The durability of 'cylcopean' ruins.

[1d8+DB]

So it's probably pretty likely that HPL got it  wrong about  pre-human ruins, like the City of the Elder Things, surviving over millions of years into the current era (the Anthropocene epoch). Pretty much no structure, made of normal matter, is going to withstand over a million years of exposure to the elements, and tectonic movement. The glaciers would have ground the Elder Thing City into dust before the mammoths died out.

If human being disappeared today, in a million years  the only  traces we would leave behind would be the presence of radioactive isotopes and  plastic micro-particles.

So if you wanted to incorporate  pre-human ruins in your game, and you want to do it 'realistically', what would you do?

A couple of thoughts:

1.) They're self-repairing. You could have ageless 'repair' shoggoths  waging an endless war against epochs of desuetude. Or perhaps a creeping tide of 'gray ooze' nanites, constantly reabsorbing and rebuilding; in this case the 'ruins'  could actually be expanding, and will perhaps one day cover the planet!

2.) What million years? There could be some relativistic time-dilation occurring within the ruins; so that, within a certain area,  only centuries, or even decades have passed since they were abandoned. This would be particularly effective for  play in  a modern setting; GPS and cell-phone coverage is not going to work  in a area that is out of synch with the local time flow by twenty-million or more years!

3.) They're not made of normal matter. They would be impervious to any tools, to any analysis. A citadel of 'dark matter' perhaps (hmm, invisible in just about the whole spectrum)?

Any other ideas? 

 

[SaintMeerkat]

I guess I just always assumed it was #3, but I love #1. The thought of some race of shoggoth caretakers is a lot cooler to me than magic rocks. Maybe there is even some ancient race of shoggoth shepherds that checks in on them from time to time.

[mvincent]

20 hours ago, 1d8+DB said:

So it's probably pretty likely that HPL got it  wrong about  pre-human ruins, like the City of the Elder Things

 

I'm certain that HPL's work had lots of plot holes (like giant mountain in the middle of the Antarctic, or lack of fossil records elsewhere), but an incredible old race being able to build extremely durable structures seemed reasonable to me. I was thinking extremely hard substances, like molecularly aligned nanostructures (kinda like graphene), but I like your ideas of even more exotic materials: like self-repairing or temporally stable. 

[EricW]

On 6/13/2022 at 9:05 AM, 1d8+DB said:

So it's probably pretty likely that HPL got it  wrong about  pre-human ruins, like the City of the Elder Things, surviving over millions of years into the current era (the Anthropocene epoch). Pretty much no structure, made of normal matter, is going to withstand over a million years of exposure to the elements, and tectonic movement. The glaciers would have ground the Elder Thing City into dust before the mammoths died out.

If human being disappeared today, in a million years  the only  traces we would leave behind would be the presence of radioactive isotopes and  plastic micro-particles.

So if you wanted to incorporate  pre-human ruins in your game, and you want to do it 'realistically', what would you do?

A couple of thoughts:

1.) They're self-repairing. You could have ageless 'repair' shoggoths  waging an endless war against epochs of desuetude. Or perhaps a creeping tide of 'gray ooze' nanites, constantly reabsorbing and rebuilding; in this case the 'ruins'  could actually be expanding, and will perhaps one day cover the planet!

2.) What million years? There could be some relativistic time-dilation occurring within the ruins; so that, within a certain area,  only centuries, or even decades have passed since they were abandoned. This would be particularly effective for  play in  a modern setting; GPS and cell-phone coverage is not going to work  in a area that is out of synch with the local time flow by twenty-million or more years!

3.) They're not made of normal matter. They would be impervious to any tools, to any analysis. A citadel of 'dark matter' perhaps (hmm, invisible in just about the whole spectrum)?

Any other ideas? 

 

The glaciers move around them. Some of the alien technology, which ignorant humans mischaracterise as "magic", is still very much operational in such places. Remember some of the ruins were in use for 10s of millions of years before they fell into disuse.

Edited June 14, 2022 by EricW

[Ali the Helering]

I have always felt that this is an implicit element to the Cosmic Horror of it all.  The inexplicable should not be explained.😈