258: D&D Is the Apocalypse

[Pietroschek]

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 I think Dungeon roleplay is the old, outdated, archaic and despicable form of roleplay...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... ;-)

 

[sharp_as_a_cork]

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.

 

[mattaui]

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.

 

[Yosarian2]

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.

 

[Johnny Impact]

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.

 

[briankoontz]

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.

The Cold War is merely one of the apocalyptic issues. It began the Age of Anxiety, and the failure of liberalism culminating with the Vietnam War began the Age of Despair and the popularization of the conscious understanding of the end of the world.

The understanding of the industrial revolution and what it meant for ecological destruction informed the life of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in the 18th century. Both he through his Faust and Shakespeare through The Tempest explored the perils of modern civilization and ambition.

The "spiritual apocalypse" was covered in the 19th century, culminating with Friedrich Nietzsche and perhaps best spoken by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

C.F. Volney's novel Meditations on the Revolutions of Empires, aka Volney's Ruins, is the direct spiritual predecessor to Dungeons and Dragons, not that many know this or have even read it.

The most that gamers can apparently be expected to understand is that Jack Vance's Dying Earth series along with Tolkien inspired Dungeons and Dragons, which is like gazing at the tip of the iceberg and calling it a day.