Glory of the Elder Days: Magic Items and Sandbox Histories

A hundred spells Phandaal personally had formulated — though rumor said that demons whispered at his ear when he wrought magic. Pontecilla the Pious, then ruler of Grand Motholam, put Phandaal to torment, and after a terrible night, he killed Phandaal and outlawed sorcery throughout the land. The wizards of Grand Motholam fled like beetles under a strong light; the lore was dispersed and forgotten, until now, at this dim time, with the sun dark, wilderness obscuring Ascolais, and the white city Kaiin half in ruins, only a few more than a hundred spells remained to the knowledge of man. Of these, Mazirian had access to seventy-three, and gradually, by stratagem and negotiation, was securing the others.

Jack Vance, The Dying Earth 

Stick with me, I’m getting to the fantasy worldbuilding and dead gods.

In ecology the trophic pyramid is the basic structure of the food chain. Up to 90% of energy can be lost as waste heat instead of converted between steps, organisms higher up the food chain are more inefficient. It could take 1,000 calories of grass absorbing a fraction of the awesome energy of the sun to produce 100 calories of grasshoppers or 10 calories of shrews feeding on grasshoppers or just 1 calorie of tasty, succulent, owlflesh fueled by catching shrews. As is, this is a neat tool for figuring out the population if you want a bit of simulationist ecology to establish the territory of your biggest scary predators in a sandbox region based on available food sources if you dig that style of world building.

But now let’s take the pyramid and flip the bird.

The power from the owl’s mighty corpse flows upwards, diffusing from its original form to feed a larger number of smaller but still great beings that feed yet tinier and more plentiful beings and so on.

I dig this as a metaphor for how magic and ancient powers can be handled in many post apocalyptic/fall fantasy settings. There is no active inflow to the system in this model. Magics originate from a mighty but finite original source (The Precursors, The Divine World Empire, The Ancients, etc.) that loses up to 90% of its power in waste heat (dead archbeings, spilled blood, burned archives, smashed artifacts, annihilated civilizations) as it is transferred to the next age and then reduced again until the current age is but an echo of an echo of the great power of the past. 

This type of worldbuilding method is useful for fantasy setting of old powers buried deep and drawn upon in diminishing fragments by the lesser inheritors searching through the ruins. The concept of a time abyss touched on in Matt Colville’s “Dead Empires” video and Joseph Manola’s OSR Aesthetics of Ruin blog post which elaborates on the idea that “the more wrecked things are, the more open they are to free-form adventure” are both highly recommended pairings with this post.

In order for impressive ruins with cool stuff in them to exist there must exist greater past civilizations. The scattered remnants of House Targaryen at the start of the Game of Thrones series is a shadow of their dominating power in the House of the Dragon prequel which itself is a mere shadow of the wonders of old Valyria. Each age is a shadow of the one before, picking through the bones of its sire.

Some ancient and modern writers saw the arc of real history as grouped into broad ages following a declining trend. Loads of fantasy like Tolkien’s Four Ages or Howard’s Hyborian Age takes inspiration from schemas like this and the influence persists in the heaps of works they’ve influenced.  Every age is diminished from the last. Entropy increases. Things fall apart, the center will not hold. All is an echo of the past stemming from initial greatness, the lesser shards and spawn of which produce their own pale imitations of grander forebears.

It should go without saying that real history is messy and doesn’t follow easy schemas, taxonomies, or universalized trends- but fun post collapse world building doesn’t always require accurate historical analysis’s it’s very common that whatever current era the writer was living in was the most unsettled, degraded, and dangerous time- it’s always the end of days, and the worst time in history to be alive, past greatness fading. That’s a pretty powerful vibe, what if it actually was the case for once instead of eternal cyclical nostalgia?

“Our sires’ age was worse than our grandsires’. We, their sons, are more worthless than they; so in our turn we shall give the world a progeny yet more corrupt.”
-20 BC, Book III of Odes, Horace

Step 1. Outline your Ages

These ages serve as guide posts for a loose timeline broken into big chunks, things you know are true about your setting and places to slot in your weird magic items, creatures, and ruins. This isn’t  prescriptive but rather paints the broad strokes of your setting.

It can be easy to get lost in the weeds here. Don’t do it. If you catch yourself wanting to detail the complete lineage of five thousand year old noble houses, stop! Make a note- come back to it later if it still inspires.

  Break down your setting’s history into 3 or 4 main ages of creators, and their ruins, and artifacts- this allows you to have a general concept of what’s happened that can be discovered by your players. What we’re trying to do is add anchors that lend congruency to our loose worldbuilding without building an encyclopedic straitjacket of facts about the setting that ossifies it into a dead fixed thing.

