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View Full Version : DM Help What would survive a millenium in a high desert?



Aotrs Commander
2016-05-02, 09:14 AM
The PCs are going to be exploring a very roughly typical-fantasy-tech-level city whose inhabitents mysteriously disappeared (along with all the other sapient/sentient inhabitents of their planet) about 900-1200 years ago. There are no obvious signs of conflict or disaster (i.e. whatever befell them was a quick but not destructive), akin to the point you could nearly have walked in just after the disaster and the table set for dinner, so to speak.

The city's location is a high desert (e.g. Colorado plateau, to use an example I found on wiki when researching), on the top and bottom of a section of a deep river valley (like a much smaller version of the Grand Canyon).

What, given the age, climate and lack of later looting, plant-growth and much in the way of animal life, sort of accoutrements would we expect to have survived? Would wooden objects still be there? Would other organics be essentially freeze-dried? Would there still be books or tapestries, or would it mostly by now be dust-filled empty rooms with only a few more imperishable metal decorations left?

Knaight
2016-05-02, 09:18 AM
What's the wind like? Dry conditions are really good for preservation, and I'd expect interiors to generally hold up pretty well under most conditions. What's not so good for preservation is sandstorms, and if the area gets heavy wind and is sandy then there is likely to at least be some significant erosion.

Beleriphon
2016-05-02, 09:50 AM
Most none wood structures will have damage, but not significant damage, they should in theory still be inhabitable. Best examples I can reference are Pueblo structures found throughout the South-West United States.

If structures are largely stacked stone block you could expect most of the roofs to have collapsed as well as most wall. This is assume even a minor amount of geological movement. Also even in a desert you could get rain (and in around 1000 years it would only take one freak rain storm), which is going to quickly turn most ground into mud which will rapidly cause ground level erosion so collapsed buildings are pretty much a guaranteed result. For references see the pueblo cultures of the American South-West (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancestral_Puebloans).

Max_Killjoy
2016-05-02, 10:00 AM
These discussions always bring to mind, for me, the following:


I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”


Look at what has survived in Egypt after 2000 to 6000 years.

Aotrs Commander
2016-05-02, 10:13 AM
What's the wind like? Dry conditions are really good for preservation, and I'd expect interiors to generally hold up pretty well under most conditions. What's not so good for preservation is sandstorms, and if the area gets heavy wind and is sandy then there is likely to at least be some significant erosion.


Most none wood structures will have damage, but not significant damage, they should in theory still be inhabitable. Best examples I can reference are Pueblo structures found throughout the South-West United States.

If structures are largely stacked stone block you could expect most of the roofs to have collapsed as well as most wall. This is assume even a minor amount of geological movement. Also even in a desert you could get rain (and in around 1000 years it would only take one freak rain storm), which is going to quickly turn most ground into mud which will rapidly cause ground level erosion so collapsed buildings are pretty much a guaranteed result. For references see the pueblo cultures of the American South-West (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancestral_Puebloans).

The area is in the rain shadow of the continent's west coast, with mountains less than a hundred miles to the south and probably quite a lot less than that to the west. (A tributary to the canyon river flows from the westrern mountains, once a terminating in canals and a loch system.)

By co-incidence more than design, it bears a fair resemblence environmentally to the Colorado Plateau, which is mostly bare rock - though as my familiarity extends only as far as the wiki entry goes, I don't know what the winf-level is like.

By design, I intend the buildings - which are mostly fairly advanced stone archetecture - to be mostly still standing (or at least a modest number). There are still-standing spires and minarets (one of which is intended to be an observatory of sorts) and the remains of the canals. The main one has obvious eroded into a series of waterfalls, and the subsidiary ones are now mostly dry (and thus have survived better).

The big question is what - of anything - they are likely to find inside the more-or-less intact buildings.



I will definitely also be reading up on the Puebloans, since I've never heard of them until now and that stuff is always fascinating. I was looking at a sort of very vaguely-ish MesoAmerican-ish look with bit of Roman construction influence - the PC's base of operations is basically a giant stepped pyramid a hundred miles south belonging to another civilisation which collapsed "naturally" a couple of centuries before the unspecified disappearance - but that might give me other ideas, too!



These discussions always bring to mind, for me, the following:


I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”


Look at what has survived in Egypt after 2000 to 6000 years.

A lot of my quest are PCs pcking around anicent ruins...!

There's a bit of a difference between 2000-6000 and 09-1.2k, though - the archetecture, at least should be in better condition. Thoguh that is a good point to bear in mind - I'd thought about it but largely dismissed it as being too old.

Yora
2016-05-02, 10:30 AM
I think the most destructive force might be frost. Even with minimal moisture, some ice will form in tiny cracks and over centuries that will break a lot of things. Not sure if pottery would survive in such conditions, even indoors.

Maybe some wood would still be preserved, but possibly extremely brittle.

Aotrs Commander
2016-05-02, 10:44 AM
*reads up on ancient Puebloans and their archetecture*

Unholy fracking crap.

*tosses original quest aethetic out window, where it maims a passing small child*

This stuff, is, like, perfect! Right down to multistory buildings! I had, like the major thoroughfare from the cliff-top to the river valleyr as a shallow slope with a central canal as a street, broken into stretches of steps, flanked by not-insulae.

