Magic Item Mines

[Stahn Li]

I'm trying to build a world that has several magic item mines. These came to be because once the world was populated with very powerful magic wielders but a sudden disaster killed them all. thousands of years later there various magic items (durable due to there magic powers) are burried underground.


If anyone knows anything about archeology where would concentrations of these items be found (riverbeds, hillsides, old battlfields?)Also what cool things could be dug up.

 

[hong]

My magic item mines are called "dungeons".

 

[Turanil]

My magic item mines are called "dungeons".

Ditto.

Here is what i did for my precedent D&D campaign: PCs over the course of the adventures learned about a civilization of evil magic-users that thrived some 2000 years ago. Eventually, they would be able to recognize the same architectural style left over from that distant epoch, and would know what to expect from its ancient sorceries (including that most magical items from that epoch have near always something evil in them). That way I gave some flavor and coherence to the campaign rather than just let the players visit some dungeons nobody knows why they are there.

On the other hand, just digging the Earth to find magical items doesn't make interesting stories. Better to dig the Earth until finding a buried crypt or tower, with kind of summoned monsters, demons, and treasures that the PCs would finally understand and could expect.

 

[RangerWickett]

You don't seem to understand Stahn Li's game style. Mining for magic items is funny. It'd be like future humans mining central Georgia to find old DVDs of Cartoon Network shows. I don't know what sort of help my friend wants, or if he's just bragging about his silly cool idea.

Mike, I do know that, well, they'd be concentrated in old cities, probably in remote ones, because the ones close to civilization would have been reinhabited. If Savannah sank into a swamp, people would build a new city over it, and all the old art projects of the college students would lie buried, just waiting to be discovered and sold for silly prices.

 

[kyloss]

From a semi realistic perspective

It depends, what was the catastrophe? fire, Flood, earthquake, volcanoe, plague, invasion ? they would all have different effects. Floods would create lowland deposits of middle to lightweght items with more fragile items being destroyed-ie wand potions etc. Fire would burn things like cloaks capes wand staffs destroy potions but most metal would be fine the resulting erosion would lead to slight acumalation downslope but not near as much movement as a flood. Earthquake and volcano would have the least movement and best chance for some of the more fragile items to survive. however large brittle items like pottery would most likely brake and any buildgs may collapse so large items and potions again are most at risk. With plague not much destruction at all and likely build ups are cemetaries, which also raises the possibility of unearthing the occasional undead. and with invasion not much would be left because invaders would most likely loot everything of value so a few small things might be left. Interesting idea.

 

[Stahn Li]

What I am trying to figure out is how would the magic items come to be buried. The disaster was probably some world wide event caused by some sort of misuse of magic. I was thinkin gof some sort of massive overlap between this plane and a elemental plane such as fire, something that killed everyone real quick.

Still the question is how did all the stuff get stuck in the ground. If it wasn't stuck in the ground then someone would have already taken it. And I'm not really thinking about dungeons I'm thinking about you gotta dig for it, not neccesarily an activity for the player characters the are more likely going to be involved in fighting over mine sites and unearthed magic items.

Just was wondering how real archelogial sites come to exists to make this whole effort more realistic.


Also some magic items were intentially designed to be more durable, pottery that is hard to break, cloaks that are hard to burn ect.

One thing I think could be fun is one of the mines begins to flood as miners try to dig out magic items. They later would find out that they dug close to a decanter of endless water that was turned upsidedown a created an underground well, but could not fill it further till miners uponed it up.