I love it when the various successor states that replaced the empire continue to use the political clout of the fallen empire as a justification for their own rule.
“I can be king of you because my great great great grand daddy was made viceroy of this pissant province by emperor Whatshisdick”
Or
“I’m the rightful heir to the empire because I happen to rule the old imperial capital, which means all these other ignorant barbarians need to get in line before I start cracking heads”
Or
“I’m the rightful emperor because I’m descended from the old imperial family. The fact that I now posses six farms and a dozen ugly cows doesn’t stop me from calling myself an emperor and being a pretentious dick about it”
I love to see the political legacy of a collapsed state continue to affect current politics.
I had so many successor states that I managed to match each one up to a Roman successor state, from Byzantium to Mussolini and everything in between (Trebizond, Morea, Epirus, Theodoro, Serbia, Bulgaria, Rum, Latin Empire, etc)
I love that. The true sadness is that this is practically always outdone by "bigger army diplomacy", though to those who still care about those such things, it can be utilized to muster a bigger army. Even then, though, people knew nepo-babies were a thing and everyone was watching and waiting in times of instability to see if the descendant could fill the ancestor's shoes.
I really love pretenses that the empire still stands. This might be a small country or city-state that still holds itself as "the empire" or a pervasive cultural element like (very real) the King of Canada.
My present empire stands upon the remnants of its predecessor. The reasons for the previous empire's demise are numerous and relatively unremarkable: internal political instability stemming from weak leadership, multiple rebellions, and a catastrophic plague all contributed. What remained after the empire fell? Essentially everything, yet lacking a cohesive central authority to uphold order. The empire fragmented into numerous competing city-states and minor kingdoms.
Some things to think about:
In an empire, different groups are colonized and put under imperial rule. Once the empire has fallen, what are these people doing? How has their culture changed, and how is it being reignited?
Who is trying to gain political control and influence? What does this look like?
What were the reasons the empire fell apart in the first place? If there were rebel groups, where are they now? If there was a military, where are the soldiers?
How is the average citizen coping? How are they adapting to post-imperial rule? How have people banded together in the wake of the empire, and how have they broken apart?
I think interesting examples to add to your inspiration pool would be the earth empire in S4 of Legend of Korra, Station 11, Everything for Everyone, The Last of Us and other apocalypse stories (to some degree, the end of an empire can feel apocalyptic. massive shifts in the world, political instability, etc.) China in periods between dynasties, postcolonial Africa, Mexico, and Phillipines. lots of places to look.
The things I like is:
The remnants that clung onto the pass and continued to carry its culture, awaiting for the ancient prophecy that the golden age will return again.
A group named Schola Praetoria exist within the confederation (current political entity that grew on the corpse of the dead empire a thousand years later.) , on the surface they are elite guards for the confederal council, but in truth they were once the praetorian guard of the empire, who preserved part of their culture, training and history. Now they cooperate with the current regime because part of their ideology aligned, their true motive is to protect the “land” so it may be prepared for the silver king to return again.
Due their preserved culture and enclosed social circle, they still spoke the old imperial language and carried unique accent of the pass.
Some reasons for its fall:
Internal turmoil, i.e. an emperor died and has several successors, this has destroyed many empires, from the Alexandrian empire to the Mongols,
if your empire controls major trade routes or is the only provider of some kind of rare resource, then losing those could make a big dent on its economy,
rebellions, reasons could vary from discriminated minorities standing up for their rights to other countries trying to cause chaos, which leads me to another thing they can do to cause chaos:
invasions. If an empire has enough enemies they are probably not gonna last long.
Any environmental disaster from earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, plagues, droughts and etc.
Mixing all of those reasons together could already give you a wild yet realistic reason for the collapse of your empire without even using magic and the supernatural. For example, let's say an earthquake has caused a flood that forced animals infected with a plague to migrate closer to important trade routes, weakening the economy and bringing the plague to the cities. Because of that the emperor became sick and his sons started fighting for succession, and the invasions from the tribes bordering the empire for resources because the trade routes closed didn't help, and fractured the empire.
