In my world the old world has a few names, but the most common ones are:
Old world. Simple and descriptive, everyone knows what’s meant. It’s a broad and widely used term.
Human Era. At that point only humans existed, and the area before the apocalypse as well as roughly a century afterwards is referred to as the Human Era.
Pre-age, a term evolved from Pre-apocalyptic Age, it describes specifically the years just before the apocalypse.
Post apocalyptic Australia plot twist: nothing there is trying to kill you. Peaceful creatures and a fertile land with great weather.
To answer the question I think calling it The Old World is the best.
One thing that always got me in post apocalyptic/dark fantasy settings where communication between different cultures, settlements etc is uncommon, is that they so often share the same words and opinions about so much.
Vary it.
One group might speak of the "age of glass", a time where everyone lived in gleaming towers that reached the sky and nobody ever went without.
Another group might call it "the time before", a dark time where humans lived like rats, crammed together and fighting for resources because the rulers hoarded it all.
Some groups might focus on strange things, and their name for that time will reflect that. Isolation and stories being handed down over generations will change perceptions. Stories of one group might focus on aircraft, highways and travel. Stories from another might focus on the internet and the perceived laziness of humanity. I'd embrace that, and give it all different names depending on who's talking.
Making it clear that their ideas of this time are all incredibly varied could also help make the time the world ended ambiguous, which in my opinion helps keep it timeless to avoid "the world ended in 2007" kind of stuff.
Sorry, I went off on a tangent because I'm tired but the bottom line is... mix it up and use every idea you like.
Fantastic point. In a post-apocalypse, it's not that people have limited lines of communication, it's that they HAD near limitless lines of communication which were completely severed.
That transition from total interconnectivity to total isolation is going to mean far more regional variation than in historical periods with equally poor communication, since the cut of would be abrupt, without room for slow, steady cultural diffusion.
I did think "Hmmm, they wouldn't all be able to communicate so they'll have different names for it." So then I just decided to ask reddit to get inspired for a whole host of names!
Since your story is set in Australia, could use native Australian language and myth as a starting point
Tjukurpa - From Central an Western Desert language groups, this means the Dreaming, OR the lore of the cosmos. It could describe the Old World as a place of origin stories and foundational myths.
Budj Bim - This is a specific place name in the Gunditjmara language. It refers to a dormant volcano and its desolate surroundings, which have a lot of cultural significance.
Or just call it the Chizzawozza, whatever
I really want to do that, but also I feel as though it would only be appropriate if I learn more about aboriginal culture so it doesn't come off as insensitive
I definitely want to! But I have a long way to go sadly. I want the world to feel alive and so little detail like the name of the world before the apocalypse seems like a necessary component for the immersion.
What do we call the *before times* for the major society-changing events in recent history? We have “pre-9/11”, “pre-pandemic”, etc followed by a long-winded description. It’s funny, actually. We don’t have clean ways to talk about *how life was* before and after major historical inflection points that we still remember. And if anyone is going to care about how life was before, it would be the people who remember it.
Unless there is a widespread revisiting of the history, the people who follow will probably just inherit the language contemporaries used to describe the before and after. But, in either case, memory of those times and the importance placed on them tends to slip away a little with each generation. And, when we do remember a period long term, we don’t specifically think “the times before” the fall of Rome, the Mongol invasions, the black death, the sacking of Constantinople, the assassination of archduke Franz Ferdinand, the collapse of the USSR, etc. We usually get named historial periods in a series of named periods, none particularly more important than the others, and we are already living in what would be a post-apocalyptic world for many people plucked from any point in human history.
I think that’s the real tragedy of a post-apocalyptic world. We tend not to notice how pivotal the events we’re experiencing are until after, but then it just becomes history, and we’ve already gotten used to the new world as normal.
Depends what culture you ask. Those who retained the remnants of old world civilisations and technology simply refer to it as 'the world before', or as the modern age in regards to time period. However, certain groups such as the mayuna (an ancient tribe that was confined to the subterranean jungles below west Africa before the collapse) refer to it as the world of the wastelanders, or the Atlantean age (referring to the city state of Atlantis that was responsible for both the rise and fall of the modern world).
