A Bit of History
There are a few things all these sites have in common, namely that they have been abandoned by their previous occupants, they were forgotten at some point, and they have a rather weird vibe. That last part may seem rather vague or even out there, but its true, lost cities have a strange feel about them. They are rather lonely places, even when you are visiting or working alongside a small cadre of people. The gaping windows, open rooms, discarded artifacts, and even the way the air moves through them lends to a sense of loneliness and gloom. Surprisingly the ones that lie in the desert or other arid environments have this feel, despite the glaring heat of the sun baking all and sundry.
I'll just come out and say it: lost cities are creepy places. Especially when there are burials present. You never lose that feeling that you are being watched, or forget that this was once someone's home. Creepiest of all, when you know the place was abandoned rather catastrophically and you dig up children's toys.
Adventurers in all manner of genres are likely to encounter lost cities of one form or another, and this month's column is dedicated to providing inspiration for designing and exploring these forgotten settlements, be they from real history, on some alien planet, or filled with traps and treasure waiting for pseudo-medieval tomb robbers to come and loot. A lost city can be something as simple as a former mining settlement now a decayed and dilapidated ghost town. It can be as complex as a stone city miles across filled with jungle covered temples and plazas. It can have been constructed of the simplest materials and technologies, as are the two thousand year old ruins of piled stone hunting camps and blinds that dot the mountains of the Great Basin in the Western United States. They may be of the latest technologies, such as an abandoned orbital station found above a distant world. When planning to use a lost city in your game, a few questions need to be answered by both the GM and the players. Namely, who built this thing, what happened to make it abandoned, why it was forgotten, where did the inhabitants go, and what is left behind. The first question will vary greatly from campaign to campaign, and the GM should have some idea on how to answer it. We will take a closer look at the remaining questions below.
Why is No One Here?
This is the primary question that should be asked, for if there is no reason for people to abandon their homes and goods, then the city is not lost, but is still inhabited. There can be a range of factors leading to a city being abandoned, usually separated into push and pull factors. Push factors are things that make people want to leave; in effect they are less of a decision and more of a force. T
These include a loss of critical resources (water and food especially), disease, drought, famine, plague, warfare, shifting trade routes, internal strife, or religious imperatives. The push factor might be one that doesn't necessarily make folks leave, but instead kills them, which is a kind of leaving that works the same for our purposes. If barbarians come over the walls one night with flame and bloody death, slaughtering the inhabitants and dragging the survivors off into slavery, the end result of the city being abandoned is the same as if the wells dried up and everyone left.
Pull factors entice people to leave and go elsewhere. They are attractants that make life over there more appealing then life here. Pull factors are less 'flashy' than push factors and are somewhat more difficult to work with. Basically, they necessitate that there be something else in the region at the same time that will draw not just a few people away from their homes, but enough to leave the city abandoned. These can include: religious fervor, warfare, sudden opportunities such as gold or other resource rush, economic opportunities, land rushes, improved security, or political causes.
Often push and pull factors work together, and it is a rare abandonment that relies on only one cause. A local draught may be particularly bad or long, but it alone is not enough to drive people to abandon their homes. When combined with a gold rush or the preaching of a charismatic religious figure on the other side of the mountains, enough people decide to leave. When determining on the combination of push and pull factors for your lost city, keep in mind that they need not all be contemporaneous or sudden. Often, as has been the case in history, a series of factors spread over years or even generations have led to the abandonment of a city. Rome wasn't built in a day, nor did everyone leave Cahokia in one night.
Why Was the City Forgotten?
Once the reasons for the abandonment have been determined, the next question is why was the city lost? In other words, how come people just forgot about these ruins over there? The simple answer is, they didn't. There are only a few rare cases of a settlement being abandoned where centuries or millennia later there are no records of it, either written, oral, or in the traditions and beliefs of the former inhabitants. After all, if the city is entirely forgotten, how do the PCs find it?
This is the key to designing your lost city, deciding what clues still exist to its former existence, history, and location. The first step in determining any clues is developing why a city has been lost or forgotten in the first place. Take a look at your push and pull factors for why the city was abandoned. If war came to the city and destroyed the population, it is possible that the people responsible for the city's destruction are the ones who remember it. Renown in folklore and song is the day that the People swept over Seven Bridges and slaughtered its inhabitants, tore its mighty stone walls down, and put its buildings to the torch. A city lost to plague or draught may only be remembered by those who once traded with it, peoples who today live far away and have histories or legends that speak of a city out there in the Forbidden Wastes, a city cursed with death that none dare venture towards. Such a city may be intentionally forgotten, its former inhabitants either widely dispersed or slain, its location far off the normal routes of trade and travel because they have been shifted to avoid it.
It may be something as simple as the march of time. Many of the ancient cities of the Americas had been abandoned centuries before a written record (or a written record that can be indentified as such or deciphered) existed. The descendents of those cities may live nearby, but have either forgotten that their ancestors once lived in great cities, or have intermixed with other cultures to the point that they do not even recognize that those who built the ruins were their ancestors. A different people may have migrated in, displacing the lost city's survivors. Legends would likely abound of some strange city or earthworks off in the depths of the forest, half covered in jungle, or tucked away in some hard to reach and inhospitable corner of the canyon lands.
