The End Of Empire

The advantages of reading broadly

One effect of making your history reading (whether primary¹ or secondary²) extensive, not intensive, is that when you want to base your setting on real-world examples there may be a better example than the one that first came to mind.

If you actually want to write about Dark Ages Europe, or a thinly veiled fantasy substitute, read as intensively on that era as you like, and the sources permit.

If you want to write about people adventuring in the ruins of a past civilization that fell rather than was conquered, there are, in fact, other options out there.

The fall of Rome, I grant you, is well-documented, and perhaps only the collapse of Chinese dynasties into such things as the Northern and Southern kingdoms or the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period has comparable documentation.

Which is preferable to rip your region off from? China reconstituted itself in a way that the Roman Empire did not, but that may not factor into the period you wish to build. The earlier empire may be more desirable as the backstory, and you decide to use the era that would logically flow from that.

But then, what if they do not suit your taste? What if you wanted a more complete collapse?

You could look at exaggerating their falls, or looking at places such as Britain where the fall of Rome hit particularly hard.

Or you could consider the Mound Builders. They filled the Mississippi River Valley cities and chiefdoms, over the course of centuries. A bit hard to trace owing to a lack of writing, and using mostly perishable artifacts. Still, we have a little writing about them from Spanish explorers. The encounters generally went badly for the explorers, who often were slaughtered, enslaved, or scattered.

Unfortunately for the Mound Builders, none of that stopped the epidemics.

The Mound Builders collapsed owing to catastrophic and rapid depopulation. They collapsed so thoroughly that while some of their descendants connected themselves to the mounds their ancestors built through myths and legends, others were unaware that the hills they lived by were actually artifacts, not natural, let alone built by their own ancestors.

Imagine tribes of goblins wandering a wilderness, ignorant that those odd rock formations are not just natural. You might want a more magically inclined catastrophe to bring down the great goblin civilization, to make the ruins better suited for adventurers -- and to account for the scale, because the scope of the devastation was a confluence of unique factors.

By comparison, the Justinian plagues did a number on the Roman Empire, but nothing so complete. Indeed, one major effect was to increase Christianity, because Christians organized efforts to ensure the sick received food and water, and so survived at a higher rate.

Faring farther afield brings up other possibilities, though less well documented. The Late Bronze Age Collapse is chiefly studied through archaeology. The original thought that it was caused by the eruption of the Iron Age appears to reverse the cause and effect: the Iron Age started because the collapse made it too hard to procure tin and so to make bronze. Did the Sea People invade and cause it? Which might not make it what you want. (On the other hand, just because the Iron Age explanation was debunked does not make it unusable, if suitably altered.³)

Likewise, Classical Maya civilization collapsed -- or just chilled out, as some put it. The empires fell, but the culture went on, with some shifts in locations where it was concentrated. Drought? Invasion? Disease? The disputes rage on. (Fortunately, if you like one, you can steal it for your own civilization even if it ends up rebutted in time.)

The Harappan, or Indus Valley, civilization is also showed a mysterious decline where debated causes include disease and desertification. Also invasion.

The downside of such lesser-known collapses is that they may require digging through more academic writing, and still perhaps not learning as much as is known about the Dark Ages.

And the very differences between them mean that you need to apply spackle plentifully when getting ideas taken from different collapses to work together.

Such is world-building.

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