Where does treasure come from?

The answer to “why hasn’t anyone looted this dungeon full of treasure before us?” is easy in the Ravenlands: it’s full of monsters and/or everywhere around it has been infested for 260 years by demons who would kill anyone who tried exploring, and the PCs are the first to be brave enough to go looking. (The same applies to any aboveground building in an uninhabited village or fortress.)

The answer to “why is there a dungeon full of treasure?” is harder.

Cohen the Barbarian, in Terry Pratchett’s first Discworld novel The Colour of Magic, has as a general rule “You find chokeapples under a chokeapple tree. You find treasure under altars.” But that’s true of rich, established, decadent civilisations. The Ravenlands aren’t like this – or were they?

Is there even treasure to be found?

Before anything else, we need to work out if people from the past left anything behind that’s worth nicking.

Bad news: a lot of people in the past were probably as poor as most people are now

People in the Ravenlands in AS 1160-odd, immediately after the Blood Mist went away, live pretty frugally; and maybe that was also the case hundreds of years earlier. Yes, there are a few ancient settlements where dwarves or elves used to live, which they’ve subsequently abandoned – e.g. the Eye of the Rose, Wailer’s Hold – but the withdrawal from there was orderly, and chances are that anything of particular value was carefully distributed to other elven or dwarven cities. If you find a village that’s been abandoned for whichever reason and wander through the deserted houses, you might well find exactly as many things of value as you would if you ransacked any living person’s house; which is to say, not much at all.

Also, look on the various “finds in a lair” tables, and notice how few items of clothing there are, even though that’s one of the major ways you tell rich and poor people apart. The reason is simple: clothes fall apart, get eaten by moths, rot. Even if people in the past lived pretty well, a fair bit of their wealth hasn’t lasted.

Good news: more people in the past means more inequality

Judging by the size of the armies that fought the Alder Wars, the population of the Ravenlands was about an order of magnitude larger than it is now, after 260 years of blood mist.

This means that the use of coins pretty much everywhere can be relied upon, which is good as that’s half of the “finds in a lair” tables. You may reasonably wonder why that’s useful, though: sure, coins are shiny, and if you have a large number of them, all alike, that’s interesting to the sort of person who’s into collecting coins. But there’s no way they have the same value now that they used to.

But consider this: if you have so many people that coins are commonplace, you also have an economy where people can get considerably richer than is possible in most of the post-blood mist Ravenlands. At the moment, most people are subsistance farmers, and the economy is mostly based on barter; but previously, when there was trade across all of the Ravenlands, smart and/or lucky people could skim a bit off the top of many, many transactions.

And what rich people tend to do is become patrons of the arts (even if they often insist that said arts end up being about themselves). This won’t produce much in the way of nickable stuff if they sponsored poets, authors or playwrights; and if they had architects build them a really nice house that’s great if you get to live there, but otherwise a tragedy if it’s since been destroyed or is infested with demons. But if the arts took the form of expensive statues, paintings, furniture or jewellery, well, that’s what we came here looking for.

Good news: people in the past liked basically the same stuff as people do now

Because the sort of stuff that’s precious to your players now was precious to people in the past for similar reasons. This means art (sculptures, mosaics, murals and paintings if the pigments have held up), furniture, weapons and armour (which arguably double-count as art if they’re the ceremonial type; a gold sword is rubbish in battle but looks really fancy), any fine clothing that survived (including jewellery), fine wines, spirits if you think your world has distilling. This is the other half of the contents of the “finds in a lair” tables: things that you’d be happy to commission someone to make for you in the present day.

And you don’t even need to find a buyer for your treasures, if you have a stronghold and are trying to persuade people that you should be taken seriously. It doesn’t matter whether it’s peasants you’re trying to attract to your stronghold so they can work for you, guards who can defend the stronghold when you’re away, skilled artisans who can build or staff something more basic than a 10ft x 10ft room, or neighbouring rulers you wish to show off to. The very fact that you’ve got an entire room of your house filled with large shiny stuff is a pretty decent way of convincing people that you should be taken seriously.

