A D&D empire, 200 years in - what makes it collapse?

[RadiantPhoenix]

Left Behind

The Empire itself was a means, not an end.

These two seem almost the same, and I like them; the empire rose from the attentions of heroes, and it falls as that same attention keeps going and leaves them behind.

[fectin]

Most of these suggestions have been how DnD magic doesn't work as advertised, or how people are the root of the empire falling apart. That's cool and believable, but is it what the OP asked for?

[TheFlatline]

Most of these suggestions have been how DnD magic doesn't work as advertised, or how people are the root of the empire falling apart. That's cool and believable, but is it what the OP asked for?

He asked how a wish economy would fall apart because of the mechanics of how magic works. Not necessarily how it works as advertised.

Sounds like it legit answers to me.

[Bihlbo]

Sounds like it legit answers to me.

Yes. Thanks, everyone! Awesome stuff!

Sketch out your empire in a little more detail first.

Okay! Most people probably will mentally "tl;dr" this, and that's okay with me, but here's an explanation of why this came about.

The game I'm wanting to run is set in the aftermath of a massive Empire's collapse (like post-Alexander Greece). People in the setting look back on the Empire and recognize that it was magic (specifically 3.5's core spell lists and vancian magic system) that ruined it. That's the goal, now I need to figure out how that happens in a way that stands up to very intelligent and investigative players' scrutiny.

In the way back past, magic was rare and of fairly limited power. Spellcasters were eccentrics or the pet projects of curious kings, not frightening world-changers. This doesn't change for ages, even as magic is expanded and developed. Then, a small empire is formed with the blood, sweat, and iron of military might. The emperor sees magic as a way to rule more than just a few dozen islands and some hills, and so brings together all practitioners he can.

In a little less than a century magic has completely caught up with what you see in D&D. The Empire controls most of the largest continent and any civilization doing better than Team Monster has become either a part of the Empire, or a puppet state unwilling to oppose anything the Empire does. Prosperity abounds and the new class of Casters have, in one generation, dominated virtually everything. All non-casters, who used to be the only people who mattered in the world, are suddently obsolete.

The Empire only lasts a few hundred years then collapses, leaving barbarism, ignorance, and a general Dark Ages feel to the world in its wake. Eventually enough of a civilization re-emerges in pockets of the world that it's suitable (for my tastes) for adventuring. In the intervening centuries some changes have come to pass: Tome.

[fectin]

Necromancy is probably the easiest answer then. It's real easy to use undead legions to conquer a large area, especially backed up by real necromancy. If undead are also evil and need close supervision, that could go very, very bad, very quickly. That also gives you an excuse to throw lots of undead absolutely everywhere too.

[Bihlbo]

Necromancy is probably the easiest answer then. It's real easy to use undead legions to conquer a large area, especially backed up by real necromancy. If undead are also evil and need close supervision, that could go very, very bad, very quickly. That also gives you an excuse to throw lots of undead absolutely everywhere too.

I don't think necromancy needs more villainization, and I'd like it to in fact have much, much less. Also, this doesn't address the fact that only powerful undead are powerful, and all others are virtually ignorable. If you can throw around powerful undead, you can throw around powerful angels, and really, either are just as good a reason for things to get out of hand.

[fectin]

But zombies are easy to get. And one zombie is trivial. If you're creating legions of the things, that's something else.

I still like steampunk as your next best bet. You don't need very many people to have a large effect, and you especially don't need many designers. If they were clustered in an academy that exploded, you can have a sharp ramp-up and a slow decline as everything wears out.

[Chamomile]

I don't think necromancy needs more villanization, and I'd like it to in fact have much, much less. Also, this doesn't address the fact that only powerful undead are powerful, and all others are virtually ignorable. If you can throw around powerful undead, you can throw around powerful angels, and really, either are just as good a reason for things to get out of hand.

Generally speaking, angels can be reasoned with. They may not have the same priorities as mortals, but they have priorities besides "find and kill every living thing I get close to." Undead make for good villains because they have exactly one desire and they will pursue it relentlessly, even to their own destruction.

[Bihlbo]

Undead make for good villains because they have exactly one desire and they will pursue it relentlessly, even to their own destruction.

Don't PCs too?

Seriously though, I want to go throw a frisbee if I read a story intro that goes, "The greatest empire the world has ever known was filled with godlike magic and was overrun with mindless corpses, so it's gone. Zombies are scarier than evar1!" That's boring as crap and doesn't warrent the least amount of investigation and interest. Done in by the Z. Got it.

"The greatest empire the world has ever known was filled with godlike magic, which was its own downfall," makes me ask, "What? Why? How did that happen? Could it happen again? Is magic the problem or people who wield it?" It's interesting, it builds a game world that people could care about, and it gives something the PCs can look into that will be complicated and multi-faceted.

