Why would a medieval world have no population?

Working on a GDD for a fantasy RPG with as little story as possible and no quests.

Looking for suggestions on why a medieval fantasy world would be depopulated.

Story so far:

You’re a prince to a race of dragons that live in isolation.

They stay in human form bound by a McGuffin crystal.

Part of the right of passage is they need to turn into a dragon from sheer willpower.

Your dad dies and your uncle makes a cue for the thrown.

Your uncle wants to bring back the old ways rule the world.

He tries to kill you and your mother flies away with you, getting mortally wounded. Dies. And drops you off in the middle of nowhere.

Your McGuffin crystal is smashed. The pieces fly around the world.

Every piece grants you an ability like double jump and glide.


Okay, so where is everyone?

-Zombies via Lich

-plague

-dragons created a great famine that obliterated civilization

-dragons ate them

-dragons destroy any city that gets too big

-mysteriously disappeared with no explaination

Any suggestions?

 

How much fantasy do you want there?

1. Black Death happened.
2. War happened.
3. War with supernatural beings happened.
4. War between gods happened. Malevolent one won and killed everybody.
5. Cthulhu awakened. Then went back to sleep.
6. Mortals managed to insult fertility goddess, and she cursed mankind. People are almost never born, but die as usual.
7. The world is undergoing cycle of rebirth, and is going through the dying out phase.
8. 3 centuries ago a powerful wizard, unleashed a mighty spell that disrupted natural cycle on the world. He stole soul of every living human in the world, and use them to fuel his tower of magic. Almost none escaped the spell.
9. A god of death/pestilance/suffering/diarrhea bestowed its blessing upon the world which made most people to die off.
10. In the last one, someone created an ultimate weapon that annihilated most humans. A magic spell, or a killing machine. It can still be somewhere in the world, dormant.

That's just first scenarios that came to my mind, pretty much.

 

* Famine, area abandoned looking for more fertile lands
* Fire, evacuated the area
* Kidnapped by evil sorcerer
* Enslaved by a rival kingdom
* Time traveler changed the past so the kingdom never existed
* Mass flood
* In hiding in mountain caves
* Population being held for ransom
* The population is fine, but the player has been transported to an alternate universe where there is no population
* The population has been rendered invisible but is still there

 

* CVirus decimation in 10ths of millions (what she say joke)

 

The dragons were the ones keeping ecology going. When they all got trapped, things went out of control. Famine, flood, darkness, plague, pestilence. Might work better for an Eastern flavor of dragons.

 

Turned into mice? Frogs? Birds? Could have some fun reveals as the user discovers this. (especially if the little mice or whatever were dressed as tiny farmers/peasants/townsfolk.)

 

I love hearing all these suggestions.

right now I’m leaning towards the dragons ate everything and people starved to death.

 

Dude!

Spoiler

Just saying....

 

That would actually sound less plausible than a curse, war, plague, and so on. This is because dragons usually have small numbers in fantasy worlds, and while they're supreme terrifying being capable of wrecking countries, they usually do not go around devouring everything in their path, and instead hoard wealth.

 

Tell that to Smaug

Spoiler

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

 

Smaug is the classic wealth hoarder type, though.

I mean, he established domain, hoarded wealth and that was it. He did not eat the world.

 

Well thats true.

But burning whole towns, makes him much different?

Spoiler

Now if we consider 100 dragons like that, that will be quite a bit of world burning I suppose?
Luckily, this particular dragon slept most of the time.

Contrary, as far I am aware, in eastern Asia continent, dragons are perceived mostly as good creatures.

 

I don't believe so. This guy is weaker than a nuke, he can only be at one place at a time, and has limited flight speed, while the world is vast. He would establish its own domain, limited by his flight speed, can kill everything in that domain, but the rest of the world will be safe. Basically, in case of smaug rampaging you'll lose few towns, but people will remain and will be busy repopulating in some hidden settlements, or simply outside of dragon's reach.

The other problem is their reproduction speed. Dragons typically portrayed as having incredibly long lifespans, and taking a long time to mature. Thousand of years. Hundred of years. Which makes them vulnerable to being made extinct by humans. Because humans reproduce faster, develop faster, and can poach dragon's egg. And once a great wyrm is slain, it will be a long time before another one appears.

Basically, it is a calamity, but not a world ending one.

To really get rid of mankind you need something more powerful and terrifying than that.

One interesting take on that was Shadowrun: Dragonfall, where

Spoiler

there was a scientist hellbent on destroying dragons, which were ruling the world as corporations. In one of the endings, he succeeds (with your help), but, turns out that dragons had a role after all, as they were natural predators for Horrors - lovecraftian entities seeking to destroy the world. With dragons gone, horrors started to breach into the earth realm, and eventually exterminated Mankind.

