Dungeon Fantasy Settings
 

I'm curious about the campaign settings people use for DF. Exactly how do you go about creating a world that has lots of interesting abandoned ruins loaded with goodies and baddies?

I was considering a continent of folks who fell under the influences of the elder gods, devolved into subhuman troglodytes and now their lands are up for grabs....

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Settings
 

I think the easiest way to handle ruins and lairs would be a world that went from a period of prosperity to a period of dark ages created by massive wars or natural disasters. A world like this would have a lot of historical records missing and plenty of abandonned castles, ruins and cities.

A quick example like this is the world of Krynn from Dragonlance where a foolish priest angered the gods and it resulted into a major catastrophe; cities sinking into the earth, mountains popping where there was none before, major geographical changes, etc.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Settings
 

Well, yeah. It can even be better if this has happened *many times*, and at different times in different parts of the continent or other campaign area. That way, you can dot the landscape with a variety of very different types of dungeons. The Gothic (in the architectural sense) castle that was sacked by revolting peasants just a generation ago and since then has been inhabited by ghosts and other undead can be quite different from the ancient ruined city of the Golden Oldies, and can be quite different again from the ziggurat temple that's found other several meters of earth or the city of Blackjack that's been rebuilt 21 times (so far), with all the earlier layers of the city still navigable underneath the streets and accessible from everybody's basement.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Settings
 

I've always wanted to run a game where an insular society suffers some crisis and needs to seed adventures into the world, only to discover that their community is inside a huge subterranean realm, or cyclopean ruin.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Settings
 

Someone posted a setting idea on these boards to justify the Dungeon Fantasy style that I thought was cool.
http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread...8&page=1&pp=10

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Settings
 

There's an illustration in one of the preview books for D&D 4E that depicts this cozy little hamlet by the woods, but when you look closer you can see massive and ancient dragon statues that the houses are practically built on top of. It's pretty cool, and rather like a smaller-scale version of your idea.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Settings
 

That was me, but I've since decided that rather than have there be *one* past civilization of Ancients, it would be more fun to have had civilizations rise and fall a good dozen times or so. Each past society can leave behind distinct types of dungeons, and if the last 'Fall' was around 500-1000 years in the past, there can be plenty of individual small kingdoms and holdings that have sprung up and fallen into ruin, just more locally.

Actually, enumerating the types of past civilizations, what types of ruins they would leave behind, and how they fell would be another useful exercise. I'll start -

1) Pseudo-Roman Empire (Tiberians? Quirinians?) with strong use of college-based magics including use of Earth spells to create a system of roads. Leaves behind buildings and entire cities and towns of strong stone or wood construction, frequently with a central atrium area open to the sky, frequently buried by hostile action using Entombment or other Earth magic. Fell in the War of the Trees (Oak vs. Olive), when rampaging hordes of Druid-backed barbarians (small b- not all of them were SM+1) not only sacked most of the cities but also covered them with rapidly sprouting forests.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Settings
 

Progress is a relatively modern notion. High fantasy typically hearkens back to myth, and very often includes the notion of a fall from a previous Golden Age. Civilization devolves. Heroes of the past were always mightier, and the elder wizards had a better comprehension of mighty magics lost to us today.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Settings
 

Ala D&D's "hollow world" campaign setting?

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Settings
 

Very true. A 'in the ruins of fallen (metaphorical) giants' setting isn't only great DF, it's not all that bad history. Roman ruins, while short on orcs, certainly stood, for a time, amoungst people who had little clue how to replace them.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Settings
 

Reminds me of the Malazan Cycle setting, by Stephen Erikson. Best background of any fantasy world I've ever read. There's layer upon layer upon layer of history, some human, some not so much. The world itself is a little too realistic for a DFesque campaign, IMO, but I definitely think the cycle of rise and fall of empires would give you the varying ruins that the setting demands.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Settings
 

Too realistic? It's a bit on the gritty side, maybe, but it's some of the most epic stuff I've ever read. And I don't even want to think about the point values of characters like Quick Ben and Karsa Orlong.
I'd buy a GURPS Malazan Book of the Fallen worldbook instantly, that's for sure. Fantastic setting.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Settings
 

That is an enough good starting point for DF developments keeping some degree of fabulisimilitude.