The RPG, The Sword, The Crown, And the Unspeakable Power breaks the process of mythmaking origin worldbuilding into a sweet fill in the blank format that’s worth stealing for any game to come up with the elevator pitch for what your average commoner knows about the past as popular history and what you tell your players.

This is awesome and we can steal the Mad Libs method of history generation for a less elegant version that fits our quick history by Ages format to link it all together. I actually recommend making the Golden Age stuff unknown to most common folklore to leave a more mysterious time period to discover.

“In the beginning… (Golden Age)
† Until… (Fall of Golden Age)
† This resulted in… (Silver Age)
† Until… (Fall of Silver Age)
† Then (Bronze Age)
† Until… (Fall of Bronze Age)
† And now…” (Iron Age)

Questions About Each of Your Eras

How Long Ago?
What Were They Like? (Culture, motifs/architecture/ruins style, etc.) ?
What types of magic items/creatures were often created during this era? Why?
What influenced them from previous eras?
Specific Notable Figures or Creators of Magic Stuff? (Limit to 1- 5 initially, you can always add another hero, traitor, or godking later)
How did their ruin come?

Example Ages of Power

Golden Age/Age of Myth
Examples:, Ascended Immortals, Primordial Beasts of Creation, Angels, City Sized Elder Dragons, Kirbyesque Space Gods, Alien Overlords, Nasty Old Ones
OSE Spell Level Range: 6-???

The most magical time, the origins of your setting that matter, the deepest layers of Just because it’s the most wonderous time, doesn’t mean that it needs to be the most enjoyable time to be alive. Maybe the world was ruled by unknowable Lovecraftian Old Ones, whose slumber led the way to the new age where people could live outside their rule. This could be the dawn of time itself or a thousand years ago, it is the point at which the interesting stuff in your campaign first emanates from. You don’t care about anything before this, it doesn’t matter. In most games most creatures or relics from this era are outside of the range of possible player advancement and gameplay unless you want to wind up playing a truly epic level game. Real Infinity Gem, Simiril, Dragon Ball type stuff. I mostly use this age to set the vibes of the setting, themes, and to influence the direction of following eras.

    

Silver Age/Age of Legends
OSE Spell Ballpark Levels: 5-6+?
These beings come directly from the scattered magical essence of the Golden Age. Inheritors, usurpers, spawn, or rebels? Their magic items are the most powerful artifacts, creatures, spells, around, campaign macguffins, mighty dungeon treasures or threats. Of these make at least one absolutely crazy artifact as your power ceiling for the expected campaign somewhere, go nuts with that one. This is your One Ring or God Slaying Blade for your sandbox. Tuck it away in a dangerous dungeon somewhere or give it to an ambitious NPC antagonist. Put it somewhere a level 1 PC is likely to pick it up if you want some great shenanigans early on.

Bronze Age/ Age of Heroes
OSE Ballpark Spell Level: 2-5?
These beings and items are inheritors or creations of the Silver Age Powers. This era is your bread and butter, recent enough that it’s vaguely familiar history to most people in your settings but old enough that it has enticing magics and was suitably mighty.  If you need a sweet magic mace, wild wonderous device, or helm this will probably have it. I like to have a recent centralized empire, a nice contrast with modern scattered and endangered successor states and settlements for that swords and sorcery vibe.

Iron Age/ Age of Today
OSE Ballpark Spell Level:1-2
Inspirations: Conan/Dying Earth/Dark Souls/Lord of The Rings
This is the fallen realm of today, squatting in the layered shadows of the past.. This where your strange minor items, common supernatural beasts, and new creations of modern mages, witchlords, and alchemists fall under. The realm of the impressive but knowable. In a limited magic setting even these lesser sorceries might be wonders or terrors. In a wide magic but low power setting these types of items and charms might be widely available or replicable. All of these minor magical items from Goblin Punch fit well.

Step 2: Create Magic Items for Each Age

Reserve the most powerful or impactful items for being created or originating from the oldest eras with a little overlap between the mightiest craft of a new era and the weakest of the old. Older stuff is generally rarer and more powerful. New stuff is less potent but more  Try to tie almost every interesting magic item to an Age. Give it a style, trademark special effect, material, associate it with one of the historical powers to create a denser web of hooks. This helps players learn more about the world’s connections and history in an interactive manner and be given the context to act on this. They’re also paying more attention than average when you describe treasures. Your players might grow beyond the limits of the current Age and create more mighty items of their own- sweet.!

The trophic pyramid might use a 1:10 scale between new and old tiers but you could use 1:4 or 1:6 or whatever fits your idea of how prevalent magic items from each following era should be. You might also need more or less magic items depending on the scope of your games setting. The specific ratio doesn’t matter just the basic principle.