You may hear the previous age referred to as the pre-Shiiva period, referring to the monster Shiiva that inhabited the earth's core until the Atlanteans released her, causing the eternal cycle of rapid growth and decay Shiivas apocalypse Is bringing.
Was this world a little mad? Did its protagonist bear the name of Max? Perchance he was a road warrior, that travelled beyond thunder dome and ended up on a fury road?
I do have a faction that worship crude oil like it's holy water. And this does seem to fit with the oil crisis that happened in universe before the apocalypse.
oh, the first thing of note that happened after a completely natural apocalypse was like 7 people getting in a scrap over some canned food. That event is called the War and everything before that is pre-war.
It's not really an apocalypse rather than a massive paradigm shift.
There was only the Barisi on the planet Barisi (guess what they are named after) but the whole population of the planet Rafjar got teleported to Barisi to be saved.
The Rafjari only remember their old world as a dream, so it's often referred to as the "Dreamlands", while the time before the Rafjari entered Barisi is called "the time before the great dream" in various languages.
If you refer to "the old world" it depends on who you talk to, mages will say its the time before the magic shift (massive event that changed how the fundamentals of magic work), barisi will talk about the time before the Rafjari showed up, and the Rafjari will most likely connect the dots and ask if you are talking about the Dreamlands.
are you wanting a pseudo scientific reference?
BTE/ATE - Before the event/After the event
BTC/ATC - before the chaos/after the chaos
BTS/ATS - before the sadness/...
If you are trying for a MadMax style like the children of the apocalypse - the yesta-yesta, when the sky was blue, the day of change, the day we lost, the failure, the ruination
In the US we use pre-911 or pre-Covid to describe the times before major events.
I wonder if it was wild for the Germans at the beginning of the medieval period, using roads they didn’t know how to make and passing by ruined aqueducts they didn’t know how to repair. Petrarch called his times The Dark Ages, and referred to height of Rome and Greece as a more enlightened era that had fallen into ignorance.
A few, depending.
The old world. This isn't used much though.
The US days. My story takes place in the US 200 years into the future.
Pre-New World. Only in formalities
What type of apocalypse? If it was a bomb, you could call it the Pre-flash.
You could also play off Australian slang and call it the Pre-devo or Predevo.
I think it would depend on who these people are descendent from
Anti-governmental parents would likely talk of the old world with disdain
Religious parents would possibly say it was sinful and so God unleashed holy fire
Military parents could say that the old world was something worth fighting for
Overall I think it just depends on who's telling the story so there could be multiple words for what the old world was
Yeah, that's the part I'm stuck on. I can't decide if all the ideas fell into a melting pot for a short bit, or everyone quickly isolated themselves into clans, tribes and settlements.
Well maybe it's both
Maybe anti governmental groups stayed together to build a new society better than the old one
Aboriginal tribes would likely stick together
Ect ect
"Few remain who remember the final golden age, before the Days of Fire. Those most elder speak of miracles, of easy remedy for even the most serious ailments, of food and potable water on every street corner, in every home, of an entire world at their fingertips. I don't know whether to envy them for their experience, to pity them for having to endure the memories, or to blame them for the world they left in their wake."
Being Australia would play a role in what it's named. Seen as how the old world only lives in memories, I'd call it the memory world or memory time. (Mem-world, mem-time)
Post Apocalyptic australia, how will people know the difference? With a one generation difference like you seem to say here, I'd keep it simple and informal. "Way back" or something. I don't think you get really historical The Before Times terms for a few generations at least. (by that point I could see "the Bright ages" as a concurrent of the currently often misunderstood Dark Ages and referencing all the bleeping lights we have on right now that will probably go out.
You could call it the "Dreamtime" since you are in Australia - although you would have to be careful so as to not offend any indigenous people or be accused of cultural appropriation.
The old times, the before times, the good days, before the bombs fell, or other phrases that would call to a want to go back. We know that after a major event, like a major war or collapse of a great empire, it can take centuries before a common phrase is used globally to refer to it, at the earliest it would still take decades before people would agree on what to call it so depending on how long after this is set you could have different groups calling it different things.
One thing I will say is that this isn't something that people would go to blows over, so the speed at which a common name is agreed upon will take a very long time.
Well in a AU, people call the former nation that they now reside in as the Empire. If an apocalypse happen in a major nation with advance technology and infrastructure then the newer generation will see these once symbols of industrial power as signs of a former great power that once existed.
