Decline and Fall

Of this blog becasue my brain is shutting doooooooowwwwwwn

Chris JSFsaid-

    “Is it too late for a first-time commenter to make a request?"

IT IS NEVER TOO LATE CHRIS!

"I'm looking for a random table or generator for a civilization's collapse or decline. It can be engineered, accidental or their just karmic reward. I think it'd make for good adventure seeds - the PCs can explore ruins to unravel the mystery of a culture's decline, or they can be caught right in the middle of it.”

AND YOU SHALL HAVE IT. But I am out of clever formatting ideas so you get a sarky list.

1. GAME OF AMORAL GODS

They raise you up, they cast you down, some gods will just fuck with the only culture that prays to them for the drama, of because they don’t think far ahead. Usually telling you its really important you do some crazy shit, then swapping sides for fun, helping then running away, or just generally hanging around while you die. As if the forces that order the universe were a bunch of sociopathic teens. See- the Trojan Wars.

2. OLD TESTAMANT JUDGEMENT

Being judged for weird social crimes by a violent mass-murdering abuser who thinks you don’t love him enough. Fire from heaven, brimstone, floods, you get the drift.

3. ACTUALLY-JUST JUDGEMENT

Yep you pretty much deserved that one. Both observers and recipients of the divine holocaust are utterly unsurprised by the fiery doom unleashed from the sky. Decadence, murder, massive pervosity without safewords, country dancing, the lot, its good you got burned, no-one will miss you.

4. PREDICTED CALANDER CYCLE END-POINT APOCALYPSE

The creepy thing about this one is that everyone involved knew exactly when things were going to end, to the day. Settled debts, packed up stuff, kissed kids goodbye. Empire is still there, just empty. Rest of world just carried on as normal.

5. FROG IN A BOILING PAN

Civilisation decayed so slowly that no-one is sure how it happened. Never really died, just evaporated into other cultures. Arguments as to when one thing turned into another.

6. BORN OLD

No-one is sure where this culture came from, all it ever seemed to do was decline, fractured endlessly into smaller states who all believe they are the real thing and the others alien scum.

7. TOTALLY UNPREDICTABLE INVASION OF WHAT-THE-FUCK-IS-THAT?

Some ghastly unknown thing just came over the horizon one day and killed everyone. See- Genghis Khan. Whole place wiped out in days.

8. BULLSHIT LITERARY DREAM DECAY

Civilisation consumed own reality, disappeared inside own dream of self, now flickering in quantum half-life, real yet not. Centre-right historians and scholars universally enraged as calendars no longer make sense and no one knows when anything happened. Left wing historians fucking loving it as “what is history anyway?”

9. MORAL DECAY – SLAVES

Everyone ended up slaves of everyone else. Wealth pyramid narrowed to a point and then collapsed.

10. ECONOMIC DECAY – HAYAK

Like east Germany X 1000. Everyone drawing government wage working for panopticon security state. Grey fungus of state bureaucracy expands, consumes everything and dies.

11. SPRITITUAL DECAY – GIBBON

Ruthless mass-murdering bastards start worshipping hippy god. Turn into pussies, fall apart, get eaten by tougher culture. Should have stuck with Zeus.

12. SOCIAL DECAY – US CONSERVATIVE

ITS ALL TRUE!!! Highest echelons of government really secret conspiracy of cultural aliens plotting to destroy nation out of nihilistic but surprisingly well-organised hatred. All cultural change engineered by cabal of weirdoes and gays to destroy family structure. Government took weapons to make people safe then sent everyone to re-education camps. Resulting famine, chaos and multimpe Great leaps forward finished them off.

13. SOCIAL DECAY – US LIBERAL-

ITS EVEN MORE TRUE!!! Higher echelons of government merely secret agents of psychotic and amoral corporate powers planning to chop-up nation and sell off for cash. All wars deliberate meat grinders in order to reduce numbers of underclass and keep profits up. Religious nutjobs seize control of state power and re-write society Handmaids Tale-style. All social divisions and hierarchies now widened, deepened and defended with lethal force. Civilisation splinters into hyper-paranoid mass-bunker states that spiral into death like moths crossing a campfire.

14. SOCIAL DECAY – UK

Nation evaporates in grey haze as entire population stops giving a fuck about anything. Intellectually and emotionally neutered blanks stumble through relics of former self, not even aware used to be a people. Tabloid industry still going strong.

