Seas of Blood, Rains of Fire: The Post-Apocalyptic Worlds of Early ‘Dungeons & Dragons’

By Michael Grasso / June 3, 2026 “Sailing the Blood Sea of Istar,” Jeff Easley, 1986 A couple of years ago, a canny and intelligent friend referred to the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons setting of the Forgotten Realms as “post-apocalyptic.” I thought for a moment, ready to dismiss the fictional world’s bog-standard fantasy feudalism as nothing of the sort, when one of those huge realizations hit me square between the eyes: wait a second, all three of the original AD&D campaign settings are technically post-apocalyptic! It’s not something I had consciously realized before that moment, even though I was reasonably (okay, maybe obsessively) well-read in the histories of these worlds: the Forgotten Realms‘ Toril, the World of Greyhawk‘s Oerth, and Dragonlance‘s Krynn. And it’s not like the idea of an expressly post-apocalyptic setting was alien to me: I’d played loads of role-playing games set on a destroyed Earth (more or less) and AD&D itself, as it moved into its Second Edition in the…