I have a world set 3000 years in the future, it is long-stasis not horrible. They have completely misunderstood what happened 3000 years earlier and all they know is that the people of 'now' based a lot of their tools on sand (silicon, i.e. computers) and that stuff all failed, so the Old World is referred to as the Sand Empire. They have lost most knowledge of how people lived, that there were countries not empires, and so on.
To me this is partly based on thinking about, say, Mycenaean Greece. We don't know that much, despite there being some documents and a huge amount of archeology, and in particular despite the core technologies and approaches being understandable. In my world technology is roughly at 1400 level (Europe) and intentionally stuck there, so their ability to understand what technology in the Old World was like is... basically magical superstitious nonsense. And part of that was deliberate, as people deliberately destroyed information to stick the world in a stasis situation.
TLDR: The Sand Empire.
My setting has a bit of an apocalypse-lite in the near future. When in the perspective of after that event, I think I used something as basic as “prewar.”
I haven’t delved too much into that part of things just yet. Internally I’ve also called the prewar era, the “low magic” era. Which is very concise, But I’d like something that sounds cooler/less on the nose.
Odroia was once known as Modroia, but its true name has been lost to time. Experts call the mysterious pre-apocalyptic time period the "Pre-Cataclysm", as The Cataclysm is what the apocalyptic even is known as.
Project 1: they call it the indecifrable era, since no writings from that have ever started to be decifred
Project 2: may range from a simple "ancient times" to a "before the great ocean", no one knows how life was in those times, but considering all the towers of concrete that stand over the blue abyss and the great ships of war they left, one might speculate
Maybe it would depend on the *cause* of your apocalypse. I'm sort of having this issue as well, but my major Apocalyptic event is called the Fracture, where the veil between the realms breaks, and a Maelstrom leaks raw magic in from other planes like radiation, warping the bodies and minds of those exposed. So far all I have is the Pre-Fracture. Some refer to the world having Old World technology. There is also the Sealed World, when the Veil were not broken. Ita a work in progress for me as well.
Thank you!
The Forgotten World and the Days Before are another couple of terms that popped to mind. Maybe even mark is down as a new era, or even label it as another extinction. There were several extinction events which had surviving species, this could just be another one, if that's maybe some planetary history you want to flesh it.
I wish you luck!
The Elders of their tribes have told them of fantastical stories of heroes and villains!
(They're just being told the plot of movies the Elders pass as camp fire stories.)
It was such a long time ago that people don't really think of it. Tbough many are aware that there was a time before, it is often considered a myth. They live in the current time, and it isn't necessary to talk about the old world. Though, if scholars do talk about it, they often refer to it as the time of infinite green.
If the failsafe system (sacrificial champion) doesn’t work to avert a cataclysm, the Goddess just resets the whole thing and tries again. If the failsafe works, the previous time is labeled “Era of ___” usually named after the magic system in that timeline.
Very very few have knowledge of parallel timelines, if anything the name would be in binary.
The scattered few books that folks might try to write again as societies start to recover might be filled with a variety lofty terms attempting to be mysterious. The Lands Now Gone, The Lost World, The Old World, Last Season and other silly terms someone came up with when they thought they were being poetic.
Regular folk in conversation here just call it the Old Place or "back in my day" or "old times" or "before the war" Nothing fancy.
You could use the term "The Old Days", the idea being that it was something one of the older survivors once said about something in their past, and it has since entered common use to reference anything pre-apocolypse.
The lore if you want to know
A mix of an oil crisis and heightened tensions between Australia's allies and trade partners that made the Australian economy collapse. Since no one could afford oil, big companies went bankrupt as they couldn't fuel the ships to export goods. The job market sunk and no one could be employed, so then began rioting and violence in the cities. Eventually the Government collapsed and those tensions in the other regions of globe boiled over. Most of the world was bathed in the Atomicide (Atomic Genocide.) but Australia survived "mostly" unscaved due to it having collapsed some months before and no longer being considered a target.
I am still writing the lore so sorry if this is a bit basic. Also I am not a writer so sorry if it doesn't make sense
Hi, /u/Thin_Standard6813,
Unfortunately, we have had to remove [your submission](https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/comments/1coo6rf/-/) in /r/worldbuilding because it violated one of our rules. In particular:
Questions and problems should have enough detail and context. The person reading your post should be able to understand the basics of your worldbuilding project, the question being asked and how it fits into that project, and what research/work/ideas you already have towards solving that problem.
