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The Lost Age in the RPG

Now that my stint as GM is over, and I no longer have to spend my spare time thinking how to run the last campaign, I’m spending my spare time thinking about how to run the next campaign. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, GMs gotta think up adventure ideas.

I have one well-developed concept, but that concept was for a different set of players—one more amenable to firefights and less averse to railroading—and I’m forced to reconsider the possibilities. Since promising possibilities lie everywhere, choosing is largely a process of elimination: I just did a fortean conspiracy campaign, so no conspiracy or forteanism; three of our last four campaigns put the PCs aboard a ship, so no voyage stories; I have grown to detest the blasé gentleman fallen from grace that one of my fellow players adopts whenever possible (and often when thoroughly appropriate), so no pirate adventures, Victorian steampunk, or antebellum westerns. And so on. As my list of rejected elements grew, the permissible campaign tropes dropped, slowly at first, but then alarmingly quickly, to the point where I began to fear I’d need to rethink some of the things I positively did not want, beginning with elements that cut off relatively many possibilities at a stroke.

The first forbidden element to be retracted might surprise you; it certainly surprised me: the post-apocalyptic scenario.

“Post-apocalyptic” is a loaded term, so I hasten to clarify. I don’t mean games set in the immediate aftermath of nuclear holocaust, like Twilight 2000 or Aftermath; I mean games set in a world that harkens back to a lost golden age, the loss of which isn’t just a bit of background color but an influential event with ramifications throughout the setting. The trope is rife in RPGs.

In part, this is a simple matter of narrative practicality: if you want your players seeking powerful magic doodads, you need a reason why plundering ancient tombs offers a better risk-reward balance than simply going to the local mages’ guild and commissioning one. No matter how high the fantasy gets in Dungeons & Dragons, I have yet to see a world that doesn’t claim a lost age that was even richer in magic. The idea has proven insidious, from Gamma World mutants looking for laser guns and hovercraft to Werewolf: the Apocalypse garou questing for lost scraps of the litany to d6 Star Wars jedi-in-training sent to recover jedi holocron fragments. There’s also the matter of dramatic tension: a campaign requires a wrong that needs righting. A stable, comfortable setting can act as a backdrop for this action, but you get more bang for your buck if you tie the campaign action into higher stakes like the fate of the world. This means that most campaigns take place in one of three scenarios: the world has fallen apart and the PCs need to recover it, the world is in imminent danger of falling apart and PCs need to protect it, or the world is a promising frontier and the PCs need to exploit it. Only one of these three dynamics is not directly shaped by an apocalypse, and even these often include some fallen empire in their past, the rich frontier offering a chance to rebuild a nation rather than found one.

But I think there’s something larger at work here than practical needs of a GM. I think the post-apocalyptic scenario and lost paradise is so popular because it works with something deep in the psyche of western culture. Every culture has its Shangri-La myths, but the lost golden age took stupefyingly deep root in Europe when Christianity was seized upon as a political expedient and grew out of control: priests’ message of original sin and the expulsion from Eden resonated with a sense—from within and without the empire—of the loss of something grand and noble in the disintegration of Rome. Even when Europe dug itself out of the dark ages and began surpassing Rome in every way, culturally in the Renaissance and materially in the colonial subjugation of the world, it continued to look to Athens and Rome as perfect models of everything civilization should be. The lost golden age is a cornerstone of our worldview. It feeds into every narrative art form we have, which naturally includes role-playing games.

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