How come Fantasy Prisons are always about some self-automated holding place for typically one or a few powerful beings, like a titan, a dragon, or an evil god.
Why aren't there any tropes about an actual Fantasy prison holding hundreds or thousands of individual magical malcontents and unique monsters, staffed by an actual prison guard.
>When you play so many campaigns that you build up an Arkham Asylum's worth of villains and antagonists
I had a place in a campaign i ran called The Shattered Gaol which was exactly that. Basically an old fortress that was broken into pieces by some unspecified magical event that's now used as a prison for dangerous wizards and intelligent monsters and such, patrolled by highly paid and unscrupulous guards.
I'm actually planning a sorta magical prison for my next campaign, staffed with clerics and paladins of Helm.
What's their contingency plan for a mass breakout
Uhhh...magic? I dunno. Never explored it more thoroughly, it was just window dressing.
There were a bunch of powerful riot control golems they had stashed in a closet somewhere, though.
Warcraft has three such prisons that I can think of off the top of my head, the Vault of the Wardens, Tol Barad and the Violet Hold. I vaguely recall Stormwind having a second prison for powerful mages and such that is the counterpart to the Stockade as well.
> tfw one setting where the planet was basically a huge dungeon for the gods, with some great old one that was the enemy of the setting's high god or something at the middle. Basically anyone who insulted the gods/broke their rules got tossed into one of the levels, depending upon their crimes. The ones with the lesser crimes were tossed on the 0th level, the surface. Basically just an excuse to have dungeons naturally appear because god metaphysics/magic. I'll probably never use the idea, unfortunately.
>wizards
>dangerous
How the fuck can a wizard be dangerous if you've captured them? Strip them naked and burn their spellbook. Done. Simple.
What are they gonna do, kill me with Prestidigitation?
Forgot I was greentexting half way through that, forgive the formatting
Simply because that would mean actually designing a prison. That is a lot of work. You can't just bs that because it's obvious to the players that the system shouldn't have worked on the npc's when they break it.
I was excited for an evil campaign where we start in prison only to find it's pretty much just an antimagic field in a demiplane, we ended up escaping because of contrivance.
Prestidigitation + Sleight of Hand + Perform. They just magic tricked a weapon off you. I'm not all about caster domination, but some wizards get crafty and nasty when you back them into a corner. Not everyone is old, frail, and twiggy if they do magic. Sometimes you get those John Constantine bastards.
Wizards being a general term for magical folks with magical juju, you goon. Not just spellbook-carrying nerds
What would be goods monsters to hide in an SCP like fantasy prison? I feel like making a campaign where the PC were guards in the upper most sector and have to get to the bottom to turn the power on to open the secured blast doors.
Azkaban.
>what is sorcerer
>one of them has a phylactery and just needs to kill themselves
>one of them has a bag of holding in his left tooth
the amount of ways they could be still a threat is large
Fuck your beautiful idea, absolutely disgusting, kill yourself please.
>> Build prison to hold multiple types of high powered bad guy...
>> Conflicting wards and materials make it too weak to contain them!
>medusa/beholder warden who petrifies all prisoners
Because most of the big bad threats that are worth talking about can't be killed by normal means, so they must be imprisoned.
If the Dark Lord releases a plague on the kingdom, you don't throw him in prison. You cut that fucker's head off. You only lock him up because you have no other option.
Because you can't kill him by normal means, you need a prison you can expect to work forever. You don't want the ancient unkillable evil getting out because someone forgot why they were paying guards to protect this one specific door in a city no one has lived in for hundreds of years.
Because he is effectively immortal, he has unlimited time to figure out a way to trick his way out. So you want to reduce his options as much as possible. That includes not giving him any guards to lie to and seduce into his service. The location of the prison being secret also reduces the chances that evil followers will try and jailbreak him.
So you want what is essentially a permanent solution that takes care of itself without oversight. If you are not dealing with a dude this powerful, he is either killable (so you kill him) or not powerful enough that you really need more than a normal dungeon cell.
Really, the worst thing that can happen is that you get someone you should have killed and lock him up instead, so he inevitably gets free and you are right back where you started.
>the world is a dungeon
>a LITERAL dungeon ordained by the powers-that-be
Because usually the people that you would throw in jail get killed by the PCs.
The Vaults, I believe, which was a dungeon that got cut from the game.
>badass king
>easily Solar Exalted-level of power, mundane and magical
>has many enemies, throw ithem all in a dungeon so big you could easily have a whole country (or at least a city-state) there
>enemies start out at the bottom, are told to go up for freedom- no real coalition is possible between them, they're too diverse as a whole
>he does that so that only best could come out and serve him
Go for quality over quantity. Casters, the real spooky bastards. Humans (or other base races) with magical enhancements. The results of magical experiments or fallout. A few demons.
The facility has to have a reason to imprison rather than kill. Maybe it's controlled by someone that wants the kinds of secrets the prisoners might have? Maybe they just collect them?
What if the prison drains them of their powers while they are inside (making them easier to contain) but the unintended but VERY useful side effect of this is that the collected power can actually be reduced into a format useable by others and even transported.
Basically turning your magical prison into a farm for valuable mana crystals that are pretty unethical to make under normal circumstances, but are pretty much unavoidable as a side effect of the prison working as intended.
So they judge the benefit of keeping them imprisoned as being worth the risk. For obvious reasons, mana crystals are moved away from the prison as soon as possible, rather than stored anywhere near where the prisoners might break out and get to them.
>Why aren't there any tropes about an actual Fantasy prison holding hundreds or thousands of individual magical malcontents and unique monsters, staffed by an actual prison guard.
Because it's medieval fantasy, user. The people therein don't have a problem with just killing all the malcontents and monsters. Prisons are for people you expect to be able to get some more money out of, holding people until you kill them, or for beings so impossibly powerful that you can't kill them.
Or, occasionally, people who you don't like very much but are not actually worth killing.