 Example Magic Item Spread:
 
0-1 magic items? = The Golden Age
10 magic items = The Silver Age
40 magic items = The Bronze Age
160 magic items = The Iron Age 

Now at this point you might say “Joel, there’s absolutely no way I’m going to spend the time to come up with 210 magic items for prep – that’s a recipe for burnout.” No worries, that’s cool! You don’t have to, no should you write down a couple hundred magic items before you start your campaign. If you can’t even come up with ten big Silver Age magic items at first, steal and adapt from other sources or just come back and add to the list when you’re inspired or need to invent a magic item on the spot. It’s an aspirational list, but I think it’s neat that there’s also a limit to the number of items of each potency and era existing in your game. It’s a finite resource.

Name:
Appearance:
What Does It Do:
Origin (Who created it and the era, 1-3 sentences ) :   

Thrown Together Example:

Name: The Eye of the Flamemother
Appearance: Bloodshot Quartz Eye with boxy geometric engraving, smoking pupil enterally darting around. Shines bright orange When Used.
What does it do: Replaces an eye, ignites everything stared at for 2d6 damage – covered with a ruby eye patch. The user can look into any flame and see what has passed before it in the past. Visions push the user to greater pyromania and must Save to not ignite large flammable structures in view. 
Origin: Plucked from the Fettered One’s face during the Silver Age of Legends by the Eld Lord Hanuba who wore it on the battlefield. After he was felled during the Year Without Summer, The Eye was passed down the generations by the Slayers House of Jareen. (I don’t actually know what all these lore references are yet besides the broad strokes of which culture/faction/force was the power of each age, you can flesh out nuggets in random details if needed )

Step 3: Scatter Magic Items Around Campaign Setting

At this point you should have the start of a list of sweet magic items of varying eras and puissances. Start putting them in dungeons and the hands of powerful NPC’s. Anytime you need to place a magic item and don’t already have something specific in mind, grab it from your list.

In creating your adventure sites use whatever your method of sandbox stocking is. I like the Worlds Without Number, An Echo Resounding, and Beyond the Wall region generation procedures supplemented by hand placing others.

Now roll on this d10 table and tie all of your built adventure sites to the.  (Again, odds can be shuffled to taste.)

1d10
1-4: Iron Age(Modern Era) – 40%
5-7: Bronze Age Ruin- 30%
8-9: Silver Age Ruin- 20%
10: Golden Age Ruin 10%

This doesn’t track with the various eras’ magic item ratios but those get looted or destroyed over time and shattered ruins stick around longer. If you roll an older era for an adventure location that’s modern and in use then it’s a repurposed original structure dating back to that era-also helps give this setting a sense of history.

If players notice a recurring patterns from exploring a black marble swamp laboratory showcasing eight headed snake motifs carved with glowing eye gems and holding strange animate bone whips and scissor blades, and built atop a collapsed ziggurat whose interior grave chambers contain the undying skeletons of hydras with a single vial of glowing blood locked in a chest of shimmering blue crystal in it’s deepest vault.

This seems a lot more fun and engaging then telling them the players via a lore dump that the vanished Hydramancers of Thaarn built their laboratory compounds in the swamps to revere the undead remnants of hydras bred long ago by the Gray Emperor who used the blood of captured gods in awful rituals. They’re going to remember actually experiencing that archeology live a lot more. Maybe they don’t ever get the whole picture but because you know it, it’s easier for a sense of verisimilitude and consistency to develop with your world- a feeling that there’s always something new to discover.

Not every site needs every layer of history to be present and tangible. Plenty will just be a recent construction or built upon a site associated with a single previous era.

Leveling Up and Digging Down

So what are adventurers and seekers of lost lore doing? They’re scavengers converting the power of the former Age more efficiently and reducing the waste energy that bleeds away to the past on the magic reverse trophic pyramid.

A dungeon consists of going deeper and deeper through the layered ruins of these past ages. The deeper you go  the weirder things get, the more dangerous, the more magically potent. As adventurers gain levels and power they are digging back into the past. Explicitly and symbolically. Modern Iron Age structures and settlements are everywhere, Bronze Age ruins are fairly plentiful, Silver Age ruins are rare and the location of the couple intact Golden Age sites are lost to all or the deepest held secrets of some order. 

Perhaps in forging great wonders of their own, delving into secrets, they might turn the Wheel once more towards the wonders and glory of elder days?

Later something new and great and terrible could be created- some atom bomb analog capable of putting to shame anything the old order had and laying waste to the new era’s wonders in the process. The future ruins of this brave new world created by that party could be the era’s ruins you have another party crawl through in your next campaign’s shattered future. The cycle continues.