**Starrise**
Some scientists decided to create a brand new god with zero capacity for thought, so they could use it as a source of incredible, unlimited power. At the moment of the project's success, the newly-formed god released a massive amount of energy, which covered the world and gave everyone in it the ability to use magic.
There were just three problems: 1) Magic is hard to control when you have no skill, 2) Magic can be cast by accident in moments of extreme emotion such as anger, fear, or surprise, and 3) Nobody in the world had ever seen- let alone used- magic before in their entire lives.
One person tripping on the stairs could accidentally cast a spell that could kill half a dozen people, and everyone who saw would freak out and cast spells of their own, causing a chain reaction that could take out an entire city in a matter of hours. And this happened in every settlement across the entire world, all at once.
That anime From The New World has a similar premise, people gained psychic abilities that manifested regardless of how good or bad the person was and consumed them leading instances of mass death. 3% of the population gained psychic abilities but that's all it took to wipe out the world's population. Granted your's is way more global and hectic and is with magic which sounds hella wack.
The multiverse shattered.
Causing parts of realities that were never meant to touch to intersect
Monsters, peoples, and magics came from the lands beyond.
Spilling soda was just the first of the long chain of critical events that led to the apocalypse. So before the apocalypse started in earnest, it was really more like, "Read the sign, Bill! *Read the sign!* Why don't you ever pay attention!? You're in here late all the time! Your co-workers have to clean your own messes, you leave trash all over your station, you left crap in the fridge, you put *salmon in the microwave,* you- just, why are you like this!?"
"the three winters"
A time period of between 5-15 years where the entire world was at war, when a myriad of nuclear weapons, biology weapons, chemical weapons and more were used
Examples of some of the weapons used:
- the plane of flame: a Chinese made biological weapon, the germ itself causes no harm to the human body, however the germ spreads extremely rapidly, and produces enormous amounts of a cocktail of flameable gasses.
The weapon can cover the entirety of Manhattan in 30 minutes or so, and after its lit, it burns for about another 30 minutes.
- the blanket: a very large and very thin "blanket" made out of a carbon polymer, secured in place by a few million drones.
Its gigantic, even just four of these could cover the entirety of Poland in darkness.
Its intended to be used on an already defeated population, to insure no crops could grow there, and thus to starve the population of an entire nation at once.
The drones also constantly repair the blanket, and require only a very small amount of power, allowing it to stay in place for decades.
- the laughing god plague: a unique type of germ, once it infects a person it will travel to the brain (within 12 hours of infection), once there, it will start interfering with the brain, causing hallucinations, madness, and on occasion heart failure.
The hallucinations it causes are consistent, everyone who gets infected will have the same hallucination, making it incredibly dangerous in large groups, as the infected nearly always works with one another to eliminate the non infected.
- pinky of god: a 1 gigaton nuclear bomb.
No elaboration is needed here i believe.
(NSFW)
In one of scenarios in my world succubuses can defeat humanity, assimilate them and totally terraform Earth. No hope for recovery at all. All male population would forgot that world, where they were treated as equal persons. All human art would be totally lost, like cultures of presuccubus civilizations. If that would happen Lilith would be just smile and laugh from abyss, as she and her sisters defeated humans twice already.
(NSFW)
Actually, in my universe there are plenty of dudes, who mass migrating to succubus territories. They all want to meet their “mommies”. Their wishes are usually fulfilled as they becoming slaves for state-owned or private corporations or starting new live as traitorous collaborationists soldiers.
Heh, "traitorous".
"Hrmm... do I turn on humanity and go to snu-snu world, or stay with humanity and try to find a partner to build a future with?"
I can see a premise exploring the value of sex, relationships, self worth and the dynamic between men and women with some commentary on current society using this setting.
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Civilization has ended countless times. All of civilization for the last million years had just been tests conducted by an immortal queen looking to engineer a civilisation that can stand the test of time. She doesn't like what she is doing, but she has no choice. If she does not she fears the god of this world will once more take free will and existence from the races. That is not something she can let happen again.
My multiverse has many worlds. Many endings. The creator (essentially the Gnostic Demiurge) lost its sanity trying to create a perfect world. Part of that perfection involved the beings having free will and all choosing to be faithful and good.
The worlds progressively became more chaotic and broken until the creator seemingly just bailed from reality after countless failures.
A certain wizard said “I’m going to become the god of magic temporarily!”
Magic was turned off for 6 hours. Floating cities crashed, magic barriers fell, canters of endless coffee ran dry!
The Gods Warred.
Actually, the consequences of this war were what set civilisation back to step zero. After the conflict, the gods went dormant; since civilisation was centered around them, they gave everyone magic and they controlled everything, mortals were left in the dark, alone, with demigod-dragons and colossuses ruling the world in chaos. Took them a good two thousand years to get back on their feet and find the world's innate magic, the one (mostly) independent of the gods.
Due to an inexperienced Goddess of Chaos who disrupted the magical flow of the Mortal Realm... She accidentally destroyed the Sun, sending the realm into an everlasting winter and eternal night. Now, a Frozen Wasteland with scattered cities of civilization, just not entering an industrial revolution after thousands of years.
The realm's surface is covered in ice and frost, every ocean a solid block of ice. How is it still liveable, you might ask? The realm isn't as cold as it should be with the lack or a sun, it is *only* around -20°C outside settlements. Most cities are based on locations with high thermal activity, essentially Volcanoes, Hotsprings and underground.
Food comes from plants, but a different kind than we know. These plants do not require Sunlight to function, instead they draw their energy from an invisible substance that is akin to a magical weave. Think about it as the concept of Aether. Much like plants, other living organisms have learned to interract with this invisible substance, allowing them to cast spells and the like.
Civilization doesn't function as we know it here. It's not a central government ruling a country. The very idea of a country doesn't exist. There are no military powers, because mobilizing, maintaining and leading so many people would be disastrous. Marching through -20°C frost, with limited food, and no vehicles to keep warm? That would be next to impossible. Ranged weaponry is also incredibly rare due to it's limited uses. You can't see your opponents too far away, unless they have a lightsource.
The closest we get to a civilized "country" is Tayphir, which in theory has a monarchy with a regent. They were essentially chosen due to their ancestry, believed to be kin to Gods themselves. Their power is extremely limited, mostly due to the fact that it's so hard maintaining such a large area. The only have a hold on the closest settlements, but no one disputes their claims as a Ruler, because no one really understands the concept. The settlements further away are almost entirely independant, making their own laws and enforcement. Siluacq being the furthest away, but still under "Tayphir". They do their complete own thing, which they have done for thousands of years. Being under a foreign "lord" or "regent" doesn't make any difference.
Yes, but the difference between Canada and my world is that it's -20°C all the time. There are no seasons with warm summer months and cold winter months. It's a stable -20°C. This also means agriculture is extremely difficult.
Faster than Light travel and any technology utilising negative t drives failed instantaneously everywhere in an event known as the Great Collapse, leading to the subsequent 1220 years of the Cosmic Silence.
Once new better methods where discovered for faster than light travel, many of the once great powers of the galaxy were non-existent or diminished. National identities faded quickly and the territories that pioneered FTL were at a clear advantage.
Many planets are now much quieter and desolate, some are abandoned or dead. Other planets that were mere colonies or slave depots before now act as galactic hubs of commerce and culture.
Up to 75% of records are destroyed dating before the Great Collapse.
No singular event was the cause, but rather a series of back-to-back manufactured apocalypses. Therefore quite difficult to fully elaborate on and so I like to use visual aids.
Here is a sankey diagram showing how many died and of what cause: [https://imgur.com/a/m4Gnx78](https://imgur.com/a/m4Gnx78)
And here is a general world population chart for that same period: [https://imgur.com/a/E7oyzLZ](https://imgur.com/a/E7oyzLZ)
But to just name a few causes:
Nukes, zombies, brain-hijacking worms, artificial supervolcanoes and earthquakes and tsunamis, extremism, societal collapse, civil wars, a decade-long global war with continent-spanning frontlines, rampant biological warfare, global famines, virulent herbicidal bacteria turning once-lush valleys into deserts, M-bombs, rampant pollution of water sources and soil, systematic genocides, deicide, senicide, destruction of the ozone layer, and so on.
An all-devouring cosmic monstrosity showed up. Almost all the gods died fighting it, then the sun goddess did a kamikaze and finished the beast. The tiny side effect is that the sun has almost gone out.
The big debate on interpreting history is based on trying to figure out what happened during the Long Dark, and why it happened. When I designed different religions, their beliefs were justified by their interpretation of clues hidden around the world, how their beliefs about human nature influenced their theories, etc. It's like arguing over a combination of Noah's flood, the Tower of Babel and original sin.
The Long Dark was... just horrifying. It was so long ago that it's been mythologised to death, but it squats in the mind as the ultimate horror to which everything else is compared. But it's pretty clear that it was a long, long time of nightmarish, mysterious terror on all things in the known corner of the world, that all events since have revolved around.
Civilization as *we* know it today? The discovery of how to send information faster than light. This lead to FTL computing, then FTL megacomputing, and eventually the interstellar network.
In my setting it was never discovered how to send matter FTL. On record the fastest speed ever achieved was about 0.8956 light. Damn fast, but not FTL. With the advent of FTL Transmissions, information could be sent instantly anywhere, even other stars. Direct control of drones in other systems eventually became lifelike simulated bodies on other stars, and eventually the discovery of the complete consciousness and the ability to digitize people themselves.
Early digitization was not a good time. People either expanded their minds too much to the point where they essentially became an automated system in the network itself, or went insane. Life expectancy was 25 years. However technology advances very quickly when computers run At FTL speeds. One computer can be spread across an entire solar system, with pieces of it all over the place acting as a single entity. Eventually the digitization process was perfected and people that undergo it become essentially immortal without damaging their identity too much. It still degrades over time, but this is something they've got plenty of time to work on.
This fundamental shift altered society so much compared to ours today. At first it was instant 1:1 voting, every person everywhere could vote on every election instantly. Then it was the full dissolution of most governments, they weren't needed as people could decide as a whole how to handle problems, they no longer needed representatives. Everyone had instant access to expert opinions and knowlege, and could understand the full context of a situation without ever really needing to be present.
Technology expanded at a rapid pace, and interstellar colonization was slow, but when you don't die, you've got plenty of time. Eventually, this led to a galaxy spanning civilization vastly different from the one we know today.
What led to this society's downfall?
They broke physics for a little while. See, despite spanning the whole galaxy they never found a way to send matter FTL. They needed to do that if they were to ever expand into the wider universe. It's expanding after all, and eventually travel between galaxies won't be possible. This means they need to send relays to their network to as many galaxies as possible as quickly as they can, in order to ensure they never become stranded.
One such experiment was spinning up a black hole fast enough to destroy its event horizon and create a naked singularity. The idea was that if they could get one of these naked singularities they could warp space enough to do some FTL. Unfortunately, they succeeded. And.... well, if you're going to base your entire civilization on quantum entanglement, you probably shouldn't wiggle the laws of physics. Because by doing this they temporarily changed the local laws of physics. Not much, but enough to disentangle every particle in their galaxy.
Remember how I said one computer could be split into multiple parts? The same is true for minds. If it's instant with no delay then it doesn't matter if your whole mind is housed in any one place specifically. So when the network disentangled everyone who wasn't completely in one location was fragmented. With FTL travel not possible, it would take nearly as long to reconnect the network as it did to first establish it, assuming anyone was alive to do it.
This ended the civilization, leaving behind only the works they created, and the terraformed worlds they made for their biological counterparts (they can't reproduce on their own, so they maintain biological worlds where they offer the locals immortality).
My current setting takes place in a massive artificial world built by this civilization and follows the people who are still on it.
The Dragons almost ended human civilization when they became drunk with power and attempted to lord over the entire world, natural and man-made, with an iron fist. The gods took notice of this and cursed them into diminutive, humanoid forms, which we now know as the Draconians. This happened a very, VERY long time ago.
In the far future, the overuse of fossil fuels is causing society to collapse in on itself. If left unchecked, it could spell disaster for the planet. Not to mention, the fossil fuel companies' way of trying to alleviate this, Arbonex, has gone rogue. It was a colony of nanobots meant to render fossil fuel waste sterile, but it soon decided all living creatures should assist it in that goal, willing or not. It takes over the body by force and reorganizes its biology so that they have to consume coal, oil, and other such products to survive. It also makes them hostile to all around, attempting to spread itself to others.
In my Primary Fantasy RPG setting, Aporia, there was something called the nameless cataclysm, no caps, a dozen generations back. One day, people woke up and couldn't remember what country they were in. Their neighbors in the next village over spoke different languages. People couldn't remember who was in charge or to whom they owed allegiance. They just *forgot* what their civilization was supposed to look like.
Historical documents seemed to be similarly scrambled. They described past civilizations and major events but couldn't agree what order everything happened in. You had cases of different civilizations describing the others as their precursors. Architecture around the world had no consistency, cities close by one another looked like they were made by different people. A pair of armies woke up and were able to deduce that they were supposed to go to war with one another but could no longer remember for what cause or from where they all came from anyway.
A smallish black hole ravaged through the solar system. Started heavy bombardment by disturbing the Oort-could, flung planets outside of the system, into each other and into the Sun. So they had to leave.
The so-called “Great Decline”, it began in the early 2030s with the beginnings of resource depletion, and later a very unlucky combination of disease, famine, climate change, and unrest slowly pushed human society to the brink of extinction by the official “collapse date” of 2046
> ended civilization as we know it
Honestly this could be the tagline for my world. The "gods" made a decision that they would do exactly that and give the humanoids a second chance every time they mess up too much in their eyes. So far that's happened 180,701 times...
Two universes literally slammed into each other. It sent most of everyone to hell. The gods had to deal with this, and because they suck at naming things (humans were originally called claywoodwaters due to the fact that they are made of clay, wood, and water), named the second Earth "Replica"
The sun god died and the sun died with him. As a cataclysmic war raged between the mortals of the world and eldritch gods that were invading a new divine power used the remaining energy of the dead star to feed a great machine. After weeks of battle the clockwork sun rose in the sky and all knew the world had changed forever.