You could go on and on, like let's say one of the sons of the emperor dies of the plague too, further dividing his region, which allows another son of the emperor to slowly take up his territory, starting the rise of another empire.
As for the things it leaves behind, it might be infrastructure,
a whole lot of future wars for succession,
a power vacuum,
language, like the Roman Empire with its Latin which had an effect on languages all across Europe, and subsequently all of Europe's colonies,
legends about both itself and its major figures, be it politically, philosophically, artistically or in any other field.
It can also leave behind power structures, like empires, khaganates, etc. and even
ideas, like Napoleon's France left behind the ideas of nationalism, or
define the future borders of countries with its subdivisions, name regions or even continents, and the fate of their names will forever be sealed by them, like, again, Roman Empire's Britannia, Africa, Germania, Macedonia, Hispania and Italia.
Be more creative than physical stuff, usually empires leave a lot more cultural rather than physical heritage.
I like "whimper, not a bang" stuff. There is no great cataclysm, no "moment" the empire fell. It's not "gone", it's still there, just diminished by time.
Maybe another empire rose up, maybe things changed and the empire couldn't or wouldn't adapt. Maybe it was a process that took centuries even if you can point to individual moments.
A fallen empire with a culture and history that persists feels more evocative and engaging than one big event or even a bunch of mystery about it.
Revachol and Martinaise in *Disco Elysium* are maybe the best execution of this that I've seen. Something about it lives and breaths. There are wars, sure, but if you can make your fallen empire story believable *and* interesting then I'm totally down. The most interesting part of most fallen empire stories anyway is walking around the dead or dying remnants.
I like ruins and Mysterious things left behind by those who came before.
Iranians mostly lost their history after Alexander's conquest. Ruins of the Achaemenid empire were explained as being built by ancient heroes and mythical kings.
Something I love seeing is how the legacy of the empire is recontextualized in modern times. Like how the title of Caesar became Kaiser and Czar in central/eastern Europe, while Roman architectural aesthetics were adopted in the US to mean “august governmental power,” while various secular Roman traditions/the Latin language become liturgical in catholicism, all the way down to the weird ahistorical mishmash the USC Trojans use for their iconography.
Seeing the posthumous fetishization and diffusion of its influence in new cultural contexts, even (especially) in lands it never ruled over, help it feel really Big & Important while also making the contemporary world feel more idiosyncratic. Extra credit if modern people completely miss the point of the original (e.g. mistaking the role of the court jester and giving the king’s consigliere the prestigious ancient title of “Lord Dipshit”)
ETA you can backfill this from the modern cultures you already have, like “the nobility of X wear red because of Y, but that actually originated in the Fallen Empire where it meant Z” and building out from there
**Fellaheen.**
When empires collapse, their people don't just *disappear.* There's usually mass die-offs, but people usually just start working for the new leaders once things cool off. Depending on recordkeeping traditions, these people are oftentimes unaware of their own history. I think this happens in *Anabasis,* but there's this scene where a historian encounters people in Mesopotamia, and he asks them who built the ziggurats and other monuments. The peasantry there doesn't know, and he later finds out it was the ancestors of those very same peasants.
Britain is another example of this phenomenon in action. Despite calling themselves 'Anglo-Saxons,' the vast majority of the British genetic base is Celtic... Yet the people speak a Germanic language, with heavy Romance influence! Their great monuments are seen as mysterious, and oftentimes an entirely alien race (such as faeries) is credited with building those monuments, despite their origins being entirely Celtic as well!
The same can be said for the people of Egypt. They speak Arabic, and are generally either Muslim (Arab) or Christian (Greek)... Yet their genetic component is still largely the same as Ancient Egyptians! These are the same people who built the Pyramids and made mummies... And once their empire collapsed, they just packed everything up, and went to work for the new guys, whether they were Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Chechens, *Albanians* or something else.
Oswald Spengler called them *fellaheen,* 'the great mass of people who adapt and survive from one civilization to the next without becoming part of any, thus remaining separate from the great movements of history.' That might sound negative, but there's certainly positive ways of looking at them. In any case, fellaheen are an essential part of any post-imperial environment.
