We don’t know exactly how or when it happened.
We dare not try.
Digging deeper is far too dangerous.
Where did it begin?
Was there one point of origin? Could we have prevented this?
We can never know. Not truly.
But I do have my theories.
An adventurer looted something from a dungeon. From there, if it was vendor trash, they immediately sold it to a merchant. Or maybe the adventurer used it, until they got something better, and then sold it. I don’t know for sure, but either way, we caused it. We should have seen the warning signs. I know why we didn’t. Spot Checks generally fail when nobody thinks to perform them in the first place. All it took was for us to not look where we needed to. We were so stupid. I can’t believe none of us saw it sooner.
I don’t know what to call it. Change Blindness. Inattentional Blindness. Weirdness Censor. Selective Obliviousness. Bystander Syndrome. We failed a spot check because it was so gradual, it became a part of our daily lives. Whole generations grew up not knowing certain phenomena they were living through in real time hadn’t existed a hundred years prior.
To them, it was ‘normal’. What would have alerted their ancestors, they took for granted. We were slowly desensitized to what will be our demise. Our perception was slowly filtered, inducing apathy instead of alarm. I want to say I can blame my ancestors. But up until a couple weeks ago, I was no different from them. When something new is introduced into the system of society, it is noted as new at the time. Generations of use turns it from new into ‘it has always been that way’. It was not always this way. The changes can be traced.
We definitely could have seen it coming. We chose not to. We didn’t realize the consequences. Oh Gods. The consequences of our arrogance. It wasn’t a problem. Or so we thought. What could possibly have gone wrong?
Well, at some point, we reached the point of no return. The development of society spiraled in a way we can’t recover from. It’s too late. It’s far, far too late. I don’t know what to do. Nobody does. Not anymore.
All I really can assume is it had to have started harmlessly enough. It sure doesn’t feel that way anymore.
Back in the day, adventurers didn’t start with any enchanted gear unless they were already ludicrously wealthy. The only way to obtain enchanted gear was from dungeon crawls. Even then, it was very rare, and risked carrying curses. What I wouldn’t give for our situation to be just a curse cured by praying to the Gods. No matter how nasty the curse, at least we know how to treat those ailments. This? What happened…what can we do.
On rarer occasions, existing equipment could through extraordinary circumstances gain enchantments. Eventually, we learned how to artificially replicate what was previously fluke occurrences. What was once accidental, we learned to do intentionally. We honed it to a science, perfecting the process of enchanting equipment of all kinds. To make profits, the more powerful and useful the equipment enchantments, the higher the cost, so despite the advances, nothing really changed for adventurers like myself. Most started with normal gear, the cheapest on the market.
Still, an increased supply made it comparably easier for adventurers to buy or find enchanted gear earlier in their careers. Merchants and vendors of all sorts would buy obsolete equipment, mark the price up, and sell it to adventurers that’d treat the gear as an upgrade.
For questionable equipment not appraised, merchants might offer an increased price for their mystery equipment. In regulated areas, merchants who feared getting jail time for deceptive business practices instead offered these mystery items at a discount, so adventurers couldn’t complain if the items ended up dangerous. “You get what you paid for”. Oh, how we certainly did. I can’t think of a more apt phrase.
This process lasted for hundreds, thousands of years unchanged. To this day, it still exists to some extent. The adventuring economy relied on this process, and nothing seemed amiss. For five years, I’ve followed in the steps of my predecessors in continuing these practices. I might be the last generation to.
As for where and why things changed? My theory goes, eventually, something disrupted the process, in a way an adventurer would have spotted if they were the one in charge. To our dismay, it was instead brokers. Dealers. Retailers. Handlers of the goods we adventurers relied on. If they had cared, if they had shown concern, maybe we could have averted this disaster. Their deception was simple, yet deadly. And we were all complacent in allowing it.
Merchants began selling mystery equipment they didn’t remember having in stock. Capitalism won over curiosity, and because adventurers enjoyed the cheap enchanted gear, they didn’t investigate too closely. I’ve heard stories of our ancestors checking every piece of gear meticulously just in case it had some hidden property, but they didn’t check these, and I can’t bring myself to blame them. As an adventurer myself, I understand.