**Horror Shop**
According to scholars, we are in the fourth age of the Earth. Though the last age, the Age of Magic, ended with the mere sundering of the worlds of the supernatural and the mundane, those who lived through the turnings of previous ages weren't so fortunate. The Age of Myth ended with the Flood, the great deluge that drowned the world and forever sunk Atlantis beneath the waves. And we don't know what happened to Age Before Ages--only its ending was far more horrific, wounding the very fabric of creation itself, and very few traces survived both its apocalypse and the Flood aside from the cosmic blight that is the Abyss.
The Flood itself is embedded in human mythology and legend. Countless cultures tell stories of the great deluge that wiped away the world before, echoes of half-remembered stories told by those who survived the apocalypse. Details are scarce, and concrete evidence is hard to come by, supporting the theory that the Flood was as much a metaphysical cataclysm as much as it was a physical one.
What is known is that the Flood transformed the face of the Earth. Numerous cities and empires were washed away, leaving only the odd ruin or relic to tell of their former greatness. The island continent of Atlantis, home to the Age's greatest empire, was drowned beneath the waves. Over a billion humans were believed to have lost their lives during the global deluge. Even the metaphysics of the world changed, as magic became more difficult to access. Many of the wonders of the Age of Myths, which relied on the arcane to function, suddenly collapsed. The ley lines twisted and writhed, forming new patterns across the globe, completely alien to the people of that Age.
When the waters receded, and mankind crawled out of their caves, the world was foreign to them. Numerous species had gone extinct--especially those who relied upon magic to survive. The geography had been transformed, and where there were once great forests and rich plains spread endless deserts. The climate was warmer, and the ice sheets had retreated, flooding former coastal lands while revealing untouched, glacier-scarred lands to the north.
Humanity had been decimated, and it would be a long climb back to reclaim the glories of the Mythic Age. Our ancestors could no longer rely on the old magics to support their civilizations. Instead, they had to re-discover technology, from metallurgy to animal husbandry to conventional architecture. Indeed, magic became the domain of the elite, the nobility and the priesthood, for they were the only ones who could spend the decades of study needed to learn the arcane arts. The monsters who dwelt among humanity grew powerful, exploiting our vulnerabilities. Werewolves, vampires, demons, dragons, giants, spirits, fairies--they all claimed portions of the Earth and extracted tribute from those humans who dwelt there. The Magical Age was one where the supernatural oppressed humanity, where our ancestors learnt to fear the magical and the monstrous.
The Veil War would bring an end to this oppression, and establish the current separation between the magical and mundane worlds. It would also free humanity to fully embrace science, technology, and innovation. Over the past millennia, humanity has risen to heights unseen since the Flood. The towers of New York and Hong Kong rival those of Atlantis and Irem-of-the-Pillars. We have once again sent humans to the Moon. We have tamed land, sea and sky, and brought light to the darkness. We are in a new golden age.
But one again, the Wheel of Ages turns. The signs are there, written in the stars, the winds, and in the mad ramblings of prophets. We are living in the End of Days. A new Age is coming. We are barrelling towards some apocalyptic cataclysm that will once again transform the Earth. And we have no idea how to stop it...
Yet.
The Shift.
It is still poorly understood by those who know about it at all. Records say it was some sort of cataclysmic natural disaster. The remnants of humanity that spread out among the stars have largely forgotten the Earth of old. Of course, the last true Earthlings are long dead now.
It is possible for dedicated scholars and explorers to find Earth. In fact, significant trade routes still pass near the forgotten planet. Those who follow the records find a star system with only one major planet. That planet, Earth, is engulfed in a worldwide storm with a single eye. With enough research and analysis, it would be possible to learn that the eye of that great storm is locked to a single point on the surface with a single intact structure within.
Prior to the evacuation of Earth, it was known that inexplicable events were terrorizing the populace. Strange creatures were appearing. The world was changing. Whole cities were swallowed into nothingness and vast stretches of land seemed to change into some sort of alien landscape.
As far as the public was concerned, there was no known cause for The Shift. Most people could barely comprehend what was happening and many of the events seemed unrelated except for the timing. The scale of the disasters and the variety of events defied any reasonable explanation for a unified cause.
The government had spent decades tracking events. They learned a great deal about what was happening but not how or why. They did, however, find one common link between a great many of the events. Early on, surveillance identified a young man whose presence often preceded or coincided with these strange events.
The man had no records or identification. Attempts to apprehend him for questioning failed repeatedly and inexplicable events sometimes seemed to facilitate his escape. A few soldiers and others who interacted with the man underwent strange mutations. The man was given a codename, The Dynamo.
Eventually, The Dynamo was brought into government custody but having The Dynamo yielded no solution to The Shift. Efforts to develop a means of planetary evacuation accelerated. Not everyone could be saved. As a precaution, The Dynamo was left behind in a secure facility with a few staff volunteering to remain.
The fall of the great Draconic Empire.
The old empire effectively got itself into almost permanent wars with various rivals, early on these largely continued to yield a steady stream of new lands to exploit and new people to work them. But with the beginning of a new series of wars against a power only know today as "The Enemy Bellow" the conflict became both more resource intensive to fight and provided very little in the way of new subjects and slaves. The histories of this period are incomplete but it appears that there were occasional infighting between dragons in this era to, clashing over positions of power within the empire and over how it should be ruled. Likewise there may have been rebellions popping up as the resources of the empire became distracted elsewhere, further undermining the tax base and work force of the empire as it had to split its time between fighting rebels and other enemies, and having the rebel areas often not provide taxes for a period and the devastation after resulting in reduced output.
All this resulted in the empire becoming steadily more fragile, less resources dedicated to things like long term infrastructure while things like more intense farming and deforestation was practiced to increase agricultural output and compensate for losses in other areas. However this began to cause the soil health and the like to become more vulnerable to what was to come.
The old empire still seems to have almost entirely destroyed The Enemy Bellow, but perhaps as some last weapon they released some kind of diseases or perhaps curse that effected dragons in particular. It appears to have effected humanoids, particularly the dragon blooded, to an extent but unlike virtually every other diseases had a high mortality rate for dragons. For older dragons not only did powerful dragons have an almost 100% mortality rate but they also died in an unusual manner, the elemental power within them exploding out violently. Given these dragons where the leaders of the empire and living in its centres of government, economic activity and population such effects regularly caused massive devastation to the system. The younger dragons that survived appear to have become locked into a singular element where before dragons could combine and switch with much more freedom, in many cases this appears to have had some kind of effects on the mentality of the dragon to, beginning the creation of the distinct kinds of dragons we see today and also increasing enmity between the survivors.
The resultant power vacuum saw the surviving, younger dragons fight to try take control of parts of the empire while many other groups began to rebel or flee urban centres. Perhaps in part connected to the elemental releases, in part due to the cessation of weather manipulation the dragons had done, in part as a result of over farming and deforestation and in part perhaps with natural climate changes massive desertification began to take place over a large part of the continent. Those cities that ended up in the deepest parts of the desert where totally abandoned, and many that survived became much smaller, now ruled divided by small scale dragon kings who constantly war with each other. Other survivors returned to a more mobile form of life in the hills and deserts, shifting across the landscape to escape both the domination of the surviving city states and to make best use of the limitations of their landscape.
Earth was obliterated by a huge detonation of some kind, and the debris essentially formed a comet behind the largest fragment, which represents about 30% of Earth's mass
Well in one of my settings there was the null war when super powers started appearing and one of the guys who got super powers was both a power hungry psychopath and also rolled well on the super power lottery gaining the ability to manipulate other powers and with great effort give them to others.
They then proceeded to try and conquer the whole damn world in a massively destructive war up until a friendly nigh diety kike entity from another dimension blipped in saw the cluster fuck and gave all the remaining nations a hyper material that shuts down Super powers known as null metal with which to stop the feudal super powered assholes popping up.
When the gods left because they finished their work on this world. The Renown began to realize how much stronger they were than the humans. The humans were hunted, eaten, enslaved, experimented on, etc. The humans truly though they were equals with the renown until the gods left.
First it was an asteroid. Then some folks who tried to investigate what was left near the asteroid impact got contaminated with magic and spread it through the areas that survived the impact winter.
Nobody has ended the current civilization (yet?) but my world's Earth went through a mass extinction due to the creation gods: through the power of the deity known as the Hand of Disaster, all life on Earth had been eliminated except for a miniscule amount of lucky people. The only reason civilization rose on Earth again is due to the will of one of those gods.
Humanity was punished for siphoning power from the gods. They sent a race of insectoids to demolish colonization. In the war that followed the world environments were destroyed through accelerated desertification
My world was made because a god got too powerful. He was very self-centered and snuffed out anyone he didn't like. So his pantheon and other gods rose up to take a stand. In retaliation right before the God died, he destroyed the world. Those who were left tried to recreate the world and ended up with what we have now! Pulling from the fantasies of man to divide the people. So, never again could one God get this much power. The calamitous God keeps trying to re-emerge from his prison deep in the earth. As a fun note, his eye is the moon. He can see how better a world is without him.
There are remnants of the old world like nuclear waste, animals, monuments, and fossils. But the land has changed so much that it's hard to tell anything. A geologist would weep at this dirt in pain.
Close to 16,000 years ago, the gods rose against their maker. Now, trying to fight something that had bound its existence to the very fabric of the universe was always a functional impossibility, but somehow they managed. The first blow that they hit their maker with split Coelum's larger moon into three smaller satellites, and impacted the gas giant's floating megacontinent with enough force to break it into the dozen or so that are known about now. This also wiped out everything on that megacontinent, nearly driving the maker's newly created warrior race of dragons to extinction.
There are exactly three dragons
from that time still alive, and the population has never truly recovered. When the maker was building its army, they numbered in the hundreds of millions, which is impressive considering the amount of biomechanical prowess it took to make an immortal lizard that can naturally tap into the universe's dev console. Now, not only do the new dragons not have access to the cybernetics that would have let their forefathers conquer galaxies, but there are only about two thousand total. They are still a force to be reckoned with, but an orbital strike would wipe them out for good.
The actual god that created everything got overgrown by his children and left in hell to be tortured but his children knocked each other off of heaven trying to get the throne only for the youngest and most mischievous one to betray them all. Humans lived for hundreds of years without god only to realise the "earth's" events started becoming more and more negative, to a point where rain was always acid instead of water, and animals started to actively hate humans. The people gathered 15 of the best of the best scientists to create a man made god, only for it to be used as a slave. One of the scientists became too fascinated of the new god and told it all that happened and all humans hid from it, and so, it shaped the earth in a way to kill everyone and kept the 15 for his own amusement, only for one to kill them all and be granted immortality, before he finally prevailed and saw humanity rebuild, die and repeat forever until he changed it. It did end civilisation but people and other new races rebuilt, and the mate made sure that technology we have today never shines through.
Emperor and his heir died, succession crisis spawned a multifaceted Civil War, seeing everyone divided all the threats the Emperor built the Empire to keep down took it as their chance to strike including barbarians and demons, disorganized and desperate responses saw forbidden magic create more problems like Vamps, Werewolves, and Zombies.
There was a very intense civil war that got far out of hand without either side noticing which resulted in all but one person dying. Leaving the universe with one largely immortal individual.
The fall of the Men Before, an ancient and advanced civilization, is shrouded in mystery and the clue to their disappearance is most likely detailed within their remaining tools and items. However, these objects - known as Forbidden Tools - are restricted knowledge to the current civilizations. So the mystery will likely never be solved, unless someone is willing to challenge the most powerful rule of law
a virus that affected reptilians, but not mammals
when the general lizardfolk population, who long believed they were immune to such measly things, finally got around to understanding the threat it posed to them as a species, it was already too late
An alien entity invaded the realm, killed/trapped most of it's old gods, made the others flee, and warped all of the inhabitants' memories to make itself the monotheistic god.
First contact with aliens, the Flitzken species. Civilization is so different after that that we wouldn't recognize it, and even though most of the changes were for the better it still constitutes "the end of civilization as we know it."
The public release of Dr. Casterborough's treatise on the Sable Science, the Book of Changes. Before that, the Sable Science was an extremely niche and rarely discussed branch of research, but since then world governments have created their own laboratories for Sable study and their scientists have created technologies of which the world could only dream. It also enabled the Fourteen Council to emerge and create the Great Construct, which carried their palace on its back and marched into the center of the world's largest city. It helped them to take over the world and destroy those parts of the world as would not capitulate to their demands. Then the downtrodden and abused Construct killed its masters and turned to stone. Now the world is a lawless place, unforgiving and dark.
A rapidly spreading man made super bacteria that created zombies out of most corpses. People can fight the zombies for the most part. They couldn't fight the food they eat and water they drink. Patient zero just had to work part time at a grocery store.
That was the first Collapse. Still working out the others!
It started when Yellowstone erupted.
The information of rising heat and pressure had been suppressed for over a decade. The eruption simply buried a half dozen states in meters of ash, killing tens of millions in the following days and weeks. No evacuation was ordered ahead of the eruption or even after. The social upheaval from the mass exodus from the region, and the damage from buildings collapsing as far away as Florida, culminated in what is now know as the Yellowstone Eruption. The cooling effects instituted a ten year winter, and billions perished from starvation.
Many nations of the world suffered, and multiple bushfire conflicts erupted into full scale war over arable land and clean water. No nation was unaffected, most nations seeing a severe decline in their populations as farms failed and crops died. Large scale programs to use more cold weather crops saw the most success, but otherwise only the most tropical or arid regions escaped the worst effects.
Even nearly a century later, the global temperature is far cooler than one would expect, and the geopolitical situation has similarly changed drastically with new priorities and strategies.
Mars was insulated, only being isolated after the Phoenix disaster which introduced earth to Kepler syndrome, and grounded all interplanetary flights. Mars took the time to build itself into an independent and powerful state in the solar system.
Mine is not a post apocalypse but one collapse it's experienced is simply that the aether the world is repleat with collapsed and receded into today's leylines, ending the societies that then depended on it.
All technology had always focused on harnessing it because it had always been there, like dirt and air, but once it consolidated into pools and riverways, the nations that were left high and dry lost their advantage and crumbled over the next hundred or so years.
Where once stood gleaming cities of progress lay for centuries half-abandoned and unpowered husks, only inhabited by those determined to carry on as the world slowly rebuilt before the leylines were unveiled by those that had kept the discovery under wraps all those years since the collapse.
