how would you justify a world full of dungeons (as in enclosed spaces to explore, not the literal sense) and artifacts without resorting to the advanced-ancient-fallen-civilization trope?
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Think of the Gods that shaped that world as cheeky game devs who like hiding easter eggs and secrets for people to find.
Honestly Ready Player One would make for a fun setting to play in.
A long time ago there was a video game called Alternate Reality. There were only two parts of seven ever released, The City and The Dungeon.
The idea was that an alien ship visited Earth and stole a bunch of humans, then loosed them on a city inside a massive arcology like Metamorphosis Alpha. Fantasy races, then, were just aliens - magic items were scientific tools that couldn't be explained. And, The Dungeon itself was the service tunnels and bowels of the ship.
I don't remember why the aliens did this, but I think it was for entertainment purposes. Literally the biggest reality show in the Universe.
A cataclysmic event occurs every 1000 years or so that resets civilisation.
The world is slowly losing magic and grand artifacts and locations are hidden away to protect the world from being abused.
You are scavenging the remains of an ancient race who mysteriously disappeared.
Dungeons for the sake of dungeons
checked
Reminded me of picrel, I like it.
I like it.
My personal answer would be that there has been literally centuries of warfare from large continent level conflicts to brush fire wars. These have left every place with a significant population with underground shelters for protection, defense, and storage in case of siege.
As these places are sacked and razed the underground shelters become inhabited by various creatures.
Due to constantly-shifting underground rivers of natural mana, large cave systems spontaneously form in the ground, surrounding powerful mana crystals that are created at the intersections of the rivers (the centers of the dungeons). Monsters are naturally drawn to the concentrations of mana. When the crystal is removed, the mana rivers reroute themselves, the monsters leave, and the cave systems gradually collapse.
This is pretty standard in RoyalRoadslop fantasy.
I like the thought of mirroring IRL etymology on the word "dungeon", where the earliest are magical neolithic bunker complexes to deal with all those flying monsters that became outdated as fortifications and so their design trends continued as prisons. All underground, with wonders of long-forgotten societies abounding, but with clear inadequacies for the current context because they weren't built for it.
No, the Royal Road standard for Dungeon Cores is that they directly create the monsters rather than attracting pre-existing ones.
Using the packed graveyards of ages past as your dungeon location is excellent, as is the notion of a city "buried" under the sands that actually EXPECTED that and so is still navigable if you can find a tower to enter form.
Based CHIM modder-sama.
>RoyalRoadslop fantasy.
A what. I knew of Dungeon cores (wich is fun at the first levels and lose stamina fast) but never read about royal raod stuff.
I wouldn't
civilization built on top of the ruins of itself.
think rome or paris catacombs. or the ancient cities in the deserts of saudi arabia.
you can't travel around italy without stumbling on something greek, roman, or medieval. there are abandoned greek and roman cities which emptied out when the water level changed, malaria killed a lot of people, and they could no long function as a port.
if people occupy the same place long enough, they will eventually build on top of themselves.
>how would you justify a world full of dungeons
Simply don't, your players will not care either way.
do players ever care about anything anymore?
They never did.
Nogames.
In my current campaign, the dungeons are there because according to the main villain who has twisted and molded the dream world the campaign takes place in all the best video games have them.
okay here's a bunch of ideas, take notes, you will be tested
monsters dig them instinctively
ancient-not-that-advanced-actually civilisations that just had long lasting construction
wizards did it
mad scientists
mad architects
mad lad with a shovel
infection-like phenomenon under the land that causes dungeons in which monsters begin to grow; most aren't discovered until they reach the surface and even then the monsters usually have to be big and nasty enough to cause serious problems
mad dwarves
entire planet is an experimental lab that got out of hand; these are the mazes
mad justice system for which "cruel and unusual" is more of a mission statement than anything
the planet has large sections of unusual rock that just end up like that. readymade homes, just dig.
mad wizards
>how would you justify a world full of dungeons (as in enclosed spaces to explore, not the literal sense) and artifacts without resorting to the advanced-ancient-fallen-civilization trope?
I've been justifying it mainly via three reasons (so far):
>Ley-Lines.
The planet has seams or deposits of particularly rich concentrations of mana that naturally form and pool up at the bottom of caves, caverns, etc. Think like how fossil fuels do.. Mana in it's physical state is extremely bioreactive and nourishing and causes things like accelerated evolution, a higher biotic allowance, and allows plants to grow without light.
That's a naturally occurring Dungeon. Minimal treasure, maximum monsters.
>Arcanum.
