Looking at how often this happens in Star Wars proves that it’s space fantasy.
Link you gotta build a spaceship to get to that floating island.
But this is Hyrule, a medieval fantasy world! We don’t have rockets and airplanes!
Hear me out… Zonai devices.
Dwemer ruins gang represent
As a forever GM, this is one of my favorite tropes, it’s usually one of the driving forces in my worlds, I tend to prefer narrative power struggle type top level conflict in my worlds and this trope just makes for such fun gameplay.
Either there’s multiple influential organizations vying for control of the ancient tech, or a group of userpers that found it, or the current ruling org is using it, or it was undiscovered until the PCs activated it (a good way to also be able to fluidly integrate a chosen one trope into a group without one single chosen one)
In a magic world, pure magic gets stale and starts to feel all the same, but replacing some of that magic with ancient tech can add a lot of fun flavor that doesn’t need to upset game balance and can provide power advancement in ways beyond experience and level ups.
There was a post somewhere here on lemmy recently that inspired an idea for something like this:
An ultimate AI dominated the world and kept humans only on zoos along with all other animals. Over several generations those humans lost all knowledge and culture they had. Eventually the AI got wiped out by some natural disaster and it allowed humans to start over.