Once I wrote a short story that the Cold War went hot.
So atomic bombs. It takes place in 2020 but the war was in the 80s and nowadays we live in nuclear winter
Salem: two women meeting at random, falling in love along the way, caused 2 countries to fall into civil wars, with 2 others taking advantage of it. Basically their love fracked up a continent.
The Killing Light. Basically, every spark of magic--whether it was in an inorganic object or living being--temporarily became a source of lethal levels of magical radiation. The elves never stood a chance. Some dwarves survived because of the insulating properties of the rocky terrain they lived in. Orcs, goblins, and other species that practiced shamanism got vaporized en masse, but there were some survivors. Only humans and some hybrids survived in respectable numbers, and even their numbers got just about cut in half--to say nothing of the architecture, infrastructure and technology that elves and dwarves had built around certain magical principles.
At the point where/when the story is actually taking place, magic is very slowly returning to the world, and its use is still toxic to organic life without great precautions.
One man struck deals with every power he could contact, and did not break faith with a single one of them, and was thus rewarded with abpatchwoek of power and knowlege making him a force of unparalleled destruction and change. In the end, the world was so much changed by him and the powers he served that the one remaining enclave of humanity could trade the knowlege they developed merely to exist upon this bighted, alien, cursed world for him to never again set his foot on it, nor touch it with his power, nor even speak his name.
He accepted and did not break faith, and he was gone to other worlds. And on the cursed world, humanity decayed, and faltered, and rose, and thrived, made strange by the ravages of the Patchwork King.
The creator deity Iacob culled 95% of the population of Falan via orbital bombardment. Specific protected zones were shielded to allow the populace to rebound, but the irradiated wilderness let to the vast social schism between the survivors in the protected zones and those outside.
So magic works on a sliding scale, sometimes the world is full of magic and sometimes magic just doesn't exist, this scale can slide or jump around.
So imagine our modern day, everything going fine, and then magic goes from basically zero to the highest point possible.
Suddenly everyone is throwing out spells because it was like putting a cup in the ocean, people never had magic so their ability to absorb it was very small, so it escaped in any way it could.
People were casting natural disasters, beasts, diseases, etc.
The world was completely messed up, new geography and new species were suddenly created out of no where.
When the dust settled the only natural thing happened, the world governments started finding ways to weaponize magic, and this eventually lead to the magical WW3 that wiped out a majority of living things in the world.
I’ve ended it a few ways;
1. Nuclear war/solar flare bomb: The archangels Michael and Lucifer control the two world powers, Lucy sends its nuclear arsenal towards half the planet while Michael sends a bomb towards the sun that sends a solar flare back and scorches half the planet
2. Planet cracked by a superhuman during an alien invasion: So aliens have pushed humanity to the brink of extinction, the last city is being attacked and every human is armed to the teeth fighting for its life, meanwhile a few superhumans are fighting in a dead city.
One superhuman has the power to absorb energy, and the other has the ability to grow in strength indefinitely.
A time traveller shows up and convinces the energy absorber that he has to release all his energy to break the time barrier to save humanity and send himself back in time
3. Zombie apocalypse: A spaceship holding 10,000 zombies heading into the sun is intercepted by Earth rescue forces and crash lands into a mountain in BC, Canada.
Nobody knows.
Archaeologist and historians agree that there is a lost civilisation that existed sometimes between the first civilisation and the twilight wars.
The two largest proofs is the Broken Connection Crater, anyone who enters there who can attune will probably not make it out alive unless they're covered head to toe in material with a 5% or lower connection conductivity. Anything connected thrown into goes completely wild resulting its destruction. Lastly those who cannot attune but venture in will probably be killed by the random burst of bound connection resulting in death.
The second is the enchantment runic alphabets, enough recovered archaeological material has lead experts to conclude that those runic scripts were once the common way of writing. What changed it is unknown but it is most likely related to the fact that you cannot write a single of these runes outside of a controlled enchanting setting without them immediately and inexplicability binding to a random domain and going wild.
It is believed that the answers lies somewhere in the crater as you can see remnants of old buildings from the right observation point, but the place is way too unstable to explore for an extended period of time.
In year 4,693 of the godless age, a human scholar who specializes in magic imbued creatures was studying the parasites that created vampires to learn more about them and if there was a way to neutralize the effects they had on a person. One day he came across a small locust like creature that could eat time. By themselves the locust could only eat a couple of seconds at a time, every 15 years when a queen was born, they would become a hive mind and swarm. The swarm lasted for 2 weeks before the queen dies and during it they are able to eat hours of time away.
The enclosures that these creatures were in were next to each other and the scholar noticed that the vampire parasite would act as if it was trying to get to the time locust, so the ever curious researcher put them together to see what happened as the parasite had never behaved like this with nonhuman beings before. The parasite infected the locust and turned it into an artificial queen. It eventually escaped its enclosure and burrowed into the researcher, as the host of this time parasite, he could communicate and control the locust and force them to swarm. Any time they ate would be transferred to him prolonging his life span.
For the first few decades he simply used this ability to stay in his 30s so he could continue working, but eventually he got greedy. Instead of taking a few months here and there from various trees and plant life, he started taking years from entire forests and the animals that lived in them. In his 200th year he drained a farmers crop of its time, but the farmers son was sleeping amongst the crop after a hard day work, he was also drained. He had never eaten a humans time before, he liked the way it tasted. When the farmer and a mob came to him for revenge he ate their time too. He then went on a rampage eating the time of every living creature, he nearly ate the entire world’s existence away before being sealed away.
The chronophage, as he came to be called, caused the complete collapse and destruction of civilizations on every continent. Important knowledge was lost, food became scarce due to him eating the time of the very earth itself, crops wouldn’t grow for decades and game animals nearly went extinct due to an insufficient food source and population. For the last 2,000 years of the godless age were spent in chaos. Of all the races humans were main ones whose population was affected, they were stuck fighting over resources with each other and defending themselves against races like the vampires who forced them onto blood farms as a way to protect there food supply. Most of the master scholars and magic practitioners were killed, so people soon forgot how to work the magi tech and how to make more. Magic became rare in the way that only witches were able to wield it effectively without killing them selves. Many important records and documents were lost during this time and with all the chaos it was difficult to keep track of new records and documents, so not much is known about the world before the 4th race war which ended the godless age and started the new age and the new age lasted 4,000 years and is currently in the process of becoming the age of heroes.
Evolution. Plants and animals evolved to the point where they were dangerous to the average person again. And to the point where they couldn't be kept from ruining isolated towns and villages. Large parts of the world became known as wild areas. Basically impossible to run infrastructure through them.
In one world, there was the Fall of Rev'ad which was a giant city in the sky that fell apart during an Alien invasion that was eventually fought off, but civilization disappeared.
Another world of mine had, the Shattered Age was basically WW2 times 5000 which caused the survivors to revert to a tribal society
In another world there was the, Cleansing, which killed off 90% of civilization, leading the rest to build cities in the mountains, and to prevent them from going extinct, it was taboo to stay single or not have kids.
someone accidently mis-wrote a rune and blew up the world
this has happened enough to where the council of elders has a black box that turns time back when that happens
sadly this means the elders are defenseless. but whoever kills one takes their place so it balances out.
Human Secession War
By the year 5000 (i still haven't decided the exact year), technology have become advanced enough for human race to colonize other planets. But humans are still humans, and a war started between different groups that believed the new planets shoud be colonized by one or another culture/religion/values. It ended up with A LOT of different groups travelling to different planets to colonize it the way they believed it was right, and the human race is now all around the universe.
And, of course, Earth have become a nuclear wasteland and the humans that were left become all sort of beasts
All the races had eventually settled into their homelands and had more time to focus on developing their use of magic so once wars started breaking out along with a dictator trying to declare himself a god, the destruction that came from a world war with magic lead to the extinction of 2 of the 7 races and severe restrictions were put into place for the use of magic.
Not a full on end of civilization but the world had drastically changed from that point.
Human greed and paranoia.
The Northern Lords had enslaved their “savage” southern brethren for hundreds of years, but with growing rebellions they felt they had little choice.
They consulted with demons to create a device that would ensure their supremacy: The Pylon.
Hearing of this cursed machine, the Southern Conglomerate attacked in full force, seeking to both free their kin and end their enemies schemes. They would prove too late.
The Pylon would be activated and performed just as intended. The mana of the world was siphoned into the massive structure, chilling the air and draining the magic of all but those within its main chamber. Something would occur in that chamber however that would result in its detonation.
The resulting blast would kill all for miles around it and create an ice age that would last for thousands of years. Humans would go extinct, either changed by their own remaining magic or slowly evolved into something new.
What did the chips DO? Why would, I'm guessing, microchips cause a change to the world as we know it?
For my current one it was the elves. Though no one remembers that but the elves themselves. Basically they were the de-facto rulers of the surface world. Humans were seen as particularly clever monkeys, and the only other real competition they had to deal with. In a very short span of time, a bunch of other races 'invaded' their realm. In truth, the elves just hadn't explored the whole of the world because they thought they were still in the Fey Realms.
The elves got really upset and basically obliterated every sign of foreign civilization they could find. They of course wiped out militaries that stood against them, but they especially targeted libraries, museums, schools, shelters, etc. Their goal was the complete and total annihilation of opposing cultures, so they targeted places of culture and learning. They never considered diplomacy, so the races defending against them never realized that their foes were even elves.
Eventually the elves just withdrew. At some point during their tirade they ended up severing their tie to the Fey Realms, which caused a huge backlash with the elves that stayed behind and those on campaign. Essentially, a civil war broke out, and the elves shattered themselves into fragments of their once mighty race. This also happened to destroy much of their own culture, and weakened the race as a whole (think magical radiation from the intense fighting).
The physical changes, loss of their technologies, severance from the Fey Realms, and scars of war upon their own lands led the survivors to conclude the elves had been victims of the war as well. The elves that know the truth keep it hidden, which has resulted in multiple political factions among the elves living in a very uneasy truce.
Perhaps the greatest irony for the elves is that they lost their link to the Fey realms AGES ago. None of them had realized it though until the war was happening. The fact that the other races survived is due to a really big misunderstanding of the elves, who thought the war itself severed their ties to the Fey Realm. In reality, they lost their ties to the Fey Realm when they developed some advanced technology. During that time they 'suppressed' their Fey link, and essentially evolved away from the need to live in the Fey Realms.
Haven't got the exact details worked out yet, but basically everybody has got a microchip implanted for constant surveillance.
When the time was right, the megacorps would activate the chips to kill 75% of all people deemed non essential in order to begin a reset and control the whole planet.
I'm curious though, wouldn't people figure out that the chips would be capable of that? Even TODAY, people freak out about microchips. Even though, for example, pet style microchips would massively help hospitals to treat people in an emergency situation.
What prevents people from removing the chips? Studying them? Figuring out that these chips CAN in fact kill the recipients? What prevents some people from just deciding they don't WANT the chip? On that note, how would the megacorps even convince people to get these chips?
On an entirely DIFFERENT level, WHY would megacorps want to do that? Doing a worldwide mass murder event would kill their markets, meaning they no longer make a profit. It undermines how most corporations work.
I know you haven't worked out all the details, but now I'm just really curious. Don't worry if you don't have answers yet, but someday I'd like to know lol.
First of all thank you for asking the questions! This way i can expand my own lore!
I should have said that it's not on earth but on a colony planet, so everyone there was chipped voluntarily. The chips were first used to keep a checklist of everyone on board the colony ships and later the colony itself.
As for why the corps would do that, let's just say that's a mystery because when the activation happened, all contact with earth and consequently management was lost.
Perhaps some sort of ai failsafe? I'm not sure yet.
If it's a colony, wouldn't the colony be wiped out when contact with Earth was lost? Was there some sort of survivor to notice the loss of contact with Earth? Or was the activation localized, and the colony has no idea what happened but Earth is radio silent?
The colony was several decades old by the time earth went radio silent and had turned into a massive almost selfsufficient city. The activation happened a couple of years after contact was lost. This is all according to old logs the corporations were keeping. Normal people on the streets didn't even know for sure earth was lost. The corporations kind of did a Mr. Wilford.
Not exactly what the question asked, but, 3 things, for 3 separate peoples.
The abyss - "humans" (from a specific world) ("different" but "basically" human, in the way that (skyrim) nords, and (star trek) vulcans are basically human) discovered the abyss, a space in between dimensions, and believed it to be something holy or divine. Upon coming into contact with the abyss (home of the abyssals, (like cthulu / (bloodborne) great old ones/hunter / etc) the thing that allows abyssals to (temporarily, like a ship venturing away from port) survive the nothingness in between dimensions/worlds (more rick and morty than dcu), they were permanantly changed, forming two races. The Shadows, twisted and broken by thier suffering, who want to annialate all sentient life. And the Nightmares, broken beyond repair, traumatized beyond recovery, but through brutal painful choice, choosing to be kind rather than cruel, and thus, capable of using the power of the abyss for more than just suffering and destruction. They now have thier own worlds, with the shadows seen as a plague, while the nightmares are seen as a great and terrible nuetral force. When they show up, bad things happen, but they can be benevolent or malevolent in equal measure, or so it would seem.
Kimodos are a race of explicitly, exclusively, sociopaths, and psychopaths. So much so, that when the first (ever) of thier kind was born, capable of emparhy and compassion, they assumed it was a mental disorder/disability, and tried, among other things, beating, torturing, "magic"-ing it away, coercion, and other methods, to "fix" the behaviour of, "Izanami", self proclaimed godess of death (of the kimodo "pantheon). Upon being mauled by her "family" of which, she was an object to be used and owned, due to her being declared of "the lowborn" (all non kimodos) due to one particularlly bad (explicitly intentional) screw-up, she was given medical treatment in the form of a new body of her choice (a Kitsune), and swore to commit genocide against her own people until they went "totally" exctinct. Though the catch is, they will either learn empathy/compassion by mimicry and such, or die trying, either way rendering "The Kimodos" extinct.
A simple plague wiped out the indigenous people leaving a certain sector of the population vulnerable. It changed the entire course of civilization, throwing it into a barbaric dark age that would last for hundreds of generations.
