Basic Trope: A long-abandoned device or city is still in remarkably good shape despite the passage of time.
- Straight: The Macguffomatic still works despite being lost for a thousand years.
- Exaggerated: The Macguffomatic is fully functional even though it was made out of bamboo and the last living creature to see it got a face full of dinosaur-exterminating asteroid just before dying.
- Downplayed:
- The Macguffomatic is still functional when it's found, but it's in a very bad shape.
- The room contained millions of no longer functional Macguffomatics. Enough pieces remain that they can be pieced together to get one working example.
- The Macguffomatic is on the verge of falling apart, but the heroes are able to get one more use of of it before it falls apart.
- Justified:
- The Macguffomatic is an artifact Forged by the Gods.
- The Macguffomatic was forged by dwarves, who have a viciously strict “2000 year warranty” policy.
- The Macguffomatic was specifically designed to withstand lack of use for millenia because it was designed to combat a threat that could show up thousands of years in the future.
- The Macguffomatic was contained in a stasis field.
- The Macguffomatic was made entirely of materials which can only decay in the presence of something completely isolated from it.
- The Macguffomatic's essential components were made from near-indestructable Unobtanium by the local Sufficiently Advanced Aliens.
- Inverted: "Behold, the Macguffomatic! This thing is so foolproof, it'll still be running 2,000 years from n- uh oh. it was working this morning..."
- The Macguffomatic was discarded as brittle and highly toxic waste by ancient Troperians but it decayed into something better than even they could have dreamed of over thousands of years.
- Subverted:
- Turns out, the Macguffomatic is only cosmetically functional. It breaks the moment someone tries to use it.
- The Macguffomatic was expected to be non-functional but could be analyzed to figure out how to create previously Lost Technology.
- Double Subverted: The malfunction turns out to be part of the still-functioning security system.
- Parodied: The Macguffomatic is revealed to be older than the universe itself. It still sparkles and a character comments that it has that new car smell.
- Zig Zagged: The Macguffomatic looks functional, but breaks the moment it's used, but it's part of the security system, but the whole thing was actually being maintained by a secret legacy, but they abandoned it a long time ago.
- Averted: None of the ancient artifacts encountered are technological enough that they'd be expected to have broken down.
- Enforced: The writers want to have the characters in an Urban Fantasy story use a more contemporary method to defeat the 1000 year old Sealed Evil in a Can, but the editors believe equally old Lost Technology has more mystique.
- Lampshaded: "They don't make things like they used to, huh?"
- Invoked: "We don't need the trap to actually work - people will heed a DANGER sign long after any real security measure would have stopped working, just on the off chance."
- Exploited: Emperor Evulz realizes that everything around him should still work in a thousand years, so he travels back in time and sends his scientists to keep working. 1000 years later in the present, Evulz finds 1000 years of work to defeat the heroes with.
- Defied: "What are you scared of? It couldn't possibly still work."
- Discussed: "Just once, I would like a death-trap that was BROKEN when we got here!"
- Conversed: "Is ‘immunity to entropy” one of the Macguffomatic's functions or something?"
- Deconstructed: The 10,000 year old Macguffomatic could have saved the day for the heroes, if only they'd found it 7,000 years earlier.
- Reconstructed: But there's enough of it left functional that it can possibly be reverse-engineered and a new one built.
- Played For Laughs: The Macguffomatic is inexplicably intact despite being surrounded by far more durable things that have already collapsed.
Back to Ragnarök Proofing.
