December 2025 RPG Carnival Round Up: The End Times And After
For the month of December 2025, I hosted the RPG Blog Carnival, having chosen the theme "The End Times and After." As a reminder, I asked for blog posts on any of the following topics:
- games featuring an imminent or on-going apocalypse;
- post-apocalyptic games like Gamma World or Apocalypse World;
- post-apocalyptic games that take place in the next world;
- games that heavily feature the ruins of lost civilizations.
I'm grateful that a number of people helped us close out the year, with nine submissions. Thanks to all of you for participating – and thanks to everyone reading this for your attention. It is my honour to provide this list of links to these contributions, presented in chronological order.
Vulcan Stev at Vulcan Stev's Database reinterprets several ttrpg settings as different periods in a single world's history in "The End Times and After: RPG Blog Carnival – Autodueling in Toril," including Car Wars as a post-apocalyptic era, with 5e-compatible options for road warriors and vehicular combat. (I do wish Vulcan Steve had respected my request not to use text-to-image generators for the pictures, though.)
Sean Holland at Sea of Stars examines his Sea of Stars setting as a post-apocalyptic one in "What happens after the World Ends? Is the Sea of Stars post apocalyptic? (RPG Blog Carnival)." As is so often the case, his fantasy setting has a kind of apocalypse behind it – though not the one its inhabitants expected.
Empedocles the Wizard at Elemental Reductions in "End of Times; or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Enjoy the Apocalypse" enumerates several kinds of apocalypse you could unleash on your players (but first goes briefly over the etiquette of unleashing an apocalypse on your players).
The author of Dungeons & Possums has given us two posts: "December Blog Carnival: The End Times & After" expresses excitement about the topic, while "December Blog Carnival: The End Times & After Part II" provides a grab-bag of post-apocalyptic assets: an Appendix N, three distinctive weapons, and a wasteland settlement with plot hooks and NPCs.
VDonnut at VDonnut Valley conducts an autopsy on a failed apocalypse campaign in "Unfinished End - failed campaign retrospective"; although I love the basic adventure idea presented here, I also think the problems identified are ones anyone hoping to run an apocalyptic campaign should be aware of.
In "Solo All-Out Apocalypse: Vehicles Playtest 1" at his eponymous blog, Nick Hendriks playtests some vehicle mechanics for his rules-light All-Out Apocalypse system. For personal reasons I'm always interested in seeing All-Out develop.
My own contribution for the carnival is "Mould Nymphs," in which I elaborate on human-mimicking fungal colonies as potential player characters in my weird post-apocalyptic/slow apocalyptic setting, the Lakelands. (Did I choose this topic knowing that I would inevitably have at least one post-apocalyptic post this month? Yes.)
At Seed of Worlds, Xaosseed thinks about uneven apocalypses and collapsed civilizations in "Apocalypse for thee, but not for us (RPG Blog Carnival )," and provides 6 ideas for apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic games.
I have enjoyed reading everyone's contributions. Overall I'm pleased to see the attention to how the tropes and genres work at the table, and how they don't. Although there's a clear bias toward the post-apocalyptic (as I suspected there would be), I was happy to see some participants take up the other options as well.
If you think I missed a contribution, please let me know in the comments of this post (hosted on Bluesky) or at cerhendriks[at]proton[dot]me.
The year has ended, but the world has not. Here's to 2026.