Existance of adventure locales?

[Quasqueton]

Are there still lost ruins, hidden tombs, forgotten temples, etc. left to find in the Forgotten Realms? Greyhawk?

How have these places remained unknown for so long with so many adventurers wandering around? Even without adventurers, with all the normal people of these worlds, how have these places not been stumbled upon already?

How much adventure is left in Faerun and the Flaness?

Is the party of adventurers in your campaign unique? Or are their adventurers all over the place? How quickly is a new discovery investigated by adventurers in your campaign?

Are there any well known adventure locations in the world? Why haven't they been "adventured out" by now? What prevents the PCs from coming back to it at epic levels and wiping it out?

Or do you not run/play adventures into unknown places?

For example, let's look at the "official" adventure path series of modules:

Why has the Sunless Citadel not been "cleansed" before the PCs arrive in town? What happens to the location after they leave?

Why has the Forge of Futy not been reclaimed before the PCs get the map? Surely *someone* knew where it is (after all, the orcs found it). What happens to the location after the PCs finish the adventure?

Why has Nightfang Tower not been razed before the PCs find out about it? What happens to the tower after the PCs kill off all the undead?

Quasqueton

 

[BiggusGeekus]

Dude, I totally know where you're coming from.

It seems like only yesterday that I traveled to the Villiage of Hommlet and slew the vile ones in the Temple of Elemental Evil. Now, I have to return there and do it all over again just because some country bumpkins can't be bothered to do basic houskeeping on a simple moathouse. It's enough to drive one mad, I tell you!


Anyway....

That's one of the prime criticisms with the FR and Greyhawk. Too many heroes and villians to suspend disbelief. My advice is that if you're asking these kinds of questions is to either ignore the problem or homebrew. Which is kind of an unsastisfactory answer, but what's a DM to do?

 

[The_Gneech]

Well, adventure sites regenerate, don'tchaknow, like in "Gauntlet." Evil things crawl out of the darkness and take up residence in any abandoned stone structure they can find.

The Temple of Elemental Evil, even if you clear it out right down to the Lady of Fungi herself, is itself a palpable generator of evil -- if good people moved in, it would just corrupt them, and with corruption, would come consorting with monsters, and the whole cycle just starts again.

Turns out it's a side-effect of the energies of magic missile and fireball spells interacting. Worlds that don't have these spells, may very not have regenerating dungeons.

-The Gneech

 

[Henry]

The reason, I've always imagined, is due to the existance of magic.

In real life, there are no liches making underground condos for themselves; death traps without maintenance just break; and the advent of global satellites and mapping means there's far less places to hide an entire brigade's worth of people.


However, there ARE places to adventure in real life! People don't realize it.

• There are still pirates in central america, hijacking small boaters and hiding in gueriila style camps.
• Warlords still exist everywhere in the Middle East.
• Treasures LITTER the ocean floor where even humans with high technology cannot yet reach.
• Slavery is still practiced in many locales.
• Soldiers of Fortune are still involved in actions that "don't exist."

Mind you, it's not creeping out of every corner, but these conditions above STILL DO EXIST. And there are still archeological ruins still undiscovered holding treasures we know nothing of; archaeologists still find ruins (small, but still existant) that hold important secrets and occasionally gold and other precious materials.

Now, compare the Realms. You have, even moreso than our world, countless old empires that have risen and fallen in the past 5,000 years. Add to those empires magics that replenish and sustain. Add to all of these other sentient beings besides humans, who have the power to repel humanity, AND who are sometimes even stronger than humans. Add to this undead - something we are totally lacking in our real world. Modern Archaeology would look like something out of a d20 Modern/Indiana Jones crossover if ruins explorers had undead beings to contend with.

Myth Drannor is a prime example of a dungeon that restocks itself; in the real world, lack of magic means less "restocking," but people get lulled into a false sense of security just because they can drive from one end of the continent to the other without getting killed, not realizing that there are many hostile place to, er, "adventure" even in our modern world.

 

[Silveras]

As BiggusGeekus suggested, the answer is sometimes to Homebrew. I run a homebrew world.

