Manses and Archeology in the wilderness

The trouble with making manses in the game as places where cities and towns are found, which makes sense, is that it make it easy to find all the good places people put things in the First Age.  

Is it right.  Certainly towns and cities have to make sense where they are in the landscape.  You are not going to have a huge city in the middle of nowhere if the is nothing to support it.  So cities and towns need to make sense as to where they are placed in RPG settings.  But there are cities that fit where they are that break the rules.  The Ancient City of Rathess was not originally a human city, so it does not need to be located where humans put cities.  The First Age city of Meru was on a mountain, but when it was built, air travel was common, so it makes sense.  The city of Hollow/Nexus is at the confluence of two great rivers, so it is perfectly placed.

The First Age was a civilization that ran on Power.  The Power it ran on was Geomancy and Essence.  As such all the Geomantic hotspots must have been tapped.  There was 700 Celestial Exalted and about a Million Terrestrial Exalted, they would all want Hearthstones and they had devices that ran on Hearthstones, like Warstriders and airships.  There was the artificial intelligence, I AM, who ran a network across the world, powered by manses.  There was need of a lot of power.  Not all the Manses would have towns around them, but they were castles and homes for various people.  With a minimum of 2-10 rooms in each manse, they would make great places to be personal storehouses and retreats.  So, if in the First Age all the Geomancy was developed, finding demesnes and manses in the second age would be like finding the best place to look for artifacts of the First Age.  

When the Contagion and the Balorian Crusade wiped the First Age away, many of the First Age manses were destroyed or lost.  Many towns disappeared, and the population of Creation dropped to one percent of what it was.  In the tweaks that I did to Creation, I put that the Shogunate sponsored a campaign of summoning Demons and Elementals to rid the world of caches of Orichalcum artifacts.  The many manses were stripped of Orichalcum, often to the detriment of the Geomancy, causing many manses to overload and blow up.  The Orichalcum was destroyed and the tombs were looted.  The Sidereal's have charms that can move buildings, tombs that were manses that powered the defenses were effectively turned off.  

Large parts of Creation are still not populated.  These locations would have manses, demesnes and places where artifacts are looking to be uncovered, but no Orichalcum and Moonsilver artifacts.  But the problem is that they are all located on Dragon Lines, so anyone can find them.  These locations may increasingly be more dangerous the deeper in the wilderness, away from civilization.  A lot of the Geomancy of a manse is dependent on things outside the building, if the outside is not maintained, the Geomancy is disrupted.  This means that there would be many manses that would have been destroyed.  Or reduced in power.

With the imbalance of numbers, even in the First Age the Terrestrials out numbered the Celestials, most of the low powered Manses would have had Terrestrial owners in the first age, at least renters.