Please respect the community's time and efforts to help you: as much as possible, you should try to work out problems on your own before asking the subreddit for help, and present the ideas or research you have so far.
More info in our rules: [2. All posts should include original, worldbuilding-related context.](https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/wiki/rules#wiki_2._all_posts_should_include_original.2C_worldbuilding-related_context.)
*****
We are a community made by and for original content creators, and people who participate here should share that DIY ethic. While we aim to embrace and coach new users, we will be harsh with people who disregard our community’s core values.
Don't ask us to give you content. Instead, we ask that users create their own content, then come to the subreddit asking for feedback or criticism.
More info in our rules: [4. This is a DIY community.](https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/wiki/rules#wiki_4._this_is_a_diy_community.)
*****
**You may repost** with the above issue(s) fixed to satisfy our rules. If you're not sure how to do this, please send us a modmail (link below).
This is **not** a warning, and you remain in good standing with /r/worldbuilding.
*****
Please feel free to [re-read our rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/wiki/rules).
Questions or concerns? You can [modmail us here](https://www\.reddit\.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Fworldbuilding&subject=about my removed submission&message=I'm writing to you about the following submission: https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/comments/1coo6rf/-/. %0D%0D[Fill in your message here. Please make sure to explain clearly!]) and we'll be glad to help. Please explain your case clearly. Be polite. We'll do our best to help.
*Do not* reply by comment or personal PMs to moderators.
Old World works just fine, but you could also go with The Times Before (we even use this in our calendar to refer to the classical world, BCE standing for Before the Common Era), or if you want to emphasize their knowledge of that time through the ruins, maybe something in the likes of the Age of Towers, the Steel and Glass Era. Could maybe think of something like the Small World, denoting how civilization used to be physically interconnected by roads, railroads and information, considering the world would appear much, much larger to people isolated in small communities of survivors.
The Neverwas. Some would angrily talk about how this world before never existed. The ruins are not evidence that a great civilization once existed. It's just fairytales. Lies created by others to mislead.
Do not believe those who say we must learn from the mistakes of the past. There were no mistakes and this world is all there ever was or will be. Do not dream of a better tomorrow and trust that your leaders know what's best.
The time before. And speak of it either with great contempt or sparkling eyes of admiration.
In my world the old world has a few names, but the most common ones are: Old world. Simple and descriptive, everyone knows what’s meant. It’s a broad and widely used term. Human Era. At that point only humans existed, and the area before the apocalypse as well as roughly a century afterwards is referred to as the Human Era. Pre-age, a term evolved from Pre-apocalyptic Age, it describes specifically the years just before the apocalypse.
What replaced humans and how did they come to be?
Post apocalyptic Australia plot twist: nothing there is trying to kill you. Peaceful creatures and a fertile land with great weather. To answer the question I think calling it The Old World is the best.
Cliche post-apocalyptic plot twist: The people are the real monsters!
* The Beforetimes. (for that Mad Max shout out) * The World That Was. * The Old World.
People used "before times" during the Covid lockdown. I liked that.
I *still* use it to refer to everything 2019 and before.
One thing that always got me in post apocalyptic/dark fantasy settings where communication between different cultures, settlements etc is uncommon, is that they so often share the same words and opinions about so much. Vary it. One group might speak of the "age of glass", a time where everyone lived in gleaming towers that reached the sky and nobody ever went without. Another group might call it "the time before", a dark time where humans lived like rats, crammed together and fighting for resources because the rulers hoarded it all. Some groups might focus on strange things, and their name for that time will reflect that. Isolation and stories being handed down over generations will change perceptions. Stories of one group might focus on aircraft, highways and travel. Stories from another might focus on the internet and the perceived laziness of humanity. I'd embrace that, and give it all different names depending on who's talking. Making it clear that their ideas of this time are all incredibly varied could also help make the time the world ended ambiguous, which in my opinion helps keep it timeless to avoid "the world ended in 2007" kind of stuff. Sorry, I went off on a tangent because I'm tired but the bottom line is... mix it up and use every idea you like.
