That's actually an interesting line of thought. I never made the connection of the Cold War with this apparent obsession with apocalypses, but it seems obvious in hindsight.

Hey, I OWN Forgotten Heroes: Fang, Fist and Song, bought it as soon as I learned of it's existence due to the lack of Monk-ness in the initial 4th Ed volley.

Still, great article that nicely details the apocalyptic necessities of DnD. All things considered I find it hard to believe that there are many DnD campaigns running today that don't draw from some sort of apocalypse as the primary source for their threat and if not the source, then the threat itself. One campaign I had the pleasure of sitting in on actually dealt with the world ending, a grand Never Ending Story style fall into absolute nothingness which killed the gods and left it up to the PC's to halt the end by becoming gods themselves. His next campaign was set in the same universe, dealing with the ruined world rebuilt by the now divine PC's. Heavy Apocalyptic influences to be sure.

Funny that this article should come up as I plan my next campaign. My new campaign takes place on a newly discovered continent in a young world. The players travel through a frontier; discovering new locations and braving untamed wildernesses. The villain isn't raising ancient evils, but creating new horrors. And, ironically, the only ancient ruin to be explored is a crashed inter-stellar vessel from another planet.

SpaceFuMaster:
Funny that this article should come up as I plan my next campaign. My new campaign takes place on a newly discovered continent in a young world. The players travel through a frontier; discovering new locations and braving untamed wildernesses. The villain isn't raising ancient evils, but creating new horrors. And, ironically, the only ancient ruin to be explored is a crashed inter-stellar vessel from another planet.

Don't forget to use dinosaurs! Young worlds go great with a few dinosaurs.

Brilliant analysis, Tavis. I never thought about it before, but Tunnels and Trolla has the same kind of apocalyptic underlining, and not just one, but multiple apocalypses. For T & T it was the Wizards War, a battle that lasted thousands of years, reshaped the face of the planet, wiped out some races and brought new ones to the world.

And that was followed by The War of Liberation which brought the Death Goddess to poweer in Khazan and subjugated the Good Kindreds to the Monster Kindreds in that corner of Trollworld.

And then comes the Interstellar War when Khazan is destroyed by Zweetz and his spider-alien allies in 1333 A.K.

And after that comes the Magic Pulse that slays all wizards and magical creatures and sets up the superhero world of Power Trip.

Apocalypse after apocalypse after apocalypse. It seems like we can't do without world-destroying catastrophes in Heroic Fantasy.

Is it the destruction of the old that we love, or the chance to build a new and better world in the ruins?

--Ken St. Andre

Intriguing - on some level I've always been aware of the whole "nothing is as good or grand as that which came before" trope in fantasy settings, but I honestly hadn't drawn the now rather obvious parallel with my personal favorite fictional universe until I saw it spelled out in this article: the bits about the treatment of technology (the anecdote about the pipe organ in particular) could easily have been describing Warhammer 40,000.

That's always been one of the various elements of the 40K setting I really dug - the mystical reverence of technology without understanding, civilizations with plasma pistols that believe proper maintenance and 'prayers to appease the machine spirit' are equally important, the monolithic decaying empire venerating the relics of the ancient past while remaining leery of the implications unearthing it might have (mankind's collective technological height is labeled the "Dark Age of Technology" by the inhabitants of the 'modern day' Imperium, not because it was a literal dark age but rather because the enforced ignorance the "Priesthood of the Machine" brought about was missing from it) - there's just something about the backwards notion that "ancient means way better" that I find fascinating.

Which is essentially how fantasy settings like D&D's treat magical artifacts: nobody wants a new sword when they could have one from the dawn of time itself - that one is obviously going to be way better.

Shadeovblack:

SpaceFuMaster:
Funny that this article should come up as I plan my next campaign. My new campaign takes place on a newly discovered continent in a young world. The players travel through a frontier; discovering new locations and braving untamed wildernesses. The villain isn't raising ancient evils, but creating new horrors. And, ironically, the only ancient ruin to be explored is a crashed inter-stellar vessel from another planet.

Don't forget to use dinosaurs! Young worlds go great with a few dinosaurs.

Let's face it: everything goes great with a few dinosaurs! :p

*stares at own home-brew setting of scorched earth and fallen civilisation* Apocalypse, one, check. Wooo!

trollgod:
I never thought about it before, but Tunnels and Trolla has the same kind of apocalyptic underlining, and not just one, but multiple apocalypses.