Some powerful Wizard, or other some such Enchanter or Sorcerer, has created a powerful Magical Artifact and a depository to both store it for safety purposes, but also to protect other people from it. This can mean a Lich' Phylactery, a Warlock's Omnibus, a Wizards vault of assorted magical items, an Alchemists cloning facility, you name it. It can even be an ArchDruids 'source' Tree. These places become Dungeons when they essentially 'spring a leak' or otherwise enter into a state of disarray. (Sometimes a sufficiently powerful Magical Artifact *is* the Dungeon, like a Painted World.)
That's a man-made Dungeon. Maximum treasure, medium monsters.
>Portal.
A stable Portal has formed, whether naturally occurring or man-made, and is now shitting out weird things from another dimension and creating a localized weird things ecosystem. Naturally occuring portals to the Elemental Planes are not uncommon, but Portals connecting to other Planets, or even Hell for that matter, are not unheard of. The basic premise is they shit out weird things and.. They either form an invasive ecosystem, which is the Dungeon, or somebody builds a Dungeon around it for exclusive access.
Something happened to make most of the world population stop existing, leaving behind towns and castles full of items for those who remain.
I wouldn't bother
It's a game and it's not about achieving 100% realism
They're living things that grow in psychic sympathy with man's dreams.
The real world has tonnes of cave systems, abandoned buildings, and other locations that would pass for a dungeon. Just take any urban exploration or cave exploration video from youtube and add in fantasy tropes and it would make sense.
Dungeons are incubation pods for magical catastrophes. If you bust in before it's done growing, you can nab artifacts which are essentially infant stage developments of the coalesced magic. Monsters are the immune system.
Or maybe the whole process of development necessarily requires the war of monsters within.
They appear spontaneously and without explanation and do so more in times of great upheaval, they’ll regularly change their interiors and they disappear just as easily as fickily as they appear. Villains may reside there as will scores of people who’ve gotten trapped and turned into feral savages. No I will not give a reason for why they exist or how it works
The dungeons are…a mystery.
A mystery dungeon if you would.
Bits and pieces of Hell bubbling up through the crust of the world. Are (You) man enough to smite evil and pillage its shit?
Wizard did it.
Dungeons can be things like: caves, ruins of castles used in wars, catacombs from not-so-ancient civilization (think Rome to early medieval people), ruined monasteries, tunnels under battlefields, galleries excavated by fantastical creatures, castles owned by evil barons, temples of pagan cultists
Items of power exist in the world and they were deemed to dangerous for mortals to have, so the current or previous government built hidden vaults across the world, each containing a dangerous monster or magical item. And because they were built under the same regime, they all have a 5-room dungeon structure to them with the item at the end as a prize.
>dungeons are Areas 51
I like it
Tweaking this slightly, you could also have an age of heroes where it is tradition for great heroes (PCs) to have their own tombs telling the stories of their lives with all of their loot at the end.
That would give you an excuse to recall previous characters you've made for other games and build puzzles/encounters around memorable moments from those games and also bring in items from other campaigns.
The world is a chaotic place. with wars, disasters, migrations, goblin attacks, etc. there's bound to be plenty of places that get abandoned or taken over by monsters or bandits.
This isn't to mention, plenty of tombs full of funerary riches, and in a world with magic, why wouldn't they be guarded by the undead or dangerous traps?
I feel I should also mention that there's no reason a dungeon has to be monsters or bandits, it could be a cult hideout or just a normal castle or town or other location that your party happens to have been hired to attack or infiltrate (or is doing so of their own volition because they have some goal, like assassinating some pesky wizard or noble or something that they don't like)
The world purposefully resets itself and every new civlization that it brings onto itself eventually fades either by time or by violence and their buildings and homes and structures and treasures they uncovered become new dungeons for a fledgling race to discover and the cycle to repeat at the planets own amusement.
Tuesday has been acid rain day for so long that everything just gets covered up and built over on principle.
Dungeons are living things, like a gigantic worm with a hollow inside. Opening themselves to the surface is part of their life cycle.
Mimics are larval dungeons, and imitating useful magical items is how they migrate
Whenever a powerful being dies, its corpse spawns a dungeon filled with traps and loot that are just low tier enough for the person who killed them to not bother looking into it.
Non-advanced fallen ancient civilization whose ruins have been taken over by something otherworldly.
I'm playing a game set in the fantasy genre.
The world is slowly but measurably expanding, cosmic inflation style, with new wild terrain growing into the space between settlements and cities faster than they grow, on average. There may be occasional catastrophic events that consist of very rapid expansion or compression/collapse.
