Vestigial Empire / Tabletop Games

• Abel in Anima: Beyond Fantasy. What was once an empire that dominated the entire (known to most humans) world after the Rupture of the Heavens is now just its core regions, most territories have become independent of it for one or other reason, and while it is still the most powerful nation of the setting, its forces are spread over its domains.
• The default setting in Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition, the Nentir Vale, is rife with these, most notably Human-controlled Nerath, Tiefling-controlled Bael Turath, and Dragonborn-controlled Arkhosia.
• Eberron has the goblinoid Dhakaani Empire, which was mostly destroyed 9000 years ago by an invasion from Xoriat, the plane of madness, then slowly declined. Well before that was the ancient Giant empire on Xen'drik, which was destroyed by the dragons. Survivors of both occasionally attempt to restore their civilization's former glory.
• Lookshy of Exalted fashions itself as the last remnant of the Shogunate, the worldwide Dragon Blooded government prior to the Great Contagion, reduced to a single (if securely independent) city-state.
  • The Realm itself is not quite there yet, but it is a lot less strong abroad for having spent the last five years drawing the lines in preparation for civil war, and being reduced to a fraction of its former power is a noted possibility. Some Dynasts would even prefer a Vestigial Empire; it would be easier to manage, and they don't have any greater ambitions than maintaining their own tremendous wealth and luxury.
  • The Lintha have been on a downward spiral since the fall of the Primordials. Depictions of the First Age show the Lintha Empire (which once ruled most of the West) to have been reduced to a small coastal state where pure blooded Lintha (the only ones able to use their magic and operate their technology) are virtually an endangered species. The default setting shows the vestigial remnant of that, where the Lintha are nothing but a few criminal families (with practices of incest and self-castration/mutilation) operating off of the back of a dying monster.
• Unther in the Forgotten Realms. Up until the Time of Troubles it was a force to be reckoned with, ruled by Physical Gods. After the gods' mortal incarnations are killed, Unther becomes a shadow of its former self and is mostly annexed by its neighboring empire, Mulhorand. In 4E, Unther is one of multiple countries that was unceremoniously destroyed by the Spellplague.
  • The Forgotten Realms also have Ostoria, the former kingdom of the giants, which fell due to a long war with dragons, breaking both races' worldwide influence.
• Khador in Iron Kingdoms was originally the Khardic Empire which held a very large portion of Western Immoren. After the Orgoth invasion, it lost much of its original lands, which were given to the newly founded Kingdoms of Llael and Ord, leaving it severely weakened. It was not until recently that the Kingdom was able to expand and reclaim much of what it had lost, finally becoming the new Khadoran Empire.
• Mechanical Dream had two that would eventually fall. The Frilins are an unaging, super-smart plant people that have further benefit of being able to survive without Orpee fruit. With all these advantages, they created a long-lasting empire that fell when their Super-Soldier species, the Zin turned on them. After the Frilins fell, a newer race the ambitious Gnath rose to power despite only having increased reflexes and finding it extremely painful to consume Orpee. The Pre-Core Gnath empire fell when legendary figure known as the Core usurped the old empress and ushered in an industrial revolution and rise of the mercantilist corporate world, which he named the Core.
• The Remanence of Myriad Song is ruled by the descendants of the Syndics' genetically engineered slave overseers and consider themselves the Myriad Syndicate, and just waiting for the Patrons to return. In the meantime, everyone else hates them.
• Pathfinder: Taldor and Cheliax. The Taldan empire used to be a superpower that ruled over half of Avistan directly and exerted influence over much of the rest. Its westernmost province Cheliax broke away from Taldor during a war with Qadira and started an expansionist empire of its own, then Cheliax went through a Civil War that ended in the House of Thrune and the Church of Asmodeus taking control. Its Varisian colony Korvosa became de facto independent during the civil war, while Molthune, Isger, Andoran, and Galt broke away later. The Archduchy of Ravounel declares independence from Cheliax in the Hell's Rebels adventure path, and the subsequent Hell's Vengeance campaign deals with Queen Abrogail bankrolling an evil adventuring party to try and stop the empire from collapsing further.
• Ponyfinder: After Queen Iliana's death, the Empire of Everglow quickly falls into decay, expending its energy on numerous futile internal conflicts and power grabs before utterly collapsing in on itself, to the point that the humans who take its place mostly don't believe it ever existed.
• Spears of the Dawn: Nyala used to rule all the Three Lands, until one of their defeated foes made a Deal with the Devil for survival and revenge and became the Eternal. The resulting Long War saw Nyala lose control over all its previous provinces and eventually have to formally acknowledge their sovereignty in return for their help in finally defeated the enemy. In the present day, Nyala is still culturally and technologically high-standing, but it no longer has any more military or political power than the other four of the Five Kingdoms.
