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I'm building an empire for a D&D game I'm about to run. The empire has grown for about 2 centuries in a world where wizards can and will (should?) have access to wish on a daily basis. Because of the magic system of the world, things are collapsing.

I'm trying to come up with some specifics as to how this happens, without going too much into metagaming. For instance, it doesn't matter to the people of the world that the DMG tells you that PCs should advance at a certain rate per gaming sessions (they don't know what XP is), so it doesn't logically hold that it literally takes two months for a crap-covered farmhand to fight some dragons and conquer a kingdom single-handedly. It does however logically hold that since wealth gives you access to unlimited resurrection spells, the powerful have lived for centuries, and will only die if they are ousted from power.

The empire was built by humans, because that's something the other races just don't do. I'm a racist about that crap. The people who gained power did so by the sword as they killed, raped, and pillaged everything that made it hard to say "This is mine." Now there's a big empire all built up, with trade routes and plenty of prosperity going around, and the wizards and druids and 90'-tall radiation-breathing clerics have no problems achieving anything they set their minds to achieve. The pathetic (monks and paladins) of the world who have power see that they only do so by the whimsy and grace of those who are awesome, and tension is building.

Obviously this ends very badly, but how?

To clarify, the reason the Empire collapses is because D&D magic works the way it does. How does D&D magic lead to the downfall of the empire it creates?

Bihlbo wrote:Because of the magic system of the world, things are collapsing.

leylines have shifted and the NEXT spell cast causes an inescapable magic rebound destroying this civilization literally in the blink of an eye, and it goes not with a bang, but a whimper sucked out of existence.

The empire contains a large number of dungeons, and a bunch of local dragons get together and decide they want to take up residence in them. Throw in something about an ancient red wyrm as their leader who went around killing all the high-level wizards and you've got yourself an ancient villain as potential BBEG, if you don't have one of those worked out yet.

So far I've come up with these points:

• The Pax Romana effect is hitting our fictional empire. In the last 200 years most all opposition has been killed, bought, or absorbed. Good luck finding a dragon still alive within a thousand miles of any border.
• Opposition leads to experience, but mainly it leads to death. Level 12 NPCs just aren't seeing much opposition anymore, and so aren't dieing off. Most small towns are being run by or protected by someone who's level 18 or higher. And no one of that level will ever die, thanks high-level clerics looking for paying work.
• Magic items not only abound, they are the norm. Masterwork items are actually in shorter supply than +1 items.
• Pretty much everyone without a need to prepare spells is terrified of those who prepare spells, because they know that when it comes down to it, you either tell the Fraternal Order of Godlike Sorcerers that FOGS can do whatever the hell they want, or your town is swallowed up by lava and overrun by fiendish mudskippers.
• Trade routes have not involved animals or caravans in a generation. In fact, the monopoly that magic-users have on transport has driven them to cause the extinction of most mountable creatures and beasts of burden. If you can't use a donkey to pull your cart because there are no donkeys, you will pay a sorcerer for the services of his dominated trolls.
• Technologies are being lost due to disuse. With a few people in every town magically producing food, farmers have lost their lands and turned their children over to whatever group would train them best to do something useful, like changing a stick into a treant to build homes all day.
• Innovation has stagnated in certain areas. Until the collapse comes, there will be no reason for anyone to ever invent a better polearm or a better way to shoot something pointy.
• Most people with any power has spell resistance, at least from an item if nothing else. This ups the tention, as everyone knows that if open conflict broke out between powerful groups of magic-users, it's difficult to determine who would win.

Resurrection Spells don't let you bypass age limits. Reincarnation does.

The biggest reason for the empire to collapse in the wish scenario is that once you can wish for a harem of Janni to suck your cock and provide you with luxurious food, you don't need an empire for much of anything.

You could do something wacky like have it struggle on until enough of the wealthy leadership have to get reincarnated that no one knows who anyone is, and pretenders arise in every province and a massive civil war breaks out and destroys everything. Or you could just go the decentralization route - where the casters on top simply do their own thing to a greater and greater extent during a period of relative stability and then something important happens like an invasion of orcs or demons or something and the wizards all get called up to be war wizards and they say "Go fuck yourself."

-Username17

Chamomile wrote:The empire contains a large number of dungeons, and a bunch of local dragons get together and decide they want to take up residence in them. Throw in something about an ancient red wyrm as their leader who went around killing all the high-level wizards and you've got yourself an ancient villain as potential BBEG, if you don't have one of those worked out yet.

How would the empire have ever gotten large if there are any dragons in it? Besides, once they conquer everyone, the armies would get tired of patrolling and go hunting. Three farms get burned, someone blames a dragon because he found a scale in his field, and people go hunting. People want dragon leather because they are eccentric and powerful, so they send people hunting. It's the same reason there could be no dinosaurs today, even if they had not died out before humans came around. We only abide that which is useful, and destroy that which is so dangerous that it threatens our way of life.