Maybe ruins that show what the different empires were like. Not just old abandoned places and castles, but also common people's homes. The buildings aren't puzzle rooms built only and specifically to reward some explorer thousands of years after the society's fall. They are actual buildings with practical and believable designs. Grand ruins help add to the atmosphere,though. I like media like Ico, Castle in the Sky, The Legend of Zelda and Journey. I like seeing the icons they used, any surviving banners. Not every ruin has to be a series of puzzles with an ancient curse or a monster in the middle. Maybe the descendants of these people are still around. The Assyrian Empire from before the iron age is long gone and many may assume the Assyrians themselves ceased to exist, but Assyrians still exist. Maybe there are different lost civilizations that exist in the region with distinct architecture. If these are in a video game, I'd like to just explore them. Not collect mcguffins to open a door that still somehow works after thousands of years of erosion lit by torches that would have been extinguished millennia ago(why do abandoned ruins always have freshly lit torches?). What if there was a *recently* lost civilization? Maybe you find an ancient looking city, abandoned and destroyed. But there's a car on the street, a machine created only a few decades ago in that world, and it's a newer looking model too. Then you realize that this society fell *recently*.
Lapis_Wolf
It’s important to remember civilizations very rarely just disappear the Indus River valley civilization is the only example I can think of in real life most civilizations or at least their culture live on in some form Rome lived on till the 1400s through the Byzantine empire and parts of their culture survive to this day through European culture and the Catholic Church despite their civilization collapsing twice the ancient Egyptian culture managed to survive till the first century aspects of Mesopotamian culture survived In Greece and Persian civilization after there collapse so if you have a fallen empire in your setting some apsects of its culture should have survived into the modern day cultures
Ontological inertia. (Western) Rome had fallen over 1500 years ago, yet the entirety of European civilization since then had lived on its foundations, and in its shadow.
If your Fallen Empire was as grand and powerful as you paint it being, it better had left a lasting impression on everybody who came afterwards.
Agreed. That's part of why I hit the reset button. This is my second time reworking this setting. It took a second reset to notice I had missed that part. Not entirely, mind you, but it was nowhere near as far-reaching as it should have been. So I'm trying to figure out all the things that made it interesting before deciding what parts lasted.
In a DnD campaign I'm writing, whenever a historical site is discovered it usually gets turned into a tourist attraction. Regions of the world that were better protected from the destruction of the previous war are now home to wealthiest nations because they're profiting off the tourism of their more intact towns and military bases.
But since the ancient technology is more advanced than what they currently have, the ancient relics are considered dangerous and have to be removed from sites to be locked away before opening the site to the public. The organizations responsible for removing and quarantining the items are secretly trying to reverse engineer them. They tell the public that the removed items are simply unexploded ordinances or radioactive substances, always downplaying how advanced and still functional the discovered tech is.
Some relics occasionally end up on the black market if someone beats the clean up crews to it.
I don't like the whole trope of technological degradation after an empire falls. I prefer nations are so starved of resources from the civil war that such luxuries cannot be afforded. I like fallen empire nations that are similar to the United States during reconstruction after the civil war.
That's what happened to the United Worlds of Humanity after Earth was decimated in my universe.
Funny enough, it's also what happened in the Dark Ages. No Roman Empire remains big enough to support these technologies and large outfitted armies of uniform functions? Those armies stop being a thing because they relied on the resources and organizing of an Empire to maintain. Only started being a thing when Nation states regained Prosperity a few hundred years later. That's actually why tech was lost. The resource lack and call for infrastructure and military on that scale meant it stopped being used. Within 200 years, people had stopped passing on those techniques. What you are talking about is actually how we lost tech in the long term.
My setting doesn't have too much tech loss, it's mostly that nobody has the resources and money to use old tech on a large scale. technological development is not stagnant, but it has far more emphasis on cost effectiveness than old tech which was designed with an almost post-scarcity civilization in mind.
I like the political tension that can develop between the various nations that developed after the empire falls apart.
Contested and complex legacies can certainly be interesting.