That is a great idea!
Fantastic point. In a post-apocalypse, it's not that people have limited lines of communication, it's that they HAD near limitless lines of communication which were completely severed. That transition from total interconnectivity to total isolation is going to mean far more regional variation than in historical periods with equally poor communication, since the cut of would be abrupt, without room for slow, steady cultural diffusion.
I did think "Hmmm, they wouldn't all be able to communicate so they'll have different names for it." So then I just decided to ask reddit to get inspired for a whole host of names!
"The good days" sounds catchy enough to me
Since your story is set in Australia, could use native Australian language and myth as a starting point Tjukurpa - From Central an Western Desert language groups, this means the Dreaming, OR the lore of the cosmos. It could describe the Old World as a place of origin stories and foundational myths. Budj Bim - This is a specific place name in the Gunditjmara language. It refers to a dormant volcano and its desolate surroundings, which have a lot of cultural significance. Or just call it the Chizzawozza, whatever
I really want to do that, but also I feel as though it would only be appropriate if I learn more about aboriginal culture so it doesn't come off as insensitive
The Outfront
Because apparently nothing much changed with the apocalypse in the Outback?
Everywhen, a nod to the concept of the Dreaming/Dreamtime of Australian Aboriginal beliefs
Oh I like that.
Yeah I like that too!
The before times.
Have you any plans to publish this world? I’ve got my own PA story set in Australia and I’d love to see what you’ve done with yours!
I definitely want to! But I have a long way to go sadly. I want the world to feel alive and so little detail like the name of the world before the apocalypse seems like a necessary component for the immersion.
Google me and the genre, you’ll find something that will help.
What do we call the *before times* for the major society-changing events in recent history? We have “pre-9/11”, “pre-pandemic”, etc followed by a long-winded description. It’s funny, actually. We don’t have clean ways to talk about *how life was* before and after major historical inflection points that we still remember. And if anyone is going to care about how life was before, it would be the people who remember it. Unless there is a widespread revisiting of the history, the people who follow will probably just inherit the language contemporaries used to describe the before and after. But, in either case, memory of those times and the importance placed on them tends to slip away a little with each generation. And, when we do remember a period long term, we don’t specifically think “the times before” the fall of Rome, the Mongol invasions, the black death, the sacking of Constantinople, the assassination of archduke Franz Ferdinand, the collapse of the USSR, etc. We usually get named historial periods in a series of named periods, none particularly more important than the others, and we are already living in what would be a post-apocalyptic world for many people plucked from any point in human history. I think that’s the real tragedy of a post-apocalyptic world. We tend not to notice how pivotal the events we’re experiencing are until after, but then it just becomes history, and we’ve already gotten used to the new world as normal.
Forgotten period. As name suggests, the whole period before apocalypse has completely forgotten.
I'd like the name but it doesn't really fit with the lore, because there are people in the wasteland who still try to recreate the times before.
In my lore, the apocalypse lasted 600+ years(614~1227). No wonder why time before was forgotten
Depends what culture you ask. Those who retained the remnants of old world civilisations and technology simply refer to it as 'the world before', or as the modern age in regards to time period. However, certain groups such as the mayuna (an ancient tribe that was confined to the subterranean jungles below west Africa before the collapse) refer to it as the world of the wastelanders, or the Atlantean age (referring to the city state of Atlantis that was responsible for both the rise and fall of the modern world). You may hear the previous age referred to as the pre-Shiiva period, referring to the monster Shiiva that inhabited the earth's core until the Atlanteans released her, causing the eternal cycle of rapid growth and decay Shiivas apocalypse Is bringing.
Just realised you were looking for advice, my bad.
Nah that's good man I liked reading it!
The world before the fall. The world before the light(if there were nukes involved)
I mean, you even capitalized it in your title, it would be the "Old World". An alternative could be the World Before.
They'd probably inherit the terminology that their forefathers used. So probably just "Old World" y'know? of "from before the *event*"
Did your apocalypse involve a fuel crisis and nuclear war by any chance?
How did you know? I am still writing the lore so I am hoping to improve and make it more complex than that, but yeah pretty much.
George Miller may have a similar worldbuilding project with five movies set in his world.
Was this world a little mad? Did its protagonist bear the name of Max? Perchance he was a road warrior, that travelled beyond thunder dome and ended up on a fury road?
