Floods of Irdya

[egallager]

In maintaining a campaign, I came across a usage of the word "antediluvian". "Antediluvian" means "before the flood", referring to the flood narratives of Genesis in the Bible, and/or the Epic of Gilgamesh. This has me wondering, has Irdya ever experienced a planet-wide flood? I'd assume that the third sun falling in "The Fall" would have caused some floods, but IMO any floods there would have been merely secondary catastrophes compared to the primary catastrophe of a sun crashing into the ground, so that wouldn't really count...

[gnombat]

Note that, even though the word literally means "before the flood", it is sometimes just used as a synonym for "old":

Colloquially, the term is used to refer to any ancient and murky period...

The adjective antediluvian is sometimes used figuratively to mean of great age or outmoded. H. P. Lovecraft was particularly fond of the term, using it frequently in his horror stories...

[odisseus_]

Yes, the word "antediluvian" references a global Great Flood, which until the 19th century has been considered a real, or at least plausible event. In particular, the fossilised dinosaur bones were attributed to "antediluvian beasts", which supposedly had been exterminated by the Great Flood.

Therefore, while this word was totally suitable for Lovecraft (who wrote about ancient monsters inhabiting our Earth), I would avoid this word when writing about Wesnoth (which AFAIK has no Great Flood even as a myth).

[gnombat]

An example from "Pickman’s Model": "...Pickman produced a flashlight and revealed an antediluvian ten-panelled door that looked damnably worm-eaten."

I don't think Lovecraft intended this to mean that the door literally pre-dated the biblical flood (this is supposed to be a building in Boston) but simply that it was a very old door.

[odisseus_]

Fair point, but this is still a reference to the (myth of) Great Flood, which doesn't exist in Wesnoth.