Before the Flood: The Pre-Apocalypse

I have a longstanding fascination with the pseudoepigrapha - that body of texts which might have ended up in what we think of as the Bible, but didn't (branches of the Orthodox churches notwithstanding).

In The Book of Jubilees, we get a window onto a very different antediluvian world. In it, a group of fallen angels, the offspring of Adam and Eve's third son, Seth, have sex with human women (the daughters of Cain) and the result is the Nephilim, a race of monsters and giants. The Nephilim themselves then breed with humankind and produce the Elioud, a people of great ability and also great evil. We also hear that there are in fact four types of angel - the mysterious 'angel of the presence' (which appears to mean a direct representative of God), and angels with, respectively, purview of sanctification; guardianship over individuals; and the natural world. 

We also learn that time itself is divided into 'Jubilees' - cycles of 49 years - and that the year has 364 days with four quarters of thirteen weeks; the extra day is made up by a 'double sabbath' of two days once a year. (The implication would appear to be that there is a treble sabbath once every four years.) 

There is a lot to say about this world - a world which is dominated by what appears to be a metaphysical confrontation between angels and what the Beowulf author might have called the 'clan of Cain' ('ogres, elves, evil phantoms, and giants') - with human beings caught in the middle. And there is therefore a lot about the implied setting that is very gameable, with the PCs navigating this landscape of confrontation and trying to win fame and glory, or to do good (or evil) accordingly.

But what I especially like about this idea is that it conjures an image of a world that is fresh, and unencumbered by history, in a way which in D&D circles strikes me as genuinely novel. We are used to D&D settings being weighed down by accumulated weight of lore and timelines and ten-thousand-year narratives; OSR settings are generally no different in that they allude to the existence of vast chronology while keeping it largely implicit. Either way, D&D settings generally assume the presence of things that are very old: old gods, old dragons, old treasure hoards, old ruins, old civilizations, old cataclysms and disasters.

The world of the Book of Jubilees has none of that sense of great age. And a game set in such a setting would therefore cast the PCs in a very different role to that to which we have become accustomed: not the looters and explorers of the ancient and antique, but as the movers and shakers in a world that has just been born and is in the very act of being shaped. They would be situated not at the end of time, but at its beginning. 

It would also cast their actions in a tragic light, because of course that world is already foreshadowed by the eventual flood which will sweep everything away - it is pre-, rather than post-, apocalyptic. Everything that they could achieve will therefore in the end, in any event, be meaningless. (Unless perhaps one were to imagine their quest as being to somehow avert the eventual deluge itself.) 

This, in a strange sort of a way, calls to mind the only example I can really think of of pre-apocalyptic fiction, Jack Vance's Lyonesse. There, we have an entire trilogy of novels which (not-really-spoiler-alert) all take place on an Atlantis-style subcontinent lying off the coast of Arthurian Europe which will one day sink beneath the ocean. Everything that therefore happens in the books is pointless because shortly after the action ends everybody will be dead anyway. But we read along regardless. 

It is an interesting question as to whether a knowably pre-apocalyptic setting would be a compelling one in which to play a D&D campaign, but I rather like the archness of Lyonesse and its fundamental bloody-mindedness. In Vance's way, a philosophical point is being made: nothing matters in the end because everybody will be dead in the fullness of time; yet at the same time, everything still matters. To put it another way: "It won't be expanding for billions of years yet, Alvie, and we've gotta try to enjoy ourselves while we're here!" The Biblical point would obviously be that even though you're going to at some point be dead, there is a larger story that plays out far beyond the scale of the human lifetime, and if that floats your boat (or, perhaps, your ark), there is plenty of grist for the role playing mill there, too.