[gabador]

Many fantasy books have some kind of a ruins in them. Jordan with shadar Logoth, and mashadar, and all the Conan stories seem awash with them.
Saying that, I think they are a goldmine of mysterious writing. I mean, who would ever suspect an eerie set of haunted ruins for a source of bad?
Hehe.
I want to add one of them to my story, with some kind of evil in there, but I'm afraid that when people read it, they'll snort and say "Jordan" when it wasn't him who inspired me to do it.
What's your opinion about haunted ruins?

[LeMort]

Ruins can lend a great atmosphere to a book, but you'll have to try and work them into the story.

There's nothing worse than a novel that is, basically, a bunch of people travelling from A to B with haunted ruins, jagged mountains, dangerous swamps etc. lined up between the two points.

So include them in your story if you want, but make them interesting and not just a road block.

[Lifino]

I've considered this exact issue. The best solution I've found so far was inspired by my trip to Israel, where there are very many locations where people have built new cities/towns on the exact site where a city/town existed some time in the distant past... Sometimes the old 'ruins' had been cleared away, while other times the old place had been burried by the land and still stood some 30 feet down below the new city/town.

It gave a very interesting feel to those places as you walked through them. There was a certain mystery, you couldn't help but wonder what it used to look like, who were the people who lived here, and what was their life like...?

And now you ask, how is it you could tell a town built upon a town, from the normal, every-day, run-o'-the-mill town... Well they put the simple prefix "Tel" on the name of the town... Hence: Tel Aviv.

I always though that it'd be a neat idea to borrow this concept and switch the prefix from tel to something else, or make it a sufix, just personalize it a little.

-Silas