This naturally develops into a points of light setting that is filled with wild plains, unfathomed forests, untamed mountain ranges, and ruined cities.
Old maps may hint at what a lost kingdom looked like, back when its farthest-flung villages were a mere five days' ride from the city where the king sat. But now those villages are cut off by towering mountains. And the city itself is a ruin, overrun by beasts that emerged from the dark wood which grew up next to it two generations ago.
If you're playing anything high fantasy it's probably easy enough to explain some as the current or former residences of insane wizard hermits
They're entry points to the underworld. If you go down deep enough you enter hell.
The civilization isn't ancient: it fell just a decade ago.
>fallen civilization
>trope
You're moronic. Almost all civilizations that ever existed have fallen. A stable continuously governed civilization is much more of a trope.
To answer within the bounds of your moronic question: Monsters prevent civilizing the wild places. These areas are littered with monster dens, bandit hideouts, and leftover structures of those hoping for secrecy, failed attempts to colonize, etc etc.
t. can't read
You know many fallen civs had advanges tech right? Shit, they're only now figuring out how to replicate Roman cement.
Historically there's only a few neat-but-not-important technologies lost in the collapse of a major state, and the ruins tend to be stripped clean within a century or so. Often, the ruins themselves are scavenged for building material. More of the losses are coordination things than anything else.
Whereas with the trope, there's large swaths of infrastructure the premise of is gone and the ruins possess actively-useful treasures of great import.
Real world doesn't have monsters to keep scavengers out
And that still contributes to the treatment being a trope instead of a historical reference, as was the point being made.
But that's not the point. It's historical reference when the context is extraordinary. To my mind, this means it isn't quite a trope and more a logical extension. Regardless, I already gave an example of how you could avoid the entire "fallen civilation" angle to get to something more fluid. As for Artifacts, by their very nature the great majority would have been made from an earlier time. That is unavoidable.
There is no real analogue to the extraordinary circumstance, the history is all made up, the monsters aren't even necessary (bandit hideouts can still count), not a single thing is solid enough to extend logically because every premise can easily be something that contradicts the claim being made.
"Dungeons" in the utterly minimum cultural context of the Opening Post, per the reply chain we are in, don't have any of that stuff. We're all "Anonymous" here, it requires higher-brow consideration of writing style than I care to engage in to tell if you're
,
, or
to tell what you mean with the last two sentences.
If you want people to give a frick about what else you've posted, then fill out the Name field.
Or you could, you know, follow the reply chain...
They're created by cthonian entities under the earth to lure greedy fortune seekers to their deaths. The dungeon hates you and wants you dead.
Sounds like modern pharmaceuticals.
Mythic underworld. The dungeons are less real and old parts of the world and more mythical gates to hell. One day, a door just appeared into the mountain, ever since adventurers have been getting lost to the depths that lie behind it.
What lies at the bottom? A question that assumes there is an end.
A really, really old continuous civilisation.
Sometimes people just make dungeons as a hobby, the way hobby tunnelers do. Harrison Gyar constructed a network with a total length of 400m, William Lyttle made a tunneling network for forty years under his home in Britain. There's loads of examples.
The Ancient Civilization going around making these things wasn't advanced, and the "dungeons" were made specifically because they didn't have the same know-how we have now.
Spells that Banish or otherwise discard of magical entities are the modern reason we don't usually build dungeons any more; the Dungeon Builders (The actual name for their civilization long-lost over the years) created these complexes to imprison dangerous things, the idea being its easier to lock these things away.
That changed as magical research led to banishing spells and other means of disposal for things like demons, devils, and so forth.
But unironically Every answer other then ancient civilizations is dogshit high magic Harry Potter ass dnd libtard shit no cap though
The same way Cultist Simulator does it: there are all sorts of old ruins with stuff in them and dangerous presences, because human civilization has been around for a very long time.
Why haven't they been looted yet? Danger, or obscurity.
There are still tons of unlooted ruins in that universe because half the homies who ascend end up erasing themselves from existence later anyways.
In my setting the world is literally carved out of the corpse of The Big God. Most people live on the surface, but if you're brave enough you can find an entrance into the global megadungeon that runs through the world and go venturing off into the veins of a dead god on your own.
Also, if your magical artifacts aren't as simple to destroy as a regular unenchanted version of whatever it is, it'd make sense that over time you end up with a bunch of magic shit just kind of laying around, actively in use or forgotten about. It also helps to make artifacts without much of a "game" angle, either as a placeholder for cash when they can sell it or just ornamentation to flesh out hooks and plots.
ex. "Shard of the Sunspear"
Thin piece of gemlike metal that seems to glow with an inner light. It reacts violently in the presence of magical darkness, growing brighter than a bonfire and producing sweltering heat.