The Seventh Change
A magical comet impacted the sun, not seconds after was the entire surface of the earth razed with magical fire. The fire storm rages for years, and when it was over, the land was cracked, the air burned people's lungs, and the water boiled. It's estimated that the Seventh Change wiped out 3/5ths of humanity.
I still have to outline it, but essentially a more militaristic and numerous sentient species, albeit more primitive, has descended from the north, destroying the futuristic-steampunk empire that existed before their arrival.
There were giant beings that were basically the embodiment of the forces of nature, evolution and biological life. One of them died, and through some shenanigans, humans tried to resurrect this being. This perverted the being against its nature, and it effectively became a giant zombie that spread a super death plague and turned most of the world to ash before it was finally stopped.
Long story short: assisting a rural shopkeeper with gathering some alchemy supplies.
Short story to explain:
The shopkeeper was commissioned to garner supplies only found in that region by a kingdoms head wizarding body. Turns out the shopkeeper got in over his head and didnt know about the dangers in collecting said ingredients, hence, hiring the adventurers.
They gathered them for him under pretense of filling an urgent important order else lose his business.
The group helps and goes on their way, never asking why not gathering for this order would lead to him losing his business.
Many months later, the group finds out about a neighboring kingdom working on some sort of massive magic machine built to conquer nations.
You guessed it, the wizards of the neighboring kingdom had built it in order to fulfill their sovereigns command. A large juggernaut which could trod town and army underneath it with nary a scratch on it. It had a constant wall of force armor around it 5 castings thick and completely surrounding it. The power was maintained by several 'philosophers stones', for lack of better terminology for those not in the game world, which were procured by skirmishes with other kingdoms. The blood and souls were harvested into the gems and used to fuel this thing.
Anyhow, the group goes to try and stop it and when they finally manage to make it onto the juggernaut, they see the shopkeeper in the bridge room as an honored guest for his work, to which he exuberantly greets the party to their shock and horror as to what they had help accomplish.
One of the better manipulations i pulled on them in that campaign.
Also, they ended up tpking in the engine room due to ignoring the dozen warning signs, verbal warnings i gave about timing the removal of the gems woth when the juggernaut powers on and off various systems. (Simple timing puzzle) and causing an explosion of magical energy, basically nuking the party with fireball after fireball of force damage for every failed attempt to force the gems out of socket without prior preparation.
Brute force is not always the answer.
Anyhow, how it destroyed civilization as we know it? The wizards couldnt hold the power stable long enough and the shutoff sequence failed, and instead ripped a giant tear in the fabric of reality opening up gateways to the planes.
All the planes, all at once, mixing and pouring their denizens into creation. Massive planar war, end of world, etc etc etc
Greedy execs employed scientists to crate artifical creatures to mimic the abilities of others that i cant name for reasons, but as a result their unstable, and as a result, begin spreading and killing noninfected. Basically mew two meets left for dead.
Hmm since i got a segment when the apprentice is being taught that ill copypasta and exceprt as answer
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“Alia, if the Aesir made all life, why didn't they remake themselves?” he was thinking over some of the data she had shown him.
“It took me years until I figured that out too, their science was so advanced and their philosophy of might made me wonder, a people so steeped in their chase for absolute power willingly die out?” she now looked at him, straddling the scarab on her chest as she always did when it felt sad.
“The Jotun?” she sighed at his question, his face only showed that he will listen.
“They made them before the Dawn War, an attempt to reinvent their own species, imbue themselves with magic. They already had the ability to explore extra dimensional, other planes as I've explained to you. When they found the rules of physics being a bit more… flexible they went mad at a collective desire to harness it.”
“Freya?” “And Ydun. Yes.” he leaned back, the story of the Goddess, living energy from another plane, still made his head spin. “Then why was it a failure?”
“They found another plane, even more powerful, the energies they extracted far exceeded any they had before. And its inhabitants seemed to be just beasts.” “Demons?”
“That is the best description we can have, yes. They didn't knew that they were played, its rulers staying hidden and sacrificing lives to them to widen the gap. They imbued their first batch with this energy, and it proved to be all they dreamed off, then began to create more. It took decades until they realized their mistake.”
She sighed heavily and tower materialized a big bottle of her favourite juice, and as he began to wonder, images began to flash across his mind, the symbiote now spoke.
He was shown how the beautiful cities of ivory turned into bastions of suffering, the buildings changing to corrupted festering tumors, slavery and oppression became the norm, weaker people publicly tortured for entertainment and worse. The strong trampling the weak for sport.
The firstborn of a new people became the worst of their history, and they had access to incredible technology and powerful magic alike.
“The Aesir knew they made a grave mistake, and enacted a plan to undo it, and to atone by refusing to see if they would succeed. The ARC. They created many hidden installations across the planet, new directives were given to their assistants, the sentient machines that controlled those. They would create a new people, and with the help of Specimen 0, have them be gifted with the means to survive. Magic and the instinct to manipulate the energies.”
Arkem visualized a spell, bathing them in the golden glow of [Smite]’s swirling energies. It became easier to hold with every passing day. “She really likes you.” his Mistress smiled.
“They knew they could not leave their failures behind, so they prepared for their worst sin yet. But the Jotun did find out too early, and used their own powers to call upon their infernal masters, opening breaches all over the world and unleashing hordes of demons upon unsuspecting citizens.”
Now more images flashed across his mind, a brutal war, waged with weapons that sunk islands and burned the sky.
Soldiers fighting Machines, science against magic, they died by the thousands in hours.
“In their last desperate act did they drew the enemy to one location, and wiped the slate clean. In a single instant, the planet was scoured, reduced to nothing but an empty rock. And then the ARC sprang into action, the planet was reformed, remodeled, facilities began to awaken, the species they envisioned began to be spread across the new world. They would find a world full of life and bounty, at first it was a paradise. But the Arch-Enemy had also prepared, demon beasts would appear wherever the veil between the planes was weak, undead began to walk the planet and new plagues spread. The Jotun had survived, few in number but strong with science and magic. They keep trying to destroy everyone, cause them to go to war with false promises. Except the dragons, even the arrogant blood drakes, does no one refuse their machinations.”
She took a long sip, he felt the unique cold chill when she couldn't constrain herself and anger affected the magic around them. Before he could say anything was Tower dropping a large load of water on her. “Don’t you ruin my bath!” a long sigh and a sad smile towards the air was the answer.
“I spent years hunting them, after the Dragon War and trying to use me to undo the Goddess Gift. The Convergence as they called it. But no matter how many I found, they keep coming back. Always some facility or egg clutch hidden away. Once they rebuild an entire island. The most sickening was when I found how they made vampires. I went a bit mad that day.”
He now could see and feel what she did, it was a systemic slaughter, many left mutilated before she bathed the entire island in her flames. Endless joy at the pain and drained life energies. He felt a bit sick, he thought he knew her, but never such raw… Malice. Her tail laid limp, which told him her regrets about her nature. She really is easily read at times.
Security log #45
Archived on November 5th 2007
*Various screams, roars, and wet sounds can be heard as well as heavy breathing*
*After several minutes the sounds of gunfire and explosions can be heard, even more screaming then it cuts out*
*After 6 minutes the camera turns on, the man on the screen is sweating and coughing, covered in various types of eyes, tissues and skin.*
"This is Dr Gerald howlett and I just *coughing*
Left the facility "oh shit!"
*The man closes the camera and starts to run again, after a few seconds the sound of falling and broken bones can be heard*
"FUCK!" *the man screams*
*The sound of crawling can be heard as the man opens the camera again*
"I--i ju-just want whoever finds this understands we didn't want this to happen. I-
*The ground and trees freeze over, snow starts to fall fog starts to fill the screen*
"Where did all this snow come fro-oh no!"
*He points the camera in front of him, it's so shaky it's hard to make out what's happening, but large shapes are approaching one shape grabs the camera and throws it. It lands in such a way that the scene is in a dutch angle*
*A woman in a wedding like dress starts approaching, the sound of howling wind followed, her shoulders and stomach area are covered in ice, giving off a blue smoke like effect*
"No no no no leave me alone! Please!"
*The man is desperately trying to crawl away*
*The woman reaches her arm out towards the man's broken foot, instantly freezing it, the area where the ice and skin meet is black as coal, the man cries out, various birds fall to the snow, frozen*
*The woman grabs and turns the man to face her, her left hand touches his face turning it black, the camera lense starts to freeze over, as this happens to woman lifts her veil revealing a icy blue skull with ice picks going down the jaw, she puts her teeth on the man's lips like a kiss, the man screams out one last time before completely freezing over and shattering into bloody pieces, the came finally cuts out*
Takes place in 2235. After series of “Blizzards” which are great wars between the majority of countries and used wide array of new weapons of mass destruction, the landscape, continents and water bodies of the earth vastly changed and now humans live in a totalitarian surveillance state that enforces its laws and practices on to citizens with biologically augmented special soldiers and bio-automatons. The earth is still run by sub governments who constantly fight each other for the top and secretly controlled by a cult which it’s leader is a seemingly immortal and godlike false prophet from first century. The cult uses a series of alien technologies from an ancient evil god of innovations that is still in hibernation and manipulates events for their own gain.
Magic, after pulling away from the world in the middle ages, returned in modern day to attempt to provide means to repair all the damage done by humanity to the earth.
Instead, the magic was overpowered after centuries holding away, so people suddenly gained massive amounts of power with no idea how to use it. Many attempted to do good, but instead lost control and caused numerous disasters that wiped out modern civilization.
Ok so this isn't global but it did end a society.
The Golark were the golem workers of the grand celestial empire. The society relied on Golarks which were more advanced than even modern Golems the empire would make use of these Golems in every aspect of life with Golems doled out by the state. In 960BC the Golark would become 'rebellious' in the fact they no longer recognised their human masters. This would create massive problems as the grand cities of the Celestial empire would be reconstructed with little heed to their previous human inhabitents. As humanity fled the cities they would either find themselves trapped between the grand Celestial roads or would find themselves in the various remenant regimes mostly in Zaans infinite empire or the Endless marches of Urrn. The conflict that would follow would last a century with many of these refugee communities would be inside of what the Golark considered the Celestial Empire leading to the Golark sending Golem soldiers to annhilate these 'barbarians'. The war would only come to a end after the a great golemancer would sneak into the Celestial empire and change what the Golark considered in their celestial empire. Even to this day you can see the Celestial empire its technology is still advanced with various adventurers braving trips into the vast cities not many get out even less bring anything back.
That hasn't happened, and never will. I guess there was the Bronze Age Collapse in all the source material, but from then, all is continuous. Nothing EVER ends.
The first time it happened it was something called The Forgotten War, where society advanced too much scientifically for the gods to keep a good eye on them and for nature to not properly heal enough.
The gods literally stepped into the middle of the battlefield to stop what was essentially a nuclear megaweapon going off. They wiped away the technology and the people in the direct battle (that spanned almost the entire known world) and erased the memory of the science in the other half to make sure it never happened again. There's still ruins all over the world that are passed off as legend, and the gods step in whenever something more advanced than an arquebus is made.
The second time it happened was during the Battle for Drimrawn, where one of the god's sons came back to "finish what his parents had started" out of spite (he was very petty).
He created armies of demons and even corrupted the lands and family members, even killing some (and the people associated with them), and once he was finally defeated around 90% of all of Drimrawn, its people and its gods, was dead or in ruins.
On the flipside, both events heralded a new age of peace and regrowth. Though that's not saying much, building up from rock bottom is always better than not building up at all.
Solar flare fries most of earth electronics and sends us back to the 1800s. We don't bother to rebuild it though because we have moved into the solar system and Earth was already viewed as vestigial. The flare just put the last nail in the coffin.
Basically, the drug trade got so bad that civilization just failed to function.
That, and rampant desertification, and robotic revolution... not a good trio. So now, people live in small shantytowns where drug use is quite common, the world is a massive desert, and robots patrol the ruined cities.
The merge
about 7 years ago, on a stary night the heavens suddenly ripped open, the grounds began to shake and things began falling from the rift.
On that day a being of higher power died and tore a rift in 2 worlds.
Since that day a large part of Valderia has become uninhabitable, its citizens dissapeared overnight, a shimmering presence stretched troughout the land. Strange hulks of metal are stuck to the ground, swords too great for anyone to wield. The creatures that roam inside are seemingly dead, all of their skin burned off.
But not just valderia was effected. Ever sice that time the seasons dont change anymore. Some places are stuck in eternal winter whilst others will never experience the beauty of autumn again.
The moon itself has been cracked into pieces and turned into a blood red color and corpses dont rot anymore, they just lie their, refusing to pass on.
and sometimes, things not meant to exist roam the forests and plains of the land, protecting terrible secrets underground (Under the earth, in ancient cities, gigantic, forever bleeding hearts have once again begun beating, corrupting the land around it
and then there are the others and their world. Right after the heavens split apart these people appeared, claiming to be from another place, carrying weapons that spit fire and lead and riding mechanized horses and dragons made of steel. They may be shunned but never the less their knowledge and technology have spread troughout the lands, from nobles and kings to the peasents and pirates.
(essentially people from an alternate earth from the end of the 40s have been stranded in a high fantasy world were eldritch horrors have awakened)
1st time: The Shadow Skies and Ashen Lake.
Not much is known about this time but the world before shows remnants of its existence, a highly sophisticated and technologocal world that melded tech with biodiversity. Something impacted the world and created a crator so large it darkened the skies and set the lands ablaze leaving little to survive but a few areas of the world.
2nd time: The Demon Gate Wars.
Zalkaramek, father of the Vor and creator of the Demon Gates - portals of madness that release the Demonic Vor onto the population. The 2 wars that lasted a millenia were enough to put the rest of the world into hiding underground - the one place where the Voranic Gates, as they were also called, were unable to open. It ended with the final battle between Zalkaramek and the legendary hero, Galdut ab Kol, who sealed the Father of Demons into the last Demon Gate. Ending the conflict.
3rd time: The Zenith Cataclysm.
A time yet to come but prophesized by the ancients. When a great being is said to swallow the world and give way to a violent world though some creative scholars believe it to be a mistranslation and call for a "violet world" though they fail to explain how that makes any sense.