If you really want a dragon uprising, you can have the dragons sleep beneath the earth for a thousand years or something and then pop out to go on a hungry rampage. Draconic hibernation is almost as good as demonic "being on another plane" for excusing why they are invading with a full scale army today and didn't seem to be around yesterday.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:If you really want a dragon uprising, you can have the dragons sleep beneath the earth for a thousand years or something and then pop out to go on a hungry rampage. Draconic hibernation is almost as good as demonic "being on another plane" for excusing why they are invading with a full scale army today and didn't seem to be around yesterday.

-Username17

That has been done with cheese good/bad effect. (YMMV)

FrankTrollman wrote:If you really want a dragon uprising, you can have the dragons sleep beneath the earth for a thousand years or something and then pop out to go on a hungry rampage. Draconic hibernation is almost as good as demonic "being on another plane" for excusing why they are invading with a full scale army today and didn't seem to be around yesterday.

-Username17

That would completely take the fun out of having the Empire collapse due to the system of magic that D&D uses. And if I wasn't clear, this is the point.

The Empire collapses because D&D magic works the way it does. How does this happen, and what are the details?

FrankTrollman wrote:The biggest reason for the empire to collapse in the wish scenario is that once you can wish for a harem of Janni to suck your cock and provide you with luxurious food, you don't need an empire for much of anything.

I don't really see that as happening. If you do that, you make yourself irrelevant. Like otaku who line every surface of their cave-like room with illustrations of naked cartoon teenagers and masturbate more often than bathe, no one cares that they exist anymore. Those who want to achieve something don't fulfil fellation dreams, and so they matter to the world.

You could do something wacky like have it struggle on until enough of the wealthy leadership have to get reincarnated that no one knows who anyone is, and pretenders arise in every province and a massive civil war breaks out and destroys everything. Or you could just go the decentralization route - where the casters on top simply do their own thing to a greater and greater extent during a period of relative stability and then something important happens like an invasion of orcs or demons or something and the wizards all get called up to be war wizards and they say "Go fuck yourself."

Good elements to throw into the mix. But I don't see how casters are going to allow other casters to do their thing without check. In fact, casters are more than likely going to form groups who do whatever they can to take down anyone who is willing to be a caster without being part of their group, just like unions do. It's the beaurocracy of these unions that pose the real danger, because once they have power enough to wag the dog, they have no reason not to. Just like unions do.

Pride could play a big role here. Your civilization's Persist-Spell-abusing Clerics of Pelor could be all like "fuck those wizards" and decide to kick their asses. Wizards take a hit, but Batman themselves out of it.

Then the war begins, with lots of minions and death effects. Almost all weak (3 levels below the strongest guys) get beat the fuck up unless they find a place to hidereally well, and then it's a war of the upper powers, which will eventually end (someone's SR will eventually break, and someone will eventually fail their save. All it takes is the combination).

Though, I thought of another idea here... all the casters retreat to their demiplanes protected by super guardians and shit, and don't venture out without liberal amounts of scrying and plotting and sending out scouts. It's basically hide and seek with nukes. With all those higher powers stowing themselves away, nobody of legitimate potency will rule the population, and the peasants oust the aristocrats who haven't become heroes.

Bihlbo wrote:The Empire collapses because D&D magic works the way it does. How does this happen, and what are the details?

(see Spellplague from Forgotten Realms)

Your plan is nonsensical and retarded.

You started out with the conclusion (D&D magic will lead to formation and eventual collapse of a mageocratic empire because of how it works mechanically), built a plot around that (retarded) premise, and are now asking us to backfill why the conclusion should be the case. And, as it turns out, it isn't the case. The D&D rules indicate that either A] the empire will never form in the first place, since it's too easy to depose the existing Emperor and install yourself as the new Emperor, or B] that the empire is extremely stable and fundementally unlikely to fall apart once it's got itself going. Which is the case depends on how you rule certain things to work (such as scry, imprisonment, diplomacy, etc.) but neither of those two situations would result in the plot you are demanding arising naturally from the rules.

DM fiat that bit of plot, or abandon your premise entirely. It isn't something that will occur naturally according to the D&D rules.

Demons and Devils influence a part of the top brass, and induce one or more to make a powerplay, maybe by mass-sacrificing peasants. Opens gates to the abbyss/hell, and fiends go to town.

The Netheril solution: Most powerful wizard reaches for godhood, slays goddeess of magic in the process which makes all magic go wonky and/or fail for a period of time.

Split (religious or cultural or whatever) leads to a civil war during which spellcasters do scorched earth on each other until neither has enough resources anymore to upkeep the rest of the population with magic.

Piles of mage slaves controlled by permanent charm, dominate, and various calling magic....