Bows which never broke.
Spears which never snapped.
Staves which never splintered.
Shields which never shattered.
Quivers which never ran out of arrows.
Arrows which never split.
Later, previously-rare bags of holding with a seemingly bottomless amount of storage space. It was just too good to give up. Rationally, they should’ve realized it was too good to be true. But I know the failings of our system now and at the time, they could justify ignoring the warning signs.
There were dozens of ways for gear to gain those enchantments. Requiring a magical charge–not much, any adventurer’s mana pool would be enough to power this–wasn’t considered an unusual prerequisite for the enchantments to work. After all, magical equipment is magical. Without being given magic, it didn’t seem unusual for damage to cause it to dissolve.
The obvious explanation was the equipment attempted to activate the enchantment and ate itself when no magic was present. It seemed reasonable enough, and fit within the rules we knew. As long as we fed our gear a supply of magic to feed their enchantments, the enchantments would work. Fail to give them the magic, and they would malfunction. Every adventurer knows how that works. I got taught it in adventuring school.
We were ALL complicit. What are adventurers if not ruthlessly pragmatic? Any and every advantage, even if it is one we didn’t fully understand, we could and would exploit. It’s literally our job to find unconventional uses for everything. Equipment which was indestructible as long as it was given a magical charge any adventurer could give? How could any adventurer pass the opportunity up? The uses are endless! The mystery equipment was cheap, easy to use even by rookie adventurers, and very effective. While there was better enchanted equipment available, rookie adventurers would use these discount enchanted items until they had something stronger.
Most traded the old gear for upgrades, but some kept their old rookie equipment. Even upon retirement, they would hang these hallmarks of their younger days on wooden mantles, placing them on the walls of whatever business they retired to run. Positions like innkeepers, bartenders, blacksmiths, merchants, and more. You name it, adventurers could retire to pick up that job, and they often had their gear to either pass on to the next generation or use just in case it was needed.
After all, you never know! That old equipment could come in handy! I know I personally was planning to hoard every item I ever got and only give any up if I truly had no choice. Keeping my own set of starter enchantment gear was a no-brainer.
Within a generation, this enchanted gear was so common it became the starter equipment of every adventurer. My first set was entirely made of these, and I still use my bag of holding even while having upgraded my other gear. It’s the standard. The norm. Many don’t even bother with getting different upgraded equipment at all, spending their entire adventuring career using this basic starter equipment. If the starter gear still works, they reason, why replace it?
And it is an issue we’re now stuck with. I don’t even know if I regret it.
Detect Monster used to be considered one of the most valuable, important spells in the arsenal of an adventuring party. It offered pinpoint precision on where monsters were, allowing an adventuring party to locate any and all threats to them. Dungeon crawls were much safer with liberal usage of the spell, alerting them to any danger before it would strike. It seemingly had no limits in what it could offer. The spell could find any threat and help neutralize it. From the smallest aggressive dragon to shapeshifters to subterranean burrowers to the mightiest of dragons flying high above in the sky.
However, about three-hundred years ago, something incredibly confusing began to happen. The previously-precise spell started seemingly misfiring. Adventuring parties often could still find creatures which could potentially be classified as monsters. Passive creatures which would be caught by the spell when aggressive were the theorized culprits. The thought process was the Detect Monster spell had become too precise, classifying things which could be said to be monsters, as monsters, in spite of their harmless nature. Perhaps it even thought humans were monsters, because humans had the theoretical capacity to be monstrous.
Nobody could figure out what the issue with the spell which was previously so valuable was. It had been refined over generations to be sure, since spells evolve just as much as equipment does. A mutation in the spell probably turned it from valuable to worthless over time. So the theory of my ancestors went. It seemed a reasonable conclusion. Perhaps we simply didn’t want to accept the obvious.
