AD&D as Post Apocalypic

http://www.brainleakage.com/home/the-implied-apocalypse-of-dungeons-dragons

Interesting discussion.  I'm not entirely sure that I care, because honestly, almost ALL of fantasy pines for a lost Golden Age—Middle-earth as we know it is a pale shadow of Middle-earth during the heights of the kingdoms of Gondor and Arnor, which in turn were a pale shadow of Middle-earth on Numenor, which in turn was a pale shadow of Middle-earth in the First Age, etc.  As it mentions here, Conan is also post-apocalyptic, in a way.

Then again, I don't care about dungeon-delving, fortress building, and I don't care all that much about magical spells even.  (Arguably my Lovecraftian rather than Vancian magic has the same quality, in a sense, as described above, but in reality, of course, Lovecraftian doesn't imply a past Golden Age, but rather a past age of horrors.)  So I don't care much about post apocalyptic.  DH5 is really more about the settlement of a new nation, although the PCs aren't meant to be the main players in such an endeavor creating new settlements, but rather the type of rough people who wander about those types of frontier settlements.  But with swashbuckling sword & sorcery and horror being the vehicle to get you there.



This is long, but it's interesting, and part of it is what prompted the link above.  It also talks at length about the genesis of AD&D out of OD&D, and makes the cogent point—OD&D wasn't very good, but it had the right idea.  AD&D was better, but had the wrong idea; i.e., it went the wrong direction.  And it's still arguable exactly how much better it was.  There was plenty of ingenious innovation and great ideas, but a general lack of professionalism that meant thinks were weird from the get-go.

Which is exactly what I mean when I talk about my tastes being not old school, but old fashioned.  I like the idea of OD&D, but the rules needed work.  The rules that later evolved weren't to my taste and catered to a paradigm that wasn't really the one I was on. (Not to mention the baked in cosmology, as mentioned in the second big segment of discussion.) But with m20, we got the ability to see what "modern" D&D brought into an OD&D-like paradigm would look like, and it was glorious.  To see what this could be like, check out Microlite Purest Essence, or the different versions of Microlite74 (especially either Basic or Standard; when it got to Extended, it became an alt.AD&D all over again.)  While the rules of FANTASY HACK or DH5 (i.e. Dark•Heritage 2) obviously deviate from those, it was those specific iterations that inspired me to use m20 because I now saw how it could be used.

I strongly suggest reading Microlite Purest Essence and Microlite74: Basic for it's own sake.  They're cool, and quick and easy to read.