In the Long Term We All Diminish Into the West

Epochal change is a rich, but I think generally underappreciated and underemphasised, theme in fantasy literature. 

I was thinking about this recently in connection to Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon. Bradley is a problematic figure these days, but The Mists of Avalon does an excellent job - for all of its rather tired and now somewhat trite anti-Christian stance - of depicting a world that is in transition from a pantheistic or pagan culture to a monotheistic one. Without giving away spoilers, the backdrop is one of a withdrawal of a particular kind of religiosity, and with it a retreat of a certain way of life and a certain type of magical, or mystical, power. In a particularly effective scene about two thirds of the way in we witness the main character, a pagan priestess, witnessing a sort of trivialised re-enactment of a ritual with which she was familiar when she was young. The original version - full of sex and sacrifice - had been denuded of its significance and bowdlerised into a comedic dance with sweet treats being distributed to children. This gives a poignancy to that character's sense of loss: in witnessing the spectacle she realises the extent to which times have changed.

Another good, but very different, example is M. John Harrison's Viriconium series, which if read in omnibus form chart a transition from a fairly robust sword-and-planet style fantasy world to a fragmentary, dissipating dreamscape that exists only in the reflections in the window of a down-at-heel British cafe. Gene Wolfe's A Book of the New Sun in a sense does the opposite - its backdrop is that of a dying sun that may or may not find itself being revived. George R R Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire has little of the poetic or elegaic qualities of either of these, but is itself of course set at a moment of epochal transition from summer to winter. Jack Vance's Lyonesse, meanwhile, is set at the cusp of epochal change, in that the entire continent on which the action is set is soon to be submerged beneath the ocean and never seen again. 

And then there is the ur-text of them all, The Lord of the Rings, which all takes place against a background of the retreat of the elves 'into the West', the drawing to a close of the Third Age, and a wider historicised 'decline and fall' narrative that goes through peaks and troughs, catastrophes and eucatastrophes. There may be antecedents to this (it is notable that ER Eddison, one of Tolkien's fellow inklings, may have been a braching off towards a more cyclical and nihilistic historicism) - readers will have their own recommendations. 

The idea of a epochal change can be a central part of the drama, as in A Song of Ice and Fire or The Mists of Avalon, but in its own right it is a useful way to add richness to the background of a story - or RPG campaign. It creates a sense that matters are not simply fixed, of course, and that actual events are taking place. But it also creates the impression that something is at stake. Things matter - ways of life are brought to an end, civilisations decline and fall (or rise anew), and the structure of the world itself changes.

Epochal change can be natural - a big earthquake, tsunami or volcano remakes geography, and the campaign takes place in the aftermath of, or during, the event. It can be mundane - a big war or invasion is taking place; a civilisation is in collapse; and so on. It can be apocalyptic - a meteor strike, zombie plague, and so on is sweeping the earth. It can be elegaic - the elves, Gods, alien overlords, etc., are leaving (whether suddenly or slowly). And so on. The important point is that there is a dynamism to the backdrop, to which the PCs must in some sense respond (if only to survive).