It isn't a weapon, it's hardly a tool, but a simple description like that lets my players run wild crafting theories on how it could be useful, if it should be sold, if it's just a shard maybe it could be reforged, whatever.
Alternate reality merged with the present one leaving behind ruins from an alien civilization that isn't of that world.
A land of wizard academics and power hungry nobles plot and scheme constantly, and their lairs are often filled to the brim with wondrous treasures.
Dungeons literally materialize into existence.
Usually underground or in unpopulated areas, but sometimes a dungeon appears on top of a town and people get stuck inside.
Inside of the dungeons there's treasures. Usually gold, but sometimes pieces of strange technology or magic items, spells nobody has heard of, or historical records that are verifiably bullshit, sometimes in languages nobody speaks or about countries that never existed.
These treasures have caused leaps in progress, which is why dungeon delving is such a lucrative career.
Where they come from is the big mystery of the campaign.
The answer to the mystery is that it's a dimensional merge. Sections of other planes are no-clipping into ours.
your planet is an scrapyard where some space civilization regularly dumps their gigantic spaceships.
Mad wizards
Why would I? It's a great trope.
Because being unique is le important, frick actually having a good and interesting world, being unique is ALWAYS good and interesting and never dumb or boring
>unique
Every response was aliums or dimensions. People couldn't even give unique alternatives.
I know you were being sarcastic.
>Hey, do you guys want to play dungeons and Dragons? yeah there's dungeons and sometimes dragons in it. yeah? Cool grab dice
what other justification do I need? Who am I justifying my game too? Why? Not you, OP, because you're a homosexual and nobody has to justify anyone to a shitpipe sucker.
You could have said anything, but you said that. What kind of environments do you usually place your dungeons in?
The world is full of giant ants that like to collect shiny things and stash them in their nests, dungeons are anthills but most of them have been abandoned as the giant ants move on to new food sources and sometimes the tunnels are fortified and repurposed by intelligent races.
A lot of dungeons in my campaign have been secret hideouts or old musty tombs of once-grand, but not advanced, civilizations. A few have been natural caverns or forests.
Most of the world's population was wiped by a plague. Colonizers with immunity to this thing are now enroaching to the recently abandoned places, but they are few in number. The dungeons reflect not only the actual cities and castles and such, but also the various esoteric ways the now passed residents tried to ward off the plague.
Earth is full of such places. Society is just so soulless and greedy that excavation and exploration of such places is not profitable.
Man made dungeons to store loot full of normal and magical traps, eventually enough people die and energy is built up that it attracts dark entities who want to farm it. Abundant energy naturally enchants the goods left behind by the dead. Legends spread about the dungeon, when enough people believe the legends they manifest into reality.
Some dungeons started off as a simple maze with a few trip wires and rolling balls but after a few decades turned into a massive underground fortress of monsters, Elementals, booby traps and more.
Also the good thing is that if there's a legend about the dungeons treasure being [X] and enough people believe it [X] will manifest in the treasure room.
Justify for who? Just say "idk"
Climate and extreme weather forces most of civilization to live underground. People can still move around on the surface but permanent dwellings are impossible to maintain for longer times. All the underground digging gives civilizations a lot of rare materials, which they use to create artifacts.
The real world already has a frick-ton of "dungeons" to explore and probably "artifacts" that have been left behind, the problem is all those pesky trespassing laws. So just take the real world, and make it so trespassing laws aren't enforced for areas considered sufficiently abandoned, with a "delve at your own risk" policy.
Gods doing god things. Natural formations filled with valuable materials and an ecosystem where people go and die in there.
Actual man made dungeons designed to attract people to suck them of their vitals or some shit, purpose built by some wizard king, ancient dragon, lich, whatever.
I[m sure somebody with some actual creativity can come up with thousands of reasons.
In My Setting the Deities waged war against the primordials and Old ones and won, chaining they enemies to the planets cores (so the general name they are know is tartarians), so the upper parts are mostly human friendly (well, about a third is Earth like) and the deep parts are all kinds of fricked up. That's how I justify "dungeons" tough I call them labyrinths when are bio-made and ruins when they are well, ruins.
I wouldn't because fallen civilizations are cool.
Magic exists, specifically spells for shaping rock.
As a result building stuff out of stone is pretty easy, as long as you have access to solid rock.
The easiest way to get good rock is to make a tunnel down using the same magic.
So everyone ends up with lots of spare underground square footage that's used for whatever since most people don't like living underground.