....and then some well-intended fucker drops a hallow onto the capital.

In fact, casters are more than likely going to form groups who do whatever they can to take down anyone who is willing to be a caster without being part of their group, just like unions do.

Wat.

Seriously, that is a complete non sequitur. Powerful clerics have basically no reason to even talk to each other. Powerful wizards onlz have cause to talk to each other to trade spells. And that only needs doing once a century or so.

Low level characters need fairly similar things. They need food, water, shelter, safety, and so on. They turn to the empire because it keeps the roads clear of bandits and price stability in gold and all that shit. Higher level characters don't care about those things, but they still have needs. Radically divergent needs.

As people go up in levels they get needs that are completely tangential to what any normal person cares about. A ninth level wizard doesn't give a tiny fuck about whether the seas have pirates on them because he can fucking teleport to the mainland and back. But he does need to collect thousands of dead bees and tonnes of obsidian. A high level druid doesn't need to talk to human farmers at all, but he does need to go deep enough into the Bane Mires that he can talk to the will o wisps there. And so on.

It isn't simply that the higher level casters stop caring about the basic services the empire was created to provide and start caring about high level services instead - it's that they stop caring about basic services and start caring about weird crazy crap that isn't even the same one person to another. One guy is running around the world harvesting blue energy from dueling other blue energy duelists and another guy is searching for glowing green meteorites to eat. The blue energy guy doesn't even get anything from finding or eating one of those glowing green rocks - he'll probably just leave it on the ground if he comes across one.

So here are some scenarios for the empire coming apart:

• Left Behind The Empire was created to fill the needs of the people who owned it. Originally that meant making sure that the crops weren't destroyed by manticores or stolen by orcs. Eventually that meant harvesting Raw Chaos and Celestian Gems for the powerful magicians. The empire focused more and more on that stuff, and eventually it just fucking moved its primary operations to Limbo outposts or something. Imperial edicts just stopped coming because who gives a shit?
  
  Go Fuck Yourself The Empire was originally faces with great adversity at every corner. They beat back threat after threat and gave concession after concession to powerful wizards and warriors to make that happen. Then they went for some period of peace, and the mage lords already had pretty much everything they wanted. One day, a new threat reared its head and the emperor found the only leverage he had was to threaten to take those priviledges away if the mage lords didn't pitch in. The mage lords told the empire to go fuck itself, because they already had towers made of human skin and hundreds of years of necromantic research and felt - quite correctly - that they could defend their ancient mage lord rights in a stand up fight.
  
  We Lost the Keys The Empire is powered by increasingly big magitech machines that are based on the Relic rules or some similar cheese that allows high level casters to do big things by poking cheap ass items with high level spell slots or rogues. And then there's a big splurge of assassinations or a mage lord walkout or a big war or something, and suddenly no one know how to operate the magacqueduct or the food replicators. And then things go fucking nuts, because no one knows how to farm anymore.

-Username17

Double post

Sketch out your empire in a little more detail first. If they're using crazy necromantic power sources, use K's plagues. If they're chai binding efreeti, they can run out of efreeti. If they pacified the region, ther is no longer a way to make back XP.

It doubly matters, because you need the starting point and the event to figure out what the aftermath is like: if a wish-based country runs out of wishes, they still have a crapton of scrolls around. If magic stops working, the same scrolls are handy firestarters.

We had a thread a while back, "water purification spells", which had a half dozen ideas you could run an empire on. Pick one, run it forward, and see what you get. The flaws will be a lot more obvious then. Personally, I like steam power, which leads to greenhousing and also flooding.

I'm a fan of the Left Behind option that Frank suggests. It creates a situation not unlike Vance's Dying Earth.

I like Frank's 'Left Behind" scenario because it addresses the fact that there are people out there who just like to hold and wield political power, and 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, fuck the Prime Material Plane, you rule the goddamned Elemental Plane of Fire.

Seriously, the planes opening up to characters is probably the biggest single mutator to come into play for people who do enough shit to get levels of real classes under them. Beyond that, most people are going to hew to the Prime mostly for sentimental value. Which means yes, there are high level characters who are going to come back from adventure to retire by running shit in their homeland for a while, but this is probably not especially common.

So, how about this: The empire has been run for (Insert amount of time here, probably 2x or 3x the longest amount of time a Real-World monarch has reigned) by a single Mage-King who has kept peace by a combination of arcane might and force of will. He is high level (18-20 or more), and has nothing to stand against him because after about tenth level or so (Give or take), most adventurers have either died off or just gone away to explore the universe. The Mage-King has done all that, but eventually he wanted to settle down for a century or so to the land of his birth to play politics.

Finally the Mage-King has died for the last time, leaving a horrible power vacuum behind. His court, made up of mostly people in the high-single digits is consuming itself at a rapid click and factions are erupting into civil wars that rip the countryside apart while outside the empire, powerful forces (Dragons or what-have-you) that were kept in check by the power wielded by the Mage-King are beginning to stir, with nothing standing against them.