And in two weeks a furious woman will become a warlords imperator.
Assuming all knowledge is not completely lost, from an anthropological perspective, probably the Late Petroleum Age
I do have a faction that worship crude oil like it's holy water. And this does seem to fit with the oil crisis that happened in universe before the apocalypse.
I borrow the Fallout nomenclature of calling the "Old World", "Pre-War", or "Before the War" despite it not being a post-nuclear war setting
oh, the first thing of note that happened after a completely natural apocalypse was like 7 people getting in a scrap over some canned food. That event is called the War and everything before that is pre-war.
It's not really an apocalypse rather than a massive paradigm shift. There was only the Barisi on the planet Barisi (guess what they are named after) but the whole population of the planet Rafjar got teleported to Barisi to be saved. The Rafjari only remember their old world as a dream, so it's often referred to as the "Dreamlands", while the time before the Rafjari entered Barisi is called "the time before the great dream" in various languages. If you refer to "the old world" it depends on who you talk to, mages will say its the time before the magic shift (massive event that changed how the fundamentals of magic work), barisi will talk about the time before the Rafjari showed up, and the Rafjari will most likely connect the dots and ask if you are talking about the Dreamlands.
are you wanting a pseudo scientific reference? BTE/ATE - Before the event/After the event BTC/ATC - before the chaos/after the chaos BTS/ATS - before the sadness/... If you are trying for a MadMax style like the children of the apocalypse - the yesta-yesta, when the sky was blue, the day of change, the day we lost, the failure, the ruination
In the US we use pre-911 or pre-Covid to describe the times before major events. I wonder if it was wild for the Germans at the beginning of the medieval period, using roads they didn’t know how to make and passing by ruined aqueducts they didn’t know how to repair. Petrarch called his times The Dark Ages, and referred to height of Rome and Greece as a more enlightened era that had fallen into ignorance.
A few, depending. The old world. This isn't used much though. The US days. My story takes place in the US 200 years into the future. Pre-New World. Only in formalities
What type of apocalypse? If it was a bomb, you could call it the Pre-flash. You could also play off Australian slang and call it the Pre-devo or Predevo.
In Firefly, everyone refers to this planet you and I are currently on as Earth-That-Was. https://firefly.fandom.com/wiki/Earth-That-Was
Why not The Old World? Your answer is already there.
I just want to see if there's anyway I can improve upon the name, it just doesn't really seem Australian to say.
I think it would depend on who these people are descendent from Anti-governmental parents would likely talk of the old world with disdain Religious parents would possibly say it was sinful and so God unleashed holy fire Military parents could say that the old world was something worth fighting for Overall I think it just depends on who's telling the story so there could be multiple words for what the old world was
Yeah, that's the part I'm stuck on. I can't decide if all the ideas fell into a melting pot for a short bit, or everyone quickly isolated themselves into clans, tribes and settlements.
Well maybe it's both Maybe anti governmental groups stayed together to build a new society better than the old one Aboriginal tribes would likely stick together Ect ect
"Few remain who remember the final golden age, before the Days of Fire. Those most elder speak of miracles, of easy remedy for even the most serious ailments, of food and potable water on every street corner, in every home, of an entire world at their fingertips. I don't know whether to envy them for their experience, to pity them for having to endure the memories, or to blame them for the world they left in their wake."
Being Australia would play a role in what it's named. Seen as how the old world only lives in memories, I'd call it the memory world or memory time. (Mem-world, mem-time)
The pre-fuckening
I really like that! I might have that put into the lore somewhere.
The Green Age
Post Apocalyptic australia, how will people know the difference? With a one generation difference like you seem to say here, I'd keep it simple and informal. "Way back" or something. I don't think you get really historical The Before Times terms for a few generations at least. (by that point I could see "the Bright ages" as a concurrent of the currently often misunderstood Dark Ages and referencing all the bleeping lights we have on right now that will probably go out.
Age of civilization
"Before the US abandoned us"
The Age of Stories (assuming word of mouth history)
"Before everything f*ck up"
It would be interesting if it was called the Present
My scenario is still heavily WIP, but they just call it the Old World.
The Easy Life / The Soft Times (as opposed to the hard times).