If you can get the treasures to your stronghold. Many of these items are bulky and heavy, and it’s going to be a fair effort to schlep them overland, even if you don’t attract the attention of e.g. drakewyrms.

Where in an adventure site do you find treasure?

OK, so we’ve at least potentially got treasure. Where do you go looking?

A community will put its treasures in public buildings

Look at the White House, Buckingham Palace or the Elysée Palace: regardless of where all of the gold and bling came from originally, the USA, UK and France respectively have agreed that there should be a place where the Head of State, who represents the nation, can welcome people from other countries and say “look at this awesome stuff in my big house!” A Kin’s best builders, crafters and artists will gladly produce works that they will donate to the ruler, representing the community as a whole, in exchange for a decent quality of living and social recognition. Note, though, that short of a catastrophic societal collapse, these works of art will stay with the ruler and their successors: if a disaster hits the buildings where they’re currently located, the ruler and/or their successor will seek to retrieve them, to maintain continuity with previous rulers and avoid a loss of legitimacy and prestige.

It doesn’t just have to be the place the ruler lives or works, either. Obviously if the people had any kind of religious belief, they might have decided to decorate any shrines or temples to the gods they favoured. It’s arguably desecration to remove them from their current resting place; but it could also be said that it’s actually honouring the Gods by taking them to a new temple where they can be involved in worship again. If the players don’t engage with this moral dilemma, remember that more people will visit the abandoned (and now partially-ransacked) church in time, now that word has spread that the PCs went there and there’s nothing scary there after all / any more. A religious zealot denouncing these newcomers for having desecrated the ancient temple of Flow / Wail / etc. could be a serious threat to any ongoing negotiations between the PCs and neighbouring villages.

There’s also plenty of secular communal buildings - marketplaces, parliaments, festival halls - that a community might want to decorate, to reflect its power and beliefs. (This especially matters if they’re democratic enough to not have a single ruler.) If your players find a large, well-decorated room with a flat space at one end and then an increasingly-raised floor at the other, they’ll have to guess what it was for, because much of the furniture has probably rotted away. If the shape of the raised bit is a rectangle, it might well have been a theatre or lecture hall, whereas if it’s a semi-circle this might have been a place of debate like a modern-day Parliament. But regardless, the presence of art and other decoration indicates that this place was important to the people who lived here; if there’s a frieze depicting people harvesting grapes, a large number of barrels in cellars, then countless bottles resting in racks, well, you now know what they used to do (or at least what they considered was worth commemorating, which isn’t always necessarily the same thing), and the players should now be looking for the wine cellars.

And if there were just loads of artists for whichever reason, you might find statues everywhere. My understanding is that modern-day Florence is like this.

Corruption and excess open up more opportunities

Which isn’t to say that there might not be an inner sanctum where some additional treasure is kept. If this was stuff that was out of favour and was moved here for safe-keeping, it’s probably less valuable than the stuff on public display, unless it was hidden away for political reasons, or opinions about artistic merit have changed since then.

If this was stuff that the people in charge decided to keep for themselves, it could well be more valuable than most of the public stuff (there would probably be a public outcry if you grabbed the most famous pieces), unless it was kept private because it was weird and creepy, but so were the people in charge, and now you have an inkling of why that village came to a bad end.

On the other hand, if your rich people are rich because of trade, they could be squirrelling away other people’s treasure in their house. The locals know that their cultural heritage is proudly on display in public buildings; faraway people know that they were robbed, but have no idea where their stuff is now; only the rich guy knows that there’s a statue of an ancient dwarven King in his bedroom.

And this must be the appeal of the whole thing: that everyone in the open source treasure community thinks that a particular item has been lost forever, but you know better. Only you, your family, and maybe a small handful of close associates know the truth; and, sure, you occasionally wonder whether you should brag about owning something so valuable, but then you remember that almost nobody knowing about this is the point.

The “almost” bit is where the PCs come in, because one of those people has written it down somewhere, or came back as a ghost long enough for someone to ask them. And failing that, an art storehouse or a fancy house are still fairly obviously-identifiable: you could get lucky and just blunder into them.

