Is this what they meant by simpler times?

I recently had a look back at an old RPG from the 1990s, Nephilim, which had a conspiratorial alternate history with nigh-immortal magical beings who occupied human forms and faced mortal human enemies. Some particularly bad guys (from the Nephilim perspective) invoked the black sun, so at least that little bit aged well, although there were other elements in the original French Multisim line that probably would have been cringe had they been translated to English, like a supplement titled Les Bohemiens, which centered on Roma. In fairness, there was a lot of cringe writing regarding Roma in RPGs at the time.

The milieu, reminiscent of Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, would not work today, as the world along with conspiracy theory has grown more turbulent. The X-Files and Vampire: the Masquerade feel similarly retro. Back then, one could built narratives with a backdrop of a fictious mundane reality that was propagated and enforced in order to keep the masses in a state of compliant ignorance of secret history, a claim now impossible to so simply assert given the metastasis of conspracy theory via social media and consequent tumultuous activist QAnon-inspired splinters.

How much of that sense of a simpler time was the privilege of living in a relatively stable Western country?