And you’re absolutely right in that doing so lets the GM be as grandiose and gratuitous as he wants to be. In fact, it’s probably better that he gets it out of his system before the campaign starts!

@ Lugh: Feel free to nitpick. There’s a lot of truth to what you’ve written, and perhaps zooming in and out is a better metaphor. I would contend that, differences in terminology aside, our approaches aren’t all that dissimilar. Your examples of dealing with the Great Fire are exactly what I meant by “downsizing” – it takes the greater disaster and reduces it to a series of character-sized scenes. Instead of spending all your time as GM narrating the epic conflagoration, you get the players involved.

I would contend that the same principle applies regardless of the scope of the disaster, and I tried to illustrate that by considering disasters of different magnitudes throughout the piece – from Ragnerok to Flood to Personal Crisis.

Your reply seems to assume that disasters are inevitable. But a lot of decent plotlines can stem from seeing a potential disaster and preparing accordingly, or trying to head it off or weaken it in advance; the threat of doom can be more useful at times than the doom itself.

Thanks to both of you for taking the time to contribute.

First, the scale of your “disaster” varies wildly through the article, from Ragnarok to flood to personal crisis. And, yet, I think that these things are actually very different. I don’t believe that a personal crisis, such as losing a job or being diagnosed with a disease, qualifies as a “disaster.” It is a life-changing crisis for the character, and there are articles galore on techniques for handling this. Similarly, Ragnarok/Armageddon/etc. is, by definition, a campaign changer. You have to split your world into “before” and “after” or it’s not really an “end of the world” scenario. Again, that requires some specific techniques to do well, that aren’t at all applicable to dealing with, say, a flood.

With a flood, you are working on a scale that is well above a PCs ability to stop, and yet on a level that the setting is likely to recover from with only minor permanent change (maybe a change in a trade route, or a specific city being abandoned, or a plague creating a new class of monsters). The stories revolve around saving who you can, maximizing the clean-up effort, and dealing with unexpected consequences (like an earthquake cracking open a prison for supervillains).

My other nit to pick has to do with your choice of terms with “downsizing.” You seem to think that the only way to make the disaster into something that the PCs can meaningfully interact with is to make it less of a disaster. I think it is more helpful to refer to zooming in and out on the disaster. When the Great Fire is consuming London, it is still a massive disaster regardless of what the PCs do. In a handful of campaigns, perhaps the PCs can actually battle a blaze of that magnitude. More likely, though, the story will be about saving people, salvaging artifacts before they are lost, assisting with the firefighting efforts (e.g., creating massive walls of stone as a firebreak), or working to save one specific locale (e.g., a cathedral). The story is about whether the PCs can make a difference, not about whether they can beat the disaster.

A disaster is really nothing more than a massive set-piece. It moves under its own power and at its own pace, often regardless of what the PCs (or the villains!) can do. Improperly handled, it can serve to severely de-protagonize and dis-empower the PCs. Properly handled, though, it can provide as many moments to let the PCs shine as any military action (the most common sort of disaster seen in RPGs).
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I think there is another type of justified disaster: One that happened before the campaign started. Dealing with the aftermath or finding a way to reverse the disaster can be the whole premise of the campaign, or just some inconvenience.

I am currently planning for a campaign I will probably start next year some time, the premise behind it is that there was a nice one-two punch that has taken the world down to it’s knees. First there was a civil war between the gods, which resulted in the most powerful of them (who created the world and elevated the other gods to divinity) and most of his supporters being destroyed. Then an ancient empire destroyed most of the world when their attempts to harvest power from the negative energy plane didn’t quite go as planned. The campaign world is flat and finite (like how Europe viewed it during the middle ages) and is crumbling at an alarming pace. It will be up to the PC’s to eventually do something about it.

You can also pull this card in the event that the PC’s failed to stop a disaster from occurring. If the second disaster I mentioned above (the negative energy plane one) was a major plot point of a previous campaign and the PC’s failed to prevent that disaster everyone can just roll up new characters and continue in the same world (as long as there is still some world left) and try again, this time with the added inconvenience of dealing with the aftermath of a major disaster.