Lights and colors swirled around me for several seconds before everything went white, blinding me. When my vision cleared, I found myself sitting in front of a fire underneath starless night sky, the moon a tiny, dim light that provided almost no illumination. On the other side of the fire sat an old man, his hair a shade of grey just this side of white and his ancient skin deeply wrinkled and aged. I found that I couldn’t do more than move my head slightly side to side and there were others sitting in front and around me, all wearing simple, loose fitting linen clothing that was open in the back. Each of the young men and women seated in front of me had a tiny emerald-colored crystal, smaller than a fingernail, embedded in the center of their back. I knew without looking down that I was wearing a similar outfit, and felt a slight itching on my back that let me know that I also had one of those crystals. I was in a cut scene, the opening event for Apoch’s Twilight that briefly introduced the back story. I grinned and sat back to watch the show.

The old man begins to speak with a voice that is kind, but weary with age and responsibility. “My sons and daughters, it is time once again to pass on the mantle of Adventurer to a new generation of recruits. Each of you bears the mark of the Dome, granting you great power but also bearing with it great responsibility. And so, you must know of what came before. Of the world that was, Apoch, and how it met its Twilight.” I winced. I forgot I cribbed the classic Spider-Man power and responsibility quote there.

The old man waves his hands and released a handful of dust or sand of some kind into the fire. It flares, and images form in and above the fire showing the world of Apoch. It shows a massive city on the shores of an ocean that rivals New York in size and scope, home to millions of people, the city that was one Ravensport. Enormous sires and towers reach up hundreds, thousands of feet into the air. They resemble a cross between skyscrapers like the Empire State Building or the Burj Khalifa and the epic fantasy architecture you see in stuff like Lord of the Rings or Pathfinder. Great winged sailing ships sail across the skies instead of airplanes as magically powered carriages pack the streets. Hundreds of thousands of people pack the sidewalks of the city, hurrying to their destinations, many carrying small handheld devices that resemble a crystalline egg split down the middle, the magical equivalent of a smartphone.

At a quick glance it could easily be mistaken for any large, modern-day metropolis in the real world if it wasn’t for the more fantastical touches like gryphons and wyverns flitting through the skies or the little uses of magic going on, from levitating window washers to illusory billboard ads to the diverse races walking the streets, from elves and dwarves to more monstrous looking races such as orcs, furry bipedal felines, and canine humanoids.

“The world was highly advanced,” the village elder says as the scene shifts back to the old man at his fire. “Magic was everywhere and infused into everything, even items used on a daily basis, and it made life comfortable and easy. In the Eastlands we had peace, open trade, and travel amongst all the people of Apoch. The Darklands of the West hadn’t bothered us for many, many centuries.”

“Then began the events that would spark the Twilight, the end of the world as we knew it. No one knows how it truly began. The Westlanders claimed their Emperor was killed by a holy knight and began a worldwide invasion of the Eastlands, while other say it was just a pretense, an excuse for a war they had been craving for centuries. Whatever the case, with no warning the dark armies of the West invaded overnight.”

I chuckled to myself. The back story was very vague, intentionally so. I needed some history and wanted this concept of an epic world war that destroyed this highly advanced civilization, but wanted the freedom to throw in almost anything I wanted down the road, so I deliberately avoided locking myself into anything too specific.

The illusion in the fire shifts again and this time a vast army of millions can be seen, filled with warrior in sinister looking armor, creatures of evil such as goblins and orcs, monsters and creatures of every size and description. The sky is almost totally blotted out by dragons, winged demons, and other flying monstrosities and horrors.

“War raged, but the tipping point came when the gods themselves stepped in and began warring as well.” The old man says in front of his fire. “The gods of evil came to the world and aided the armies of the West, while the gods of good aided the armies of the East who stood against them. The Lords of the Grey, the gods long neutral and responsible for maintaining the balance between good and evil, broke their neutral stance and began choosing sides as well.”