I'm humbled that I forgot to look at T&T in surveying the early RPG apocalypses, but delighted to be able to hear about it from its creator! Over at The Mule Abides I posted a timeline of when the early campaign settings were published and muse about the crossovers between Arneson's campaign and those of Gygax and Barker, with an eye to possible lines of transmission of the idea. In the end I suspect that it arose independently in each, out of the shared heritage of science fiction and fantasy concepts. It sounds like you're confirming that was the case with Trollworld, rather than something you were aware of in the RPG genome and consciously decided to use.

Gildan, good point about WH40K. When I was reading Barrington Bayley's _Eye of Terror_ recently a sentence about how the officers were equipped with Martian archaeotech pistols, while the grunts had inferior brand-new ones, gave me a thrill of familiarity. IIRC Warhammer Fantasy and Palladium Fantasy both have a related sense of humanity living in the ruins of a great alien culture, which strikes me as very Lovecraftian; our world is the Great Old Ones' post-apocalyptic setting.

Pedro, I did the monk for Fang, Fist, and Song (working title: Heroes of the Apocalypse), and in the days before he left NYC to become an Escapist editor, Greg Tito did the bard! Glad to hear some actual-play confirmation of the end of one campaign becoming the start of the next post-apocalyptic one; that's a cherished concept I've never seen in practice.

SpaceFuMaster, you might enjoy the link in my Mule post to Jeff Rients' campaign idea for a young (proto-Indo-European) world. I love that you have a crashed alien spaceship; that's another great source of weird artifacts, and it's worth noting that the powered battle armor, anti-grav med kit, and interstellar radio in Temple of the Frog are of extraterrestrial origin and much more prominent in the adventure than the pipe organ.

Credit where credit is due: My research for this article was greatly aided by posters in two threads I started at Finarvyn's OD&D boards, especially geoffrey (creator of Carcosa) and aldarron (creator of Dragons at Dawn).

It's not all that surprising, really. One day, I was wondering why post-apoc fiction is so prevalent if there has never been an apocalyptic event. Then I remembered there was - the Dark Ages. The Roman Empire was a massive civilization, spanning what at the time was half the known world, and one day it ended. A single, centralized, highly technoligcal, democratic (or at least closest to democracy as it could be during the dark ages) civilization ended, leaving nothing but the ruins of their aqueducts and coliseums, replaced by several small powerless city-states of no greater importance. The Roman Empire may not have collapsed in a grand fashion, after a war or plague or meteor or zombies, but the aftermath is just the same. Since DnD and all similar fantasy works take place in an era with roughly Middle Ages technology, it's obvious that post-apoc would apply - it's based on the only post-apocalyptic period of real human history.

That is certainly Zak Smith's best quote. It burnt into my mind when I read it. The idea of what monsters mean, really, and why our society (for instance) now loves vampires and is preparing for a zombie apocalpypse, interests me to no end.

Well it stands to reason that a dungeon is simply an underground (or buried) dwelling that was abandonned by its original inhabitants. This presumes an apocalypse or mass evacuation of some kind. Slimes don't build stone structures.

Random One, I don't disagree but would add that some of the medieval heritage is the obsession with the Roman/Greek idea of the lost Golden Age - so that the relics of the civilization you know about talk about an even older and more godlike precursor, which I think was similarly shaped by the ancients' encounters with remnants of Egyptian and Minoan civilizations.

cefm, I persist in thinking that bomb shelters built in anticipation of an apocalypse were one of the inspirations for the multi-level dungeon. However, at that same seminar I quote in the article, Arneson said the dungeon's genesis was purely functional - it exists to constrain the PC's open-ended choices to a level the referee can deal with. There's a good Zak Smith blog post about this too that I can't find right now.

Thoughtful and insightful. An excellent article. I always wondered with Terry Brooks' Shannara series whether it was post-apocalyptic...

Well, human history is kind of like that--the watershed moments we latch on to again and again are usually the traumatic events that changed everything. Some people saw the French Revolution as the beginning of the end of the centuries-old European aristocracy; others feared the Russian Revolution would mean the spread of the Communist Red Menace worldwide. World War I was "the war to end all wars" and World War II was the war that put an end to that statement. Look at the post-WWII science-fiction of Britain (e.g. Tolkien, Moorcock and say, John Wyndham) and Japan (e.g., Godzilla and almost any late 70s/early 80s anime), two empires whose great historical cities were bombed into rubble--very apocalyptic.

The ur-apocalypse in Western history is probably the fall of the (western) Roman Empire. The shining zenith of human civilization and learning is brought down by barbarous hordes and a dark age of conflict and superstition follows. That's an extreme oversimplification of history, but the popular conception makes for a good epic tale--especially for a medieval fantasy setting like most D&D games.