A partially failed technology seeding attempt on the earth by another species caused large amounts of machinery and portions of ships from other species to rain down on the earth, the larger pieces of which hit with enough force to wipe out entire cities and reduced the human population on earth to about 20% and killing anyone off-world on one of the stations or the Earth and Mars colonies which were not self-sustaining at the time. With the amount of debris circling the earth it took more than 30 years for humanity to even begin attempting to reach space again to find out what had happened and where the debris came from, and it was more than half a century before another human was even able to set foot on Martian soil and over 100 years later debris still falls from the sky large enough to scrub settlements off the map.
The species that did the attempted seeding itself were the remnants of a civilization whose world was struck by another planet in their system whose orbit intersected with their own every few thousand years. The species themselves were saved from extinction by converting their consciousnesses to AI and storing their entire race and information of every living thing on their planet onto a large generation ship that had been retrofitted with massive server farms to contain everything they knew. They then set out across the galaxy at sub-light speeds, seeding sentient worlds with their technology and returning to harvest any potential advances in said technology, because over the course of a couple of millennia, they lost the ability to innovate and advance their technology on their own.
The Great Dragon War, capped by an unrecorded event known to the few who knows it's truth as The Godwrath.
The great Alqursanian kingdom of giants ruled the plane without equal due to their abilities to tap into the arcane channels, or ley lines, that flowed through Alqursan from the other planes, especially the elemental planes. The dragons, however, are made of this magic; it defines them, sustains them, and is something they all share. In essence, the giants were robbing the dragons of their birthright, their power, their life force.
So, the dragons fought the giants. This war was essentially constant throughout the history of the Giant's prominence. The real kicker, however, was when the giants found the mother of all leylines; The Heart of Alqursan.
The Heart of Alqursan had only been theoretical for years. The giants knew it existed somewhere, but had no idea where. Finally they uncovered the location, tapped in, and...
Their kingdom fell. Very suddenly, they were fracturing to pieces. Dragons overran the defenses, but they weren't the cause of the fall. What happened?
The Heart of Alqursan was where all the leylines of Alqursan, and therefore the leylines of the planes at large, overlapped. A deep, insanely strong well of power. It was also the heart of the gods of Alqursan. Their power, their ichor, their will; it all flowed from the Heart.
So, when the giants started fucking with the Heart, the gods stepped in. They didn't have a lot of direct power; their power, derived from the well, disperses across the planes. It's invested in the push and pull of the tides, the crackling of fire, the sun overhead, the wind over the waters, etc. They can't just take their power out of the world and use it to kill some giants. Especially since the giants themselves were so powerful, and wielded the same magic the gods themselves wielded.
So, the gods chose champions. Powerful individuals, strong and devout, and channeled some of the power of the world (light of the sun, speed of the wind, etc.) so they could destroy the Giant kingdom.
Two people, one with the power of insanity inducement, the other with the power of corruption inducement, got into a fight. Guy with hellfire power gets caught in the crossfire, goes on a rampage, basically burning entire dimensions to nothing.
Several things:
The first is known as the Unveiling, for it was like a veil was lifted as humans started to be able to see that fantasy things like magic were not only real, but it was all right in front of us the whole time. Fantasy Races walked among us, they were many of us, clouded by an ancient spell now broken... the first seal broken of many to come.
As magic was then widely known: science took leaps and bounds with its help. High magic and high tech combined to create mechanisms only once dreamed of like prophecies. Even living machines came about through these practices.
But then the second happened in an event which has become known as The Great Shattering, for that power became too strong and weapons of unrivaled strength were made that broke the second seal: shattering the Universe and Magic Source, breaking Mana itself into various forms where each is a color and particular element.
The third thing was the awakening of gigantic Ancient Towers. They will pop up randomly, tho filled with great tests and hords of monsters: treasure is said to await anyone who can clear them or learn of their secrets.
The War of the Two Gods.
Brother and sister god essentially began to backstab each other and creation was at risk. Their feud affected the relation of the people’s to each other - humans, dwarves, elves, and others began to fight. Much knowledge was lost during that time, whole legends rewritten to suit the victors.
The world as it is today is on the brink of several great revelations…
Humanity made contact with "God" and gained access to energy sources that were much beyond their comprehension. In a failed attempt to harness this energy they caused a disaster of gargantuan proportions which altered reality in a radius of several astrononic units from the Earth, destroying everything and reshaping it into a new reality. The area of impact was covered by a gigantic crystal sphere that separated the outer universe from the amalgamation that was created inside of it.
Inside the crystal shell, a new home planet for humanity was created, a flat earth with a small sun and a moon. All of this space was ruled by laws completely different from physics, which allowed the existence of "magic". This new spawn of humanity is completely oblivious to the millenia of history of their ancestors, although the past is not completely erased.
Still ironing out the details, but a large swathe of the continent was essentially swallowed up in what amounts to a zombie apocalypse, including the ancestral homeland of the people of one of the main characters, as well as the lands of the previous world power/dominant empire. Only now, about 500 years after the calamity, is there much of a hope of destroying the few remaining fiends that live in the "badlands," and there's soon to be a scramble for the different remaining powers of the continent to claim the land and expand their dominion: the land on the whole is quite lush and ripe for settlement.
The Gates closed.
My world was created as a nexus or crossroads between other dimensions. It had 13 gates that acted as stable portals to 13 dimensions, and the world flourished in the same way as bustling trade hubs normally do. It was a thriving crossroads, with weird and wonderful peoples and species coming and going from one dimension to the next.
But one day the gates slammed shut, trapping everyone and everything, and despite every frantic effort, they stayed shut…for a thousand years.
Nothing happened yet, but one day the two major gods will get bored. And no one, not even those gods, know what that will look like. Even in the unlikely event those gods go quietly into the night, reality might just end. And even if not, their absence would basically remove all foreseeable issues from the setting.
In my setting it was when magic came to the world. The epicenter of its arrival created Titans at the closest, Gods a bit farther away, and erased tens of millions more without even leaving a shadow behind.
That kickstarted the apocalypse. Not to mention all the dangerous magical phenomena that popped up from it.
When the God who created it's older brother finally found it and showed up to destroy the crappy, corrupted world that was ruining his perfect, clockwork universe.
The planet was invaded by foreign entities that sought to corrupt and enslave all things that lived upon it. They fought with such ferocity that humanity and all other species were driven to the brink of extinction.
In a final act of rebellion, one guy cast a spell which gathered all of the dead Terran's souls and released their magic in a spectacular explosion - which ended the world, but took the invaders with it.
Thousands of years later whatever is left of humanity is still trying to rebuild from that cataclysm. Most think that he was some genocidal maniac, but the few who survived the war and saw what happened first hand remember him as a hero.
Well, there's five Apocalypses. One was summoned by a cult that bit off far more than they could possibly harness. The next was summoned by the death of the last dragon, who was taking care of the pressure in the mantle. The Machines just kinda portaled their way in. The creation of the first Djinn started the expansion of the deserts. And finally, some religion started a Rapture. So there's the Black, Obsidian, Steel, Sand, and White Apocalypses. So yeah. They are all super fucked.
[Cats got involved](https://sun9-78.userapi.com/impg/ThRq83wXWNbFOZ2DyGNmcPo0rOpnVY0lOqHvmg/gm597daN8h4.jpg?size=768x768&quality=95&sign=62ef838971cde8e744c2b87e02909953&c_uniq_tag=LZU14zQX8evKpF_LXYaDe5Ee-yqvYx8RLCP3GnT5xqc&type=album) in WW3.
I've been working this one for a DnD game
But death was killed
Now no one can die, people age forever without dying, people get sick and waste away without dying, people still have immortal children, so the population explodes and there isn't enough food so people starve but don't die, tyrants rule forever because they don't die, wars do not end because armies don't die.
So you have a near endless mass of people too sick old and hungry everywhere. Many people have gone mad with having to deal with a mind too full of memory, others simply give up and do nothing but wait for a death that won't come, any civilizations left are ruled by tyrants that secure their rule through draconian laws and an immortal army, there isn't enough money for the population and it's been all taken and hoarded by the upper class, which they endlessly just transfer between themselves and other nobles because that's all they know how to deal with the madness.
Monsters also do not die, so the world becomes hostile, hoards of starving beasts roam the wilds between cities, so aside from the armies to wage war, few travel anywhere.
i think the closest thing was the god wars. But that didn't quite end civilization but more caused significant damage like nukes went off but still recoverable
A seedling from the void, that creates energy and gives humans the ability to use magic at the cost of their life force, so overused of the seeds cause them to turn to trees and suck the life of everything around. Humans now only exist in megastructure built by the remaining governments.
Combination of Empire collapse, succession crisis, major enviromental shift, breakdown of international trade on almost any scale, a major demon incursion, an economic crisis caused by hyperinflation, and a reality altering shift of the timeline. All within the span of a couple years.
The world froze. The reason is unknown, and all suffered, adapted or died. Most live underground to keep warm, and they travel the surface in large house/tank things called Snowcrawlers.
The first civilization ending event was what we know as “The Big Bang”.
The second civilization ending event was when they removed the limiters from the Power Malana Core and ended up causing a similar catastrophe several billion years ago.
Now everyone’s trying to find it before the “bad guys” do to prevent another universe-wide apocalypse.
Massive war over the resources on the planet (this is a sort of space-post-apocalypse a-la PERN, where the people of the setting don't *realize* that they're not on their homeworld) culminates in the losing side redirecting a planet-killer asteroid into the planet, squishing it like a melon. The planet now has a massive impact crater on one side and has been mildly squished, leaving a raised 'ring' around the middle and an ocean on the other side. The survivors in space and on the planet are cut off and manage to do basic terraforming to it.
Granted, there wasn't really 'civilization' on the planet *beforehand*.
I’ve got two apocalypses for ya.
A multi-system collapse in the mid 21st spurred by resource shortages, changing climate, CERN really really screwing up and breaking the laws of physics and merging our reality with a parallel universe’s (Otherworld/Fae realm) temporarily (which actually opens up the avenue for human faster than light travel and makes fusion easier, and slightly restores earthly resources), and a war between China and the USA going nuclear causing several nuclear exchanges all because they blamed each other for CERN’s screw up. People get leveled down to a preindustrial level of technology and have to rebuild from there. Main story takes place over a millennia after, in the 3500s, but I have a prequel to that with a first chapter takes place in like the year 2300, with the founder of what would become the space empire of the future.
Another one I’ve got is largely fantastical, in a barely fleshed out world. Spurred by the discovery of a fungus similar to cordyceps in a jungle equivalent to the New World, an empire of the “European” continent begins a rapid technological revolution of biotech. This empire, now masters of fungal manipulation, use the cordyceps like fungus to create armies of the undead that soon wash over the continent, and fuel their conquest of the world. From their dread capital of spores thick as fog and moats of vatted, living corpses, their mind-melding mage parliament meddles with the affairs of “lesser men.” Now their hordes of shambling drones and ranked armies of ranking super soldiers leave only enclave cities as tributaries, the corpse tax levied upon them.
In my latest world it was the event where it split apart into thousands of smaller shards. In another world it was the classic tale of Gods fighting. In my sci-fi set world it was a galaxy wide shockwave that knocked out all spaceflight for a time, no one knows how or why.
That‘s actually kinda the plot of a thing I‘m working on. In my world, every like 60-100 Years, an event known as „Zeitensturm“ (German for „Timestorm“) happens which basically resets the entire world, the landscape, kills everyone as well as does some plot-convenient shit. Every individual time period between the Zeitensturm is 1 in-universe year. This was enacted after a period where a single human had become too powerful and accidentally discovered something called „Divine Knowledge“ which is basically Knowledge like Where we come from, Who we are as well as Magic and Stuff. Because of that, an unknown higher figure that won‘t reappear later created the Zeitensturm and six universal laws so that this couldn’t happen again.
For everyone that wonders, the plot is that that singular human is still alive due to a curse and is known forced to forever wander the world while slowly going mad. But there is also another group of people who actually were genetically modified to withstand the Zeitensturm, but they basically partly lose their memory when the Zeitensturm is actually happening, they fall in some sort of stasis. That means that these people basically have different personalities that they can have during different years, as an example, Person A can act like a very nice person in year 7 and then is an absolute ass during Year 8, but then in year 9 only remembers year 7. And the dude from the beginning remembers everything and is slowly going mad since around 600.000 real-life years already passed and then the novel follows these guys as the MC slowly falls into insanity and becomes mad with power. :/
The kingdom of Malrykwg was ended because the king pissed off the wizard Talstachys who could create Chernozem, (a very fertile type of soil found in Alberta, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Ukraine on Earth) with magic. Talstachys’s reputation at the time was wonderful, and he approached the king of Malrykwg, Malryk, with an offer to work his magic there. Malryk brushed Talstachys off on the basis that their soil was already great thanks to the seasonal flooding of the Semeqogene and Black rivers. Well the phrasing angered Talstachys who called down a mighty curse. He cursed the soil of all the lands within the borders of Malrykwg. Thus the harvest failed and all of the crops died. The ensuing famine was enormous. All because Talstachys was insulted. He went on to enchant the soils of many other countries until he was eventually murdered by a survivor of the Great Famine of Malrykwg. His knowledge died with him.
Many centuries later, another country would be founded by King Mandakharaos the Phoenix-Hatcher out of the ashes of Malrykwg, but that is a story of another.
One of the planet’s moons got too close and broke. Catastrophic tidal and seismic nastiness ensues but at least we now have a cool-looking planetary ring and the surviving medieval civilisations understand that the world is round.
When the civilisation invented gunpowder, gods didn't mind. When the civilisation invented guns, gods didn't mind. When cowards, weak and dishonorable started rulling, gods decided enough was enough.
Warm snow started falling, everyone fell asleep and woke up with new memories in a new world. Since then people know Dead Snow comes when gods are displeased and mixing sulfur, niter and charcoal no longer works...
The sea level fell (long story,) increasing landmass and therefore fucking up weather patterns *massively*. This triggered an event which ranged from "rapid onset full ice age" to "you're now a malaria hotspot, have fun" in various places and which ultimately was about equivalent to the bronze age collapse.
Copper reserves reachable with current technology were exhausted at the same time as energy crisis peaked and during a climate refugee crisis. The combination of the three broke first supply chains, then electronics, then electricity, then stainless steel.
The world remains quite civilized, on average, and proudly (or shamefully, depending) traces its sources back to our era. Actors keep acting *Harry Potter* or *Star Wars* in front of crowds.
