The Inevitable Age of Wonders

It doesn't matter what the game, what the setting but there is always an age of wonders.   It is the ancient age where the artifacts came from.  Legendary god kings and dragons the size of cities.  Where demons and giants walked the earth.  An age of myth.  The stuff of bards  And the one big thing is that...  it has come to an end.

Be it in fire, by the breaking of the world, barbarians, corruption from the inside, or just the slow atrophy of time...  it has ended.

How does it end?  How does it go from a period of time where something like the Staff of the Magi or the Rod of Seven Parts was made and known to a period where there is only a few enchanters left that still know how to wrought steel and meld it with magic?  Where magic is now the purview of only the most rarest of wizards still control the powers of the old days while the rest wallow in the dirt or dig through the ruins for what came before.

So in almost everyone of my games, the great debate always comes forward...  some who want to advance... to 'modernize', to bring on the age of reason and the enlightenment.  Others want to remain in an age of kings and lords... they require nothing more than strength to rule.  The rarest seem to want to return to the age of the god kings.

But still, how did we get here?  How did it happen in your games?  How fast did it happen?   Is it three millennium ago and lives on in legend?  Did it just happen and the players are living in the ashes of the collapse?

For me, I went for the popular breaking of the world and slow degradation of the world as it moved towards it nadir and then slowly up towards the age of enlightenment.  It is the benefit of running a world that across the many campaigns has crawled across 1,300 years of history...  actually mapping out the evolution of cultures...  but I never addressed how it reached the original nadir point.   All the other disasters, they were story driven or player driven... but I never addressed the original breaking of the world...  it never came up.

Till now.  Now, it is like the players are the archeologists, digging through the dirt of three millenium to search for the titans of greek mythology...  completely Indian Jones stuff... trying to uncover what happened because one of those titans decided to wake up.  Now, I need to do the work.