In my rereading of many of the classic Appendix N titles, I have come around again to Jack Vance's
Dying Earth.
The Dying Earth genre is not one I spent much time with back in the heyday of my D&D/AD&D playing life in the 1980s, but one I came upon much later.
Honestly, my first foray into this sub-genre of fantasy began with Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique tales. I later moved on to Vance and to other end-of-time works like the Dancers at the End of Time by Michael Moorcock, and even the ideas about it from the DC/Vertigo Comics Books of Magic. This also led me to Lin Carter's Gondwane tales and Gardner Fox's Kothar. Even the earliest story of all Dying Earth tales, H. G. Well's The Time Machine.
What I find most fascinating about these works is that they are not just "post-apocalyptic." In fact, they are far more alien and mystical than that. We are not dealing with a world that is recovering from a disaster. We are dealing with a world that is simply old and run-down. Civilization has risen and fallen so many times that history itself is legend, and legend itself is rumor. Sorcerers are those who remember things that nobody else remembers, ruins are piled on top of even older ruins, and magic is something that nobody is quite sure how to stop.
These worlds are, in many ways, a mirror to many of the settings that we start with in our own works of fantasy. We love to start with a "fresh" setting. We love to start with a "fresh" kingdom. We love to start with a "fresh" magic. We love to start with a "fresh" hero. We don't start with a tired kingdom. We don't start with tired magic. We don't start with a tired hero.
Throughout my writing here, I've touched upon this genre a bit, sometimes intentionally and sometimes unintentionally, by circling around it. I've written about my time spent in Zothique, Vance's strange future Earth, and games like Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea, which draw upon that sense of weird future-antiquity. Indeed, even my writing about fantasy worlds and future lands touches upon this idea in some way. But what if fantasy isn't set in a distant past, but in a future beyond all human imagination?
This idea gave rise to a game idea that has been rattling around in my head for a bit now.
Wasted Lands: The Dying Age
The Wasted Lands: The Dreaming Age RPG already gives us a mythic prehistory. It is a world of early civilizations, rising gods, ancient magic, and heroes who will eventually become legend. It is a world before recorded history, a time in which the myths of humankind are still being written.
But what of the last in that series?
What does the last mythic age look like?
This question gave rise to Wasted Lands: The Dying Age.
While the Dreaming Age marks the beginning of history, the Dying Age marks its end. Not centuries, not thousands of years. millions of years. More time between the Dying Age and us than between the Dreaming Age and us. The Dying Age is set so far in the future that everything familiar to us in the present day has become legend. The continents have merged yet again, one last time, into one last supercontinent, perhaps Pangea Ultima or Novopangea. The seas have risen and fallen and risen and fallen and risen yet again. The mountains have been uplifted and worn down many, many times.
The sun is growing old. In the sky above, it shines larger and redder than it did before. The days are longer and hotter, the seasons are stranger, and in the night sky, there are wonders beyond what our ancestors could have seen. The Moon, a constant companion to humanity since the Dreaming Age, is gone. Its recession from Earth since the dawn of time has reached a critical point, and it has been thrown free of Earth's gravity. Out there in the dark, beyond all of our worlds, patient observers can see the first hint of light from the Andromeda galaxy growing brighter as it moves closer to our own Milky Way. The heavens themselves are changing now.
Yet still, human beings linger on in a barely perceptible way.
Perhaps there are only a few thousand of them left, scattered across the surface of the Last Continent. They live in scattered cities, in wandering tribes, in strange little cultures built around traditions nobody really understands anymore. They remember a few of the old things. They tell tales of empires that perhaps existed a million years ago. They dig in ruins older than their own language.
And here is magic in the world.
Perhaps there has always been magic in the world, waiting patiently in the ruins of forgotten cultures. Perhaps it is returning now that the world is growing thin with age. In the Dying Age, there are sorcerers. They are not scholars, but archaeologists of the magical arts. Every single spell they use is from some civilization that perhaps existed a million years ago, or a cult that nobody really understands anymore.
The world itself is changing, too. The great beasts that used to rule over Earth are gone now, victims of a million years of slow decline. In their place, other creatures have risen to assume their places, giant arthropods and stranger creatures.
