisted and malicious instead of harmless tricksters.
>Elves saw the world was going to shit and could never be as beautiful and glorious as it was meant to be, so they threw their hands up, said "fuck it" and passed into the Dreaming or whatever Elven afterlife/Valinor stand in there is.
>Halflings ate, smoked and fucked and generally had a jolly old time until they were no halflings anymore, but instead bloated, hungry giants called ogres that roll forth as writhing masses of flesh to eat everything they see they can't smoke or drink.
>>46491349
Non-refined uranium is nowhere near that radioactive, and uranium has been used in some types of glass for a long time. The Romans used it to make yellow glass.
>>46497072
Seriously? Any source of that? Legit interest
>>46497096
Google vaseline glass and buy some because it's awesome
>>46497096
http://periodic.lanl.gov/92.shtml
>Uranium was used in as coloring agents in ceramic glazes and glass in ancient Rome and in the Middle Ages producing orange-red to lemon yellow hues.
Also what >>46497135
said
How abandoned are we talking? Complete 100% dead zone or abandoned by it's original inhabitants with monsters and things living there?
Either way a magic ritual gone awry is a pretty good way to ruin a whole country. Maybe have a sorcerer of some kind absorb the souls of the population into a powerful gemstone that makes him nigh omnipotent? That way you have a boss worthy of a campaign and a very powerful named artifact to take home after the adventures all done and dusted.
>>46497135
>>46497157
Sweet, thanks for the info!
>>46497192
>Maybe have a sorcerer of some kind absorb the souls of the population into a powerful gemstone that makes him nigh omnipotent?
So Fullmetal Alchemist?
>>46497226
Could be also like Dwemer in elder scrolls
>>46490296
http://www.lomion.de/cmm/calldark.php
>>46490400
Tom Swift had the answer to that problem
>>46497096
Vintage Fiestaware is radioactive due to Uranium
>>46490485
>Earth turns to flesh?
Or flesh turns to earth.
Wasn't that a thing in aSoIaF?
>>46490296
It was a bustling and major nation, overflowing with troops and trade, due to its strategic location in the neverending war against [insert foe].
But then the unthinkable happened and ruin came to the land: the war ended decisively in our favor.
The country stopped receiving new troops in large numbers, and the troops previous stationed there went home. New supplies are no longer being funneled into the country to bolster defense and keep stockpiles. And the people who live there have never lived outside of a wartime economy. Businesses that have gone on for generations started failing left and right because you don't need 15 blacksmiths in the same town when you don't have an army to equip. They lack sufficient farmers because the farms were long ago turned into warcamp grounds and food came in supply shipments.
So their economy goes to shit, everyone is leaving, and now there are a bunch of out of work soldiers wandering the roads as bandits making things generally unsafe for everyone.
The land is littered with ghost towns and abandoned watchtowers and ruined forts from the war, set aflame as the army pulled back so they wouldn't be taken by anyone else. A few people still live in these lands, but it is a lonely and hard life. Nothing magical or supernatural ruined this land, cold reality did.
How about a religious uprising? Citizens rampaged through the streets, "witches" were burnt by the dozen, and all the houses were vandalised. Anyone who survived left the city, or were killed off by a neighbouring town that heard of the revolt, leaving the town largely abandoned.
>>46490296
Pissed off a god and got cursed. Could have been the fertility god so now babies can't be made there (ala Combine) or a god of the harvest so crops fail there.
>>46490296
During a war/raid from a neighbouring kingdom, the entirety of the population were killed, enslaved or worse. The bodies were left in shallow mass graves and the town ransacked.
>>46490296
Depending on how connected and literate your setting is, a civilisation can simply slip out of living memory if they aren't around anymore. When Rome fell illiterate barbarians looked at these multi-story ruins with its sewage system, aqueducts and various other wonders and asked what giants could possibly have built things like these.
You could also take a look at the film Samsara, during one part of the film they show a whole bunch of desert settlements from a variety of different time periods and cultures. The deserts of this world are chock full of places where the water just ran out.
>>46494623
>my penis is an arm, your argument is invalid
>>46494869
Why does it have to be poetic justice?
>>46490296
Haven't read through the whole thread yet, but cataclysmic environmental shift could be interesting. Traceable family lines from the exodus would have stories, so there would be info, but generations have passed and whatever went down might have caused the land there to be nigh unrecognizable. Earthquakes, hurricanes, tornados, tsunamis, forest fires, alongside magical things like the feywild (or equivalent) bleeding out, elemental spirits wreaking havoc because nothing will stop them, even the odd wizard who managed to carve out a small piece of the land and keep it safe for themselves.
Flexible enough that you can have as much or as little of the civilization's remains be present as you want, and you don't necessarily have to have the minutiae figured out beforehand. Also it's not like anyone would know why the chaos started happening, so there's no need to come up with much more than "chaos happened." Maybe the region has a predisposition to chaotic upheaval every few hundred years, maybe a capricious god stepped in to have fun, but whatever, doesn't matter overly much.
>>46490296
Meteor strike. Initial impact didn't do much but the firestorms and dust got rid of most.
