Sooo ... my group tried playing the fantasy apocalypse, and it was great fun, but it wasn't quite ... apocalyptic in the way I'd expected.  Let me explain.

I figure that an apocalypse is when the world falls from the peak of its perfection into total disarray.  You lose everything.

But so much of fantasy seems to assume that the world has already fallen ... that the golden age is past, the big magics are history, and everything's a little screwed up.

I understand the motivation for that:  The lost golden age gives people wonderful treasures to find and secrets to uncover, remnants of that glorious past.

But assuming that trope made our apocalypse sorta wierd.  We fell from a state of obvious collapse and degradation to worse collapse.  It was much more the visigoths sacking an already weak Rome than it was the unstoppable zombie horde destroying an otherwise perfect utopia.

Is this just the happenstance of our one instance?  Or is a fantasy apocalypse actually hard to pull off?  Have people tried doing the first apocalypse ... starting at the time of the ancients, and dealing with whatever monumental fuck-up destroyed them and their civilizations?

I've been re-reading the original Dying Earth book, and it had been leading me to think about exactly that kind of "apocalypse" as a setting for my BD&D (or FtA...still deciding) campaign.  While it shades into pulp sci-fi toward the end, the first stories are pure fantasy depicting a world after the first collapse: isolated settlements, weird creatures, bizarre dangers in the wild, etc.  The wizards of the dying earth are trying to recapture something of the old world, each in their own way and for their own ends.

You just have to drop preconceptions about the fantasy genre.  It's part of the reason I've been reading a lot of pre-Tolkien fantasy lately: to escape the homogenized feel the genre has had since the '70s.  There's lots of just plain weird stuff, a sense of the strange and a freshness in those old books and stories by Vance, Merritt, ER Burroughs, REH, Dunsany, etc. that modern fantasy doesn't have IMO.

(edit: that last paragraph comes across sort of pretentious and snooty...I don't mean it that way.  The "you" of that first sentence is the general "you," not you, TonyLB)

Quote from: TonyLBIs this just the happenstance of our one instance?  Or is a fantasy apocalypse actually hard to pull off?  Have people tried doing the first apocalypse ... starting at the time of the ancients, and dealing with whatever monumental fuck-up destroyed them and their civilizations?

Not that, but if you run your game more of a sandbox styles where players are free to wander the world you will find it easier to pull off. This is because in sandbox play you develop your world more of a "place" and the player get to interact more with the setting itself instead of just with individual adventures.

Hopefully this means the players will care more about the setting which is the key to making an Apocalypse work.

Back in 1986 or so I was getting bored with the Wilderlands and sought to crash it in a big epic Apocalypse. The campaign worked because of two reason

a) The players played at least two campaigns in the setting and was familair with it and had fun with ti.

b) For first edition AD&D, Battlesystem was very effective in portraying epic battle with meaningful character involvement. So I had a mechanic that was fun to play and reflected the apocalyptic aspects of the battle.

The defining moment was the players engaged the vanguard of the demonic army and managed to win. Then the main body appeared and I started to place tile upon tile of dragons across the edge of the battlefield. (I had about 40 from all the battlesystem stuff I owned. Thank you Dragonlance for the extra dragon tiles). At that moment the player when, oh shit, and realized it was the Apocalypse.

Great fun was had by all.

Rob Conley

P.S. I used Harn for my next world and it was not popular so by mutual agreement I made the apocalypse a "bad dream" and brought back the Wilderlands which I continue to use today under the GURPS system.

Speaking very generally, the main problem I have with a fantasy apocalypse is that the players weren't there for the good times.  If you did a fantasy apocalypse as a follow-up to a campaign where the players participated and contributed to the world, I think that would be effective.

The reason, at least for me, that PA settings appeal is that they are our current world totally destroyed.  So when my character finds something from the past, it has meaning because I know about it.

I don't know if that helps your situation, but just throwing it out there.

Wasn't the whole Shannara series stuff based off of some sort of apocalypse-happened-now-we're-stuck-with-crazy-shit premise or am I on crack again?

Quote from: DangerWasn't the whole Shannara series stuff based off of some sort of apocalypse-happened-now-we're-stuck-with-crazy-shit premise or am I on crack again?

I think you're right- it was actually the one thing I really liked about the first book when i was kid. Even so, I doubt I could make it past the first 50 pages now.

In order to totally get that apocolyptic feel for a fantasy setting, I think one has to envision the exact nature of the apocalypse- and then decide what are the stories the decendents of the survivors tell themselves about the how- and just as important, the why.
 
In Vance, the how is decay and ennui, things just fell apart. Everybody in the setting gets this, and most are actually particpating in it, so the apocalypse is both lost in the distant past and an ongoing phenomenon.

Mayan history is in many ways, one collapse after another. Some of these were the product of dramatic natural disasters- The TBJ eruption of Ilopango in the fourth or fifth center FRX destroyed the landscape, killed and and displaced hundreds of thousands of people and generally screwed the highland culture. Later collapses were the product of intense warfare and/or over cultivation of the land- regardless though the perceived reason behind the fall was always pretty much the same- the actions of people caused the cosomos to fall out of balance and the gods interviened to set things right.
Also people who don't have  any geology aren't going to say something like "Pyroclastic flow" they are far more likely to say something like dark flood of hot stones (as in the case of the Maya in the early chapters of the Popol Vuh). This different understanding of events can create a mistaken notion of what actually happened. There is a huge difference between these two statements, "The climate shifted, and we had an ice age- it fucked us up." and "We behaved in an unseemly manner, and the gods became angry so they layed us low." even though both statements might well be in reference to the same event.

There is a setting book available for the EABA rpg called Ythrek.  Much of the information is setting, so it should be pretty easy to adapt it to the system of your choice.  It's set several centuries after a terrible apocalypse, and travel has only recently become possible again.  Most of the world is now unknown and unexplored.  This is an 'initial fall' after the height of civilization.  From the product description:

Quote from: YthrekYthrek is a resource-poor Renaissance world with magic, honor and a very harsh climate based on several overlapping cycles that go from searing to freezing as the decades pass. It has been eight hundred years since the Cataclysm that nearly tore the world asunder. So few survived that even the nature of the disaster is unknown. But, from the accounts of the Spirits and the survivors, and tales brought by traders, things thought dead but only sleeping have begun to awaken. The spring decade is upon the people of Novomad, center of Ythrek's civilization (at least they think so). The weather once again permits travel to lands out of touch since the start of the long winter years, and the squabbling scions of the Six Families once again seek fame, fortune and Ancient knowledge in the wastes outside Novomad's fertile valleys.

I just had an idea.

The adventurers go into the dungeon and do the crawly thing. But when they come out the world has been destroyed by the angry gods. The surface is actually MORE dangerous than the dungeon ever was. They gotta find a way to survive and find out wtf and all. Maybe the dungeon is their new safe haven and base of operations, kinda a reversal of roles, pull the rug right out from under em.

Now what setting do I want to destroy?

Oh! OH! OH!

and now whatever is left in the dungeon the players have to find a way to deal with or work with for mutal survival!

"Those kooky derro, there crazy, but their better than whats 'out there'. Just don't give em any cause, or hang out with em when their hungry."