A lot of riches are situational, and accumulating treasure is a sign of weakness

Still, if you’re rich and powerful, most of your riches will be intangible or situational: reputation, access to other powerful people, a house with large rooms and a location that other people value and/or which is enjoyable for itself (e.g. great views of the surrounding countryside or the teeming masses you dominate). Future looters can’t steal and resell that.

In fact, it’s fair to say that the more insecure anybody is about their situation, the more likely they are to acquire and squirrel away the sorts of riches that current PCs would be interested in. A con artist has a nondescript-looking trunk with a false bottom filled with jewellery, ready to go if they need to leave in a hurry; a wife from an unfavoured background always wears her engagement ring and other jewellery, because she needs to be able to hawk them if the marriage goes south. A merchant has a lucrative arrangement with the powers-that-be, and as such has a trading office in a prime location, and a similarly-advantageously-placed house with servants, plush furnishings and great views; but they’re aware that political tides can turn. So they’ve made sure to convert some of their earnings into more-fungible jewels, or other small objects of obvious artistic quality, that they have buried in places only they know, or entrusted to nearby contacts or friends.

Sure, if you find the big house where the obviously-rich and important people lived, you should be able to find a few baubles. But that’s the first place anybody – the rich people, their contemporary enemies; looters, possibly much later, who nonetheless got here just before you – would look. The true riches are likely to be found in less-obvious places, precisely because they were designed to be hard to find. But if your players find clues in ancient notebooks or inscriptions on derelict walls, or chance upon an ancient ghost that still remembers part of the directions to find the hidden treasure, they now have a decent chance of finding something exciting.

Why would you protect valuable things with traps?

Look, we all like the trope of an ornate chest full of jewels which is protected by a cunning trap, so if you manage to disarm the trap you gain access to countless riches, but if you fail you’re stabbed in the finger by a poisoned needle and you now have only minutes to live.

But why would you ever have something like that in your house?

Modern-day user-experience people like to say that you should always design a product so it could be used by people with harsh disabilities, because from time to time that will be you. A person holding a baby and all of their gear only has one free arm at the moment; if the sun’s in your eyes, your vision is suddenly not good at all; when you’re staggering back from the pub after a really good night, your coordination isn’t top-notch, and you’re going to struggle at ordinary tasks because your brain is full of fog.

Why would you ever have a secret passageway that leads to your hall of riches, full of fiendish traps, if you ever expect to have house guests? Children will explore every nook and cranny and you won’t notice them doing that because adults always ignore children; drunk adult guests will do stupid things. Why run the risk?

Also, if someone sets off the trap, can you reset it easily? OK, maybe a poisoned needle can be re-poisoned (although even then you’d have to be confident that you still have some of the poison lying around and you can remember where you left it), but if it’s the sort of trap that drops boulders on someone’s head or sets off a massive explosion, you’re going to have to do some serious remodelling first.

No, if you’ve built cunning traps inside your house to “protect” your treasure, it’s really so if you can’t have your treasure, then nobody else can either. The trap going off and destroying the treasure is the point: one last defiantly-raised middle finger from beyond the grave. So at the very least you have problems trusting people and institutions, and chances are good that most people think you’re some kind of paranoid lunatic. (Yes, they are talking about you behind your back.)

And even if the PCs haven’t heard anything about the owner, there should be plenty of clues that whoever owned this house was not quite right in the head – crazed writings in a diary, a network of secret passageways so they could spy on their guests, other more minor traps found earlier in the house – so when the PCs stumble out of the house somewhat singed, or followed by a cloud of rock dust, a passing NPC can nod and say “always thought Crispinin would pull some damn fool trick like that”.

Where in the world do you find treasure?

The best treasure is found in adventure sites that nobody knows about any more. If people knew about them, after all, they’d have gone there and looted them already; or if the blood mist got in the way at the time, current rulers who claim that this stuff is theirs by right will be organising teams to go and check the place out. It’s the plane and bullet holes thing: you need to look where there isn’t anything. Or stumble across it when travelling.

