the local apocalypse
Fantasists love the highest stakes possible. That’s why we get every story about our plucky heroes trying to save the world. This is laziness.
Why do writers do it?1 Because it’s a cheap way of trying to smuggle in some emotional impact. Note, trying. That shit doesn’t work. Cf. every superhero movie made ever. If your readers don’t connect in a real way with your story, it doesn’t matter if the antagonist is trying to blow up the galaxy, the world, the neighborhood, or a stump.2
Go watch The Road. Better, go read The Road. That one hit you? Is the father marching around off to fix the world?3 No. He wants to save his boy. Is The Road 14 billion times more powerful than whatever save-the-world capeshit got released last week?
You need a local apocalypse. It’s more manageable, it can be fed into any game, any setting, without breaking that setting.
Ooh, let’s digress. Where have we seen this problem before? Have we forgotten the Forgotten Realms and the Spellplague? Have we forgotten everything that happened after the War of the Lance? Tell me this, where would you rather play, pre-Spellplague or after? War of the Lance, or Chaos War?
“It’s just nostalgia” is the obvious attack surface. The older you get, the more nostalgic you are for the fun things you remember, the more you forget the bad parts that constitute the reasons why those things changed, the more blind you are to the value of new things to which you are hesitant to even give a chance. But there’s something deeper to it that that, something more worthy of consideration. With regard to the big tentpole settings that we all remember, there were reasons that they worked. That they became so popular.4
You write a setting. Fuck, it’s awesome. But this time it’s not just you who thinks so, but a big portion of the gaming public. It’s novel, it sells, it sells novels, people like it, it continues to sell. You start writing additional materials for it because it’s still fun, and those sell well too. Eventually you get bored writing additional materials for the same old setting, players get bored reading additional materials, and it stops selling. But there’s still a big group of people who retain a serious affection for your setting. And you have retained an affection for getting paid. What to do?
Let’s do a reset. A big, world-shattering event, something that will engage the old fans who still love the setting but have gotten bored, might bring new fans who want something that feels new and fresh, and—most importantly—achieve the other result desired, having “fresh” ideas to sell new books, to accommodate a new edition change, whatever. Win win.
Lose lose. The old fans who love the setting love it because of what it was, not what you changed it to being. Statistically, this almost has to be correct. If most settings don’t make it and you have a setting that did make it and you changed it, via Spellplague or whatever bullshit seemed neat to you, into what is effectively a new setting, odds are your new setting isn’t going to make it and now you don’t have the old setting anymore, either. The old fans who liked the setting before don’t have it anymore, and the new fans ain’t coming. And you haven’t sold any new books. It’s like a trifecta of loserdom.5
Lesson: don’t drop a world-spanning apocalypse on your popular setting. Go for a local apocalypse instead.
A local apocalypse is just that, local. Here’s the nut of it: the PCs are local. They are wherever they are. By definition they are in one place.6 The camera can only focus on one spot anyway. Everywhere else is just that, everywhere else. Absent high magic information can only travel as fast as a horse can run. What's going on a continent away, on the other side of the empire, or even sometimes in the next valley over, simply does not matter to the PCs, not yet, because they can't know about it. No point in having a general apocalypse when the vast majority of it is unknown, unknowable, of no use to PCs. You destroying—read, attempting to rewrite—the majority of your campaign is for nothing.
Make your apocalypse local. Make it only as big or as small as the PCs’ direct realm of action and indirect scope of knowledge. Take what you need and leave the rest for something else.
The world provides for enough apocalypse already without gods killing gods, making magic go crazy, or a meteor falling on a kingpriest’s hubris. Wildfire burns across the late-summer land, turning the sun blood red. The sea retreats, leaving piles and hulks unsubmerged and just when those who failed to listen to their grandfathers’ stories have raced out on the mud flats, rolls back in again with a crushing wave that floods inland to a distance a man can’t walk in two days. The very earth, that paradigmatic source of stability and constancy, flutters and ripples and fields are swallowed by ugly chasms and hillsides flow like water into the lowlands. Glacial dams visited only mad men and mystics overtop and erode in the course of a day, sending lethal walls of water down canyons and fjords. Even those grey far-off clouds, shimmering in the intervening heat and illuminated momentarily by distant lightning, can do it when, under the still cloudless sky, the torrents of murky clay-colored water race down the arroyos in a terrifying blue-sky flash flood.
Any of these things can make for a local apocalypse. And let us remember that the real apocalypse isn’t the event, it’s the aftermath. First comes the disaster, then comes the plague, then comes the famine, then comes the displacement. Nothing good comes when you go look down into the well and it’s filled atop with cloudy water washed down from neighboring hillsides. Nothing good happens when you have just spent the season’s seedcorn into the ground that is now boggy with well-salted tidal surge or what is left of your vines and orchards more closely resembles the product of a charcoaler’s kiln. Nothing good comes when the people, hard-eyed and emaciated, who saw these things are now streaming into your fields, trampling the stalks and gleaning the remnants and looking balefully through your door.
Deep Carbon Observatory does a good job of this. The dam breaks and that water that was above is now below. Desperate people—of course—but also the weirdness of a world turned upside-down. What emerges when that that has been submerged now sees the light of day for the first time in centuries? When what was safely below is now unsafely above? And the things that people will do when one day life was continuing apace and the next much of that life is deleted and that which remains wishes it didn’t.
You don’t need a fully general apocalypse.
By writers we mean all of us. Go ahead, tell me that a GM isn’t a writer. In this house, we believe that anybody who makes shit up is a writer.
And by reader, of course we mean players. Let’s not pretend to be novelists here. I’m sure there’s some dumbass screenwriter out there trying to raise the stakes and blow up the multiverse and as soon as somebody invents the hypermultiverse they’ll pretend that that’s important to you and try to crush it in the “All is Lost” checkbox of a well-licked Save the Cat beat sheet.
Is there a thematic difference between saving the world from apocalypse versus fixing the world post-apocalypse? Almost certainly. Has hella thought about it deeply? Not yet. Note for future posts.
Survivorship bias here, too. Of course we only remember the settings that had that spark that made them work. The ones that didn’t work got forgotten. What up my Birthright homies, both of you.
hella, you’ve done a great job giving us a problem without giving us a solution and since this is an extended digression you’re probably not likely to get to a solution. Well, sure. So you get a footnote solution. Leave the old setting, let it be what it always was, and enjoy the long tail of true fans. Put all your new efforts and excitement—and all those dreams of what you were going to turn the old setting into—and just make a new setting. Let it stand or fall, and if it’s any good you’ve got a new canonical setting to reap the benefits from going forward, which will probably be more popular than your half-ass reboot anyway.
Obvious joke is obvious. Nope.