You neglected to mention my favorite campaign setting Ebberon, many cataclysms factor into the campaign's history like the fall of Xen'drik and the events of the last war, most notably the Mourning (Think the mist from Stephen King).

As for all the apocalypses and such, I think they speak more about Humanity's determination and tenacity than anything else.

In the Forgotten Realms, there were many cataclysms, like the Flight of Dragons (Dragons went crazy, and attacked everything in their path), the Fall of Netheril (and its floating cities), The War of the Phaerimm that created The Desert of Anauroch (which ties into the Fall of Netheril), and further south, the Kingdoms of Unther. Mulhorand and Thay are remnants of the breakup of the Imaskari Empire, which was started by Refugees from another world. It was eventually overthrown by the race they brought as slaves from their world.

And then there is the DragonLance Universe. It has a cataclysm in its history as well. Literally. Since at the Cataclysm, the Gods stopped helping humans on Krynn. They get to come back later, at the Current Apocalypse, the War of the Lance- but other things happen as well. And then there is the fall of the Ogres, once the most beautiful of races, now ugly and debased (they used to be known as the Irda).

A very interesting article, but I also think you need to contrast an Apocalypse (the ending to a whole world, as it is commonly taken), to the fall of a ancient civilization- which need not be an actual apocalypse. I think Cataclysm suits better here. To the people who live in the country or culture that is falling, it may seem like an Apocalypse, but it isn't.

I haven't finished reading your article, but I disagree with some of the basic premises. Old ruins don't necessarily mean post-apocalyptic. There are plenty of dilapidated castles in scotland and loads of ruined buildings in Haiti, but there's been no catastrophic event of global proportions. Stonehenge and Machu Pichu are ancient, but there's been no world ending disaster. Not to mention we're discovering lost technologies all the time.

I'd say that this premise is only valid if we redefine the world as a circumstance and redefine the apocalypse as something other than the apocalypse, but at this point we are talking about something else entirely.

Influx27, my premise is that the apocalypse is a myth that humans use both to explain what happened to the civilizations of the past and to express our dread that the world-as-we-know-it is coming to an end. As a fantasy game, D&D traffics in myths and legends; it shares with heavy metal the impulse to turn things up to 11. Saying that the real world doesn't have apocalypses isn't relevant because the idea of the apocalypse is a fantasy.

Sure, you could say "this campaign world is littered with the ruins of a past civilization, but nothing particularly dramatic happened to the ancients, they just gradually faded away for a number of complex reasons"; that'd be good history, but it's not good gaming fodder.

D&D is the Apocalypse: In Humor: "Not really, you just didn't find out from whom they plagiarized that one..."

Thanks for your article, I found it detailed yet not of my opinion. I want to play fantasy, not development-rpg and if I want another setting I take or write another RPG for it...

Neither Conan nor Gandalf are actually D&D characters, that long-haired Drow Ranger Drizzt is one original D&D.

Apocalypse... see Bloodwar (Planescape & Book of Vile Dark). A certain cycle for outside of it D&D officials are too dumb to explain WHY heroes exist, perhaps?

Feel free to visit my own petty files at http://scribd.com/pauper

In "Learning from dark minds" and others I wrote my own mind, yet I am... more impulsive than academic for sure. I like my style, maybe even because nobody else liked it.

READABILITY: Reading the article here was not the most comfortable... and a print version or plain-text could help when the browser, java or whatever is bitching. ;-)

Being German I became a roleplayer via "Das schwarze Auge", by now often known due Realms of Arkania series and "The dark eye" (another crappy translation, literally it is The Black Eye for those orbs looking like eyes are world-important artifcats).

THANKS FOR YOUR WORK.

Apocalypse? I never once played a campaign that invovled a dungeon, or ruined civilization, or a Cold War atmosphere. Ours tended to be more...- different. We did do a thieves one once, which is about as close as we got. In fact, I think we've never once fought something that wasn't humanoid or an ooze, and we rarely killed. Suddenly our games sound lame to me.

Hey Bran... what you call lame could be a blessing. I actually had one dungeon level before my players offered to ... end my vital functions as a merciful step... We played venturing through the worlds, a ruin to explore yes, designing a world to instantly hide in some extended cellar for months? Nope. I think Dungeon roleplay is the old, outdated, archaic and despicable form of roleplay... actually the form it was before it became heavy industry on the planet...

If one gets the proper group for oneself one has fun and in my opinion, that is how roleplay should be like from the start...