And I understand the idea presented isn't just "Zombies did it" but "Magic created zombies that did it." But however the zombies got there, it's still the zombies that did it. Solution? Necromancers are all bad guys now. Okay, no more threat of imperial collapse!

What challenges the players' view of magic in D&D? What makes them back up and look at it like the unwieldy, poorly-conceived beast that it is? What causes them to appreciate the changes in Tome and abandon PF? What makes them change their concept of what constitutes good magical tactics so they aren't under the impression that fireball is one of the best spells?

Kick that around. Zombies? Just... no.

[Bihlbo]

So I have a question... if even the smallest hamlet's mayor is level 18, yet there are no significant threats left in the empire, how do you *get* to level 18?

The Empire's enemies are all conquered. Maybe there are pockets of goblin, orc, giant, dark elf, or fungus man tribes hiding in the fringes, but they keep to themselves because they're scared. So the elephant herders fence their pastures right up to the edge of the hills without ever raising a spear.

But that doesn't mean there are no challenges. It just means the game changes from "kill monster, take its stuff" to something else. You're trying to get revenge on the rival businessman who hired an assassin to kill your brother's druid wife, and the big reveal at the end is that he did it because he thought a fox stole his bag with the contracts in it. You're dealing with endless political mechanations that have to do with boring garbage. You're going holodeck-style on "explorations" of custom-built dungeons that your friend made in a pocket dimention. You're dueling with people for practice endlessly, just to get better.

Because the people of the world aren't after XP. They're after "advancement", just like we are in the real world. XP, after all, is simply a number analog to measure a person's advancement while attempting to do something challenging. PCs do it in interesting ways, NPCs do it in less interesting ways, but it still gets done.

I don't know about you, but I've played many game sessions in a row without any combat, and still gained levels. Using the rules. It was fun. You don't need Team Monster.

[Bihlbo]

Powerful clerics have basically no reason to even talk to each other. Powerful wizards onl[y] have cause to talk to each other to trade spells. And that only needs doing once a century or so.

I see that being 100% true in any normal game. Totally self-sufficient and with no need to bring more people into the cleric club? Yeah, just wall yourself into a temple.

What I was thinking, and I could be convinced to change my mind, is that your powerful casters started off as cloistered nerds who had no idea what to do with their power. As the Empire put them to use they needed to train lots and lots of initiates to get as many call lightning spells in the field of battle as possible. These guys formed fraternities and schools because everyone who wasn't a caster treated them like incomprehendable freaks and the organization made the training easier. As they rose in power these new initiates were forming a new society, and people heard more and more murmuring about how "Us sorcercers could really run the military campaign better than the generals, and we wouldn't need all those fighters at all!" Then later the newer recruits murmur, "Why do we need the Emperor anyway?"

Different schools tinker with tactics and find ways to exploit magic to gain previously impossible power. When a school of wizards starts summoning effriti for wishes, that school becomes able to destroy any rival in about a month. Then the secret of what they found they could do becomes both a force that bonds them and a threat - anyone who even hints at disloyalty is assassinated to keep the secret to their power secure.

Then they not only have trans-dimentional power, but political power. Other schools of wizards oppose them and find themselves obliterated, and soon the others cow. Anyone who doesn't get in line to back them in every facet of society is prevented from being a wizard practitioner at all.

As this happens a religious order of clerics discovers persistant magic and does something similar. Then the druids do it... etc. This all snowballs, during which time the most powerful among them realize that yeah, the whole material plane is irrelevant and so are the thousands of doofus rabble-rousing freshmen in the school. Why do they need an empire, much less a cook, a scribe, a house, or friends? They find out quickly though that wizarding is just easier when you have allies who can warn you when an assassination attempt will be made... if you tow the party line... if you pay your union dues and don't go making it obvious that their big powerful group just as irrelevant as it actually is. And this leaves them loads more time to do things like taking over whole planes and setting up new ones just to make yours seem less attractive for conquest.

Behind all of this is one basic tenant of an economy: competition. The casters may not need an influx of gold all that much since with enough power you literally can make it out of thin air. But nothing progresses when you do it the easy way, so magical services drives both the economy and the advancement tracks of casters. You don't want the only thing your school is looking to acquire to be hurt by another group competing with you; and as much as you might want to try fair competition between individuals, enough people don't want it that the unions make it impossible.

Then again, I might be basing too much of this on human history and society of the real world, and not enough on the magic system in place.

[shadzar]

Then again, I might be basing too much of this on human history and society of the real world, and not enough on the magic system in place.

if you are trying to destroy a magic force because of how magic itself works, i would focus on the magic system itself to look for ways of crushing it under its own weight.

this would mean either arcane or divine source of the destruction would be most logical.

divine of course would be a deity just smashing the area.

arcane should be from the overuse or someone screwing up majorly.

