If where you live is anywhere like Britain, which I assume it is, you may have noticed that it is full of places that look like the photo above. Empty, clapped-out, derelict husks, sometimes dotted around vast hectares of waste ground, that once housed something that people deemed important and which now...don't. Often they brood with menace, as though all manner of bad things have happened in and around them, and have left a psychic imprint in the concrete, the steel, the stale air. At other times they give off a more mournful sensation, as though they grieve for a lost youth when people thought them necessary enough to put considerable time, resources and energy into building them. Sometimes, they appear to stand in silent and inscrutable judgment over us, like sentinels. And now and again they are repurposed into something radically different by vagrants, outlaws or rebels.
It is like we are living in a Judges Guild hexmap, peppered with ruins, monuments and lairs, which we poorly understand and suspect to harbour dangerous, but possibly also valuable, things. All that we lack is an adventurer-economy of rogues whose profession is to break into them and emerge with treasure, and oddball collectors willing to pay them for it,
d20 Modern should have been about this, but in the end wasn't about much at all. It's crying out for somebody to do an OSR version. In fact I'm quite taken with The Megadungeon Around Us as a title.
The urbex community is an interesting and vibrant one! It can be a lot of fun to explore places like this!
ReplyDeleteOddly the barber I used to go to was into that in his spare time. If only he was as good at cutting hair as he was at regaling customers with stories of his exploits.
DeleteI haven't played it or read it in depth, but I think Emmy Allen's "Esoteric Enterprises" basically takes that approach.
ReplyDeleteAh! Will have to check it out. I really liked the Gardens of Ynn.
DeleteYes, I was just going to post the same thing! I've both gm:ed and played EE, and it can come quite close to this.
DeleteThis is a great observation. There are parts of Europe where this feels even more acute, now that I think about it; where the scars of centuries of war are a little more obvious, and the landscape a little more "fantasy epic".
ReplyDeleteIn Canada, you don't really get that sense of aggregate historical detritus, but the overland hexcrawl feeling is powerful. Random (animal) encounters, natural hazards, the occasional tumbledown shack, or petroglyph marking out an ancient religious site.
Shouldn't it be set in Russia, though?
ReplyDeleteRussia is like everything that you said about the British landscape, but much more so.
Russia also actually does have a *small* adventurer-economy of rogues whose profession it is to engage in urban exploration and who then sell the occassional find of value (mostly soviet memorabilia)
Yes, I imagine so! There are a few places in the world like that - I believe the Democratic Republic of the Congo is similar. Lots of grand buildings either from the Belgian or the Mobutu era, gone to decaying ruin.
DeleteOh, I didn't know that. But of course, the DRC has that political and social fragmentation that is so great for OSR settings, and so... y'know, at least in the DRC in particular, terrible for human flourishing.
DeleteI... guess that would make the party warlords?
And common is... French?
Hmm. The OSR is quite dark when you try to set it in the real world.
I remember the pictures of that Soviet space shuttle they found! Talk about a Legendary item! :)
DeleteHalf-orcs are people, man!
ReplyDeletetotally agree. whatsmore few hours of gameplay with the fallout video game stress this out even more.
ReplyDeleteThe author Nicholas Royle - http://nicholasroyle.weebly.com/ - used to be very into Urbex, and had some amazing photos on his website of places which he subsequently incorporate into his novels. The Director's Cut features an incredible sequence set inside the huge complex of abandoned buildings, tube lines and stations that were White City back when it was an ex-exhibition centre & Olympic stadium - a true modern megadungeon - before it was developed into the Westfield shopping centre and new station. And Antwerp includes some really creepy scenes inside a vandalised Belgian mental hospital, and in a monolithic grain silo on the Schelde docks. There used to be photos of all those places on his website, it's a real shame they're not there any more.
ReplyDeleteGateshead town centre is a bit like that.
DeleteThe British aesthetic of ruin was seeded first by the dissolution of monasteries under Henry VIII. As you probably know, monastic wealth was expropriated by the crown, monasteries, convents, etc. were deliberately left in ruins. In the eighteenth century, Britain would become a center for the development of a new fascination with ruin, which was, before the term medieval was used in English in the 19th century, part of an architectural and literary craze called the Gothic, associated with Whiggism and running counter to the sentiment for the Classical. Industrial ruins are fascinating in any country, but the countryside of the UK still has its medieval ruins, now domesticated as landmarks, but once the site for lurid imaginings of depraved monks, imprisoned heirs, secret passages, and lost treasures.
ReplyDeleteHere in the US, where we have an ever growing homeless population, many of these buildings are being torn down, at least locally. Homeless folks and the criminal class (mostly meth-heads and dealers) had turned several such ruins into homes and bazaars.