15. THAT SUSPICIOUS ETHNIC GROUP WE DO MURDERS ON SOMETIMES

They really were conspiring against everyone. They really did have a 1000 year plan, bordering-on-magical powers, a gift for strategy and a lot of emotional control. With all that shit they could have made their own civilisation, instead they came after yours. You weren’t racist enough you fools!

16. CONSPIRACY THEORY

All conspiracy theories were right, even the ones that contradict the other ones. Empire still there but just machines, alien bugs and extra-dimensional lizard people wearing human skin. Apparent culture a total fake as insane multi-polar secret war rages underneath. Every home has coat racks for human skin-suits.

17. CHILDREN TURN EVIL

Adults either murder own children, extinguishing line in self-defence, or are murdered by them. Surviving super-evil children not really up to holding down a civilisation, may become suspicious ethnic group from above entry, then maybe adolescent dickhead gods from first entry.

18. NATURE HAS ENOUGH.

Ent panzer divisions, nuclear strength storm cells, microbe special forces and strategic vulcanism. The Druids warned you about the FUCKING LITTERING.

19. IT’S THE ECONOMY STUPID

Observers, historians and civilisation members all universally agree that cause of decline is economic. Somehow. All totally confused as collapse fits no known theory. Economy just fell apart and wouldn’t start back up. Population dispersed. Remains now poverty-stricken shithole. Arguments on cause fuel tenure and bad articles for a thousand years. Street beggars blame ‘magic coins’. Are correct, all homeless continually secretly eating ‘bad’ coins and protecting the rest of us since then.

20. NECROPOLIS

Secret of perfect mummification discovered. Everyone mummifies everyone else. Deserts claim cities and farms. Everyone still there, just dead and waiting.

I wrote an extra one by mistake?

DISEASE

Brain parasite infected everyone through dodgy fruit. Non-lethal but made whole population so boring they can no longer stand to be around each other. Now scattered to four corners of earth as far away from each other as they can get. Or as pariah class of driving instructors and taxi drivers in alien cities.

And a Scrap Princess special?

DUNGEON WORLD

Country runs out of adventurers in attritional war with cross-dimensional auto-proliferating dungeons. Every shadow and door has entrance to nation-spanning space bending dungeon behind it. Too creepy to stay. Abandoned.

Fugees

Kent Miller

“Party meets Refugees from a Wartorn Nation. Who are/were they, and what did they leave behind? What did they bring with them?

If you want, it doesn't have to be war. Maybe the Cause of their flight is a variable as well?”

VERY WELL KENT MILLER.

I bring for you, stolen from Dark Heresy, or maybe Rogue Trader I can’t remember, this Fugeegenerator.

This should really be horizontal so you can read down from the top but this is a blog and they are all vertical so..

Start on the left. Pick or roll an origin. Draw a line across from left to right. You can go right across BUT you can also go up or down by one diagonal for each block. So- corrupt nobles or honest kings might have left their honour and sense of self but may instead have left a sacred relic, or people they are responsible for. One or the other. You can choose to go up or down, or roll a dice to see what happens.

People can end up in different places, but only so far depending on where they started.

You can choose two or three to start with and see if they cross paths. if you get multiple dooms then they both happened but people involved saw them differently. Poor people don’t get ragnerock, that shits just murder to them.