Scratch that, then, we'll instead have the canal going down a narrow gorge, down a down series of stepped plazas, flanked either side by a more chaotic mass of four-or-five story houses, some under the overhang of the cliffs above. And the kivas as religious/ritual/(magical) site are new and novel and would actually tie very nicely into the main goal of the quest. (Which is "PCs find source of power emanations they're looking fro coming from malfunctioning magic demon containment unit.") Said contianment units were intended to be underground in a complex bored into the cliff-wall on the valley floor - so I'll stead have them in a series of Grand Kivas, bored deep into the cliffside in the valley floor.

The spires can be - aside from the observatory one - tower kivas, and further, the number of kivas in a settlement suggests why there are plenty of them.



On top of that, the Puebloans are known for pottery - so, sort of by definition, that means, at least, there should be pottery about (something I tend not to think about, because I tend to think about wooden furniture, paper and fabrics.)

sktarq
2016-05-02, 10:57 AM
One thing to note. When the Long Valley people's built places like Mesa Verde the environment was rather different-it was a dry forest largely as shown with Strontium Isotopes of support beams and Pack Rat midden studies. Jared Diamond's book Collapse has a good breakdown of this and the distinction that allowed the related/decendent culture of the Puebo peoples to thrive in its place (decentralization mostly).

Yes soft good would survive (although be rare) - also where streams reach the valley there would be more waterfalls of the type you originally mentioned. Also remember that much of the valley floor was given over to farming.

Aotrs Commander
2016-05-02, 11:44 AM
One thing to note. When the Long Valley people's built places like Mesa Verde the environment was rather different-it was a dry forest largely as shown with Strontium Isotopes of support beams and Pack Rat midden studies. Jared Diamond's book Collapse has a good breakdown of this and the distinction that allowed the related/decendent culture of the Puebo peoples to thrive in its place (decentralization mostly).

Yes soft good would survive (although be rare) - also where streams reach the valley there would be more waterfalls of the type you originally mentioned. Also remember that much of the valley floor was given over to farming.

We can finagle around that too, actually - since the the tributary that feeds in to the city comes from the rain-shadow-causing mountains, the river leads into the forested area. The idea being that the city would have essentially gotten its wealth prinicpally from being in a prime location to control the trnasportation of wood from the mountains downstream (north) to the other areas - and presumably for ceremonial reasons as well (or even mineral ones). I imagine the "grand canyon light" to be steep sided and only a few hundred yards wide, so there would probably be not a great deal of room for farming (though that's a consideration I'd not givne much thought to yet - perhaps the farms were mostly down stream).

I'm just starting to watch a documentary fom the discovery/history channel I found on youtube amnd the more I look into it, the more I'm gobsmacked that I couldn't have found a better historical analogue if I'd actually just started with the Anasazi as an influence! They're even in the exact geographic area I'd inadvertently used as an example when I looked up high desert! Right down to the mysterious abdandonment of the settlements (soe of which might be documentary hyperbole, perhaps, but you've got to admit, it's damn-well appropriate to consider here...!)

Life mirrors art indeed!

Thanks indeed for bringing them up, Beleriphon - this has REALLY helped in giving me something extra to flavour the adventure with - I was floundering a little, but this inspiration is one of those times where everything falls into place!



Edit: Fascinating. Documentatry was very interesting (if perhaps aimed a tpuch lower than I'd have preferred). It also helped me get a much better feel for the environments. It's more scrub than bare rock (asdjusted descripton therein). Things found preserved was VERY interesting. One cliff-side settlement (and by frag, I'd say you couldn't make this stuff up, but I very nearly DID!) actually had ears of corn still in the fireplace after 900 years. And in Pueblo Bonito, there were still original wooden supports in situ in the surviving intact room. The whole history actually, with some embelishment, actually can be fitted neatly to this civilisation.

If one were to postuate that the anicent city-dweller culture was forced into the canyons by a combination of drought and enemies - or perhaps a faction of their relgious order that, when the droughts came, demanded human(ish) sacrifice to sate the gods and resorted to force. The people adanonded their city (located elswehre in thsi desert and scattered to the cyons, building settlements against the walls and the ancient Puebloans did. There they remained, and this city became more and more powerful become a Pueblo Bonito of its own, streching back up to the top of the cliff and getting powerful enoguh to mae the locks. Perhaps originally, the task of getting the wood ffrom the tributary to the canyon floor was done by back-breaking labour - or perhaps clerical magics. These clerical-tpes became ever more powerful and you get a city run as principally a theocracy, controlling a site of now religious importance that was also an important trade crossroads.

And, as a backdrop, perhaps at the time coming up to the grand disappearance of all the races on the world, this civilisation was starting to have new troubles and was already on the decline. Perhaps a new drought was starting and casuing more friciton among the populace, perhaps an element were starting to hink the old searcifical priests had the right idea.... And then, thney caught wind of the coming cataclysm. (This was part of the original plot.) Not knowing what sort of thing it would be, they assumed it was something they could fight. Desparate to keep their control, the priests and mages conducted these demon-summoning chambers, using the deepest and most sacred - and secret - kivas as they basis, so that when the cataclysm came, the demons would be released to fight for them against it. But when it came, it was not something that they could fight, and they vanished before the chambers could be opened.