ReplyDeleteSo after years of increasing incidents (and I imagine, ever growing liability) the owners went in and tore the buildings down. On just the next block over they tore down a bank and a movie theater, both requiring quite a bit of effort, as they were solidly built with heavy concrete. I've seen other buildings in the area torn down in the same way. None of them had land presold or leased, so that was very unusual.
I suppose in a fantasy world they'd have to actually tear apart a dungeon from the inside out and then fill it in with rubble to truly end it. I've never seen that happen in more than four decades of playing, though. Most parties figure they killed the monsters and got the treasure and just move on, not thinking how the dungeon can always be reoccupied...
Which is weird, when "the dungeon/temple/fortress collapses just as the heroes leave" is a somewhat common trope in fiction. I too have never had that happen in a game, IIRC, as a player or DM. And yet Indiana Jones, Moria, the Brendan Fraser Mummy movie, the Goonies etc etc. Tamoachan floods, I guess?
DeleteI do know that in Detroit a lot of buildings have been destroyed for insurance scams of some kind.
DeleteBut yeah, cmrsalmon - such a good observation and one I have never thought of before. It's true. Dungeons in fiction *do* very often collapse just as the heroes leave. Now there's a subject for a blog post.
DeleteI believe that Johnstone Metzger's "The Nightmares Underneath" (an OSR retro-clone) has a mechanism whereby removing the key treasure item from a dungeon collapses it as it's pulled back into the nightmare realm. There's a kind of calculation that players have to do about whether they want to return to a dungeon with lower levels still unexplored, and if so, whether they're willing to leave the treasure in place (and leave the outside world exposed to the horrors that emanate from the dungeon's opening).
DeleteWhat are you supposed to kill though? And what tries to kill you? This type of dungeon would be a bigger paradigm shift than you think.
ReplyDeleteThis would be a kind of Hidden World setting, like Call of Cthulhu or Dark Conspiracy, where monsters and the humans who work with them lurk in the ruined areas of cities, hulks of Old industrial parks on the outskirts, abandoned suburbs, and rural ghost towns and mansions.
DeleteMaybe it is like X-Files, but with treasure. Kids On Bikes but with adults. Or even a Gaimanesque Fairy World Just Out of Sight except for the adventurers and the victims...
Could also be Collapse World, with protected high tech arcologies in the old downtowns or expansive luxury bunkers for the rich and powerful, ruins and hardscrabble misery for everyone else. Kinda like our future in about 15 to 20 years, give or take...
DeleteInspired by a 2016 incident in Kansas City, I had a go at this.
DeleteSJB
https://the180fantasyproject.wordpress.com/2022/08/25/mean-streets/
Hmm, as a foreigner living in London whose pre-pandemic travel was focused on historic sites, I don't get that feel for the country _at all_. Yay, blinders and overpriced real-estate?
ReplyDeleteThe "OSR Megadungeon Around Us" reminds me of some blog author who described explorations through the ruins of a massive imperial capital city, the half-ruined half-inhabited cities from swords & sorcery, the twin ruins-and-settlement RPG settings like New Pavis & Pavis or Lesserton & Mor.
London is sui generis. It is nothing like the rest of the country.
DeleteI think this is the game that 50% of the authors of Changeling: the Dreaming thought they were writing.
ReplyDeleteDown the road from my house is a precinct that used to be a prison. It is now in the process of being redeveloped into a shopping centre with a set of high-rise apartments around it. The space is a patchwork of old stone walls and new construction, bougie housing, a cinema, areas that are heritage listed and so must be maintained in their historical form, and others which for whatever reason are left derelict or filled with industrial rubbish. Most oddly, the shopping centre "pays tribute" to the historical prison with huge words printed on the walls such as "DISCIPLINE" and "ROCK BREAKING GANGS".
ReplyDeleteThe overall impression is not quite of a megadungeon but more of a semi-habited urban area like Gormenghast or Wolfe's Citadel.
A lot of cities throughout history have had this character when in decline, e.g. Rome in the Middle Ages, Byzantium before it fell, Delhi during the Anarchy.
Off-topic, but this reminded me of another shopping centre, but one at the opposite end of its life.
DeleteWhen I was in Portugal, we went on the "Worst Tour of Porto", (which was hands-down the best guided tour I've ever been on). The tour explored the architecture, history and politics of parts of the city which tourists don't often visit,.
The highlight for me was a 70s edge-of-town shopping centre which had been superseded by larger, easier to drive to shopping centres further out on the ring road. Not quite an urban dungeon, though it had that peculiar beauty of the abandoned and decayed, and it had subsequently been squatted by musicians. Now, every one of the hundred-or-so shops is a rehearsal studio for a different band. It was glorious!