Mad_Jack
Legend
The world of my Dungeon23 project is OLD... As in, the first modern human empire showed up about 35,000 years ago.
Elves and dwarves had multiple empires long before that, but there was a massive ice age about 50,000 years ago, and most of the previous history of the northern continents is lost, even to the elves.
(Also, said elves and all other sentient species are originally from somewhere else, i.e., an alternate world, different plane, etc.)
On the continent where my D23 adventure takes place, the Old Empire (totally a Conan-esque setting - slavery, dark magic, lost cities in deserts, etc.) which used to occupy half the continent (but is now reduced to a third of it) is actually the third (or fourth?) "Old Empire" in a row - or, more accurately, it's still the same Old Empire "under new management", again, lol.
And every couple thousand years when someone new gets all righteous and decides to throw a rebellion, it quickly becomes a case of "New Boss, same as the Old Boss" - the new powers-that-be soon realize that the Empire is just too damn big to change because it's the massive stinking zombie corpse of an empire just slowly rotting away as it shambles ever onward.
And so I've decided that, on a certain level, the Empire itself is literally a lich - an undead genius loci, if you will. Over the course of the next million years or so, the Empire is eventually going to turn into an Athas clone as all the life inside its borders eventually succumbs to entropy.
Elves and dwarves had multiple empires long before that, but there was a massive ice age about 50,000 years ago, and most of the previous history of the northern continents is lost, even to the elves.
(Also, said elves and all other sentient species are originally from somewhere else, i.e., an alternate world, different plane, etc.)
On the continent where my D23 adventure takes place, the Old Empire (totally a Conan-esque setting - slavery, dark magic, lost cities in deserts, etc.) which used to occupy half the continent (but is now reduced to a third of it) is actually the third (or fourth?) "Old Empire" in a row - or, more accurately, it's still the same Old Empire "under new management", again, lol.
And every couple thousand years when someone new gets all righteous and decides to throw a rebellion, it quickly becomes a case of "New Boss, same as the Old Boss" - the new powers-that-be soon realize that the Empire is just too damn big to change because it's the massive stinking zombie corpse of an empire just slowly rotting away as it shambles ever onward.
And so I've decided that, on a certain level, the Empire itself is literally a lich - an undead genius loci, if you will. Over the course of the next million years or so, the Empire is eventually going to turn into an Athas clone as all the life inside its borders eventually succumbs to entropy.
)