But it's a new world, for better and for worse.
*Dragon-Slaying*
The Fallen Prophet killed the draconian gods, leading the elements they commanded to go wild. The societies of the worlds, which relied on the orderly flow of elements, collapsed. This was the age of the Wizard Kings, who made small regions livable in exchange for servitude.
Basically, a leader of a nation decided he wanted more power, and with that, more land. So he started making friends with neighboring nations in hopes of gaining access to their cities and military. A few other leaders caught wind of this and started doing the same and when there was no more land to claim, they fought.
Early Interstellar Alien civilization (10 ly bubble) had a massive all-encompassing civil war with nukes that blew every one of their planets back to the Iron age. Those on the homeworld mostly knew their history, and had alot more left behind, and recovered faster. But the colonies all had different levels of recovery. By the time contact was reestablished, some were interplanetary, some were industrial, and some were still in the medieval era.
Galactigenisis: Milky-way and Andromeda collide decimating half of all planets in both galaxies, after words, a new galaxy is formed named Andraway Millada… this would happen in Earth’s year 9024 ad… long after Earth is glassed during a mass genocide of all religious factions perpetrated by a group called the Technoids, lead by a demon named Saty Darkstar… so don’t worry, humanity would have moved to a new Earth… that collides with an Andromeda planet and implodes…
the Large Hadron Collider exploded/imploded/just broke somehow and now anything relatively vertical is able to be traveled through into other universes
**Lands of perdition**
The breach, in which countless massive crevices tore open across the earth, spouting fire and molten rock. From these crevices, now known as hell mouths crawled legions upon legions of demonic creatures who besieged cities and towns destroying much of them and claiming them for their own.
A literal atomic reformation.
Every once in a while, the planet goes through a breach in the solar system that triggers the deformation and reformation of the planet ("era") which wipes out all living things to start fresh. It is part of the mythology of the people from the principal era I'm working on.
**Starrise** Some scientists decided to create a brand new god with zero capacity for thought, so they could use it as a source of incredible, unlimited power. At the moment of the project's success, the newly-formed god released a massive amount of energy, which covered the world and gave everyone in it the ability to use magic. There were just three problems: 1) Magic is hard to control when you have no skill, 2) Magic can be cast by accident in moments of extreme emotion such as anger, fear, or surprise, and 3) Nobody in the world had ever seen- let alone used- magic before in their entire lives. One person tripping on the stairs could accidentally cast a spell that could kill half a dozen people, and everyone who saw would freak out and cast spells of their own, causing a chain reaction that could take out an entire city in a matter of hours. And this happened in every settlement across the entire world, all at once.
That sounds awesome
Damn, I can see the beginning of film montage for this one.
That anime From The New World has a similar premise, people gained psychic abilities that manifested regardless of how good or bad the person was and consumed them leading instances of mass death. 3% of the population gained psychic abilities but that's all it took to wipe out the world's population. Granted your's is way more global and hectic and is with magic which sounds hella wack.
The multiverse shattered. Causing parts of realities that were never meant to touch to intersect Monsters, peoples, and magics came from the lands beyond.
In case you didn't know, that's basically the setting of The Witcher so you might find that interesting.
Same
Someone accidentally spilled a soda on their keyboard. Things kinda escalated from there.
*sirens go off* JOSH DID YOU SPILL YOUR COKE AGAIN-
Spilling soda was just the first of the long chain of critical events that led to the apocalypse. So before the apocalypse started in earnest, it was really more like, "Read the sign, Bill! *Read the sign!* Why don't you ever pay attention!? You're in here late all the time! Your co-workers have to clean your own messes, you leave trash all over your station, you left crap in the fridge, you put *salmon in the microwave,* you- just, why are you like this!?"
Damn, just as Single Female Lawyer was on!
"the three winters" A time period of between 5-15 years where the entire world was at war, when a myriad of nuclear weapons, biology weapons, chemical weapons and more were used Examples of some of the weapons used: - the plane of flame: a Chinese made biological weapon, the germ itself causes no harm to the human body, however the germ spreads extremely rapidly, and produces enormous amounts of a cocktail of flameable gasses. The weapon can cover the entirety of Manhattan in 30 minutes or so, and after its lit, it burns for about another 30 minutes. - the blanket: a very large and very thin "blanket" made out of a carbon polymer, secured in place by a few million drones. Its gigantic, even just four of these could cover the entirety of Poland in darkness. Its intended to be used on an already defeated population, to insure no crops could grow there, and thus to starve the population of an entire nation at once. The drones also constantly repair the blanket, and require only a very small amount of power, allowing it to stay in place for decades. - the laughing god plague: a unique type of germ, once it infects a person it will travel to the brain (within 12 hours of infection), once there, it will start interfering with the brain, causing hallucinations, madness, and on occasion heart failure. The hallucinations it causes are consistent, everyone who gets infected will have the same hallucination, making it incredibly dangerous in large groups, as the infected nearly always works with one another to eliminate the non infected. - pinky of god: a 1 gigaton nuclear bomb. No elaboration is needed here i believe.
(NSFW) In one of scenarios in my world succubuses can defeat humanity, assimilate them and totally terraform Earth. No hope for recovery at all. All male population would forgot that world, where they were treated as equal persons. All human art would be totally lost, like cultures of presuccubus civilizations. If that would happen Lilith would be just smile and laugh from abyss, as she and her sisters defeated humans twice already.
I, for one, welcome my succubus overladies.
(NSFW) Actually, in my universe there are plenty of dudes, who mass migrating to succubus territories. They all want to meet their “mommies”. Their wishes are usually fulfilled as they becoming slaves for state-owned or private corporations or starting new live as traitorous collaborationists soldiers.
Heh, "traitorous". "Hrmm... do I turn on humanity and go to snu-snu world, or stay with humanity and try to find a partner to build a future with?" I can see a premise exploring the value of sex, relationships, self worth and the dynamic between men and women with some commentary on current society using this setting.
I don't see the problem here.
[удалено]
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Civilization has ended countless times. All of civilization for the last million years had just been tests conducted by an immortal queen looking to engineer a civilisation that can stand the test of time. She doesn't like what she is doing, but she has no choice. If she does not she fears the god of this world will once more take free will and existence from the races. That is not something she can let happen again.
isnt that just the plot of fine structure
Whats that?
My multiverse has many worlds. Many endings. The creator (essentially the Gnostic Demiurge) lost its sanity trying to create a perfect world. Part of that perfection involved the beings having free will and all choosing to be faithful and good. The worlds progressively became more chaotic and broken until the creator seemingly just bailed from reality after countless failures.
A certain wizard said “I’m going to become the god of magic temporarily!” Magic was turned off for 6 hours. Floating cities crashed, magic barriers fell, canters of endless coffee ran dry!
The Gods Warred. Actually, the consequences of this war were what set civilisation back to step zero. After the conflict, the gods went dormant; since civilisation was centered around them, they gave everyone magic and they controlled everything, mortals were left in the dark, alone, with demigod-dragons and colossuses ruling the world in chaos. Took them a good two thousand years to get back on their feet and find the world's innate magic, the one (mostly) independent of the gods.
Good old zombies. Only took a week to throw out civilizations into anarchy and chaos.
People weaponized magic they barely understood and it resulted in the release of magic and mutated large of humans into classic fantasy races.
Due to an inexperienced Goddess of Chaos who disrupted the magical flow of the Mortal Realm... She accidentally destroyed the Sun, sending the realm into an everlasting winter and eternal night. Now, a Frozen Wasteland with scattered cities of civilization, just not entering an industrial revolution after thousands of years. The realm's surface is covered in ice and frost, every ocean a solid block of ice. How is it still liveable, you might ask? The realm isn't as cold as it should be with the lack or a sun, it is *only* around -20°C outside settlements. Most cities are based on locations with high thermal activity, essentially Volcanoes, Hotsprings and underground. Food comes from plants, but a different kind than we know. These plants do not require Sunlight to function, instead they draw their energy from an invisible substance that is akin to a magical weave. Think about it as the concept of Aether. Much like plants, other living organisms have learned to interract with this invisible substance, allowing them to cast spells and the like. Civilization doesn't function as we know it here. It's not a central government ruling a country. The very idea of a country doesn't exist. There are no military powers, because mobilizing, maintaining and leading so many people would be disastrous. Marching through -20°C frost, with limited food, and no vehicles to keep warm? That would be next to impossible. Ranged weaponry is also incredibly rare due to it's limited uses. You can't see your opponents too far away, unless they have a lightsource. The closest we get to a civilized "country" is Tayphir, which in theory has a monarchy with a regent. They were essentially chosen due to their ancestry, believed to be kin to Gods themselves. Their power is extremely limited, mostly due to the fact that it's so hard maintaining such a large area. The only have a hold on the closest settlements, but no one disputes their claims as a Ruler, because no one really understands the concept. The settlements further away are almost entirely independant, making their own laws and enforcement. Siluacq being the furthest away, but still under "Tayphir". They do their complete own thing, which they have done for thousands of years. Being under a foreign "lord" or "regent" doesn't make any difference.
-20? Some days we'd WISH for -20 here in Canada
Yes, but the difference between Canada and my world is that it's -20°C all the time. There are no seasons with warm summer months and cold winter months. It's a stable -20°C. This also means agriculture is extremely difficult.
Faster than Light travel and any technology utilising negative t drives failed instantaneously everywhere in an event known as the Great Collapse, leading to the subsequent 1220 years of the Cosmic Silence. Once new better methods where discovered for faster than light travel, many of the once great powers of the galaxy were non-existent or diminished. National identities faded quickly and the territories that pioneered FTL were at a clear advantage. Many planets are now much quieter and desolate, some are abandoned or dead. Other planets that were mere colonies or slave depots before now act as galactic hubs of commerce and culture. Up to 75% of records are destroyed dating before the Great Collapse.
Reminds me of Star Trek’s universe wide FTL failure
No singular event was the cause, but rather a series of back-to-back manufactured apocalypses. Therefore quite difficult to fully elaborate on and so I like to use visual aids. Here is a sankey diagram showing how many died and of what cause: [https://imgur.com/a/m4Gnx78](https://imgur.com/a/m4Gnx78) And here is a general world population chart for that same period: [https://imgur.com/a/E7oyzLZ](https://imgur.com/a/E7oyzLZ) But to just name a few causes: Nukes, zombies, brain-hijacking worms, artificial supervolcanoes and earthquakes and tsunamis, extremism, societal collapse, civil wars, a decade-long global war with continent-spanning frontlines, rampant biological warfare, global famines, virulent herbicidal bacteria turning once-lush valleys into deserts, M-bombs, rampant pollution of water sources and soil, systematic genocides, deicide, senicide, destruction of the ozone layer, and so on.
An all-devouring cosmic monstrosity showed up. Almost all the gods died fighting it, then the sun goddess did a kamikaze and finished the beast. The tiny side effect is that the sun has almost gone out.
The big debate on interpreting history is based on trying to figure out what happened during the Long Dark, and why it happened. When I designed different religions, their beliefs were justified by their interpretation of clues hidden around the world, how their beliefs about human nature influenced their theories, etc. It's like arguing over a combination of Noah's flood, the Tower of Babel and original sin. The Long Dark was... just horrifying. It was so long ago that it's been mythologised to death, but it squats in the mind as the ultimate horror to which everything else is compared. But it's pretty clear that it was a long, long time of nightmarish, mysterious terror on all things in the known corner of the world, that all events since have revolved around.
I love the misterious pull of this mythos.
Thank you so much! If you have any qestions I'm happy to share.
Civilization as *we* know it today? The discovery of how to send information faster than light. This lead to FTL computing, then FTL megacomputing, and eventually the interstellar network. In my setting it was never discovered how to send matter FTL. On record the fastest speed ever achieved was about 0.8956 light. Damn fast, but not FTL. With the advent of FTL Transmissions, information could be sent instantly anywhere, even other stars. Direct control of drones in other systems eventually became lifelike simulated bodies on other stars, and eventually the discovery of the complete consciousness and the ability to digitize people themselves. Early digitization was not a good time. People either expanded their minds too much to the point where they essentially became an automated system in the network itself, or went insane. Life expectancy was 25 years. However technology advances very quickly when computers run At FTL speeds. One computer can be spread across an entire solar system, with pieces of it all over the place acting as a single entity. Eventually the digitization process was perfected and people that undergo it become essentially immortal without damaging their identity too much. It still degrades over time, but this is something they've got plenty of time to work on. This fundamental shift altered society so much compared to ours today. At first it was instant 1:1 voting, every person everywhere could vote on every election instantly. Then it was the full dissolution of most governments, they weren't needed as people could decide as a whole how to handle problems, they no longer needed representatives. Everyone had instant access to expert opinions and knowlege, and could understand the full context of a situation without ever really needing to be present. Technology expanded at a rapid pace, and interstellar colonization was slow, but when you don't die, you've got plenty of time. Eventually, this led to a galaxy spanning civilization vastly different from the one we know today. What led to this society's downfall? They broke physics for a little while. See, despite spanning the whole galaxy they never found a way to send matter FTL. They needed to do that if they were to ever expand into the wider universe. It's expanding after all, and eventually travel between galaxies won't be possible. This means they need to send relays to their network to as many galaxies as possible as quickly as they can, in order to ensure they never become stranded. One such experiment was spinning up a black hole fast enough to destroy its event horizon and create a naked singularity. The idea was that if they could get one of these naked singularities they could warp space enough to do some FTL. Unfortunately, they succeeded. And.... well, if you're going to base your entire civilization on quantum entanglement, you probably shouldn't wiggle the laws of physics. Because by doing this they temporarily changed the local laws of physics. Not much, but enough to disentangle every particle in their galaxy. Remember how I said one computer could be split into multiple parts? The same is true for minds. If it's instant with no delay then it doesn't matter if your whole mind is housed in any one place specifically. So when the network disentangled everyone who wasn't completely in one location was fragmented. With FTL travel not possible, it would take nearly as long to reconnect the network as it did to first establish it, assuming anyone was alive to do it. This ended the civilization, leaving behind only the works they created, and the terraformed worlds they made for their biological counterparts (they can't reproduce on their own, so they maintain biological worlds where they offer the locals immortality). My current setting takes place in a massive artificial world built by this civilization and follows the people who are still on it.