And despite of having the appearance of being a bit simplistic approach, it can be indeed enough fun, thrilling, complex and developed if it is enough worked.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Settings
 

One twist to the Dungeon Fantasy concept I liked was in GURPS Fantasy, in the "Mouth of Hell, Part 1 and 2" Adventure Seed. Take your average fantasy setting; here and there across the land, pits, caves and tunnels open in the earth, giving access to underground mazes populated with horrible monsters and undead, guarding fabulous treasures and magical artifacts.

As the adventurers venture deeper into the mazes, their adversaries and surroundings grow increasinly nightmarish. They eventually discover the underground realm brims with even more hellish creatures, and that each time a creature dies, the killer experiences an enhancement of his abilities, but that when the opposite happens, the underground realm itself becomes darker and deadlier.

As it turns out, the various 'Dungeons' are the creatures of powerful demons who feed off human terror, greed and blood shed in their domain. It hopes to lure the entire human population to throw away their lives while playing it's dark game.

A nice twist on Dungeon-crawling, I'd say.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Settings
 

I agree.

Fantasy for me is "the spine" for Dungeon Fantasy.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Settings
 

Centuries ago there was a major war instigated by the followers of a dark god. Among their other blasphemies, these men bred monsters - orcs, wvyerns, and other horrors were the fruits of their labours. They were ultimately defeated, their kingdoms destroyed and their works thrown into ruins, but not without cost - the good guys' communities that survived were in no state to occupy new lands or even to patrol them.

Now, those communities that survived have recovered and expended to the point where there are 'surplus' young people with no prospects for settled employment and enough wealth to be able to outfit themselves and explore for loot in the abandoned and/or destroyed cities and fortresses of their ancestors and the followers of the dark gods. The monsters remain, and even thrive, making life exciting in the wildernesses, and even pushing other, lesser, monsters down into the settled lands (mainly orcs pushing goblins into civilsed country), providing another source of adventure.

That's the gist of my current fantasy campaign.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Settings
 

Quoted for truth.

Note that the Malazan world developed from a GURPS campaign. (IIRC, Erikson said it started out D&D or something but switched to GURPS when GURPS came out, and houseruled from there.) I like to think you can see traces of this in Karsa Orlong's Truthfulness, for example, or Quick Ben's Curiosity.

-Max

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Settings
 

One I've been considering...

My magic system has spells that scale power exponentially with difficulty instead of linearly (more like AD&D "strategic" magic than GURPS "tactical"). Think "hacking the universe's operating system code." It's also a lot more expensive than standard GURPS magic in terms of point-values (more expensive than Powers in most cases). But I digress--suffice to say that magic can potentially cause huge geophysical alterations like volcanoes, ice ages, California falling into the sea...

Take a medieval fantasy world. One day and for no apparent reason, across an area the size of France, underground "dungeons" begin appearing. These dungeons are, initial investigations reveal, usually full of hostile creatures as well as treasure. There's not enough food in the dungeons to support the monsters that are there, and no good reason they should have the treasure they do--but somehow they do. So far, most dungeon inhabitants don't seem interested in leaving the dungeon and invading the "real world," and while that could change at any time, the political Powers That Be don't think now is the right time to spend "blood and treasure" in clearing these potential threats. Thus. "Adventurers" are commissioned with letters of marque to clear these threats out, if they can.

By acknowledging the basic craziness of dungeoneering, you can fit it into the real world while explaining why the Powers That Be don't give you a *real* army for the job, and without ruling out sinister invasion plots that might indeed make calling up real armies worthwhile at some point.

-Max

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Settings
 

Interesting.

Contributing to that inherent craziness, even The Dungeon in a general sense doesn't need to be in the same "normal" reality, but perhaps in other different "under-earth" and partly "oniric" domain ruled by different -but estrangely familiar- laws. After all, The Dungeon isn't but a different name for The Mouth of Hell. Some of this is, I think, suited for all Dungeon Fantasy motifs.

I posted in other thread a sketchy part of my Dark Fantasy/Dungeon Fantasy setting in development.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Settings
 

Earthdawn, I think, is one of the best official "Dungeon Fantasyesque" settings there is. I'm sure GURPS could do it with very little work.

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Realistic in terms of historical sense, and being logicaly thought out.

Still the best DF explanation would seem to be earthdawn like with horrors driving everyone into underground cities and many of them falling.

I would by any MBotF RPG.