Within 20 years, adventurers had adapted to the spell’s reduced usefulness, eventually learning to use other methods of scouting and tracking to compensate for the loss of a previously-essential spell. I didn’t need to learn it, but my innate thirst for knowledge led me to still picking it up.
Kingdoms rise, kingdoms fall. Wars are fought, cities fall, new cities are built. Cultures change as new inventions are pioneered. Various factors reduce the growth of worldwide population. War, famine, disease, monster raids, natural disasters, etc. However, overall, the population of the world has been slowly increasing. With an increased population comes an increased need for housing. As advancements in city defenses, medicine, production, transportation, and diplomacy have led to longer lifespans, industry expanded to match the need of more lodging.
Adventurers used to have an average life expectancy of 20-30. Now, people like me are expected to live an average of 60-70 years, not much lower than the general population. We’ve gotten better at surviving what would previously have killed us. I know I’ve fought battles which would’ve killed me if I lived through them even as little as one-hundred years ago.
Wagons, once considered luxuries only rich merchants could use, became mass-produced. There were so many wagons around, you could often pick up a wagon from any given road, where people would leave wagons they didn’t need, so those who did could pick them up. With the increase in transportation came an increase in the ability to transport goods en masse in crates and barrels. With land transportation having expanded, sea transportation followed. Great galleons formed to traverse sea and river alike with ease.
Taverns were built seemingly overnight at crossroads. Initially not manned, but filled with permanent staff soon enough. Quite a few of these crossroad taverns would later form the central foundation of cities, including my home town! I’ve been ingrained in this culture my whole life, learning the history of this expansion quite well.
Inns, blacksmiths, and more were renovated. These new lodgings each had a seemingly endless amount of room. Inns always had at least one more room for travelers. I’ve never gone to an inn and not found myself having a room available, offering comfort from some of the softest beds I’ve ever been on, and the warmth of a fire somehow perfectly burning at a temperature tailored to my preferences.
Storehouses always had room to fit the latest shipments of supplies needed. New houses were built, and older buildings were slowly demolished and replaced with buildings designed to match the aesthetic of the newer buildings. These buildings were built over the course of days, primarily made from wood. Their walls might have been thin, and they were too close together, and they weren’t pretty, but they could be built quickly and cheaply by construction conglomerates. Slowly, as cities expanded, we watched as all of our buildings were gradually transformed.
Buildings always had plenty of furnishings. There was always enough tables, chairs, utensils, beds, and more. While there were many having dissatisfaction at the conformity of the newer buildings, people didn’t object to the convenience they provided. They might not have looked pretty, but they were functional.
Personally, I’ve seen photos of how things looked before and I always thought they were better in the past, but I didn’t have any rational reason why. Objectively, the newer versions should’ve been better. Spacious, filled with supplies, and cheap in both time and materials to build. Conformity allowed for cities to more precisely plan and regulate their growth, tracking what buildings would be placed where, and how they would fit. I recognized the value of it all, but it still somehow felt wrong. By my time we had no say though; that’s just the way things are for us.
At some point, construction guilds began rotating crews, assigning multiple teams to complete their work. It became the standard for something being finished to be assumed as simply being a different team, ahead of schedule. Projects thought to take years would take months. Months, in weeks. Weeks, in days. Small day-long ones could even be done in hours. This efficiency rose from a similar shift in supply lines.
Shipments of goods in wooden boxes often arrived early, and in excess of the requested amount. Lumberjacks were clearly working hard, and all areas of society using wood products were thriving. Carpenters never ran out of items to sell, faced with a constant increase in demand to match the expansion of society. They became more focused on selling than on crafting, but still found the time to keep up their supplies. Nobody really knew how, not even the overworked carpenters, but it was highly prestigious.
The march of civilization was also the march of capitalism. Standardization made everything faster, cheaper, easier. And while it was taxing to those in the industry, they figured they’d always have enough business. They sold more and more of their wares, and business was good. It still is, if you’re able to ignore what they did. A glaring error anyone not exhausted by the tax our money-driven world placed on them could have caught, but left unseen because they simply had other things on their minds. It was easy to miss, when not looking for it.
