Alternate History Thought Exercise: Dungeon Fantasy Earth

[vitruvian]

Originally Posted by Jürgen Hubert

In honor of the latest issue of Pyramid: What would an Alternate History timeline look like where you could use the Dungeon Fantasy series as written? How would history have gone off the rails to produce an Earth like that?

The rule is that all the stuff in the Dungeon Fantasy series must be permissable. You can add additional rules material, but not take any away.

In order for all the stuff in Dungeon Fantasy to exist, first and foremost you need magic. The divergence point for that could be back at the Big Bang, or the advent of magic could be a much more recent, possibly local to Earth, kind of thing. However, for reasons below, it probably needs to be around for at least a couple of millennia.

Then you need to account for all the fantasy races and monsters. If they're the result of evolution, that pushes your divergence point back by millions of years, and means magic needs to be around for their evolution in the case of those with innate magical traits. Or, given the existence of magic, they can just as easily be far more recent results of magical experimentation, accidents, or other effects.

Then you need to account for the dungeons themselves. In order for them to make much sense, you need the magic and monsters to have been around for a few millennia, so that ancient cultures had time to make use of them, mine or create massive amounts of gold, silver, and precious stones, build humungous complexes (either underground to begin with or buried later), enchant huge numbers of magical items, and so on, then fall into decay and ruin, whether because of war, or disease, or magical disaster, or possibly ascension into the clerical gods of the present day.

In short, the divergence point involves there being magic, which then results in Magic Transhuman Earth, then some form of apocalypse, with the Dungeon Fantasy setting being the somewhat rebuilt post-apocalypse world where the vast majority of wealth and usable magic exists in the ruins of the old world order, making dungeon delving a worthwhile endeavor.