Ok, I admit it. I cribbed here from Dragonlance a bit. I always loved the way their pantheon was set up. D&D traditionally had its alignments set up so you had a strong good versus evil, where good was obviously in the right and neutral was either “I’m not choosing sides” at best or “I’m ambiguously neither good nor evil so I can do whatever I want with no justification” at worst. Dragonlance on the other hand straight up tells us that neutral’s role was to maintain a balance between the two because too much either way was bad. It was a fascinating concept to my young, teenaged mind.

I stopped musing and focused on the illusions in the fire again as they began to shift several times in rapid succession, showing figures standing hundreds of feet tall waging war. One in fiery armor swings a sword, annihilating thousands of soldiers with ease. A dark robed, skeletal being walks calmly through a battlefield, ignoring the magic and projectiles being fired at him, and everything near him withers and dies as he strides through. Another with bark-like brown skin and flowers for hair raises his hands and the plant life grows rapidly, strangling hundreds in vines and roots that burst from the ground. Magical blasts vaporize entire towns and cities. Tsunamis crash against the shores, earthquakes tear the land apart, storms rage and blast everything they come in contact with. These were vague visualizations of some of the more generic gods, such as war, disease, nature, and the like.

“Legend says the archmages council petitioned the only three gods who did not get involved, the Dark, the Grey, and the White Lords of Magic. These three came up with the concept of the Domes, impenetrable, life sustaining shields that would protect a portion of the populace of each major city. The domes would stay in place for 20 years, allowing those inside to survive and eventually rebuild civilization.”

Again, another aspect I cribbed from Dragonlance, I admit. I loved that of all the gods, the three gods of magic basically said “screw the politics and alignment” and all worked together to advance magic.

“Here in Ravensport, it was planned to stockpile supplies, food, everything needed to survive and build a city inside our dome, but with the gods involved the war escalated faster than anyone could anticipate, and the dome had to be erected before they were ready. 1,000 people were trapped inside with little food and only a few supplies. The Dome provided shelter, clean air, a day and night cycle, the occasional rain, and even all four seasons. But without much food, that first year was hard. Nearly half the first generation died.”

“My grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather was among those that survived, and they managed to grow some crops, they tended the few livestock they had, and they survived. Twenty years passed, and the dome did not drop as expected. Year after year they waited, and still the dome did not come down. Not knowing when, if ever, we would escape the dome that had once been our salvation, but was now our prison, we began the tradition of training a group of men and women as Adventurers. A small percentage of children are born like you, marked by the dome and granted the potential to harness vast amounts of power, to grow much stronger, wield magic, and even overcome death itself. Once the dome comes down, we will need those with that power to go out and explore the world, to see what and who has survived, to find the other domes and reconnect.”

To be fair, I came up with the very first draft of the Apoch’s Twilight background a couple years before the Fallout franchise was relaunched by Bethesda and I’d never played the original games, but I was just barely old enough to remember the tail end of the cold war, doing nuclear bomb drills in early elementary school, and I took inspiration from the idea of those old bomb shelters. So we were drawing on the same general background here. For once I wasn’t directly ripping off… err… writing an homage to another fiction franchise. And the whole “mark of the dome” thing was a half-assed explanation for basic MMO tropes like the ability to respawn.

“Every 20 years we gather together the next generation of dome-marked to train and prepare. This year, it is your turn. Congratulations, recruits. Hopefully this will be the-“

The old man is interrupted as the deafening sound of thunder tore through the night sky accompanied by a rumble that rippled through the ground. Then without warning, the faux night sky of the dome vanished, replaced by a blinding light. Like everyone else around me, I threw my arm up to protect my eyes from the blinding glare. As my eyes adjusted, I could see everyone staring up, slack jawed as an audible gasp of awe ran through the gathered crowd. It was my first time here, but I knew instinctually, likely influenced by the game, that for all our lives the sky had been the dome. At night, a dark, empty space with a single weak source of illumination to represent a moon and provide some minimal light. During the day it was either a warm and soft blue with moderate illumination from an artificially projected sun or a more subdued grey light when it was raining. But this light was several times brighter than the daylight we were used to, and the sky was a vivid, brilliant blue dotted with wispy white clouds. The air stirred as a breeze blew through Ravensport for the first time in 150 years.

The old man drops to his knees, openly weeping as he stared at the sky. “It’s gone. It’s finally gone. We’re free….”