#fallen empires

[randomly-generated-posts-machine]

the lost city of tumblr

[mtg-cards-hourly]

Goblin Grenade

"I don't suppose we could teach them to *throw* the cursed things?" —Ivra Jursdotter

Artist: Dan Frazier TCG Player Link Scryfall Link EDHREC Link

[blacklotusmuseum]

"Deep Spawn"

Fallen Empires 1994 | Illus. Mark Tedin

[art-of-mtg]

Combat Medic (Fallen Empires) - Liz Danforth

More cards with art by Liz Danforth on Scryfall

[stylistic-nightmare]

God Dethroned - Fallen Empires

[mtg-art-daily]

Elven Fortress

"Burn it down, you say? Now *there's* a stupid idea. What do you suppose will become of those overhanging branches, hmm? And then what do you suppose will become of us?" —Ivra Jursdotter

Artist: Tom Wänerstrand

[terrantechnocrat]

I've been dwelling on this idea for an anthology of life on multiple "degenerated" imperial-capitalist interstellar colonies, inspired by a few sources. A broad breakdown of the history:

• Future humanity "develops" the inner solar system by surveying the Moon and asteroids to develop a rationalized system of extra-planetary "rents" and asset exchange, i.e., trading licenses to unproductive rocks as if they were stocks.

• Surveyors encounter an ancient gateway — part of an ancient artificial network of folded-space connections to other planetary systems throughout the galaxy, quite a few containing habitable exoplanets.

• The discovery leads to an alliance of great powers monopolizing the Sol gateway to regulate exploration of the great beyond.

• A massive rush begins to survey and engineer new markets upon the virgin worlds.

• Many of these nascent world-markets boil down to pet projects of industrial and land conglomerates, NGOs like academic organizations and bourgeois charities, governmental agencies, and other less 'notable' influential groups.

• Many worlds are settled only gradually and piecemeal as over-glorified credit traps and enrichment schemes for various interest groups of bourgeois society — from global real estate ventures to utopian community-building projects.

• Decades pass, and the diffusion of capital across the webway of worlds has over-specialized whole planets in this pattern.

• For example, a world that a banking network has very sparsely peopled with a class of debt-captive labor, or land speculators have so monopolized that it's dotted only by clusters of prefab office towers, or that some industrial group has planted a dozen mines or workshops fringed by some shanty towns.

• Very rarely are these colonies actually materially productive.

• Then, suddenly, for no explicable reason, the gateway network crashes — stranding hundreds of human colonies from each other across the cosmos.

• Although most of these worlds proceed to collapse, quite a few follow insular patterns of recovery that lead to barbaric world orders.

[feldonscane]

I think one of the interesting things about the legacy of Fallen Empires is how Magic's designers never fully gave up on trying to find ways to represent the rising and falling of waters (whether of the tides or of the regular flooding of the Luxa, Magic's in-universe Nile) in its game mechanics.