With the advancement of society, crimes advanced as well. Criminals had to evolve, or die. Many chose die. It served them right, society figured, because crime is crime. Nobody really has sympathy for criminals dumb enough to get caught or killed. The rest got smarter, much smarter.
Some crimes disappeared from society seemingly overnight. Piracy went extinct. Bandits stopped raiding wagons. Arson stopped happening. Vandalism vanished. While thievery remained, burglaries and wagon larceny stopped occurring. We never figured out why some crimes stopped happening, but we certainly weren’t going to complain.
The tradeoff, however, was a vastly increased rate of murder and missing persons reports. Remains were never recovered, but whenever blood splotches were found, it wasn’t hard to guess what had happened. How these corpses were so reliably disposed, nobody knew. A prevailing theory was “they didn’t actually die”. The would-be perpetrators being forcefully disincentivizing from following through. We didn’t know why anyone would bother with stopping those crimes, but it was plausible.
Maybe vigilantes became sick of the ruffians. Maybe the advancement of society made those crimes be harshly punished by the underworld. Perhaps law enforcement went above and beyond their call to duty. Since most of the missing were miscreants, we didn’t care; we were complacent. As far as we were concerned, crimes disappearing and criminals going missing could only have been a good thing.
A common thought was relocation. People move all the time. Blood indicated it was likely forceful, but being forced to leave a city isn’t unusual, people have been doing that for as long as we’ve had cities. Nobody really wanted to dig too deep into their disappearances. There were plenty of harmless mundane explanations. As long as the victims were unsavory individuals, we willingly looked the other way.
The criminal underground certainly evolved rapidly around this time. Far more secretive, far more organized, far more care taken. Reckless abandon no longer served them.
Nobody doubted why. It seemed obvious. Society’s changes meant the old ways were too dangerous for aspiring new criminals. So for a long time, we assumed all the disappearances, all the missing persons, were those who deserved it.
Many of the most crazy conspiracy theorists insisted on investigating these disappearances, but when someone proposes theories like “aliens abducted them”, “our world is a simulation and golem overlords delete unsavory elements”, and similar outrageous ideas, it’s hard to take their lunatic ramblings with any degree of seriousness. Their ideas were clearly outrageous, and easily disproven. So we didn’t pay attention to their ramblings. We listened just long enough to dismiss them whenever a far simpler, more rational explanation arose.
Eventually, religious fanatics got ahold of the news, and insisted they spoke for the gods about an emerging threat. The disappearances weren’t natural, they were a warning sign, and the end of days would be upon us all if we didn’t listen to them. We were all going to be doomed, they claimed. We had to listen to the gods and pay attention to the signs, they said.
It didn’t take long for these nutjobs to join the list of those we dismissed. When they eventually went silent, we assumed it was an inability for them to back up their theories. The end of the world never came to pass, or so we thought. The out-there theories of the crazies and the rantings of overly-‘pious’ preachers were something we collectively discarded, and the disappearances of those individuals didn’t attract any attention.
I really don’t want to endorse conspiracy theorists here, but on very rare occasions, sometimes, they can be on to something, and if we had paid closer attention to their vanishing, maybe we could’ve done something. But I suspect even by then we stood no chance.
Missing persons after a generation of change leveled out. They still happened, but at a lower rate. They became normalized. We accepted them as a given, as something happening to those not learning from history.
Occasionally, there would be warehouse and retail workers joining the long list of missing persons. The merchants’ guilds they worked for, as well as those supporting the merchants’ guilds, insisted the disappeared individuals either left of their own volition, or perhaps fell into the way of crime.
Public outrage ensued, and investigations followed, yet nothing proved them wrong. Distrust in the corporations rose, but since there was no proof of foul play, it eventually morphed to be an understood risk of the profession.
On some occasions, patrons disappeared from taverns and inns, assumed to have checked out early without anyone noticing. Since adventurers die all the time, nobody bothered following through.
Oh Gods. How many times did I come close to being among them. It’s…unsettling. Why did we accept people vanishing into thin air and random blood spots as a given?