A farmer might hitch a wagon to a massive stag beetle instead of a mule. Herds of enormous cockroaches are raised for their surprisingly nutritious milk. Armored millipedes crawl through the forests like living trains of chitin. Some cities even keep domesticated mantises as guardians or war beasts. Giant ants and giant termite war with each other across the vast internal desert of the Last Continent. I have not figured out a replacement for horses yet. I am thinking of something akin to a smaller animal grown large, like a hare or jackrabbit. I do have giant riding bats, though.
There are humans, now millions of years after us, who have evolved into other shapes, and some are only slightly recognizable as human. These will be my orc, goblin, and troll standins.
It is strange, unsettling, and yet somehow perfectly natural in a world that has lasted for billions of years.
The Dying Age is not a despairing age, though it might seem that way to an outsider. No, it is something closer to quiet endurance. Humanity has survived ice ages, extinctions, and the rise and fall of countless civilizations. It may yet survive the long twilight of the sun itself. There is melancholy here and a general sense of ennui, but there are still humans fighting against the dying of the light.
The stories told in this age are not about building kingdoms that will last forever. Nothing lasts forever anymore. No, they are about what still matters when the world itself is nearing its final chapters. And perhaps the stubborn refusal to disappear quietly.
In many ways, the Dying Age is a completion of a circle that begins in the Dreaming Age. One is present at the birth of myth. The other is present at its final echo. Between them lies all of human history, from the first fires lit in a dark age to the last red sun setting over the last continent.
And yet, in that distant future, under that ancient red sun, there are still adventures waiting to be told.
The Dying Age: Mechanics
Here is where I get to cheat. Wasted Lands: The Dying Age is mechanically no different from Wasted Lands: The Dreaming Age. This is just a different campaign model. Though the idea of Divine/Heroic Touchstone should be addressed. In the Dreaming Age, these are gifts of power that bring the characters closer to their divine apotheosis. In Thirteen Parsecs, they are also used to help define heroic characters.
In the Dying Age, heroes take on a different tone. At first, I wanted to avoid using them, but in truth, they are loved by the players and me. So if there is a pervasive, light feeling of melancholia here, then these are the rewards for the characters who say, "No. I am not dead yet."
Even though I stressed this setting is not Post-Apocalyptic, I can see using some ideas from Gamma World here in search of lost civilizations.
There are no cosmic horrors here. There are old gods, but their worship is more akin to sacrifice and cults than organized religion. The world is far too decadent and too old for that.
The reasonable question arises. Why use Wasted Lands when Hyperboria 3rd edition (or any edition) does exactly this? The answer is largely, I have grown to like Wasted Lands more. Plus, I love the rather perfect symmetry of using Wasted Lands for both the beginning and ending of the human saga.
Larina: The Ash WitchThe Doctor: At the end of everything, we should expect the company of immortals, so I've been told.
- Doctor Who: Hell Bent
I could not help but notice a trend in the various "end of time" tales that have been featured in my re-exploration of Appendix N. We have Fox's Red Lori, Vance's Javanne, and Carter's Queen of Red magic. What do they all have in common? They are all powerful red-headed witches.
Yeah. I noticed.
One of the first things I did was create a version of Larina here at the end of time. Why her and not, say, a new witch? I liked the idea of a character who could remember bits of all her past lives, something of a Larina Ultima. If Larina of the Wasted Lands: The Dreaming Age is something of an Ur-Larina, then this is her ultimate form. In this world, she is a seeress and a prophetess, though she will admit that her sight is limited because there just isn't that much future actually left.
In the far future of Wasted Lands: The Dying Age, Larina still exists, but she is no longer the vibrant witch of West Haven or the wandering occult scholar of earlier ages.
She is known simply as The Ash Witch.
Like many of my GMPCs, she serves as a witness to the age. She appears to the PCs at strange moments, offering warnings, riddles, or fragments of half-remembered lore. Sometimes she seems to know them already. Sometimes she speaks as though she remembers lives that have not yet happened.
Unlike many of her other incarnations, this Larina is not trying to change the world. There is nothing left to change.
Here, she also makes the last stand with The One Who Remains.
She does know a truth. That when the last ember of this universe fades, something new will ignite. And witches have always been good at tending embers. She is the witness of the end and the midwife of the new beginning.
Currently, I have a group playing NIGHT SHIFT. I might convince them of a Wasted Lands: The Dying Age one-shot. But it is a world I am certainly going back to.
