How to shape a devastated city?

[Balor01]

Here is the story: A Very Large Merchant City got cut off from most trade partners in the World due to the Cataclysm. Prior to this event this was a bustling merchant hub with all sorts of guilds, temples, nobility, several non-humanoid notable characters (dragons, lammasu, etc.). Worst of all, powerful spells got dissipated and can no longer be cast, but luckily this was not a floating city.

What would the effects of such an event be? Good clerics managed to set up several "milk rice producers", basically permanent "Produce food and water" constructs and do try to maintain order, but that seems like a lost hope. Many of the gods also died in Cataclysm, so things took even darker turn. In centuries, pantheon will rebalance, but it will take time.

How should I properly shape a setting for a campaign in such a city?

thanks

[Crake]

Here is the story: A Very Large Merchant City got cut off from most trade partners in the World due to the Cataclysm. Prior to this event this was a bustling merchant hub with all sorts of guilds, temples, nobility, several non-humanoid notable characters (dragons, lammasu, etc.). Worst of all, powerful spells got dissipated and can no longer be cast, but luckily this was not a floating city.

What would the effects of such an event be? Good clerics managed to set up several "milk rice producers", basically permanent "Produce food and water" constructs and do try to maintain order, but that seems like a lost hope. Many of the gods also died in Cataclysm, so things took even darker turn. In centuries, pantheon will rebalance, but it will take time.

How should I properly shape a setting for a campaign in such a city?

thanks

Did arcane magic also die in this cataclysm?

[hymer]

Cities are grown on trade. Take the trade away and they die quickly. The dominant theme to start with, once immediate survival is secured, is emigration. There will be a lot of people who become unemployed virtually overnight. Unless someone manages to soak up all this excess labour, they will need to leave, even if the food is free (free food could put landowners out of business, btw., unless they manage to adapt to the situation). People still need clothes and housing, and they will want hope that things will improve for them. The city will enter a rapid downwards spiral as reductions of the economy means loss of population, which again leads to economic drops, etc. This will continue until the city recovers its economical equilibrium.

[MrBright01]

Well, short term, massed violence against those who have goods of value (merchants, vendors, rich folk), which ends in either the death of the upper and middle classes (and most of the people capable of keeping the city going), or militery control (and a loss of much of the population of the city).

If the city was unprepared for the loss of magic, or panic was too bad, or the right kind of cataclysm happened, fire might claim huge swaths of the city. Basically, there would be dead zones where only the most desperate venture, surrounded by a ring of super-poor and desperate, surrounded by the rest of the city.

A few months in, if enough of the population died, or if order was never meaningfully restored, plagues will ravage the city as the dead putrefy and start to ruin the water supply. More dead, and if possible, people will begin fleeing the city for the countryside if feasible. A few months from there, the city is a ghost town, occupied by looters, people who need to hide from other people, and predators.

Oh, and if magical races survived, those who feed off of humans, literally or emotionally, will FLOCK to the dead zones of cities.

[Brookshw]

What's the nature of the cataclysm?

Wild magic zones? Random planar breaches? If some areas permit spells of level x, I assume control of such areas is desirable. Factions fighting for them, alliances etc.

Maybe part if the city collapsed into the underdark or lower parts were sucked through portals to the plane of earth/pandemonium.

Adventures to go find the lost temple of x where 5th level spells can still be cast, go find the nobles house after it fell into a chasm and recover (or destroy/modify) the deeds proving who owns a particular desirable location.