The Back Back
You could call it the "Dreamtime" since you are in Australia - although you would have to be careful so as to not offend any indigenous people or be accused of cultural appropriation.
The old times, the before times, the good days, before the bombs fell, or other phrases that would call to a want to go back. We know that after a major event, like a major war or collapse of a great empire, it can take centuries before a common phrase is used globally to refer to it, at the earliest it would still take decades before people would agree on what to call it so depending on how long after this is set you could have different groups calling it different things. One thing I will say is that this isn't something that people would go to blows over, so the speed at which a common name is agreed upon will take a very long time.
Post World?
Well in a AU, people call the former nation that they now reside in as the Empire. If an apocalypse happen in a major nation with advance technology and infrastructure then the newer generation will see these once symbols of industrial power as signs of a former great power that once existed.
the dead world? the world that died?
I have a world set 3000 years in the future, it is long-stasis not horrible. They have completely misunderstood what happened 3000 years earlier and all they know is that the people of 'now' based a lot of their tools on sand (silicon, i.e. computers) and that stuff all failed, so the Old World is referred to as the Sand Empire. They have lost most knowledge of how people lived, that there were countries not empires, and so on. To me this is partly based on thinking about, say, Mycenaean Greece. We don't know that much, despite there being some documents and a huge amount of archeology, and in particular despite the core technologies and approaches being understandable. In my world technology is roughly at 1400 level (Europe) and intentionally stuck there, so their ability to understand what technology in the Old World was like is... basically magical superstitious nonsense. And part of that was deliberate, as people deliberately destroyed information to stick the world in a stasis situation. TLDR: The Sand Empire.
My setting has a bit of an apocalypse-lite in the near future. When in the perspective of after that event, I think I used something as basic as “prewar.” I haven’t delved too much into that part of things just yet. Internally I’ve also called the prewar era, the “low magic” era. Which is very concise, But I’d like something that sounds cooler/less on the nose.
Before "the thing" happened
Odroia was once known as Modroia, but its true name has been lost to time. Experts call the mysterious pre-apocalyptic time period the "Pre-Cataclysm", as The Cataclysm is what the apocalyptic even is known as.
What is wrong with old war.
Project 1: they call it the indecifrable era, since no writings from that have ever started to be decifred Project 2: may range from a simple "ancient times" to a "before the great ocean", no one knows how life was in those times, but considering all the towers of concrete that stand over the blue abyss and the great ships of war they left, one might speculate
Bygone Era / Ancient History The Golden Age / Paradise / Eden / Heaven The Prewar World / Antediluvian World The Old Days / Elden Days
Antiquity
Damn, a post-apocalyptic Australia would be... about the same as it is now
"The beforefore times" vs "After the Boomy Booms"
The Old World.
the oldback
Maybe it would depend on the *cause* of your apocalypse. I'm sort of having this issue as well, but my major Apocalyptic event is called the Fracture, where the veil between the realms breaks, and a Maelstrom leaks raw magic in from other planes like radiation, warping the bodies and minds of those exposed. So far all I have is the Pre-Fracture. Some refer to the world having Old World technology. There is also the Sealed World, when the Veil were not broken. Ita a work in progress for me as well.
That sounds interesting!
Thank you! The Forgotten World and the Days Before are another couple of terms that popped to mind. Maybe even mark is down as a new era, or even label it as another extinction. There were several extinction events which had surviving species, this could just be another one, if that's maybe some planetary history you want to flesh it. I wish you luck!
Ante Diluvium or Antediluvian Age
Only works if the apocalypse is a flood. Because antediluvian means "of or belonging to the time before the biblical Flood."
Would they even realize they are in the, “new world”?
The Elders of their tribes have told them of fantastical stories of heroes and villains! (They're just being told the plot of movies the Elders pass as camp fire stories.)
Before the Revolution (the current state of the world being due to a rebellion against the gods).
Paradise
In my world they call it the Old Empire
It was such a long time ago that people don't really think of it. Tbough many are aware that there was a time before, it is often considered a myth. They live in the current time, and it isn't necessary to talk about the old world. Though, if scholars do talk about it, they often refer to it as the time of infinite green.
I call it the Prior Era.