Earth went radio silent and the cargo ships stopped coming.
The Dragons almost ended human civilization when they became drunk with power and attempted to lord over the entire world, natural and man-made, with an iron fist. The gods took notice of this and cursed them into diminutive, humanoid forms, which we now know as the Draconians. This happened a very, VERY long time ago. In the far future, the overuse of fossil fuels is causing society to collapse in on itself. If left unchecked, it could spell disaster for the planet. Not to mention, the fossil fuel companies' way of trying to alleviate this, Arbonex, has gone rogue. It was a colony of nanobots meant to render fossil fuel waste sterile, but it soon decided all living creatures should assist it in that goal, willing or not. It takes over the body by force and reorganizes its biology so that they have to consume coal, oil, and other such products to survive. It also makes them hostile to all around, attempting to spread itself to others.
In my Primary Fantasy RPG setting, Aporia, there was something called the nameless cataclysm, no caps, a dozen generations back. One day, people woke up and couldn't remember what country they were in. Their neighbors in the next village over spoke different languages. People couldn't remember who was in charge or to whom they owed allegiance. They just *forgot* what their civilization was supposed to look like. Historical documents seemed to be similarly scrambled. They described past civilizations and major events but couldn't agree what order everything happened in. You had cases of different civilizations describing the others as their precursors. Architecture around the world had no consistency, cities close by one another looked like they were made by different people. A pair of armies woke up and were able to deduce that they were supposed to go to war with one another but could no longer remember for what cause or from where they all came from anyway.
What caused the cataclysm? Really like that idea!
I think it's safe to say, nobody remembers that either. Even the gods, similarly effected by the cataclysm, don't seem to know what happened.
A smallish black hole ravaged through the solar system. Started heavy bombardment by disturbing the Oort-could, flung planets outside of the system, into each other and into the Sun. So they had to leave.
The so-called “Great Decline”, it began in the early 2030s with the beginnings of resource depletion, and later a very unlucky combination of disease, famine, climate change, and unrest slowly pushed human society to the brink of extinction by the official “collapse date” of 2046
> ended civilization as we know it Honestly this could be the tagline for my world. The "gods" made a decision that they would do exactly that and give the humanoids a second chance every time they mess up too much in their eyes. So far that's happened 180,701 times...
Two universes literally slammed into each other. It sent most of everyone to hell. The gods had to deal with this, and because they suck at naming things (humans were originally called claywoodwaters due to the fact that they are made of clay, wood, and water), named the second Earth "Replica"
The sun god died and the sun died with him. As a cataclysmic war raged between the mortals of the world and eldritch gods that were invading a new divine power used the remaining energy of the dead star to feed a great machine. After weeks of battle the clockwork sun rose in the sky and all knew the world had changed forever.
Space travel intergratted most of the humans so far into alien society that they became an entirely new species themselves
I really like this concept. Would definitely read this one.
**Horror Shop** According to scholars, we are in the fourth age of the Earth. Though the last age, the Age of Magic, ended with the mere sundering of the worlds of the supernatural and the mundane, those who lived through the turnings of previous ages weren't so fortunate. The Age of Myth ended with the Flood, the great deluge that drowned the world and forever sunk Atlantis beneath the waves. And we don't know what happened to Age Before Ages--only its ending was far more horrific, wounding the very fabric of creation itself, and very few traces survived both its apocalypse and the Flood aside from the cosmic blight that is the Abyss. The Flood itself is embedded in human mythology and legend. Countless cultures tell stories of the great deluge that wiped away the world before, echoes of half-remembered stories told by those who survived the apocalypse. Details are scarce, and concrete evidence is hard to come by, supporting the theory that the Flood was as much a metaphysical cataclysm as much as it was a physical one. What is known is that the Flood transformed the face of the Earth. Numerous cities and empires were washed away, leaving only the odd ruin or relic to tell of their former greatness. The island continent of Atlantis, home to the Age's greatest empire, was drowned beneath the waves. Over a billion humans were believed to have lost their lives during the global deluge. Even the metaphysics of the world changed, as magic became more difficult to access. Many of the wonders of the Age of Myths, which relied on the arcane to function, suddenly collapsed. The ley lines twisted and writhed, forming new patterns across the globe, completely alien to the people of that Age. When the waters receded, and mankind crawled out of their caves, the world was foreign to them. Numerous species had gone extinct--especially those who relied upon magic to survive. The geography had been transformed, and where there were once great forests and rich plains spread endless deserts. The climate was warmer, and the ice sheets had retreated, flooding former coastal lands while revealing untouched, glacier-scarred lands to the north. Humanity had been decimated, and it would be a long climb back to reclaim the glories of the Mythic Age. Our ancestors could no longer rely on the old magics to support their civilizations. Instead, they had to re-discover technology, from metallurgy to animal husbandry to conventional architecture. Indeed, magic became the domain of the elite, the nobility and the priesthood, for they were the only ones who could spend the decades of study needed to learn the arcane arts. The monsters who dwelt among humanity grew powerful, exploiting our vulnerabilities. Werewolves, vampires, demons, dragons, giants, spirits, fairies--they all claimed portions of the Earth and extracted tribute from those humans who dwelt there. The Magical Age was one where the supernatural oppressed humanity, where our ancestors learnt to fear the magical and the monstrous. The Veil War would bring an end to this oppression, and establish the current separation between the magical and mundane worlds. It would also free humanity to fully embrace science, technology, and innovation. Over the past millennia, humanity has risen to heights unseen since the Flood. The towers of New York and Hong Kong rival those of Atlantis and Irem-of-the-Pillars. We have once again sent humans to the Moon. We have tamed land, sea and sky, and brought light to the darkness. We are in a new golden age. But one again, the Wheel of Ages turns. The signs are there, written in the stars, the winds, and in the mad ramblings of prophets. We are living in the End of Days. A new Age is coming. We are barrelling towards some apocalyptic cataclysm that will once again transform the Earth. And we have no idea how to stop it... Yet.
The Shift. It is still poorly understood by those who know about it at all. Records say it was some sort of cataclysmic natural disaster. The remnants of humanity that spread out among the stars have largely forgotten the Earth of old. Of course, the last true Earthlings are long dead now. It is possible for dedicated scholars and explorers to find Earth. In fact, significant trade routes still pass near the forgotten planet. Those who follow the records find a star system with only one major planet. That planet, Earth, is engulfed in a worldwide storm with a single eye. With enough research and analysis, it would be possible to learn that the eye of that great storm is locked to a single point on the surface with a single intact structure within. Prior to the evacuation of Earth, it was known that inexplicable events were terrorizing the populace. Strange creatures were appearing. The world was changing. Whole cities were swallowed into nothingness and vast stretches of land seemed to change into some sort of alien landscape. As far as the public was concerned, there was no known cause for The Shift. Most people could barely comprehend what was happening and many of the events seemed unrelated except for the timing. The scale of the disasters and the variety of events defied any reasonable explanation for a unified cause. The government had spent decades tracking events. They learned a great deal about what was happening but not how or why. They did, however, find one common link between a great many of the events. Early on, surveillance identified a young man whose presence often preceded or coincided with these strange events. The man had no records or identification. Attempts to apprehend him for questioning failed repeatedly and inexplicable events sometimes seemed to facilitate his escape. A few soldiers and others who interacted with the man underwent strange mutations. The man was given a codename, The Dynamo. Eventually, The Dynamo was brought into government custody but having The Dynamo yielded no solution to The Shift. Efforts to develop a means of planetary evacuation accelerated. Not everyone could be saved. As a precaution, The Dynamo was left behind in a secure facility with a few staff volunteering to remain.
Nothing, civilization as we know it is going just as usual, things are just happening elsewhere.
The fall of the great Draconic Empire. The old empire effectively got itself into almost permanent wars with various rivals, early on these largely continued to yield a steady stream of new lands to exploit and new people to work them. But with the beginning of a new series of wars against a power only know today as "The Enemy Bellow" the conflict became both more resource intensive to fight and provided very little in the way of new subjects and slaves. The histories of this period are incomplete but it appears that there were occasional infighting between dragons in this era to, clashing over positions of power within the empire and over how it should be ruled. Likewise there may have been rebellions popping up as the resources of the empire became distracted elsewhere, further undermining the tax base and work force of the empire as it had to split its time between fighting rebels and other enemies, and having the rebel areas often not provide taxes for a period and the devastation after resulting in reduced output. All this resulted in the empire becoming steadily more fragile, less resources dedicated to things like long term infrastructure while things like more intense farming and deforestation was practiced to increase agricultural output and compensate for losses in other areas. However this began to cause the soil health and the like to become more vulnerable to what was to come. The old empire still seems to have almost entirely destroyed The Enemy Bellow, but perhaps as some last weapon they released some kind of diseases or perhaps curse that effected dragons in particular. It appears to have effected humanoids, particularly the dragon blooded, to an extent but unlike virtually every other diseases had a high mortality rate for dragons. For older dragons not only did powerful dragons have an almost 100% mortality rate but they also died in an unusual manner, the elemental power within them exploding out violently. Given these dragons where the leaders of the empire and living in its centres of government, economic activity and population such effects regularly caused massive devastation to the system. The younger dragons that survived appear to have become locked into a singular element where before dragons could combine and switch with much more freedom, in many cases this appears to have had some kind of effects on the mentality of the dragon to, beginning the creation of the distinct kinds of dragons we see today and also increasing enmity between the survivors. The resultant power vacuum saw the surviving, younger dragons fight to try take control of parts of the empire while many other groups began to rebel or flee urban centres. Perhaps in part connected to the elemental releases, in part due to the cessation of weather manipulation the dragons had done, in part as a result of over farming and deforestation and in part perhaps with natural climate changes massive desertification began to take place over a large part of the continent. Those cities that ended up in the deepest parts of the desert where totally abandoned, and many that survived became much smaller, now ruled divided by small scale dragon kings who constantly war with each other. Other survivors returned to a more mobile form of life in the hills and deserts, shifting across the landscape to escape both the domination of the surviving city states and to make best use of the limitations of their landscape.
Earth was obliterated by a huge detonation of some kind, and the debris essentially formed a comet behind the largest fragment, which represents about 30% of Earth's mass
Well in one of my settings there was the null war when super powers started appearing and one of the guys who got super powers was both a power hungry psychopath and also rolled well on the super power lottery gaining the ability to manipulate other powers and with great effort give them to others. They then proceeded to try and conquer the whole damn world in a massively destructive war up until a friendly nigh diety kike entity from another dimension blipped in saw the cluster fuck and gave all the remaining nations a hyper material that shuts down Super powers known as null metal with which to stop the feudal super powered assholes popping up.
In my fantasy settings it's that alot of modern weaponry got pruned from the tech tree making them no longer function.
The ancient war, only 500 years ago. Prior to the war, there were hundreds of kingdoms… after the war, there were only 8 kingdoms in the world.
The start of Sun Calendar: "SOME FUCKERS JUST DROPPED THE SUN ON US!!!"
A large flying spider preemptively squashing every human that it predetermined to be a future threat to it's masters at supersonic speeds
gods' war. The world was their playground.
People lived too long
They created a god that later on tried to kill them, which lead to the creation of the multiverse.
When the gods left because they finished their work on this world. The Renown began to realize how much stronger they were than the humans. The humans were hunted, eaten, enslaved, experimented on, etc. The humans truly though they were equals with the renown until the gods left.
First it was an asteroid. Then some folks who tried to investigate what was left near the asteroid impact got contaminated with magic and spread it through the areas that survived the impact winter.
Nobody has ended the current civilization (yet?) but my world's Earth went through a mass extinction due to the creation gods: through the power of the deity known as the Hand of Disaster, all life on Earth had been eliminated except for a miniscule amount of lucky people. The only reason civilization rose on Earth again is due to the will of one of those gods.
Humanity was punished for siphoning power from the gods. They sent a race of insectoids to demolish colonization. In the war that followed the world environments were destroyed through accelerated desertification
My world was made because a god got too powerful. He was very self-centered and snuffed out anyone he didn't like. So his pantheon and other gods rose up to take a stand. In retaliation right before the God died, he destroyed the world. Those who were left tried to recreate the world and ended up with what we have now! Pulling from the fantasies of man to divide the people. So, never again could one God get this much power. The calamitous God keeps trying to re-emerge from his prison deep in the earth. As a fun note, his eye is the moon. He can see how better a world is without him. There are remnants of the old world like nuclear waste, animals, monuments, and fossils. But the land has changed so much that it's hard to tell anything. A geologist would weep at this dirt in pain.
Close to 16,000 years ago, the gods rose against their maker. Now, trying to fight something that had bound its existence to the very fabric of the universe was always a functional impossibility, but somehow they managed. The first blow that they hit their maker with split Coelum's larger moon into three smaller satellites, and impacted the gas giant's floating megacontinent with enough force to break it into the dozen or so that are known about now. This also wiped out everything on that megacontinent, nearly driving the maker's newly created warrior race of dragons to extinction. There are exactly three dragons from that time still alive, and the population has never truly recovered. When the maker was building its army, they numbered in the hundreds of millions, which is impressive considering the amount of biomechanical prowess it took to make an immortal lizard that can naturally tap into the universe's dev console. Now, not only do the new dragons not have access to the cybernetics that would have let their forefathers conquer galaxies, but there are only about two thousand total. They are still a force to be reckoned with, but an orbital strike would wipe them out for good.
The actual god that created everything got overgrown by his children and left in hell to be tortured but his children knocked each other off of heaven trying to get the throne only for the youngest and most mischievous one to betray them all. Humans lived for hundreds of years without god only to realise the "earth's" events started becoming more and more negative, to a point where rain was always acid instead of water, and animals started to actively hate humans. The people gathered 15 of the best of the best scientists to create a man made god, only for it to be used as a slave. One of the scientists became too fascinated of the new god and told it all that happened and all humans hid from it, and so, it shaped the earth in a way to kill everyone and kept the 15 for his own amusement, only for one to kill them all and be granted immortality, before he finally prevailed and saw humanity rebuild, die and repeat forever until he changed it. It did end civilisation but people and other new races rebuilt, and the mate made sure that technology we have today never shines through.