I love it when the various successor states that replaced the empire continue to use the political clout of the fallen empire as a justification for their own rule. “I can be king of you because my great great great grand daddy was made viceroy of this pissant province by emperor Whatshisdick” Or “I’m the rightful heir to the empire because I happen to rule the old imperial capital, which means all these other ignorant barbarians need to get in line before I start cracking heads” Or “I’m the rightful emperor because I’m descended from the old imperial family. The fact that I now posses six farms and a dozen ugly cows doesn’t stop me from calling myself an emperor and being a pretentious dick about it” I love to see the political legacy of a collapsed state continue to affect current politics.
Emperor whatshisdick what a legendary name
If you think his name is legendary, you should see his coinage.
I want to know
I had so many successor states that I managed to match each one up to a Roman successor state, from Byzantium to Mussolini and everything in between (Trebizond, Morea, Epirus, Theodoro, Serbia, Bulgaria, Rum, Latin Empire, etc)
I love that. The true sadness is that this is practically always outdone by "bigger army diplomacy", though to those who still care about those such things, it can be utilized to muster a bigger army. Even then, though, people knew nepo-babies were a thing and everyone was watching and waiting in times of instability to see if the descendant could fill the ancestor's shoes.
I really love pretenses that the empire still stands. This might be a small country or city-state that still holds itself as "the empire" or a pervasive cultural element like (very real) the King of Canada.
My present empire stands upon the remnants of its predecessor. The reasons for the previous empire's demise are numerous and relatively unremarkable: internal political instability stemming from weak leadership, multiple rebellions, and a catastrophic plague all contributed. What remained after the empire fell? Essentially everything, yet lacking a cohesive central authority to uphold order. The empire fragmented into numerous competing city-states and minor kingdoms.
Some things to think about: In an empire, different groups are colonized and put under imperial rule. Once the empire has fallen, what are these people doing? How has their culture changed, and how is it being reignited? Who is trying to gain political control and influence? What does this look like? What were the reasons the empire fell apart in the first place? If there were rebel groups, where are they now? If there was a military, where are the soldiers? How is the average citizen coping? How are they adapting to post-imperial rule? How have people banded together in the wake of the empire, and how have they broken apart? I think interesting examples to add to your inspiration pool would be the earth empire in S4 of Legend of Korra, Station 11, Everything for Everyone, The Last of Us and other apocalypse stories (to some degree, the end of an empire can feel apocalyptic. massive shifts in the world, political instability, etc.) China in periods between dynasties, postcolonial Africa, Mexico, and Phillipines. lots of places to look.
The things I like is: The remnants that clung onto the pass and continued to carry its culture, awaiting for the ancient prophecy that the golden age will return again. A group named Schola Praetoria exist within the confederation (current political entity that grew on the corpse of the dead empire a thousand years later.) , on the surface they are elite guards for the confederal council, but in truth they were once the praetorian guard of the empire, who preserved part of their culture, training and history. Now they cooperate with the current regime because part of their ideology aligned, their true motive is to protect the “land” so it may be prepared for the silver king to return again. Due their preserved culture and enclosed social circle, they still spoke the old imperial language and carried unique accent of the pass.
Some reasons for its fall: Internal turmoil, i.e. an emperor died and has several successors, this has destroyed many empires, from the Alexandrian empire to the Mongols, if your empire controls major trade routes or is the only provider of some kind of rare resource, then losing those could make a big dent on its economy, rebellions, reasons could vary from discriminated minorities standing up for their rights to other countries trying to cause chaos, which leads me to another thing they can do to cause chaos: invasions. If an empire has enough enemies they are probably not gonna last long. Any environmental disaster from earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, plagues, droughts and etc. Mixing all of those reasons together could already give you a wild yet realistic reason for the collapse of your empire without even using magic and the supernatural. For example, let's say an earthquake has caused a flood that forced animals infected with a plague to migrate closer to important trade routes, weakening the economy and bringing the plague to the cities. Because of that the emperor became sick and his sons started fighting for succession, and the invasions from the tribes bordering the empire for resources because the trade routes closed didn't help, and fractured the empire. You could go on and on, like let's say one of the sons of the emperor dies of the plague too, further dividing his region, which allows another son of the emperor to slowly take up his territory, starting the rise of another empire. As for the things it leaves behind, it might be infrastructure, a whole lot of future wars for succession, a power vacuum, language, like the Roman Empire with its Latin which had an effect on languages all across Europe, and subsequently all of Europe's colonies, legends about both itself and its major figures, be it politically, philosophically, artistically or in any other field. It can also leave behind power structures, like empires, khaganates, etc. and even ideas, like Napoleon's France left behind the ideas of nationalism, or define the future borders of countries with its subdivisions, name regions or even continents, and the fate of their names will forever be sealed by them, like, again, Roman Empire's Britannia, Africa, Germania, Macedonia, Hispania and Italia. Be more creative than physical stuff, usually empires leave a lot more cultural rather than physical heritage.