Sometimes villages just fail

Obviously if the previous occupants all died out of mostly-natural causes, and they were in a secluded-enough place that they didn’t have any immediate neighbours, it might be that nobody ever knew that they existed, let alone that they’d died and their stuff was now fair game.

Or their neighbours did know they existed, but decided it was bad luck to go looking through the place where a whole bunch of people died under mysterious circumstances. (Remember, PCs are weird and unusual, after all.)

This is your opportunity to make the treasure these people have left behind somewhat… strange. Maybe there are loads of paintings, statues and mosaics, but the people depicted are all odd in some way (no noses / too many limbs / unexplained stigmata-type injuries). Maybe they feared straight lines or right angles, which you start to realise as you go through let another somewhat-curved room, and wonder at how all of the remaining furniture is weirdly bulbous and/or rocks from side to side. Maybe they had hoarding tendencies, and the stuff they’ve collected is all weirdly similar, like they have hundreds of statuettes of small rabbits, made out of a bizarrely eclectic mixture of materials (sandstone, marble, metal, yes, yes, but also glass, leather, hair).

So while the settlement was initially successful, subsequent generations were increasingly weird and/or unpleasant, to the point where nobody new wanted to live here after a while. A cemetery could have increasingly-elaborate tombstones, which will tell players who look at dates on them that the population peaked and then declined; maybe the only sign of anyone having lived here is the body of an old woman, either lying in a crumpled heap at the bottom of a flight of stairs, or maybe clumsily left in a now-rotten bed. Hopefully the little girl who was victimised by said old woman will have fled soon afterwards, and maybe she even wasn’t eaten by wolves but made it to a nearby village, and people there still remember the old story, which is why the PCs found the place. Or maybe she couldn’t fend for herself after all, and you’ll find her body in a small shack in the cemetery.

Maybe everybody died suddenly

If there were more than a handful of people here, you can be boring and have them all have died of a disease, although it’s worth pointing out that time does not necessarily kill all viruses, nor is the drinking water necessarily safe to drink again. Especially if the disease was the consequence of unwise meddlings, experiments or demonic summonings, in which case the thing that caused the disease might still be around or, even worse, not just more virulent but, after hundreds of years of no company, bored and/or crazy. When the PCs are a few rooms into a dungeon and find a clay tablet detailing how everyone has been dying one after the other, or find a skeleton on the floor with “don’t drink the water!” scratched into the wall, well, then is a good time for them to wonder how careful they’d been about not touching anything.

Another popular choice is for the previous occupants to have been a cult led by a charismatic leader who decided at one point that they should all kill themselves. A clue that this has happened might be the discovery of two bodies who clearly died in violence (a knife in the belly of one of them should be a clue that even the dimmest player can’t miss), and the presence of some minor treasures in the pockets of one of them: i.e. someone wasn’t fully on board with the idea of everybody dying, especially when that included them, so decided to leg it, and was caught fleeing by someone who was very determined that everybody meant everybody.

This sort of doomsday cult should have their best treasures protected by vicious traps, because the people in charge are crazy. And it’s worth wondering whether they thought they were ascending to a higher form of life, and whether any of them might have achieved something like that? In which case, the body of the attacker might have been part-way through the process of transformation when they died, and further into the dungeon the PCs might find more corpses that have part-changed into stone, acquired demonic mutations, or are in a weird semi-incorporeal form. Which implies that at the absolute end of the dungeon, of course, you’ll find the cult leader or their trusty servant who did ascend, albeit maybe not in the way they expected. (They’ve been either angry about this for years, and have been looking for someone to take their frustrations out on; or they’re fine with it, but they’re angry about the PCs interrupting their peaceful rest.)

Why leave the treasure behind?

But if anyone left the place alive, you have to wonder why they didn’t go back and loot the place.

In the case of e.g. the little girl who fled, an easy answer is that they didn’t / couldn’t take notes of where it used to be, and when they turned up in a neighbouring village the immediate priority for everyone there was (1) “who the hell are you?”, (2) “are you OK?”, and rather distantly later (3) “where did you come from?” and (4) “is there stuff we want there?”.