• In Traveller, the Vilani Imperium. It was superficially powerful, controlling thousands of worlds when the Terrans found it. But it was senile, indecisive, and generally a meal waiting to be snatched by whomever discovered it. ^note  Or, as its conquerors eventually found out, a dying elephant that would crush and suffocate anyone bold or unwary enough to try to topple it under its sheer dead weight. The Rule of Man inherited all the old empire's problems, and managed to prop it up for a while, but a thousand-year Dark Age came anyway.
• Unhallowed Metropolis has the Victorian Empire collapse in 1905 under the Zombie Apocalypse. 200 years later, the empire is reduced to just London and the rest of the world is even worse off.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • The Imperium of Man has waxed and waned over the past ten thousand years, but is now unquestionably in a state of decline, so much so that scholars refer to the current era as the Time of Ending. Whole sectors are being lost to rebellion, alien depredations, or governmental negligence, and on every front the Imperium's enemies are closing in. The words most commonly used are "decaying" and "rotting," and fearful sages worry that it will be a Rising Empire such as the Tau that will ultimately inherit the galaxy. Which is not to say that Mankind plans on going down without a fight.
  • The Eldar don't have so much a Vestigal Empire as they do the bleached bones of one. Where they once ruled the entire galaxy unopposed and rearranged the cosmos at a whim, now they're reduced to a few spaceborne cities called Craftworlds, some primeval colonies on the galactic rim, and in the Dark Eldar's case a nightmare metropolis in the cancerous heart of a Portal Network. As such, they're frequently described as a Dying Race clinging to life as long as they can in other races' shadow.
  • The Necrons ruled the galaxy before the rise of the Eldar, and have emerged from stasis to find their domain overrun by primitive upstarts. Their technology, while arguably the most formidable in the setting, has not always weathered their 60 million year nap, they can't reproduce due to being Virtual Ghosts, and many of the lords who have woken up have developed eccentricities due to a mechanical version of Cryonics Failure.
  • The Orks were once the Krorks, the purpose-built Super-Soldier race and final project of the Old Ones. The Beast's Waagh, little more than an echo of what the Krorks once were, brought the Imperium to its knees and had the technology to turn entire planetoids into "attack moons" equipped with Gravity-manipulating weapons that could tear flagships apart and shift entire mountains to crush opposing armies. With no off switch and no one else to fight, the Krorks eventually fell upon each other and descended into the anarchic madness that is the modern Orks.
  • The Horde of Alien Locusts that is the Tyrannids, are in fact, little more than the few Refugees who have made it into the Milky way, running away from something even worse than they are.
  • In contrast to the modern Old Ones, which were utterly destroyed in a cataclysmic war, the Old Slann of the game's first edition simply faded and declined over time, eventually becoming reduced to a small number of surviving colonies and outposts clinging to tattered remnants of their ancient power and glory.
  • Note that in all these cases, "vestigial" should not be taken to mean "weak". Even if their golden ages were millennia ago, these civilizations have held out for this long in one of the most ridiculously lethal settings ever imagined. There's also the simple matter of scale; even the Eldar can call on billions of soldiers, but it's nothing compared to the uncountable armies of the Imperium or the even larger forces of Orks and Tyranids.
• In Warhammer:
  • The Dwarfs' empire first got cracked when the Slann noticed that the mountains were no longer where they thought they should be, so they moved them back, without consulting the dwarfs who were living under them at the time. Since then they've been fighting a Hopeless War against an endless tide of orcish and goblin invaders, and they might have a chance at stabilizing if they weren't obsessed with settling old grudges, and the grudges arising from attempts to settle other grudges.
  • The ancient Elven empire was torn apart by civil war, splitting into the High Elves and Dark Elves, as well as the Wood Elves who stayed behind in their overseas colonies. The High Elves are slowly dying out, while the Dark and Wood Elves are stable, if prone to backstabbing or militant isolationism, respectively.
  • The main reason the Elves and Dwarves were unable to recover was that at the height of their power they fought an utterly pointless apocalyptic war with each other. By the time it was over they lacked the numbers and surviving infrastructure to deal with new disasters.
  • The Lizardmen's empire is down a few cities, and has lost contact with the most distant parts of their domain, but are doing better than some of their rivals in that they're actively rebuilding... just very slowly. Granted, several cities are still marked on their maps with Lizardmen equivalents for "Never Go Within Thirty Miles Of This Place Again", but it's a start.
  • The giants, too, used to have a vast and glorious empire, but it was long ago wiped out by ogres, scattering the few survivors to the four winds.
• Zweihänder has a future setting called Dark Astral. Similar to the main setting, it gives a nod to a Warhammer setting (in this case 40K) and ups the worst aspects. In Dark Astral, aliens had crushed the human empire so they retreated to Earth and are reduced to one city New Jerusalem. To make things worse, not only are ambitious aliens coming to Earth to finish what they started but the dark supernatural forces that caused human migration from Earth are beginning to wake.