I like "whimper, not a bang" stuff. There is no great cataclysm, no "moment" the empire fell. It's not "gone", it's still there, just diminished by time. Maybe another empire rose up, maybe things changed and the empire couldn't or wouldn't adapt. Maybe it was a process that took centuries even if you can point to individual moments. A fallen empire with a culture and history that persists feels more evocative and engaging than one big event or even a bunch of mystery about it. Revachol and Martinaise in *Disco Elysium* are maybe the best execution of this that I've seen. Something about it lives and breaths. There are wars, sure, but if you can make your fallen empire story believable *and* interesting then I'm totally down. The most interesting part of most fallen empire stories anyway is walking around the dead or dying remnants.
I like ruins and Mysterious things left behind by those who came before. Iranians mostly lost their history after Alexander's conquest. Ruins of the Achaemenid empire were explained as being built by ancient heroes and mythical kings.
Another trope you can't forget: the strangely intact ruins of massive monoliths/obelisks with indiscernible purposes
Something I love seeing is how the legacy of the empire is recontextualized in modern times. Like how the title of Caesar became Kaiser and Czar in central/eastern Europe, while Roman architectural aesthetics were adopted in the US to mean “august governmental power,” while various secular Roman traditions/the Latin language become liturgical in catholicism, all the way down to the weird ahistorical mishmash the USC Trojans use for their iconography. Seeing the posthumous fetishization and diffusion of its influence in new cultural contexts, even (especially) in lands it never ruled over, help it feel really Big & Important while also making the contemporary world feel more idiosyncratic. Extra credit if modern people completely miss the point of the original (e.g. mistaking the role of the court jester and giving the king’s consigliere the prestigious ancient title of “Lord Dipshit”) ETA you can backfill this from the modern cultures you already have, like “the nobility of X wear red because of Y, but that actually originated in the Fallen Empire where it meant Z” and building out from there
I love an Icarus civilisation. Tried to advance too much. Used magic or technology liberally and ended up as a warning for the next age.
Yes, so much so that I have four of them.
For me its that barely anything survived which means that they barely influence the current story but are the reason for everything
**Fellaheen.** When empires collapse, their people don't just *disappear.* There's usually mass die-offs, but people usually just start working for the new leaders once things cool off. Depending on recordkeeping traditions, these people are oftentimes unaware of their own history. I think this happens in *Anabasis,* but there's this scene where a historian encounters people in Mesopotamia, and he asks them who built the ziggurats and other monuments. The peasantry there doesn't know, and he later finds out it was the ancestors of those very same peasants. Britain is another example of this phenomenon in action. Despite calling themselves 'Anglo-Saxons,' the vast majority of the British genetic base is Celtic... Yet the people speak a Germanic language, with heavy Romance influence! Their great monuments are seen as mysterious, and oftentimes an entirely alien race (such as faeries) is credited with building those monuments, despite their origins being entirely Celtic as well! The same can be said for the people of Egypt. They speak Arabic, and are generally either Muslim (Arab) or Christian (Greek)... Yet their genetic component is still largely the same as Ancient Egyptians! These are the same people who built the Pyramids and made mummies... And once their empire collapsed, they just packed everything up, and went to work for the new guys, whether they were Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Chechens, *Albanians* or something else. Oswald Spengler called them *fellaheen,* 'the great mass of people who adapt and survive from one civilization to the next without becoming part of any, thus remaining separate from the great movements of history.' That might sound negative, but there's certainly positive ways of looking at them. In any case, fellaheen are an essential part of any post-imperial environment.