Bihlbo wrote: That would completely take the fun out of having the Empire collapse due to the system of magic that D&D uses. And if I wasn't clear, this is the point.

The Empire collapses because D&D magic works the way it does. How does this happen, and what are the details?

Because it turns out, magic has some uber-rules like "conservation of mass" and "conservation of energy" and "conservation of emotion" that really only make a difference after a few centuries.

Yeah, sure, you can still cast Walls of Iron to satisfy all your iron needs. But now nobody's sure if the iron in that sword all came from the ground, or came from magic. So when some mage casts Wall of Iron nowadays, throughout the entire Empire, swords shatter, armor disintegrates, and chains on dangerous prisoners snap because the iron in that Wall has to come from somwhere.

When a cleric casts Continual Light, then some Continual Light spell vanishes somewhere...or maybe a dozen old Continual Light spells wink out of existence. Heck, it might be so bad that a mage casting Fireball actually uncooks some food somewhere, and casting Charm Person causes a pair of lifelong friends somewhere else to hate each other (magic can be pretty wacky, after all...).

By the time the Empire realizes that formerly reliable magic is causing all these problems, everyone's at each other's throats for casting spells causing such damage, intentional or not.

Desdan_Mervolam wrote:I like Frank's 'Left Behind" scenario because it addresses the fact that there are people out there who just like to hold and wield political power, and 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, fuck the Prime Material Plane, you rule the goddamned Elemental Plane of Fire.

Seriously, the planes opening up to characters is probably the biggest single mutator to come into play for people who do enough shit to get levels of real classes under them. Beyond that, most people are going to hew to the Prime mostly for sentimental value. Which means yes, there are high level characters who are going to come back from adventure to retire by running shit in their homeland for a while, but this is probably not especially common.

So, how about this: The empire has been run for (Insert amount of time here, probably 2x or 3x the longest amount of time a Real-World monarch has reigned) by a single Mage-King who has kept peace by a combination of arcane might and force of will. He is high level (18-20 or more), and has nothing to stand against him because after about tenth level or so (Give or take), most adventurers have either died off or just gone away to explore the universe. The Mage-King has done all that, but eventually he wanted to settle down for a century or so to the land of his birth to play politics.

Finally the Mage-King has died for the last time, leaving a horrible power vacuum behind. His court, made up of mostly people in the high-single digits is consuming itself at a rapid click and factions are erupting into civil wars that rip the countryside apart while outside the empire, powerful forces (Dragons or what-have-you) that were kept in check by the power wielded by the Mage-King are beginning to stir, with nothing standing against them.

Not unlike the aftermath of the downfall of the Lord Ruler (an immortal, extremely powerful magic emperor) in the Final Empire of Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy; basically the cosmic forces which the Lord Ruler was holding in check come out to destroy the world, and the protagonists have to figure out what those forces are from the Lord Ruler's journals, find out how to acquire Lord Ruler-like power in order to fight it, and then, as all good heroes, kind of bumble their way to victory with a gracious helping of luck, quick-thinking, and grit.

Tone it down so that the forces aren't going to destroy the world, just the world as we know it, and the empire can be gone while still having a setting to rescue one step later.

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?

How about another scenario? The powers that be realize that they've f*cked themselves by making such an idyllic world. The world *needs* adversity or monsters or demons or some such crap to generate experience to fuel the wish economy.

So someone has to go over and become a heel, to use wrestling vernacular. Maybe they all do. The scenario described sounds similar to peak oil, only it's peak... experience? Just the elimination of high level monsters would freak high level characters the hell out. No more loot, experience, or other shit that their entire life up to this point has been based on.

Here's another possibility

The Empire itself was a means, not an end

Some high level character(s) needed to build an empire for some reason that most mortals cannot comprehend. Maybe they needed the continent mapped out and roads of limestone with tiny traces of celestial diamond dust cut across it to form the leagues-long diamond runes which grant them control of the land's natural magic, maybe they time traveled back from the future where a barbarian king killed their familiar and that cheese them off enough that they wanted to make sure there were no barbarian kings for a century or two; maybe they needed to sacrifice an entire civilization for an epic ritual and the only way to get one adequate was to build it themselves. Whatever the case, that project is done now, so they don't need to go on propping it up.

Fuchs wrote:Demons and Devils influence a part of the top brass, and induce one or more to make a powerplay, maybe by mass-sacrificing peasants. Opens gates to the abbyss/hell, and fiends go to town.

Or another twist on it: Demons/devils/angels/efreeti/whatever get so pissed off at being constantly summoned with Planar Binding that they team up to open a can of whoopass on the mortal realm in a gigantic trans-planar war.