Henry is also partially right; magic does make adventure locales more common. Another part of the answer, too, though is to think about what effects magic has on society. D&D magic is a form of technology ( in that results are reliable and repeatable: any caster of 10th+ level casting a Maximized fireball gets the same result every time); as such, it would have an effect on society much like technology has had on the real world. The ready availability of such "technology" would transform society away from the medieval model most games pre-suppose.

Therefore, if the society is mostly medieval, the "technology" cannot be that common.

In a medieval world, settlements spring up along trade routes and waterways. There are often large swaths of relatively-uninhabited land in between. Most citizens don't travel. At all. They stay within sight of their homes, where it is relatively safe. A few go into the wilds to hunt, but someone disappearing while out hunting is not an uncommon occurrence. There might be some murmuring, but no one is going to automatically jump to the conclusion that "There must be a dungeon out there !". At least, no one who is thinking clearly. After a few, the village might decide there is a problem that needs to be addressed, but the first few might be dismissed as natural accidents, then coincidence. Until there were "too many in too short a time", people would not take much notice.

Similarly, a local "haunted house" is just that: local. Just because villagers from X believe the old hill fort is haunted doesn't mean it is. It also doesn't mean that villagers from further up- or down- river know about it. Sometimes people believed that talking about "ill-fated things" would get their attention. Maybe the villagers were ashamed of having such a place linked to them, so they refused to discuss it. Now, it is barely a memory.

There are lots of reasons why dungeon sites can be undiscovered up to the present.

Now, as to demographics... well, that one is harder. The DM must decide how many "other" adventuring bands there are, and that will affect a lot. If there are many competing bands, the PCs should probably meet at least one right away, and maybe lose the race to a new dungeon site once in a while. If there are not many, it becomes easier to explain why places are still untouched, but it should also result in the PCs have to choose between two missions on occasion.

When I run an adventure into previously-unknown ruins, the result is often that the ruins become known. The king puts a garrison in the fort, or it is razed, or at least guards are set to watch the place. I like to apply "reasonable consequences" to actions in my world. The same is true, I would expect, for long-running Greyhawk and FR campaigns.

 

[Arnwyn]

Are there still lost ruins, hidden tombs, forgotten temples, etc. left to find in the Forgotten Realms? Greyhawk?

You're kidding me. Considering a land mass with the square miles of the Forgotten Realms (for example), and people are wondering if there's anything left? Wha...?

Needless to say, such a "prime criticism" has always be unfounded.

 

[Sir Whiskers]

Look at it this way:

Unsuccessful adventurers get killed.
Successful, smart adventurers retire after making one big score.
Successful, dumb adventurers keep going until they become unsuccessful adventurers.

So you can never really have too many adventurers, since most will eventually get themselves killed, leaving their loot behind for the next group to adventure for.

 

[Nightfall]

Qu,

There's still a lot of uncharted terriority in the Scarred Lands. Besides that, no freaking gods of magic to mess with stuff!!

 

[CalrinAlshaw]

People seem to think that adventurers abound everywhere. Just because there is a huge community of players in the real world that plays PC's, does not mean that there is in game-worlds.

Back in AD&D 2nd ed, my general impression was that adventurers comprised of about less than 1% of the population. Since, for example, there are several million people on the flaness, thats still quite a few. But not nearly as many as you'd think. Also, people assume that in D&D all NPC's with PC classes MUST be SOME sort of adventurer, which just isn't true. PC classes simply represent the more "focused" dedication to a certain set of skills than NPC classes.

Anyhow, the reason there is still plenty of places to adventure is because new situations arise. Most people are too scared to do it themselves. Also, like others have said, theres undead, constructs, and powerful magic, mix in some meddling evil villains and you have nearly limitless adventures.

Also, I find that after a while some PC party's might have ambitions beyond hack and loot, like making a fortified home of some sort and settling down. These PC's often provide a good way to introduce NEW PC's by the more advanced PC's being too busy to do it themselves.

Calrin Alshaw

Calrin Alshaw