PC made a difference, though hack&slash overdose remained... I found DDO in example to actually have many nice players, just help them in newbie stage and show them that "dungeoneering" is not a must... meeting people, ganging up to beat a good dungeon which means improved equipment and even atmosphere works as well. Strategically the military types ARE different. Their teams are squads and for them fast and complete victory is by finishing "missions"... I dislike too much "army D&D", as it suppresses all personality and individuality...

Last night I once again played through chapters of "Demon Stone", beheading red dragons became a ritual to me in a symbolic way... ;-)

Speaking of D&D setting and apocalypses, consider that:
- Forgotten Realms has more than one apocalypse (as mentioned above)
- Greyhawk has multiple apocalypses (as mentioned in the article)
- Dragonlance has the Cataclysm AND "the stealing of krynn"
- Dark Sun has an ancient apocalypse (seriously- that is the most post-apocalyptic fantasy setting ever)
- Spelljammer has the Non-human Wars in its past
- Ravenloft can be seen as a series of post-apocalyptic kingdoms (which suffered being transferred into the mists)
- Eberron had the Last war (and in it the magical destruction of Cyre)

So, yeah, I'd say most D&D setting are based an apocalypses.

The tradition of fearing an impending apocalypse while looking back on a glorious golden age, when things were good and people were better than they are today, isn't anything brought about by the Cold War, it's the story of human civilization. In fact, the concept that old ideas were better than new ideas hung on for a very, very long time. It's understandable when you look at the relatively glacial pace of technological and social development up until the Renaissance and then accelerated further during the Industrial Revolution. Furthermore, it might have been advancing for the wealthy and connected before that, but your average dirty peasant didn't notice much change at all.

All that being said, D&D (and speculative fiction in general, even space opera, with the glorious, godlike ancients) draws upon that deeply comforting idea that some time in the past, things were Right and people were Good, and if we could only get back even a little of that, we'd be on the path to Righteousness once more. The ancients had it all figured out, people thought, and that's why you had dogmatic adherence to the works of the Greek physician Galen, for example, for the better part of 1800 years! Even though we've moved beyond that in a wider sense, it's very easy for us to all fall back into the long-cherished scenario of uncovering the tools, treasures and wisdom of the ancients.

I've seen campaigns that tried to feature a 'dawn age' concept, but even they can't escape mention of the titans, proto-gods or ancient horrors that came before, just a little more recently and there hasn't been an accretion of ruined civilizations to get in the way. Those are stories of birth and creation, but as you don't see many fictional portrayals of such settings, it clearly isn't as evocative as the more tried and true concepts. If you want to have adventures to dungeons full of monsters and loot, someone had to put them there, a long time ago, so that the previous owners aren't around anymore and the monsters were able to move in. Adventure generally involves violence, and it involves the good versus the bad, or at least order versus chaos.

If the entire world is full of neat little happy kingdoms, the best you're going to get is chasing bandits and solving property disputes. However, make some of those happy kingdoms not so happy, maybe a few of them covetous of their neighbors' lands, and sneak in a few ancient relics of a dark god that's causing all this trouble, and then you've got yourself some excitement.

It's also worth mentioning that there's a good reason for this whole setup in D&D. All D&D universes are, pretty much by definition, some variant on medieval Europe. And in the middle ages in Europe, people actually were surrounded by amazing ruins they could never duplicate from a once-great civilization that had fallen into ruins, filled with relics they didn't know how to make anymore; that civilization was the Roman Empire. The ruins from the Roman Empire are impressive even today, and in the middle ages where no one had the ability to make anything like the Roman Colosseum anymore, they would have been even more impressive.

It's not just true in medieval Europe, either; in many places (ancient Greece, long periods of ancient China, ect.) there were long periods when people were quite literally living in the ruins of formerly great civilizations that had gone to dust centuries before.

You don't necessarily need an apocalypse for there to be ruins lying around with cool stuff in them.

There's a large abandoned mill a few miles from my house. I've been inside. Some of the machinery is still intact. I have no idea what it does, what the place must have looked and sounded like in its heyday. Now, it's all echoing footsteps, foul-smelling puddles, and the moldy bones of abandonment.

I used a flashlight, though I felt a torch would have been more appropriate. Some of the concrete floor on the upper level has broken away, leaving large holes. Is the rest of the floor safe to walk on? Roll Dungeoneering, difficulty 15.

I could easily imagine fantasy characters looting some useful device from there, like the large tractor parked in one room. It's almost as easy to imagine some nameless, Lovecraftian horror sliding its profane, amorphous bulk through the building's dank recesses.