Other reasons exist for a city to be forgotten. A city that has suffered a terrible natural disaster may be all but lost, as was Pompeii during the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 C.E. If your city has slipped beneath the waves, as Port Royal did following the earthquake of 1692, it may sit in water too deep for it to be easily found. In either case, it can be argued that without good records both sites may have been entirely lost (and even so their exact locations may be unknown, as Pompeii's was for some time). Even with good records, those records themselves may be lost or in a language that modern scholars cannot understand.
Finding the lost city, of which only vague rumors exist, is an adventure in itself. Imagine taking the classic dungeon fantasy and twisting it sideways a little. Before they can even begin their delving, the PCs must act as investigators, scouring dusty libraries, talking to locals, analyzing folklore and mythology. Instead of here's the dungeon, play a game of where's the ruin, and you have turned a rather stale concept into something new.
Where Did They Go?
The next question, and one that should have been at least partially answered in why was the city forgotten, is where did they inhabitants go? In all but the most sudden and terrible of disasters, it takes years, if not decades or generations, for a city to empty out. In some cases, it never really does and some few scattered survivors cling on. These survivors can be a handful of families struggling to survive in the ruins, a lone crazed survivor unable or unwilling to leave, or rabid packs of post-apocalyptic mutants who were once the noble and pure inhabitants of the city.
People generally don't just disappear (though that would make a creepy and fun explanation, especially if it is cyclic and the ball is coming back around soon, real soon). Even Pompeii and Port Royal had survivors, and these survivors had to go somewhere. If a city falls to plague, it is possible that the few who survive die later of the after effects. When conquest and war take a city, there are often no survivors, for those who do not die in the battle or are carted off by the victors, afterwards fall to disease, famine, and despair. One of the means by which a city may be totally depopulated is when the city's purpose disappears. Every city exists at its location for a reason, usually economic but also because of geographic, religious, or political factors. If this raison d'être disappears, the city may decline to the point that the inhabitants leave. This is best seen in the ghost towns that dot the American West.
What Remains?
After the last inhabitant has turned out the lights and left, there is the material culture of the city to consider. What you mostly find in these lost cities is trash, garbage, broken tools and leftovers. Midden pits and piles, the detritus of centuries, is valuable to the archaeologist, but of greater value are privies, toilets, and latrines, for they yield much information as to the diets and lifeways of long dead peoples. This isn't what your brave adventurers have struggled across scorching deserts, plunged into dusty archives, or interview countless wise men and women to find. Thus, you should probably stock your lost city with tombs, treasure vaults, traps, guardians, and ancient lore as long lost and forgotten as the city it resides in.
I like to make a rough model of important buildings out of Duplos (the larger version of Legos), and then tell my three year old to wreck it. I then sketch the result, take that sketch and work out the details on graph paper. The result is a believable ruin. This demonstrates the first step in determining what would remain, what was there before the city was lost? Decide what the city looked like at its height, and then apply the push and pull factors to wreck the place. Some of the damage will be the result of destructive forces at the city's fall, but most of it will be caused by the ravages of time. Nothing humans build stays forever (though modern debris will last a long time thanks to plastics), and your lost city will be scoured by blowing sand, baked by the sun, suffer cycles of freezing and thawing through the winter, pelted by rain, and invaded by plants and animals. Lost cities are a wreck, to put it bluntly; the place is all messed up.
Scattered about the ruins are going to be the artifacts and sometimes the remains of the original inhabitants. When people desert a place they take everything they can, if they have time. Note the qualifiers: that they can, if they have time. Your lost city will likely have large numbers of items that have been left behind, some secreted, others intentionally damaged to prevent others from using them. Anything of value that can't be taken will be hidden, and if left behind without some form of protection or concealment, taken by either other inhabitants on their way out or looted. A fair amount of what is left will be broken or otherwise of little or reduced value. If the reason the city was abandoned was sudden and catastrophic, you will likely find a great deal more items of value, as well as more damaged or destroyed artifacts. As people fled the destruction of their city, they likely took what was easily portable and at hand, leaving behind bulky or hard to reach items.
I hope this helps you develop your own lost bits of history. As a small aside, the region of the country I live in has been experiencing a population shrinkage over the past few decades, as well as serious push and pull factors that are causing many of the once prosperous and populous communities to shrink and become little more than ghost towns. Given a few more decades, these communities will disappear, leaving their own forgotten cities for the brave archaeologists of the future to excavate and ponder over. History marches on, and rather it is linear or cyclical in nature, the truth remains that we are all merely bits of history. Next month is August, and to both continue the 'lost' theme and celebrate GenCon Indy I will present The Lost Neighborhoods of Indianapolis. In September the 'lost' trilogy will conclude with a look at lost cities from history (and possibly a few fictional ones as well).