[Bihlbo]

divine of course would be a deity just smashing the area.
arcane should be from the overuse or someone screwing up majorly.

You're talking about an event, that could happen any time and anywhere. Any empire collapses when OH GOD CARP happens.

[shadzar]

are you still trying to destroy this region with magic, because of how magic works, or did your goal change and i miss it?

[JigokuBosatsu]

There's always the Thomas Covenant approach- knowledge about the rules/uses of magic were hidden by the precursors, and they are rediscovered in the wrong order, so you have Wish being cast before you've mastered the repercussions of Fireball.

[talozin]

once you're binding Efreeti so often and so well that you have a couple on hand to suck you off while you read offical proclamations

Yeeeeeeeeouch.

On a more serious note: "The Empire itself was a means, not an end" reminds me of the Quest for Immortality rules in Masters Set D&D. There's a couple of different ways you can become immortal, but one of them is in fact establishing a mighty empire that will last for hundreds of years and finding an artifact to let you time-travel into the future to save it in moments of crisis. But, as I remember the rules, there is absolutely fuck-all indication that it has to be well-governed or internally content or that you even need to give a shit about the whole thing beyond checking off the very specific boxes that you need to check off to get to be an immortal.

[RadiantPhoenix]

On a more serious note: "The Empire itself was a means, not an end" reminds me of the Quest for Immortality rules in Masters Set D&D. There's a couple of different ways you can become immortal, but one of them is in fact establishing a mighty empire that will last for hundreds of years and finding an artifact to let you time-travel into the future to save it in moments of crisis.

This goes even further than 'means not an end' by making "the empire has a crisis" part of the plan from the beginning.

[Bihlbo]

are you still trying to destroy this region with magic, because of how magic works, or did your goal change and i miss it?

The region doesn't matter. The Empire, that is the government and society made up of people, is what falls apart. Nothing at all needs to be destroyed physically for that to happen.

Also, "The Empire crumbles because D&D magic works the way it does" does not mean the same thing as "The Empire crumbles because out of nowhere big scary stuff happened and sharp things made undesirable holes in lots of people." If that were the cause of an empire falling apart it could happen in any setting, in any time period, in any game system.

On a more serious note: "The Empire itself was a means, not an end" reminds me of the Quest for Immortality rules in Masters Set D&D. There's a couple of different ways you can become immortal, but one of them is in fact establishing a mighty empire that will last for hundreds of years and finding an artifact to let you time-travel into the future to save it in moments of crisis.

This goes even further than 'means not an end' by making "the empire has a crisis" part of the plan from the beginning.

I really like the idea that the Empire was a means of achieving something unrelated to controlling lots of land and governance, but only for its foundation. I'm unsure how to make that part of the collapse in a way that couldn't happen unless the world were using D&D's system of magic. After all, this could just as easily be an aspect of an empire in Exalted, M&M, the Hybroian setting, or any of your hammer-based war games.

[talozin]

I really like the idea that the Empire was a means of achieving something unrelated to controlling lots of land and governance, but only for its foundation. I'm unsure how to make that part of the collapse in a way that couldn't happen unless the world were using D&D's system of magic. After all, this could just as easily be an aspect of an empire in Exalted, M&M, the Hybroian setting, or any of your hammer-based war games.

If you tone down the nature of the something it's trying to achieve, you don't necessarily need Immortals Set shenanigans, just an imperial founder who operates on a very long time scale. Or, more to the point, someone involved in the founding of the empire.

Imagine a group of successful adventurers, two humans, an elf, and a dwarf. After a long and successful career, one of the humans settles down to found an empire to stand with the most powerful nations of the world. Naturally, his good friend, the elven wizard, is his close advisor while he's in the process of setting up the kingdom, deciding which territory to make part of the realm and which to leave out, how to set the institutions of government, and so on and so forth. The elven wizard's advice is usually good, or at least appears to be so, and he can always point to some rational reason for doing things that appear to be against the nascent empire's interests.

But the ugly truth is that the whole thing has been a setup from the start. Elven wizard guy knew that eventually, the Dwarves and the Elves would have an epic falling out, and he also knew that the Elves would always lose out when it came to which side the Humans wanted to remain allied to. So he went out and found a promising and charismatic human, devoted ten or fifteen years of his life to helping build him up into a position of power, and then quietly inserted a number of carefully placed time bombs into the development of the empire. So, three hundred years later, when he expects the crisis between Elves and Dwarves to be at its highest pitch, the Human empire will collapse, depriving the Dwarves of their only ally and leaving the Elves in a commanding position.

