The End Times and After: December 2025 RPG Blog Carnival
"Of what is he singing?" said a queen to a queen.
"He is singing of everlasting Zaccarath."
— Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron Dunsany, "In Zaccarath," 1909
The days grow long and the year comes to its end, so for the last RPG Blog Carnival of 2025, let's discuss the end not just of the year, but of time. Let's discuss the Apocalypse, and what comes after.
The basic prompt is "The End Times and After," which I mean to cover four topics you can pick from, or combine as you like:
Games that have to do with an imminent and/or ongoing Apocalypse. These are games where Dendar the Night Serpent gets out of her cage and devours the sun, where all the good evangelicals are Raptured and the Tribulations await the rest of us, where bombs bloom on the horizon and nuclear winter will soon set in, where Avalir falls from the sky and devils run its streets, where Cthulhu wakes in the corpse-city R'lyeh and there is no Alert to stop him.
Post-apocalyptic games, as we generally understand them. These are games set in Gamma Terra, in sun-haunted Athas, in the blue sands of Vaarn, in Arora dragon-plagued, in the Zone, in the Commonwealth, in my own yet-to-be-properly-named Lakelands, in any of a dozen hacks and homebrews where everything went bad and the world is a wasteland of mutants and robots and radioactive goo.
Post-apocalyptic games, as we don't generally understand them. I've never heard of a game that takes place in the next world, in anything like the Mormon telestial kingdom or the fractal paradox Narnia at the end of C. S. Lewis's The Last Battle, but if you've run or played in such a game, I'd like to hear about it.
Games that have to do with ruins from lost civilizations. These are games that feature archaeology-adventure, where a central aspect of the game is seeking lost Atlantis, picking through the shattered towers of Netheril, uncovering an antediluvian relic, fleeing shoggoths in an Antarctic city, or otherwise investigating what remains of a society that suffered an apocalypse long ago. These aren't simply games that have ruins in them; these ruins originate in a lost civilization.
With apologies to Stacker Pentecost, for this carnival please don't write a post about a game with an apocalypse that the PCs are able to prevent. Tell me about the time you ran The Rise of Tiamat, for example, only if it ended with the Dragon Queen taking over the world.
Any post that has anything to do with one of those categories is welcome, but if you had hoped for more guidance, consider one of the following ideas:
Contemplation about what this kind of setting does, and what kinds of story it pushes you toward. Example: my "Neither Hope Nor Cynicism: A Central Tension," for types 1 and 2.
Your Appendix N for this kind of game, drawing on sources from both inside and outside the genre. Example: 1999 A.D.'s "Appendix M for Michael," a thoughtful contribution to a 2025 bandwagon, for type 4.
A session report from a game of this kind. Example: Nick Hendriks's "All-Out Playtest 1," and following posts, for type 2.
Bestiaries, treasuries, and other lists of assets ready to deploy in a game of its type.
Discussion of a specific franchise or game in the genre. Example: Grognardia's "Retrospective: Gamma World (Third Edition)," and his other discussions of Gamma Worlds's 1st through 3rd editions, for type 2
Consideration of how you might hybridize one or more of these genres with other ones – neo-noir, biopunk, kaiju, wuxia, chivalric romance, spy thriller, military science fiction, planetary romance, subterranean fiction, romantic comedy1 – and which genre tropes and structures overlap, work well together, or conflict.
A jeremiad about how everyone in the hobby gets the genre, or a franchise in it, wrong.
Participating is straight-forward enough. Write and publish a post to your blog or newsletter, or to Reddit or anywhere else with a dedicated url, making sure to include a link to this post with a mention of the RPG Blog Carnival. Tell me about it on Bluesky (which hosts my comments below) or in an email to cerhendriks[at]proton[dot]me. Seriously, please tell me about it: last time not everyone did and while I still found out about them through Seed of Worlds's links posts, you probably shouldn't count on that? As is my obligation and pleasure as host of this carnival, at the start of next month I will post a round-up linking to contributing posts, so I hope you'll come back then to see them all.
One last request: I'd prefer it if you didn't use text-to-image generated pictures for your post.2 There are plenty of free-to-use art resources available online, if you need them. For post-apocalyptic art, I tend to use Unsplash. If you do use something from a text-to-image generator, I might give you a hard time about it in the round-up.
Happy writing!
Source: Keagan Henman, 2018.
Or, of course, cyberpunk, dieselpunk, stonepunk, high fantasy, ghost story, nautical adventure, immram, western, northern, picaresque, pastoral poetry, green world romance, paranoid fiction, space opera, fairy tale, gothic romance, epithalamium, or verse epic (whose catalogues I enjoy).↩
My reasoning about this was the subject of a previous 2025 RPG Blog Carnival contribution: "RPGs, LLMs, Citational Ethics, and Lineage."↩