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Message: <blockquote data-quote="LostSoul" data-source="post: 6392937" data-attributes="member: 386">You might want to check out this blog post:<a href="http://hillcantons.blogspot.ca/2012/08/ad-apocalypse-and-hereafter.html" target="_blank">http://hillcantons.blogspot.ca/2012/08/ad-apocalypse-and-hereafter.html</a>and the others under the same label.  I found them interesting.  A snippet:“When the Invoked Devastation came upon the Baklunish, their own magi brought down the Rain of Colorless Fire in a last terrible curse, and this so affected the Suloise Empire as to cause it to become the Sea of Dust.” - World of Greyhawk (1980) “And no bells tolled and nobody wept no matter what his loss because almost everyone expected death...And people said and believed, 'this is the end of the world.'” - Agnolo Tura of Siena (mid-14th century) I've circled around the margins of theme before—as have a few others—but there is a heady whiff of apocalypse in old school D&D. It's seen not just in the rather obvious stock elements--the countless ruins, the lost artifacts, the former sprawl of civilization lost to the wilds—but hard-coded throughout the rules proper whenever broad human society is involved. The closer in I go with this AD&D exegesis the more I see this perspective reinforced in spades. Let's get started by bouncing back to an unlikely place, the Encounters section of the DMG (Appendix C) to pick apart a peculiar section on outdoor encounters (pages 182-183). Civilization: A Thin Red Line For starters you get smacked over the head with how desperate life must be even inside the few “inhabited” zones of the implied world. For you see with every encounter rolled in such areas, there is a full 25% chance that the random encounter table should be utterly ignored and a patrol encountered instead. And by patrol we are not talking about a small group of muddling watch or a handful of tax collectors/wardens, we are talking armed-to-the-teeth, recon in force.</blockquote>

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