All sorts of variants. Elven Wizard is dead, elven wizard is alive; elven wizard planned accurately, elven wizard miscalculated and the human empire is collapsing too early/too late, with disastrous results; elven wizard has never had any second thoughts, elven wizard has tried to put the humans back on the right tracks; and so on and so forth.

[Bihlbo]

talozin, what you wrote doesn't answer the question of how it couldn't happen unless the world were using D&D's system of magic. Could not happen. As in, the only way it could happen is because of the spells and corresponding class structures in D&D.

I mean, it's excellent plot development, but if you change the elves, dwarves, and humans to Sith, wookiees, and rodians it still works just fine. The question I asked was not "How do empires collapse? I can't have ideas!" it was "How does D&D's magic system result in an empire's collapse?"

If it doesn't result in the players (after having investigated the collapse of the Empire) coming to the conclusion that the power imbalance that resulted in the Empire's collapse was due to the way magic in D&D works, and then look for a fundamental change in the structure of D&D in order to avoid it happening in the future, then it doesn't meet the objectives.

[Desdan_Mervolam]

I believe that has been explained.

1) Most people don't have PC class levels, and unless you have PC class levels, your chances of getting above ~5th level are extremely unlikely (Due to the fact that it quickly gets to the point where any challenge that would give you XP can easily kill you, tilling fields and serving beer only take you so far)

2) After a certain level (~9th), planar travel opens up to the party, and from there adventures increasingly focus on places that are NOT the Prime Material Plane. The planes were designed to be more interesting than the Prime, so once you have the option of building your Summer Home at the foot of Mt Celestia or in the Elysian Fields or some other really nice plane that matches to your alignment, most of the remaining reasons to settle down as a high-level character in the Prime is going to be sentimental. To spell it out: No matter what badly-written Forgotton Realms novels tell you, high-level characters do NOT hang out on the Prime Material plane very often.

So, the empire breaks down because the high-level characters who are maintaining it all die out, and the magic system in D&D says there aren't any other suitable replacements because they're all out hanging out with cooler kids.

[Bihlbo]

1) Most people don't have PC class levels

That hardly matters, since enough people in the world are spellcasters to change the course of history. In any game I've ever played the party has faced off against foes with PC class levels, gotten information from people with PC class levels, had followers with PC class levels, and assumed that everyone with any reasonable amount of power has PC class levels.

The planes were designed to be more interesting than the Prime

This assumes the only thing you find interesting is having things to fight. In the planes you can't affect the lives of people at all, and the only interactions you have are based on personal acquisition. I find the planes extremely boring and try to avoid them at all cost.

That being said, you make a great point in that high-power entities probably will leave the empire to fighters and nobles who can't play on their level.

I wouldn't mind creating a reason for the planes to be devoid of any long-term high-level settlers. The planes being good places to adventure does not rely on D&D's system of magic, but instead on D&D's cosmology, which is a part of world building and therefore doesn't matter at all.

[shadzar]

are you still trying to destroy this region with magic, because of how magic works, or did your goal change and i miss it?

The region doesn't matter. The Empire, that is the government and society made up of people, is what falls apart. Nothing at all needs to be destroyed physically for that to happen.

Also, "The Empire crumbles because D&D magic works the way it does" does not mean the same thing as "The Empire crumbles because out of nowhere big scary stuff happened and sharp things made undesirable holes in lots of people." If that were the cause of an empire falling apart it could happen in any setting, in any time period, in any game system.

so you are looking more for a social, political, or economic reasoning for this group of people to fall because of the way magic works and how it has been used.

that, if true, then must come from those left that have not been killed off or conquered by this group of people?

[Bihlbo]

so you are looking more for a social, political, or economic reasoning for this group of people to fall because of the way magic works and how it has been used.

that, if true, then must come from those left that have not been killed off or conquered by this group of people?

If I understand what you said, I think the answer is yes.

The people of the Empire who are spellcasters use the magic system of D&D. They were an important part of how the Empire had the power it needed in order to develop. However, the magic system of D&D so far outstrips the mundane system of D&D that there is a power imbalance. Just by being so powerful the magic of D&D then brings about Very Bad Things that the mundanes cannot hope to stop. This leads to the collapse of the Empire... somehow.

I keep thinking that I asked my question very, very wrong in the first post. Obviously I didn't get my point across.

[shadzar]

you need a revolt of mundane practitioners against magic to destroy the current magic based government.....

how deep is this magic used, and can every magic wielder in power see all things around them?

the citizens could hire a group of people to begin trapping the government magic users in things they could not escape from, payment upon completion once the treasury is accessed.

oooh there was something in Glantri boxed set i think might help. I will dig that box out after eating and see if i can find it.