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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Agback" data-source="post: 2612967" data-attributes="member: 5328">Indeed. But they didn't take away the public assets. Essentially the Empire was weakened as the elves slipped off into the demi-plane of Faerie. There was an increasing shortage of elvish staff, and local recruits had to be drawn ever higher up the hierarchy for want of high-elvish colonial officials. The Empire de-colonised its provinces, but having failed to give the provincials any sense of membership of anything larger, that meant that the Empire lost unity. The Empire was essentially rotten before the orc and barbarian invasions even started.They might. But in D&D they don't have to, and it would not suit the theme or tone I am aiming at for this setting. The idea is that there should be a lot of quests to discover and recover old magical items of the Elvish Empire, that these should be fantastically valuable, but not really designed or suitable for adventurers.Indeed. Or a refectory table of Heroes Feast, x3 per day (intended for curing the sick and injured at an old Imperial city hospice), might be being wasted producing superfluous banquet for the retainers in the castle of some some successor-state king.True. I am, however, aiming for a campaign in which the Good types try to bring these treasure back into public service, rebuilding a state in which the crops are fertilised, the poor fed and clad, the sick and injured cured, the dead raised etc. In the aftermath of the Empire there will be little hope of organising new circles of wizards and cleric to make new items. It will in general be easier to  recover items that were lost, stolen, and carried off by invaders.The economics of magical items favour making use-per-day wondrous items for 'base load', and stockpiling wands and potions for dealing with emergencies. We ought to find that the wands and potions have mostly been used up (though sometimes a forgotten cache will be discovered). The things that survive will be the things of which the magic was needed every day--in the case of military equipment, this means that magical equipment for sentry-duty, street and highway patrol etc. will survive, but most of the stuff made for battle will have been used up. In the welfare department, the stuff to deal with military casualties and outbreaks of infectious disease will have been used up, but the stuff for dealing with base-line domestic, agricultural, and sporting accidents, with endemic diseases, etc. will still be working. Somewhere.</blockquote>

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