Post-collapse continents (brainstorm material for dungeons

[hengest]

I'm not sure if this is worth a thread, but here it goes.

This is an article recently brought to my attention by a friend: www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/03/1491/302445/

It's a popular article, and I mean no support or denial of the claims mentioned in it.  But the base idea is that there are claims that the Americas were much more heavily populated before European contact and diseases that is generally thought and was once (is still?) widely taught, that the plagues wiped out not just coastal dwellers, but millions of people throughout the continent.  People who may have been involved in fairly vast bio-engineering projects with results like the Amazon.  

The claim that follows is that the largely uninhabited areas found by settlers had been 'depeopled' only recently.  

Does this not sound like material for a dungeon, dungeon-valley, or dungeon-continent?

[hengest]

Hey, good post from four years ago, hengest! I completely forgot about this.

Yes, I still think this kind of thing is a cool idea. Not SO different from a lot of what we think about in terms of dungeons, but still worth a shot. Like...

-a city where everyone, or nearly everyone, died last month. Opportunistic monsters in strange places, treasure unhidden, valuable things "unguarded," but also...

-an island nation depeopled by plague, or mostly. As above, but also...warring groups PCs can get involved with, people doing their own "clearance." The PCs may be visitors, but some NPCs may be locals who survived and are now "dungeon-crawling" their own home...