Similarly, another obvious answer if the place with the treasure was attacked by outsiders, is that the previous occupants came back as ghosts or undead, or someone triggered a trap, so the attackers couldn’t loot the dungeon, or not fully. Then they had better things to do with their life and didn’t go back. Maybe a landslide buried the entrance to the dungeon under tons of mud, and over the years that’s gradually shifted, and now the dungeon is somewhat accessible again. (Obviously if the PCs disturb too much in the dungeon, the mudslide is coming back with a vengeance.)

Another is that scarcity and age factor into value, so it might have been that the statues and murals were basically worthless at the time, but now that every other similar dungeon has been destroyed, any remaining art of this period is now worth a lot more; maybe not to everyone, but certainly to some key player NPC you want to impress when they come to your stronghold. Everybody used to have Penny Blacks, after all, but eventually they got used or thrown away, and now a mint “the first stamp ever!!!1!!” can be worth serious amounts.

And of course people might have decided that the treasure in this adventure site was unlucky, cursed, or otherwise taboo in some way, but time has marched on since. Anyone who remembers the bad times when everybody died is now long dead in turn, and the only thing anyone can really agree on these days is that the treasure sure is shiny. Why, there’s almost certainly no curse left any more!

Who used to live in these ruins?

The map of kins tells us who lives where now, but the point of going looking for treasure is that you’re interested in the past. We’ve postulated that there were about 10 times more people back in the day, before wars and the blood mist did a number on the overall population; and the random encounter tables say there’s a 1 in 36 chance of any land hex containing ruins. The map is 40 hexes by 50, so once you take away water that’s easily another 40-45 smaller settlements which could be anywhere.

So who built the dungeon / abandoned village you’re exploring?

You can lose a settlement even in the most continuously-inhabited parts of the Ravenlands

There are some parts of the Ravenlands that have been constantly criss-crossed because the blood mist wasn’t a problem to at least part of the population: Harga because the Rust Brothers quickly learned to walk abroad during the night, and the ancient dwarven lands like Belderand because there were underground tunnels that the blood mist didn’t affect. Under normal circumstances, if a village or city was afflicted by bad governance, disease or a natural disaster, help would be available from neighbours.

That’s larger villages, though. Smaller villages are harder for a bureaucracy to keep track of, especially if the land is poor and people live a semi-nomadic life, or you live underground and the exact boundary between settlements is hard to map. If there was a small village with half a dozen people, and then a small handful of them turned up elsewhere and said they’d moved, who’s going to care enough to investigate (or, if they know why this happened and it was embarrassing, tell anybody else)?

Similarly, the two adventure sites in the middle of the Dankwood are almost certainly major elven settlements, and elves are too resilient to just disappear from the map. But from time to time, you could still lose one or two elves who decided to wander off and do their own thing: chances are it’d be a few decades before anyone would wonder about them because of how elf memories work, and it’s easy enough for even an immortal elf to fall off a cliff, or for a water elf to be buried under in a freak underwater cliff collapse, or for an ent to be struck by lightning.

Many parts of the Ravenlands have been inhabited by a succession of different Kins

The other forests in the Ravenlands are mostly inhabited by orcs; or at least, you’d expect to find orcs there. And orcs were terrified of the blood mist and disinclined to help each other, so absolutely, things could have gone wrong there, and there could be plenty of abandoned orc villages.

But there could easily be ancient elven settlements as well (the Eye of the Rose is one such canonical example). When the ancient elves of the Heart of the Sky explored the Ravenlands, they’ll have needed places to stay, and they may well have decided to build small cities here and there before deciding abandoning them, preferring to stay in the woods of the Dankwood. If you’re immortal, after all, what does it matter if you need to spend a few years rebuilding your house? Besides, you can do it better this time!

