I know it’s because there’s something of an actual lineage there, each new setting spun off from or inspired by the ones before, but I find it somewhat amusing that in the current big 3 fantasy ttrpg settings, D&D’s Faerûn, Pathfinder’s Golarion, and Critical Role’s Exandria, the flying cities were always doomed. They’re always there, because flying cities are cool as hell, but they’re always doomed, because we’re not sure if we want that much casual magic in the world. So the Netherese Empire, the Shori Empire, the Age of Arcanum, they’re all lost wonders of the ancient world, the ruins of fallen sky cities serving as fantastic megadungeons littering the landscape of the present day. Once upon a time there was a fantastic mage empire that set their cities flying through the sky, but obviously their hubris and/or a titanic (often divine) enemy brought them down, because such magical luxuries could never be expected to last.
A lot of current fantasy settings are a little bit post-apocalyptic. Explicitly so, in several cases. If you want to play a campaign on a flying city, you have to know in advance that you’re playing a prequel campaign and the city is doomed. Just. As a fact of being. Flying cities don’t last. You just have to live with that fact in the back of your mind.
Don’t get me wrong, the ruins and impact craters of a lost age of flying cities does make a fantastic bit of background worldbuilding. I just, I’d like to see a setting where the golden age isn’t either already gone or slated to end in doom and disaster? A setting with current flying cities. Yeah, maybe some of them have fallen or had isolated disasters, if you’ve got a whole-ass city hanging in the air with only magic holding it up, there’s a lot that can go wrong, but others are still there, they didn’t all die in a single mass catastrophe. You know? A setting where the age of wonder is right now, and it is not divinely mandated to end. We’ve got flying cities, maybe the next stop is space cities, with nothing catastrophic in between. We have all the potential, and the future is bright, and not ironically so, but genuinely so.
Flying cities are cool. They’re a cool thing to explore, and I feel like Tower-of-Babel style hubris-destined-for-a-fall is not the only potential narrative for them. But yes, I’m aware that this is mostly because those three particular settings are a nested egg of inspirations. Heh.