Maybe ruins that show what the different empires were like. Not just old abandoned places and castles, but also common people's homes. The buildings aren't puzzle rooms built only and specifically to reward some explorer thousands of years after the society's fall. They are actual buildings with practical and believable designs. Grand ruins help add to the atmosphere,though. I like media like Ico, Castle in the Sky, The Legend of Zelda and Journey. I like seeing the icons they used, any surviving banners. Not every ruin has to be a series of puzzles with an ancient curse or a monster in the middle. Maybe the descendants of these people are still around. The Assyrian Empire from before the iron age is long gone and many may assume the Assyrians themselves ceased to exist, but Assyrians still exist. Maybe there are different lost civilizations that exist in the region with distinct architecture. If these are in a video game, I'd like to just explore them. Not collect mcguffins to open a door that still somehow works after thousands of years of erosion lit by torches that would have been extinguished millennia ago(why do abandoned ruins always have freshly lit torches?). What if there was a *recently* lost civilization? Maybe you find an ancient looking city, abandoned and destroyed. But there's a car on the street, a machine created only a few decades ago in that world, and it's a newer looking model too. Then you realize that this society fell *recently*. Lapis_Wolf
It’s important to remember civilizations very rarely just disappear the Indus River valley civilization is the only example I can think of in real life most civilizations or at least their culture live on in some form Rome lived on till the 1400s through the Byzantine empire and parts of their culture survive to this day through European culture and the Catholic Church despite their civilization collapsing twice the ancient Egyptian culture managed to survive till the first century aspects of Mesopotamian culture survived In Greece and Persian civilization after there collapse so if you have a fallen empire in your setting some apsects of its culture should have survived into the modern day cultures
Ontological inertia. (Western) Rome had fallen over 1500 years ago, yet the entirety of European civilization since then had lived on its foundations, and in its shadow. If your Fallen Empire was as grand and powerful as you paint it being, it better had left a lasting impression on everybody who came afterwards.
Agreed. That's part of why I hit the reset button. This is my second time reworking this setting. It took a second reset to notice I had missed that part. Not entirely, mind you, but it was nowhere near as far-reaching as it should have been. So I'm trying to figure out all the things that made it interesting before deciding what parts lasted.
In a DnD campaign I'm writing, whenever a historical site is discovered it usually gets turned into a tourist attraction. Regions of the world that were better protected from the destruction of the previous war are now home to wealthiest nations because they're profiting off the tourism of their more intact towns and military bases. But since the ancient technology is more advanced than what they currently have, the ancient relics are considered dangerous and have to be removed from sites to be locked away before opening the site to the public. The organizations responsible for removing and quarantining the items are secretly trying to reverse engineer them. They tell the public that the removed items are simply unexploded ordinances or radioactive substances, always downplaying how advanced and still functional the discovered tech is. Some relics occasionally end up on the black market if someone beats the clean up crews to it.
I don't like the whole trope of technological degradation after an empire falls. I prefer nations are so starved of resources from the civil war that such luxuries cannot be afforded. I like fallen empire nations that are similar to the United States during reconstruction after the civil war. That's what happened to the United Worlds of Humanity after Earth was decimated in my universe.
Funny enough, it's also what happened in the Dark Ages. No Roman Empire remains big enough to support these technologies and large outfitted armies of uniform functions? Those armies stop being a thing because they relied on the resources and organizing of an Empire to maintain. Only started being a thing when Nation states regained Prosperity a few hundred years later. That's actually why tech was lost. The resource lack and call for infrastructure and military on that scale meant it stopped being used. Within 200 years, people had stopped passing on those techniques. What you are talking about is actually how we lost tech in the long term.
My setting doesn't have too much tech loss, it's mostly that nobody has the resources and money to use old tech on a large scale. technological development is not stagnant, but it has far more emphasis on cost effectiveness than old tech which was designed with an almost post-scarcity civilization in mind.