One of the central assumptions in D&D, and frankly most fantasy, is that the world is old. In D&D in particular, the oldness of the world presents you with some golden opportunities - you get many generations (or strata) of bygone civilizations whose relics and even whose villains might emerge in the modern day or be discovered in dungeons.
My own homebrew setting, for example, has a fully futuristic era in the distant, 20,000 year past that ended in a catastrophe that unleashed new eldritch abominations worshipped as false deities by psychotic cults and led to a genuinely horrifying millennium of apocalyptic terror, with history as it is generally known only starting after that point.
While I love having the supernatural at play in my fantasy settings, I do tend to still prefer a world that has some resemblance to the real world, and that includes the fact that human history is just a minuscule portion of our planet's. That means accounting for billions of years of the planet's existence prior to the events of one's stories.
But, that being said, fantasy is, I think, nearly indistinguishable from myth except for the fact that it's explicitly fictional. And given the pre-scientific time that human myths' foundational texts come from, most (or at least the texts known most widely in the west) severely underestimate the world's age, placing the emergence of humanity not long after the creation of the world itself.
The era of the world's creation is invariably momentous, and the events that take place in that first era set the stage for the future dramas and conflicts to come. Consider, for example, how the kind of "first act" in Tokien's cosmos is the Music of the Ainur, and how Melkor's desire to basically improvise his own hellish jazz solo in the middle of a symphony so that he can be the star of the concert is what introduces evil to creation. Tokien's world of Arda (of which Middle-Earth is a continent) goes through multiple eras before there's even a sun and moon - first with two great lamps, and then those lamps are replaced with two great trees, and only after those are killed are the sun and moon created.
So, could you run a campaign set in a Dawn Age? One in which the world is young, and the player characters are among the first or second generation of mortals?
In some ways, this would be very difficult, but I think there's an aspect of this that is actually quite fitting:
Player characters in D&D are powerful. And the figures of legend in the distant past of fantasy settings tend to have super-human power. Frankly, at least in 5E, player characters quickly become essentially superheroes.
But let's talk challenges:
D&D loves ancient ruins and relics of lost civilizations. If humanity's (or the mortal races') history dates back only a generation, then basically nothing was around long enough to be a lost civilization. At best, if we're going for maybe a generation past the beginning of the world, you might lament some great person's downfall and the loss of their creations.
Likewise, the very nature of something like a fiend as a distinct thing from a celestial might not have taken place yet - Asmodeus, for example, in D&D's lore, is thought to have been a fallen celestial (though somewhere it was suggested that he's more akin to a Great Old One, and that "Asmodeus" is only the avatar of the great serpent Ahirman, which lingers in the Nine Hells recuperating from its fall into them... which actually could work for a celestial past too).
This, then, raises an interesting wrinkle, and gives you some wiggle room: is this the beginning beginning, or just the beginning of the mortal races on this world? In Christian tradition, the beginning of the world happens some time after Lucifer's rebellion against God, but I don't know if there's a canonical timeline there.
Let's also talk aberrations. Technically, this creature type can mean a few different things, including the results of botched arcane experiments (essentially having a bit of overlap with hybrid-creature monstrosities like the Owlbear) but I think most people generally associate aberrations with the Lovecraftian ancient beings like Aboleths and Mind Flayers (I'll note here that Kraken, as described, feel like they could easily also count as aberrations, except perhaps because they were created by the gods rather than existing in some before-time).
I'll probably write a post some day about how aberrations don't actually really fit in D&D if you want to run it as pure fantasy rather than partially sci-fi - there's such an overlap between them and demons (not so much devils) that you almost need to genre-bend to make them work. Luckily for me, I adore genre-bending and blending my sci fi and fantasy together, so it works great!
Still, if you want a setting in which the gods didn't just arrive on some existing world and create people to inhabit it, but truly created the world itself, it's going to be hard to work in those ancient aberrations (though the sometime-rumored notion that the Mind Flayers are actually time-travelers from a distant future does kind of solve this issue as well).
A lot of mythologies have multiple groups of divine beings. In Greek Myth, the Olympians are only the last couple generations of gods, with the Titans pre-dating them, and beings like Gaia predating them. Norse myth has the Vanir and the Aesir. I suspect that these might both be instances of syncretism - the active incorporation of multiple religious traditions to promote social cohesion between the adherents of different faiths - especially likely in the Norse case given that the Aesir and Vanir are foes who eventually become allies.
But if we're using the Greek pantheon as inspiration, this gives us another interesting question: are the gods of our Dawn Age the gods that will be prominently revered and worshipped later on in this setting?
Again, given the degree to which player characters grow in power in 5E, I'd almost be tempted to suggest that the party could actually be that second generation of gods.
And in that sense, I think the appeal here is that, while coming up with a backstory for a D&D character can often be very fun and a chance at creativity, this kind of campaign would encourage forward-thinking about legacy.
Like many others, I recently watched the second part of Denis Villeneuve's adaptation of Dune. Dune, of course, has plenty of prologue history in it - it's set about 20,000 years in the future (don't let the year in the story fool you - it's 10,191, but not by the Gregorian calendar, but dating back to the formation of the Spacing Guild, itself happening about 10,000 years from now,) but what's interesting is that the first book's chapters each have an excerpt of from history books written about Paul's ascension to becoming Emperor, and given how the later books of the series go, Paul's reign itself is looked back on as a golden age of kindness and justice compared with the brutality of his son's millennia-long reign as God-Emperor (even if Paul's reign is filled with war and genocide).
Thus, the first book, so far in our future, could be described as a kind of Dawn Age myth for the civilization that follows (naturally this is, of course, a lesson for anyone thinking about their era as the only one that matters).
In a weird and very different way, in the Dark Tower series by Stephen King, the first book of the series, The Gunslinger, takes on this kind of mythic quality as well, with the title character Roland traveling through an almost dream-like experience and the boy he finds in the desert, Jake, only later able to recall those experiences from a life that isn't consistent with what actually happened to him.
I'll concede that it might be too hard to create a campaign based on a world that is brand-new. But I do think there's perhaps an opportunity, if you have a consistent table that is also invested in world-building and storytelling (which might be a big "if,") to do something really cool by imagining the grand expanse of time that might come between campaigns.
Critical Role has been a great opportunity to see a single campaign setting change and evolve and feel the impact of multiple campaigns, but it's still on a pretty human scale - I think that campaign 3 is only about 30 years after the events of campaign 1.
I'd be excited to see a legacy that extends thousands of years.
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