They were	And left behind	They were running from	Brought with them	And are now
Grand Hierarch, never-gonna-be-normal Emperor/Pope type with divine blood.	Sacred godly national relic MUST BE RECOVERED	RAGNEROCK MOTHERFUCKER! THE REAL DEAL!	The kind of nuclear self confidence that could make a daemon blink	Proceeding with re-invasion. Alone and on foot if necessary. Convinced things will fall into place.
Corrupt nobles or honest kings	Honour, sense of self, shitloads of money in a pit		Legal executive privilege for now extinct kingdom (Are now government-in-absentia)	Arguing with each other about totally-fucking-pointless-constitutional issues and who-fucked-up-what
Honest nobles or sketchy merchants	People they were responsible for, no sign of them since	REVOLUTION! (OR INSURGENCY DEPENDS WHOS TALKING ABOUT IT.)	An extensive line of credit with international lenders	Pissing away whatever they have on booze and bad schemes
Barely noble country squires	Family homestead where they grew up, fathers coat of arms		Battered armour and weapons, experience using them and the kind of flinty charisma you need to run a platoon	Putting together company of military-minded exiles for vengeance/profit
People who wore clean shoes to work (scribes, low priests, petty merchants)	Anyone who might actually give a shit about their borderline-useless skills	BIG. FUCKING. DRAGON. (OR MORE BORING INDIFFERENT NATURAL DISATER, EARTHQUAKE, TSUNAMI)	Popular novels, receipts and a precise accounting of who did what to whom when things started to fall apart	Living in poverty and trying to write misery memoir of adventures.
People of some craft (Bookbinders, Smiths)	Tools and slow accumulation of a lifetimes work.		A high level of practical skill and an absence of debt	Just about to break into the local guild system! That certification will be mine!
Yeoman or Rice Farmers (Better dressed peasants)	Place they grew up, fields, crops, land they knew for generations	WAAAAAAARRR!!! INVASION! (OR THE DRAFT)	Crockery, ornaments, desperately out of place household recoveries (pillows, pot-pourri)	Looking to put together homestead in wilderness.
Scratchy dung peasants	Dung! It was all they had!		Ferocious ambition and indifference to status markers	Fertiliser kings, shovelling dung for a living
Beggars and thieves	Nothing (Yanked some rings from a dead ladies hand on the way out, so a good week so far)	POGROMS / ETHNIC CLEANSING / FINAL SOLUTION / RESETTLEMENT	Whatever they could steal from the weak and the dead.	Backstabbing terrors of criminal underworld
Untouchables	Any memory of who they used to be		Empty pockets, willpower and hope.	Hated by everyone, old and new (“ it was probably their fault”)

dystopian squalor of a slave district

McGravin  "I'm looking for a handful of scenes or vignettes to illustrate to my players the dystopian squalor of a slave district of my fantasy metropolis."

Well here you go. Trigger warning for everything.

Babies for sale, a mother begs you to buy her child.

Intelligent young slave left in charge of a boat or coffle of lesser slaves. Freedmen gather round surreptitiously and franticly trying to persuade him to break for freedom while he can. He is reluctant as he knows nothing about the world outside “my master is a good man”.

Crowd of 50 watching a man burn to death. Food stalls complaining as fatty smoke is being blown onto their wares. Executioner argues that the crowd is the only reason the stall owners have a job at all.

Group of silent, watchful and well-dressed teenage boys watching crowd pass by and pulling sticks out of a pot as slaves cross their view. When the short stick is pulled out they gesture to the slave, who walks over. They cut the slaves throat. No reason, just state-approved Kryptos random terror squad.

Steward-slave arguing with his slave about the slave his slave just bought. Combination of “where did you get the money?” and “You should be saving up for your freedom.”

Brief rain of dead crows and vultures as crow-killing gang of slave children pelt rooftop flock with slings. All rooftops covered with scavenging raptors unless somehow protected. Birds drawn by bodies and blood. Make a secondary weather system of black wings in the blue sky.

Gutters from windowless house are gurgling even though it is parching dry. If you investigate, its blood.

Stairs to raised door of Slavers GuildHouse are made of different sized humanoids. When they kneel or bend in synch they form a living stairway as you walk across their backs. Which they must do whenever someone wants to enter or leave.

Stall selling eggs of intelligent species. Heavily defended. Chain net to prevent sky access, heavy flags to prevent underground tunnelling.

Family being torn apart.

You can’t bump into anyone, no matter how clumsy you are. It’s their job to get out of your way. Crowds of slaves aren’t crowds to you, they melt away before you as you walk through.

Two men arguing over the price of an unborn child still in its mothers womb, over the belly of the mother.

Numerous sights and sounds of torture and mutilation. Too numerous to count. Whipping, waterboarding, bassinets, that thing with the rats, the rack. 1 in 5 people you meet have fingers or eyes or ears or lips missing.

You are surrounded by people but none of them will meet your eye. Socially its as if only 10% of the crowd was ‘real’.

Betting on knife fights

Child vs Dogs 30/70

Child vs Child (knives) 50/50

Child vs Child (hands0 30/30 and 40% expected chance of draw as not strong enough to kill each other bare handed.

Woman (bare handed) vs Woman (Pregnant with knife)  50/50

Woman (pregnant) vs Dogs 30/70

Pensioner (Blinded) vs Children  30/70

A mute slave with hand-board advertises self as trained breaker/torturer of other slaves. Sign includes prices and address of master for money to be sent to.