If you really want a dragon as a humanity-destroying entity, then you'll need to up its power level, and make it a "World Destroyer", "Dragon of Corruption", or something similar. Basically, a being that by merely existing slowly changes the world around it into something incompatible with humans. For example, miasma ,poisonous winds, hostile plant life and hordes of undead roaming in this creature's territory would make it very incompatible with human life, although there will be a lunatic that will make a point to build a village in there and survive.

Another thing is that scope of the game is not necessarily clear, and humans could be gone only in areas where player is present.

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If anything that brings back memories of a campaign I dmed. I had an impossibly powerful dragon, which did exactly that. Established domain, and exterminated all humans within it, poisoning the land, which killed all life on it. The land spawned ghosts and undead in the ruins of settlement, and in the middle of desolation the wyrm lived with bunch of kobolds under his commands. However, over time some druid made a point trying to convert the land back to what it was, and while it took him a decade, he started to succeed by the time players arrived.

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Either way, this is an opinion.

 

So there was a normal population before 'something' ?

Does the absence of people 'matter' to the protagonist's story in some way? If it doesnt, then 'without the guiding hand of Dragons, the race of Man destroyed itself in War'.

If it does in some fashion, then maybe

the world the character is in is actually a parallel 'shadow' of the original one, sans humans, because magic crystal breakage. Fixing the crystal also returns things to the way they were.

 

LOL, I have mentioned wanting to do an open world Secret of Nim game.

As for the comments on what is and isn’t a dragon, I’m not set on any ideas. I’m cool with doing my own interpretation of what a dragon is.

The real point is to make an extremely basic story that serves no point other than to drop off the player in an empty world with one single goal.

I was sort of inspired by Windbound for this idea.

I was so impressed how the game was such a tight package that delivered a fun experience without having their scope go off the rails.

There was a ton of stuff that could have been done better, but the core of the game was intact and was a solid 10 hour experience made by 5 devs. That’s very cool in my book.

 

Everyone is hiding.

 

"After the age of man, dragons ruled the earth..."

I don't think there needs to be any explanation at all. I'd focus on the dragon stuff, like who bound them into human form with the macguffin crystal, and why. And who created the crystal, etc..

 

Plenty of real life medieval civilizations collapsed completely. Take a look at some of them.

Normally the source is climate change. Humans cities are heavily dependent on water. And before modern times, that meant rain and rivers. It just takes a couple years of failed rains to hill the harvests and leave people in the city starving. Or a single earthquake to reroute a river and now crops can't be irrigated. Suddenly you have a lot of hungry desperate people on your hands.

Most medieval cities were governed by a quasi-religious class. They maintain their power because they guarantee regular rains and harvests. Once these things stop, people get angry. Obedience and law break down. And every man is out for himself. People flee the cities looking for safety and food elsewhere. Most die, and those that are left descend into a tribal subsistence life style.

A disease can have a similar effect. Small pox collapsed multiple empires in the Americas. As can war.

 

And there is many indications, massive human near extinction happened aroud small age, around 10k BC. We left only with evidences of massive monolithic structures, located all over the world, included underwater flooded man made sites, dated at least many thousands years BC. While commonly thought is, human wasn't even capable doing such things back in hat time.

Metall corroded to bits. Organic materials been washed out. Signs of human settlements and cities flooded and eroded to ground. So we are only left with fragments of our massive uncovered ancient history.

 

I kind of like the idea of leaving it unexplained. Maybe drop hints that something happened without being clear as to what.

 

Ecocide, plausible and relevant to modern times

 

No offense to anyone, but game designers tend to be terrible writers. I think you would get significantly better feedback on a proper writing forum.

I write a lot and have even won about a dozen monthly story contests in the forums I visit, but I’m not a professional either so take my advice with a grain of salt.

I think every aspect of your atmosphere should, in some way, be tied to your mcguffin. Otherwise, things will just seem disjointed.

also, didn’t you already solve this problem?: “They stay in human form bound by a McGuffin crystal.” You said you broke the crystal? Wouldn’t that in itself change everybody out of their human forms?

I’m also confused by your idea that dragons are everyone. Your first sentence implies that everyone ARE dragons? You seem to indicate that people become dragons through some willpower ritual, so why would mature dragons eat it’s own beta form?

You could take inspiration from another game that sounds quite similar. Your mcguffin crystal sounds an awful lot like a triforce. In my 30 years of exploring Hyrule I’ve seen it thriving and abandoned, sometimes in the same game.



If I’m misunderstanding and each person has their own crystal and YOURS is broken, you could make tha in itself the reason everything SEEMS empty. You could be the thing that’s different, trapped in some Silent Hill/ Stranger Things parallel universe.