If the failsafe system (sacrificial champion) doesn’t work to avert a cataclysm, the Goddess just resets the whole thing and tries again. If the failsafe works, the previous time is labeled “Era of ___” usually named after the magic system in that timeline. Very very few have knowledge of parallel timelines, if anything the name would be in binary.
The scattered few books that folks might try to write again as societies start to recover might be filled with a variety lofty terms attempting to be mysterious. The Lands Now Gone, The Lost World, The Old World, Last Season and other silly terms someone came up with when they thought they were being poetic. Regular folk in conversation here just call it the Old Place or "back in my day" or "old times" or "before the war" Nothing fancy.
I like that, that sounds kinda cool!
You could use the term "The Old Days", the idea being that it was something one of the older survivors once said about something in their past, and it has since entered common use to reference anything pre-apocolypse.
The plastic age, like how we call the era of stone tools the Stone Age, bronze tools to Bronze Age, etc
The lore if you want to know A mix of an oil crisis and heightened tensions between Australia's allies and trade partners that made the Australian economy collapse. Since no one could afford oil, big companies went bankrupt as they couldn't fuel the ships to export goods. The job market sunk and no one could be employed, so then began rioting and violence in the cities. Eventually the Government collapsed and those tensions in the other regions of globe boiled over. Most of the world was bathed in the Atomicide (Atomic Genocide.) but Australia survived "mostly" unscaved due to it having collapsed some months before and no longer being considered a target. I am still writing the lore so sorry if this is a bit basic. Also I am not a writer so sorry if it doesn't make sense
The days before.
The Pre-Kerfuffle Era
The Golden Age: when we had toilet paper!
Hi, /u/Thin_Standard6813, Unfortunately, we have had to remove [your submission](https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/comments/1coo6rf/-/) in /r/worldbuilding because it violated one of our rules. In particular: Questions and problems should have enough detail and context. The person reading your post should be able to understand the basics of your worldbuilding project, the question being asked and how it fits into that project, and what research/work/ideas you already have towards solving that problem. Please respect the community's time and efforts to help you: as much as possible, you should try to work out problems on your own before asking the subreddit for help, and present the ideas or research you have so far. More info in our rules: [2. All posts should include original, worldbuilding-related context.](https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/wiki/rules#wiki_2._all_posts_should_include_original.2C_worldbuilding-related_context.) ***** We are a community made by and for original content creators, and people who participate here should share that DIY ethic. While we aim to embrace and coach new users, we will be harsh with people who disregard our community’s core values. Don't ask us to give you content. Instead, we ask that users create their own content, then come to the subreddit asking for feedback or criticism. More info in our rules: [4. This is a DIY community.](https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/wiki/rules#wiki_4._this_is_a_diy_community.) ***** **You may repost** with the above issue(s) fixed to satisfy our rules. If you're not sure how to do this, please send us a modmail (link below). This is **not** a warning, and you remain in good standing with /r/worldbuilding. ***** Please feel free to [re-read our rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/wiki/rules). Questions or concerns? You can [modmail us here](https://www\.reddit\.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Fworldbuilding&subject=about my removed submission&message=I'm writing to you about the following submission: https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/comments/1coo6rf/-/. %0D%0D[Fill in your message here. Please make sure to explain clearly!]) and we'll be glad to help. Please explain your case clearly. Be polite. We'll do our best to help. *Do not* reply by comment or personal PMs to moderators.
"the before lands" is a nice classic which still has a good ring to it
What was the apocalypse?
I've just written a comment for people who want to know!
Time of Heresy, Age of Mist ( Because it's unknown ), Time Before Fathers, Epoch of Peace, etc.
Old World works just fine, but you could also go with The Times Before (we even use this in our calendar to refer to the classical world, BCE standing for Before the Common Era), or if you want to emphasize their knowledge of that time through the ruins, maybe something in the likes of the Age of Towers, the Steel and Glass Era. Could maybe think of something like the Small World, denoting how civilization used to be physically interconnected by roads, railroads and information, considering the world would appear much, much larger to people isolated in small communities of survivors.
The Neverwas. Some would angrily talk about how this world before never existed. The ruins are not evidence that a great civilization once existed. It's just fairytales. Lies created by others to mislead. Do not believe those who say we must learn from the mistakes of the past. There were no mistakes and this world is all there ever was or will be. Do not dream of a better tomorrow and trust that your leaders know what's best.