Skip 900-1200 years, and the PCs detect the emanation coming off from one of these now-malfunctioning chambers when they use their off-world Gate and go to investigate.

So they will be able to find, in some of the better protected and intact structures, writings that may (once translated) shead some light on the dyign civilisation - and discover, at least,if not the nature of the race-erasing catastrophy, at least what it was NOT...

birdman3131
2016-05-02, 01:13 PM
Not sure how close to colorado you are looking to get but I used to live up there so i'll try and recall the climate and how it might damage stuff.

Zipcode 81143 if you want to look it up.

We had less rain annually that the Sahara desert. We never got much above 80-90F during the day. In the winter we could hit -30F to -40F We would have 70F temperature swings at times.


When it did rain it rained hard. only a couple times a year though. The ground was entirely sand (At least down to about 6 feet. We never dug further.) You could water plants 3 times a day and they would still be dehydrated.

We had a ton of wind. 30-40 MPH winds were common. 70-80 was not unheard of. This combines with the sand can do a number over the years.

The only time the wind ever stopped was for 2 weeks after we stuck up a windmill to generate electricity. Before and after that it just about always blowing somewhat.

About once a year a cloud of termites would fly through for a week or so.

Beleriphon
2016-05-02, 01:16 PM
Right down to the mysterious abdandonment of the settlements (soe of which might be documentary hyperbole, perhaps, but you've got to admit, it's damn-well appropriate to consider here...!)

Life mirrors art indeed!

Thanks indeed for bringing them up, Beleriphon - this has REALLY helped in giving me something extra to flavour the adventure with - I was floundering a little, but this inspiration is one of those times where everything falls into place!

I aim to please.

As for documentary hyperbole, it is to a degree. But there's no clear reason why some many pueblo culture settlements were abandoned. Archaeologists have theories, but none of the have any specific evidence that couldn't be applied to a different theory.

As a quick aside you want some neat info check out the Acoma Pueblo which is a traditionally built pueblo village that is still occupied the descendants of the original inhabitants. Taos Pueblo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taos_Pueblo) is similar.

viesal
2016-05-02, 02:29 PM
I wouldnt lol

Gildedragon
2016-05-02, 02:39 PM
Another high dessert: the andean altiplano: wood keeps quite well, their architecture is wonderfully cyclopean and stone heavy...

Gildedragon
2016-05-02, 02:41 PM
I think the most destructive force might be frost. Even with minimal moisture, some ice will form in tiny cracks and over centuries that will break a lot of things. Not sure if pottery would survive in such conditions, even indoors.

Maybe some wood would still be preserved, but possibly extremely brittle.

Pottery is artificial rock; even if nothing else survives, pots endure. The biggest risk they have is getting hit by something hard.

In a v dry and stable environment stuff will keep great: textiles, wood, skin...

Cealocanth
2016-05-02, 04:45 PM
If you're thinking something like the Pueblo mesa, then you're probably good with anything made of clay, brick, or stone. Those things may collapse or topple or break, but their remnants will still be there assuming something doesn't deliberately try to destroy them.

Wood is an interesting question. One one hand, the dry climate will likely keep the wood from wearing out, but if exposed to the surface, then the aforementioned termites will likely get to the wood and take it out. In deserts, where there lacks in natural bacterial and fungal decomposition, it is made up for in insects and the like. Textiles will be eaten by moths eventually, wood will be broken down by termites and ants, leather will be eaten by flies if it gets wet, or dry out and crumble into fragments over time. After 1000 years, you are not likely to see any standing wood structures if there has been no maintenance.

However, this is an area with frequent flash floods. Wooden objects, textiles, cultural artifacts, unfortunate animals and people, will be buried beneath the dust. There they will be kept nice and safe, leading to a wealth of archaeological remnants of the peoples who once lived there. If they dealt in precious materials, you are also likely to find some literal buried treasure. They won't be like new - not by a longshot - but compared to somewhere with more moisture, there will be more archaeological remnants in the dust, generally.

Gildedragon
2016-05-02, 05:42 PM
In the US SW a lot of wood is preserved above surface at pueblos and the like (which is why dendrochronology is a thing there), textiles and seeds also keep quite well, though those have mostly been in caves.

In the Altiplano in the Andes everything keeps by the combination of dryness and subfreezing temperatures (which essentially dryfreeze stuff): hence the mountain and salt mummies (human and camelid) from the region, the dessicated potatoes (the dryfreeze phenomenon was exploited to process a certain type of potato and turn it from a mildly poisonous, bitter thing into an edible delicacy), etcetera.

RazorChain
2016-05-06, 05:49 AM
These discussions always bring to mind, for me, the following:

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”


Look at what has survived in Egypt after 2000 to 6000 years.


In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows:—
"I am great OZYMANDIAS," saith the stone,
"The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
"The wonders of my hand."— The City's gone,—
Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.

We wonder,—and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.