The plains are even more complicated. The map of kins says that there are ogres in Harmsmoor, but ogres don’t tend to build anything beyond crude shelters, so any interesting adventure sites must have been built by other earlier settlers. Similarly, there are humans in Moldena, Margelda and Yendra; but the Ailanders arrived in the 500s (GM’s Guide p. 20), the Quard Aslenes turned up in 610 AS (p. 21), the Alderlanders only reached Moldena and Margelda in 845 (p. 27) before being routed in 869 (p. 29), and the Galdanes had very little time between arriving in 876 (p. 31) and the blood mist making everybody’s life a misery. That’s not a lot of time to build anything of significance.

But there must have been settlements in that part of the world before the humans arrived. Maybe not everywhere; maybe most of the human settlements were very deliberately placed away from the few existing built-up places, at least at first, before they were emboldened and started to take over ancient non-human settlements.

Like the forests, there could be elven settlements; and the obvious other choice is dwarves. This is more of a stretch, because we know that dwarves prefer to live in mountains, but maybe that’s more of a recent cultural phenomenon, possibly prompted by the blood mist making mountains the only safe place to live? After all, if you’re going to build the land upwards step by step until you reach the sky, logically you need to build everywhere, including in the lowest parts, which means plains and swamps. Maybe the dwarves didn’t mind it too much back then? Any of the places with fort or dungeon symbols could be ancient dwarf strongholds, where they hunkered down underground, occasionally making forays outside to plop down hills and mountains.

The more interesting choice is hobbits.

What if hobbits used to be rich and evil?

It’s slightly weird the way the books talk about the past being all about elves and dwarves, and more recent times being about humans and orcs, but hobbits and goblins barely get a mention. The boring Doylist explanation is that the writers don’t find hobbits interesting; the more interesting Watsonian explanation is that people these days don’t like to talk about what the hobbits used to be like. (Which is of course absolutely on-brand for hobbits.)

NB: the same may well go for your players. Check whether they’re happy broaching topics like chattel slavery! All of the hobbits in question are now safely dead, but still.

Rich agricultural land should have been populated by people who like agriculture

Hobbits and goblins are currently restricted to the plains of Belifar; but what if they weren’t always? Look at the plains of Vivend and Moldena around the Elya and Wash rivers: that looks like prime agricultural land, which should attract hobbits, especially if the dwarves and elves preferred to live elsewhere. The terrain looks like you could have vast fields of wheat, barley and maize, and grapes in the hills, all of which attract premium prices compared to subsistence agriculture; especially when there’s trade.

Talking of trade: if you look at the number of hexes on the map drained by the rivers flowing into Lake Varda (Coldwater, Seyster and Foolswater, plus their tributories) and the Wash, the Elya river must be really wide at this point. The adventure site at the confluence of the Elya and the Wash is an ideal point for a significant trading city: from here, ships can sail upriver to Lake Varda and beyond, or up the Wash at least as far as Lake Claye (it looks like there’s a significant escarpment immediately after the Blaudwater, so the rivers in Harga are probably not directly navigable). And of course trade can also go downriver to the sea, hug the coast, and then sail up the Meliwater or, especially, the Yender.

Before the humans arrived, the hobbits would be have been really interested in this land.

Hobbits are societally prone to inequality

OK, but surely the riches would be shared more-or-less equitably, right? Like how it is at the moment in Belifar? Nobody’s poor, everybody’s jolly, everybody’s having a good time; right?

Except: what do we know about hobbits? They’re desperate to be seen to be doing the right thing: never grumbling, always smiling, tugging your forelock, never airing your dirty laundry in public, knowing your place. This is the sort of instinct that makes a people easy to subjugate, especially if there’s an existing familial power relationship that you can parlay into something bigger: is it not true, in a very real sense, that the King or Queen is the father or mother of their nation, caring for all hobbits equally, and deserving respect and honour from each and every one?

Maybe they’re too genteel to rule with an iron first, preferring not to starve their workers too obviously; but all that means is that they’re One Nation Tories rather than fascist dictators. The difference is one of degree only; and if you’re still enamoured of folk tales of how the Victorians were so prudish that they covered up the legs of grand pianos with lace, read up on how your hero Winston Churchill’s main regrets about the British Empire were that they didn’t commit quite enough brutalities against distant brown people.