The Hot Boxes

Stalls selling hair of many colours.

Stalls selling replacement teeth (of all kinds including children)

Lots and lots of priests giving public sermons on the justice and righteousness of slavery.

A man being made to eat his own hand while bets are taken.

Polished skulls for sale, turned into inkstands, paperweights e.t.c.

Corrugated Carton Box Maker and Rottery Slot Machine

gexhouse28 had this to say

    “Corrugated Carton Box Maker

    Rottery Slotter Machine”

Matthew Adams8 added his request

“Weird spam as the misunderstood rambling of a cosmic DM, we are all players. How does a corrugated carton box maker hunt its prey? What race created the Rottery Slotter Machine?”

He then made ANOTHER request which included this- “I have already posted a request (which was more of a joke in response to spam than a real request, so please ignore)”

Ha. Ha. Ha. But we are all players Matthew, we are all players.

How does a Corrugated Carton Box Maker hunt its prey?

It doesn’t hunt you. It boxes you in.

There is a crossroad, or a bridge or a fork in the road, and on it is a box. The box is small and white and pale pink. It looks a little like lacquered wood, or ivory. There are sounds. You hear giggling and shuffling, an awful snuffling, the box shifts, rocks back and forth.

The Box Maker is inside. The box is made from the bones and sinew of the last innocent person you met. If you open the box, the Box Maker will emerge and take you. If you do not open the box it will hunt a new victim, make another box, trace you and leave it waiting.

If you try to destroy the box, this makes the Box Maker angry and more powerful. It will leave, find another Box Maker and they will both start leaving boxes. If you stop meeting innocent people, it will kill the most innocent person.

Inside it looks like something bad, like paper but also something else. It’s folded in on itself like origami. Like a slinky, or a toon. Eyes rolling around its smooth hollow cylindrical face.  Paperthin flesh with shadows of bone and flat contact lens eyes the size of egg whites in the pan.

If it touches you one graze flattens you into paperflesh that explodes with blood and chunks of bone everywhere. Tubes and organs hanging out. Body stuff spurts out like something stamping on a sausage.

I don’t know what it is, but that is how it hunts.

What race created the Rottery Slotter Machine?

This huge ancient brass machine does little more than punch a harmless ‘Videodrome’-style vertical rectangular slot in your chest about the size of a bible-spine. The hole has no negative material effects straight away. The fleshlips can scar up and look a little bit like an insane damaged vagina, which can be upsetting for some people.

For the person in question this hole will act effectively as a bag of holding, but nothing very large will fit in there and you can sometimes feel objects rattling around inside.

The hole also gives easy access to your spirit. A bit like a catflap. Your soul can escape and go wandering, sometimes deliberately, sometimes not. Your soul is effectively a henchman now. Like a ghostly best friend. It has its own morale and can flee in spiritually troubling circumstances. (Has no fear of mortal danger, that’s your problem.) Your soul is generally as brave as you are but afraid of different things.

It can go wandering for you and do all kinds of things, but it is not physically real.

Once your soul starts wandering off on its own it can start to develop its own pseudo-personality. It can change form in silver shapes but always gives away your true alignment. Handily, it will tell you when you are in romantic love.

Your soul is a bit more religious than you, in a mildly trying way. If it goes missing it can often be found wandering round silent temple or hanging out with occultists. It’s really into the tarot and always reads its star sign predictions.

When your soul is absent, your morals very slowly decay into learned behaviour, then legalistic codes, then into Ayn-Rand style social chains devised by the weak to cripple the strong. Soulless people find it hard to do good, but, like the fans of Any Rand, they can’t really manage original or innovative evil either. They tend towards libertarianism and the neutral evils. Music sounds flat to them, religious writing or art no longer holds any numinous charge. Despite being rabid individualists, they are surprisingly easy to compel for the strong-willed. So long as they never feel the leash.

Your body is now easily possessed by outside forces, like leaving your car window open. Ghosts and psychics and deamons and the like will head straight for you if they know about the slot.

Originally intended as an imperial control mechanism and permanent surveillance tactic. Paired machine was Rottery Lock Machine. Used to seal spirits in with special lock so that only the authorities had access, could check and remove your soul if necessary. Would inform you of changes. Soul DRM essentially.

Used to feed 1000’s of people through both machines at a time, slot, then lock. The other machine is missing, presumed destroyed in a very violent revolution.