It's the End of the World As We Know It: Apocalyptic Campaign Settings

[CleverNickName]

When I first started playing D&D, just about every adventure was Pre-Apocalyptic--we were on a mission to save the world from a terrible fate. But now, Post-apocalyptic stories are in style...nearly every fantasy novel or movie now has themes of rebuilding, rebirth, renewal, and resistance. The world already ended years ago, and now the heroes have no choice but to pick up the pieces and survive. My home campaign is no exception.

In my home campaign, the Known World is a ring of islands thousands of miles across: the only land in this massive aquatic world sits on the edge of a vast, underwater crater of unfathomable depth. What happened, and when, and why, have never been fully explained. Arcanists say a portal to the Elemental Plane of Water was opened, and flooded the earth. Deists say that the old gods destroyed the world to punish mankind for their sins. Artificers say that a great artifact of terrible power was detonated. Scientists say that a massive asteroid smashed into the planet.

Scattered ruins and artifacts offer a few meager clues. My players haven't pieced together what happened, but they have learned a bit about when: whatever it was, it happened 11,000 years ago. This was a big deal, because most scholars had assumed it had happened a lot more recently.

 

[Clint_L]

I never, ever use "the heroes have to save the world" as a plot device. I think it has diminishing returns, and it is much better to raise the stakes by building the plot out of the character's backstories and relationships. Stakes come from emotional investment, not from ever larger catastrophes (this is a lesson that seems to have become lost on the current MCU).

I find many post-apocalytic settings kind of cliched. I don't mind if it was a catastrophic even some time past, but I don't think, say, Exandria counts as a "post-apocalyptic" setting because the Calamity once happened (similarly, I would not call post-Genesis Earth in the Bible a "post-apocalyptic" setting.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

I prefer plots that don't involve the end of the world. I mean, yes, I did plenty of them back in the day, but I tired them many, many moons ago. I'm like @Clint_L in that I prefer plots to come out of the charatcer's back story, flaws, and interests.

 

[Voadam]

I would say my campaigns are usually either pre or no apocalypse with plots that could result in apocalypse or no apocalypse.

My mashup setting uses a bunch of prior apocalypses as past history to give a bunch of Conan style rise and falls of prior civilizations with things like Freeport’s Yig and Hastur manifestation clash that destroyed Valusia, Golarion’s Earthfall of aboleth meteor strike, The Scarred Lands titans versus gods war, Eberron’s ancient apocalypses, and Oerth’s Twin Cataclysms as things I can draw upon as desired.

Mostly the adventure paths I run are a bit smaller stakes for the world, though big potentials do sometimes lurk such as manifesting a Great Old One.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

My characters have finally hit the level where I was able to start the end of the world clock for the Ptolus setting. They have less than an in-game year to figure out what all the vague prophecies are about, locate the (conveniently located!) threat and take it on before it can fully manifest.

In a dirty trick by Monte Cook, that apocalypse will likely come right after they avert an entirely different apocalypse and forever change the world. I do look forward to everyone realizing that they still have a world to save. But they'll be level 20 and, if the prior apocalypse goes as expected, will have access to resources that haven't ever been available to anyone in the planet's history, so I'm expecting full-on gonzo fireworks.

 

[coyote6]

My current campaigns are:

1. D&D set on Oerth, and the PCs are tangled up with the machinations of the Scarlet Brotherhood is southern Keoland
2. Shadowrun set in the Sixth World of 2078, where the PCs are doing crimes, hooding, and (right now) heading for a showdown with a personal enemy.

It's D&D and the Sixth World, so technically, an apocalypse is a possibility, but neither campaign is about saving the world. At least not yet; the D&D game might grow into that, but it might not.

 

[ProfessorDetective]

Pre-Apocalypse is definitely the common one for me, but that's mostly because my main game is probably Call of Cthulhu, where "the end is nigh, but you might still have a shot at delaying it" is the default.

But I chose No Apocalypse, because I'm starting to prefer lower-stakes stories where things are stable on the macro scale. (Because that's the REAL fantasy, these days...)

Sure, the village might go bust if you can't get the goblins out of the platinum mine, but said goblins aren't in there summoning the Elder Things to bring about the "Epoch of Chaos" or whatever. Nor are the ones paying them to hold the mine planning anything so grand. Maybe a coup of local dukedom, if they're feeling REALLY bold.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I think "post-apocalypse" by itself doesn't cover enough of the ground, really. There's recent, mid-term and long-after versions of that, too, and they can look pretty different (a pretty fair bit of fantasy settings land in the long-after category, though some of them lean into it more than others; same for some space settings).

 

[Cruentus]

My campaigns may be set in post-war settings, or where there are lost civilizations, which technically could be "post apocalyptic", but I'm tired of the 'end of world' tropes in RPGs, where every campaign has to stop some world ending threat. I have been focusing my campaigns on an area (Moonshaes in FR) or a village (homebrew in Greyhawk's Sterich), where the stakes can still be high for the characters, but not for the world.

We've been having a lot more fun with the interpersonal relationships, the politics, and the ability to affect and shape the nearby areas, rather than hopping all over the world.

 

[Steampunkette]

In geology, there's something called the Great Unconformity.

Basically you have this one section of 1.7-1.3 billion year old rock with 500 million year old rock on top of it. Our current dating methods line up perfectly on the expected age of rock below that line, and above that line, indicating that about 1 billion years of geological history and sediment (give or take) is just -GONE-.

And you can go see it in the Grand Canyon. You can stand right next to an orange slab of sedimentary rock that's 500 million years old sitting directly on top of 1.7 billion year old metamorphic rock, with nothing lying between them. But what's worse is you can see it EVERYWHERE ELSE, too. All across Earth's Surface, a billion years worth of missing stone and dirt.

There's a lot of guesses as to -why- 1 billion years of soil and stone are missing, because remember this stuff gets compressed by the weight of the stuff on top of it, but the highest levels of that billion years of exposed material was topsoil and dirt... And the going theory is that it was during a period of -intense- glaciation where there was ice at or very near the equator.

And then something happened. Some force of nature disrupted things -so drastically-, that the surface of the Earth was wiped -clean-. And when I say clean I mean clean. We're talking about thousands upon thousands of feet of soil and rock being torn off every land mass. 2-3km deep of soil and stone just -gone- down to the crystalline bare stone below that hadn't been on the surface for a billion years. This isn't just glaciers retreating and piling up the dirt 'somewhere else', either. We're talking about an erosion event so massive it dumped thousands of feet of rocks and stones into the oceans of the world.

This event wiped out MOUNTAINS. The Appalachian mountains are 1.1 billion years old and used to be a lot taller than they are, now, but this event tore massive quantities of material off of them and dumped it into the sea.

And if that wasn't horrifying enough to consider, it coincides with the greatest evolutionary event in the history of our world: The 540 million year old Cambrian Explosion. It's very likely that whatever the Great Unconformity is, it dumped so many nutrients into the cold, dark, oceans of the earth after tearing them down through erosion on a planetary scale, that the nutrient and mineral density was so high that it triggered an insane evolutionary diversification because there was simply so much PLENTY for everything in the ocean to feed off of that population rates of any and everything underwater exploded.

Try to imagine an event that massive, and that fundamental, to the life of everything on a planet...

... And it's probably entirely hidden from every person on your fantasy setting because the evidence for it is beneath their feet and their notice.

I love that.