What about the anarchist goblins?

OK, OK, but what about the goblins? Hobbits don’t breed true, so there are going to be children born into this society who are absolute punk mayhem chaos merchants, and that’s going to be the end of it. Right?

But: if a rich society has both the resources and the backing to get rid of its unruly elements, it’ll find a way.

The most obvious solution is just to kill all goblin children. This isn’t viable these days because you need all the warm bodies you can get, and enough hobbit mothers will refuse to kill their children that some goblins will survive. But an unequal society determined to ensure the continuity of its political system will decide a “let there be no goblins” programme is something it’s worth spending significant resources on. A poor hobbit woman who agrees to have suffered an “unfortunate miscarriage” will receive an unhoped-for windfall payment that rescues her from penury, at least for a year or two; and for everyone else who doesn’t want to play by the rules, there is a vast network of whisperers and informers ready to tattle on people who don’t conform.

Or maybe you don’t kill them; not obviously, at least. Working in the fields is hard, unpleasant work; maybe it’s best if we leave that to the goblins? Where do goblins come from? Somewhere, far away; from other hobbit plantations; we don’t talk about that. And because goblin children are moved and split up from their families, they can’t organise as easily, and there certainly aren’t familial resemblances between workers and overseers for anybody to notice. And the flip-side of hobbits not breeding true is that goblins don’t breed true either: if any of the goblin workers were to get pregnant, well, maybe some of their hobbit children can get adopted by kind families (far away, of course) who weren’t able to have children of their own. Waste not, want not.

Now, obviously, goblin uprisings are going to be a thing from time to time, even if they’re weakened by working in the fields all day. But think of the hobbit Kin Talent, and ignore its name “Hard to catch”: “You can spend Willpower Points in combat to avoid being hit by physical attacks” (Player’s Handbook, pp. 62-63). Now consider a disciplined phalanx of strong, well-fed, armoured and armed hobbits advancing on a number of desperate goblins making a stand, and what happens when one of the goblins thinks they managed to land a blow on a guard against all odds: it doesn’t happen. The hobbo bastard has moved like Agent Smith out of the goddamn Matrix, and now it’s their turn to hit you with their much better sword, and they’re not going to miss.

What happened to the rich hobbits of the plains?

There’s rarely just one reason why societies collapse. Usually it’s a combination of many factors, and how important each was will vary from plantation to plantation.

The most obvious problem is that trade dries up. The Alder Wars make it harder to ship luxury goods around the Ravenlands, and people fighting a war prefer to spend money, time and resources on weapons and armour. Wars also kill people, directly or indirectly, which reduces the number of potential customers.

Less trade means fewer excess resources you can bring to bear on the goblin problem. The smaller, poorer plantations might decide that they’re not going to take your excess goblins for free, and it’s harder to find people to transport goblins around the plains, or to maintain the equipment (horses, carts, shackles etc.) you need for that trade.

The humans turning up means that you have to share some of the land now; and human villages offer a way for escaped goblins to hide from your patrols for a while, until they can make their way to the faraway forests.

Less obviously, the sort of person in charge of an extractive setup like this is going to favour short-termist approaches like sucking up to their immediate superiors, whipping the workers even more to squeeze the last few drops out of the stone, discounting long-term planning because that will only benefit their successor. A wise administrator would be careful to not overstress the workers or the land, but either the current administrator is foolish, or they have no choice, because their superior is demanding unreasonable results. An uprising as the workers decide that enough is enough, or a crop failure after the soil is relentlessly harvested without a chance to rest and recover, are almost guaranteed at this point.

Ultimately, though, the final blow is the blood mist. Trade is now gone, you can’t trade your goblins for somebody else’s, nobody’s sending you extra hobbits either, and as soon as a sickness or some other natural disaster hits you you’ll need all the warm bodies you can get just to survive, at which point coexisting with the goblins becomes an unavoidable necessity.