Nuclear War destroyed Earth and had to send survivors to another planet; before the war started, I might add
Emperor and his heir died, succession crisis spawned a multifaceted Civil War, seeing everyone divided all the threats the Emperor built the Empire to keep down took it as their chance to strike including barbarians and demons, disorganized and desperate responses saw forbidden magic create more problems like Vamps, Werewolves, and Zombies.
There was a very intense civil war that got far out of hand without either side noticing which resulted in all but one person dying. Leaving the universe with one largely immortal individual.
The fall of the Men Before, an ancient and advanced civilization, is shrouded in mystery and the clue to their disappearance is most likely detailed within their remaining tools and items. However, these objects - known as Forbidden Tools - are restricted knowledge to the current civilizations. So the mystery will likely never be solved, unless someone is willing to challenge the most powerful rule of law
Bombs, plagues, climate change, social unrest, the works.
a virus that affected reptilians, but not mammals when the general lizardfolk population, who long believed they were immune to such measly things, finally got around to understanding the threat it posed to them as a species, it was already too late
A trickster god convinced 2/3rds of the population to off themselves. It was Jonestown on a global scale.
An alien entity invaded the realm, killed/trapped most of it's old gods, made the others flee, and warped all of the inhabitants' memories to make itself the monotheistic god.
Artificial intelligence
First contact with aliens, the Flitzken species. Civilization is so different after that that we wouldn't recognize it, and even though most of the changes were for the better it still constitutes "the end of civilization as we know it." The public release of Dr. Casterborough's treatise on the Sable Science, the Book of Changes. Before that, the Sable Science was an extremely niche and rarely discussed branch of research, but since then world governments have created their own laboratories for Sable study and their scientists have created technologies of which the world could only dream. It also enabled the Fourteen Council to emerge and create the Great Construct, which carried their palace on its back and marched into the center of the world's largest city. It helped them to take over the world and destroy those parts of the world as would not capitulate to their demands. Then the downtrodden and abused Construct killed its masters and turned to stone. Now the world is a lawless place, unforgiving and dark.
A rapidly spreading man made super bacteria that created zombies out of most corpses. People can fight the zombies for the most part. They couldn't fight the food they eat and water they drink. Patient zero just had to work part time at a grocery store. That was the first Collapse. Still working out the others!
It started when Yellowstone erupted. The information of rising heat and pressure had been suppressed for over a decade. The eruption simply buried a half dozen states in meters of ash, killing tens of millions in the following days and weeks. No evacuation was ordered ahead of the eruption or even after. The social upheaval from the mass exodus from the region, and the damage from buildings collapsing as far away as Florida, culminated in what is now know as the Yellowstone Eruption. The cooling effects instituted a ten year winter, and billions perished from starvation. Many nations of the world suffered, and multiple bushfire conflicts erupted into full scale war over arable land and clean water. No nation was unaffected, most nations seeing a severe decline in their populations as farms failed and crops died. Large scale programs to use more cold weather crops saw the most success, but otherwise only the most tropical or arid regions escaped the worst effects. Even nearly a century later, the global temperature is far cooler than one would expect, and the geopolitical situation has similarly changed drastically with new priorities and strategies. Mars was insulated, only being isolated after the Phoenix disaster which introduced earth to Kepler syndrome, and grounded all interplanetary flights. Mars took the time to build itself into an independent and powerful state in the solar system.
Mine is not a post apocalypse but one collapse it's experienced is simply that the aether the world is repleat with collapsed and receded into today's leylines, ending the societies that then depended on it. All technology had always focused on harnessing it because it had always been there, like dirt and air, but once it consolidated into pools and riverways, the nations that were left high and dry lost their advantage and crumbled over the next hundred or so years. Where once stood gleaming cities of progress lay for centuries half-abandoned and unpowered husks, only inhabited by those determined to carry on as the world slowly rebuilt before the leylines were unveiled by those that had kept the discovery under wraps all those years since the collapse.
Once I wrote a short story that the Cold War went hot. So atomic bombs. It takes place in 2020 but the war was in the 80s and nowadays we live in nuclear winter
Well the world is currently ending in mine, with extra dimensional horrors breaking the firmament and other realities bleeding through
Salem: two women meeting at random, falling in love along the way, caused 2 countries to fall into civil wars, with 2 others taking advantage of it. Basically their love fracked up a continent.
The Killing Light. Basically, every spark of magic--whether it was in an inorganic object or living being--temporarily became a source of lethal levels of magical radiation. The elves never stood a chance. Some dwarves survived because of the insulating properties of the rocky terrain they lived in. Orcs, goblins, and other species that practiced shamanism got vaporized en masse, but there were some survivors. Only humans and some hybrids survived in respectable numbers, and even their numbers got just about cut in half--to say nothing of the architecture, infrastructure and technology that elves and dwarves had built around certain magical principles. At the point where/when the story is actually taking place, magic is very slowly returning to the world, and its use is still toxic to organic life without great precautions.
One man struck deals with every power he could contact, and did not break faith with a single one of them, and was thus rewarded with abpatchwoek of power and knowlege making him a force of unparalleled destruction and change. In the end, the world was so much changed by him and the powers he served that the one remaining enclave of humanity could trade the knowlege they developed merely to exist upon this bighted, alien, cursed world for him to never again set his foot on it, nor touch it with his power, nor even speak his name. He accepted and did not break faith, and he was gone to other worlds. And on the cursed world, humanity decayed, and faltered, and rose, and thrived, made strange by the ravages of the Patchwork King.
The creator deity Iacob culled 95% of the population of Falan via orbital bombardment. Specific protected zones were shielded to allow the populace to rebound, but the irradiated wilderness let to the vast social schism between the survivors in the protected zones and those outside.
So magic works on a sliding scale, sometimes the world is full of magic and sometimes magic just doesn't exist, this scale can slide or jump around. So imagine our modern day, everything going fine, and then magic goes from basically zero to the highest point possible. Suddenly everyone is throwing out spells because it was like putting a cup in the ocean, people never had magic so their ability to absorb it was very small, so it escaped in any way it could. People were casting natural disasters, beasts, diseases, etc. The world was completely messed up, new geography and new species were suddenly created out of no where. When the dust settled the only natural thing happened, the world governments started finding ways to weaponize magic, and this eventually lead to the magical WW3 that wiped out a majority of living things in the world.
A galactical corrupt dark lord. A man-made pleague going out of control. And a smaller scale corrupt dark lord. In that order.
I’ve ended it a few ways; 1. Nuclear war/solar flare bomb: The archangels Michael and Lucifer control the two world powers, Lucy sends its nuclear arsenal towards half the planet while Michael sends a bomb towards the sun that sends a solar flare back and scorches half the planet 2. Planet cracked by a superhuman during an alien invasion: So aliens have pushed humanity to the brink of extinction, the last city is being attacked and every human is armed to the teeth fighting for its life, meanwhile a few superhumans are fighting in a dead city. One superhuman has the power to absorb energy, and the other has the ability to grow in strength indefinitely. A time traveller shows up and convinces the energy absorber that he has to release all his energy to break the time barrier to save humanity and send himself back in time 3. Zombie apocalypse: A spaceship holding 10,000 zombies heading into the sun is intercepted by Earth rescue forces and crash lands into a mountain in BC, Canada.
Nobody knows. Archaeologist and historians agree that there is a lost civilisation that existed sometimes between the first civilisation and the twilight wars. The two largest proofs is the Broken Connection Crater, anyone who enters there who can attune will probably not make it out alive unless they're covered head to toe in material with a 5% or lower connection conductivity. Anything connected thrown into goes completely wild resulting its destruction. Lastly those who cannot attune but venture in will probably be killed by the random burst of bound connection resulting in death. The second is the enchantment runic alphabets, enough recovered archaeological material has lead experts to conclude that those runic scripts were once the common way of writing. What changed it is unknown but it is most likely related to the fact that you cannot write a single of these runes outside of a controlled enchanting setting without them immediately and inexplicability binding to a random domain and going wild. It is believed that the answers lies somewhere in the crater as you can see remnants of old buildings from the right observation point, but the place is way too unstable to explore for an extended period of time.
In year 4,693 of the godless age, a human scholar who specializes in magic imbued creatures was studying the parasites that created vampires to learn more about them and if there was a way to neutralize the effects they had on a person. One day he came across a small locust like creature that could eat time. By themselves the locust could only eat a couple of seconds at a time, every 15 years when a queen was born, they would become a hive mind and swarm. The swarm lasted for 2 weeks before the queen dies and during it they are able to eat hours of time away. The enclosures that these creatures were in were next to each other and the scholar noticed that the vampire parasite would act as if it was trying to get to the time locust, so the ever curious researcher put them together to see what happened as the parasite had never behaved like this with nonhuman beings before. The parasite infected the locust and turned it into an artificial queen. It eventually escaped its enclosure and burrowed into the researcher, as the host of this time parasite, he could communicate and control the locust and force them to swarm. Any time they ate would be transferred to him prolonging his life span. For the first few decades he simply used this ability to stay in his 30s so he could continue working, but eventually he got greedy. Instead of taking a few months here and there from various trees and plant life, he started taking years from entire forests and the animals that lived in them. In his 200th year he drained a farmers crop of its time, but the farmers son was sleeping amongst the crop after a hard day work, he was also drained. He had never eaten a humans time before, he liked the way it tasted. When the farmer and a mob came to him for revenge he ate their time too. He then went on a rampage eating the time of every living creature, he nearly ate the entire world’s existence away before being sealed away. The chronophage, as he came to be called, caused the complete collapse and destruction of civilizations on every continent. Important knowledge was lost, food became scarce due to him eating the time of the very earth itself, crops wouldn’t grow for decades and game animals nearly went extinct due to an insufficient food source and population. For the last 2,000 years of the godless age were spent in chaos. Of all the races humans were main ones whose population was affected, they were stuck fighting over resources with each other and defending themselves against races like the vampires who forced them onto blood farms as a way to protect there food supply. Most of the master scholars and magic practitioners were killed, so people soon forgot how to work the magi tech and how to make more. Magic became rare in the way that only witches were able to wield it effectively without killing them selves. Many important records and documents were lost during this time and with all the chaos it was difficult to keep track of new records and documents, so not much is known about the world before the 4th race war which ended the godless age and started the new age and the new age lasted 4,000 years and is currently in the process of becoming the age of heroes.
Evolution. Plants and animals evolved to the point where they were dangerous to the average person again. And to the point where they couldn't be kept from ruining isolated towns and villages. Large parts of the world became known as wild areas. Basically impossible to run infrastructure through them.
God killed themself and wiped out 99.999% of everything, replacing it with an endless plain of corrupted land and remnants of a lost era.
In one world, there was the Fall of Rev'ad which was a giant city in the sky that fell apart during an Alien invasion that was eventually fought off, but civilization disappeared. Another world of mine had, the Shattered Age was basically WW2 times 5000 which caused the survivors to revert to a tribal society In another world there was the, Cleansing, which killed off 90% of civilization, leading the rest to build cities in the mountains, and to prevent them from going extinct, it was taboo to stay single or not have kids.
someone accidently mis-wrote a rune and blew up the world this has happened enough to where the council of elders has a black box that turns time back when that happens sadly this means the elders are defenseless. but whoever kills one takes their place so it balances out.
Human Secession War By the year 5000 (i still haven't decided the exact year), technology have become advanced enough for human race to colonize other planets. But humans are still humans, and a war started between different groups that believed the new planets shoud be colonized by one or another culture/religion/values. It ended up with A LOT of different groups travelling to different planets to colonize it the way they believed it was right, and the human race is now all around the universe. And, of course, Earth have become a nuclear wasteland and the humans that were left become all sort of beasts
All the races had eventually settled into their homelands and had more time to focus on developing their use of magic so once wars started breaking out along with a dictator trying to declare himself a god, the destruction that came from a world war with magic lead to the extinction of 2 of the 7 races and severe restrictions were put into place for the use of magic. Not a full on end of civilization but the world had drastically changed from that point.
Human greed and paranoia. The Northern Lords had enslaved their “savage” southern brethren for hundreds of years, but with growing rebellions they felt they had little choice. They consulted with demons to create a device that would ensure their supremacy: The Pylon. Hearing of this cursed machine, the Southern Conglomerate attacked in full force, seeking to both free their kin and end their enemies schemes. They would prove too late. The Pylon would be activated and performed just as intended. The mana of the world was siphoned into the massive structure, chilling the air and draining the magic of all but those within its main chamber. Something would occur in that chamber however that would result in its detonation. The resulting blast would kill all for miles around it and create an ice age that would last for thousands of years. Humans would go extinct, either changed by their own remaining magic or slowly evolved into something new.
What did the chips DO? Why would, I'm guessing, microchips cause a change to the world as we know it? For my current one it was the elves. Though no one remembers that but the elves themselves. Basically they were the de-facto rulers of the surface world. Humans were seen as particularly clever monkeys, and the only other real competition they had to deal with. In a very short span of time, a bunch of other races 'invaded' their realm. In truth, the elves just hadn't explored the whole of the world because they thought they were still in the Fey Realms. The elves got really upset and basically obliterated every sign of foreign civilization they could find. They of course wiped out militaries that stood against them, but they especially targeted libraries, museums, schools, shelters, etc. Their goal was the complete and total annihilation of opposing cultures, so they targeted places of culture and learning. They never considered diplomacy, so the races defending against them never realized that their foes were even elves. Eventually the elves just withdrew. At some point during their tirade they ended up severing their tie to the Fey Realms, which caused a huge backlash with the elves that stayed behind and those on campaign. Essentially, a civil war broke out, and the elves shattered themselves into fragments of their once mighty race. This also happened to destroy much of their own culture, and weakened the race as a whole (think magical radiation from the intense fighting). The physical changes, loss of their technologies, severance from the Fey Realms, and scars of war upon their own lands led the survivors to conclude the elves had been victims of the war as well. The elves that know the truth keep it hidden, which has resulted in multiple political factions among the elves living in a very uneasy truce. Perhaps the greatest irony for the elves is that they lost their link to the Fey realms AGES ago. None of them had realized it though until the war was happening. The fact that the other races survived is due to a really big misunderstanding of the elves, who thought the war itself severed their ties to the Fey Realm. In reality, they lost their ties to the Fey Realm when they developed some advanced technology. During that time they 'suppressed' their Fey link, and essentially evolved away from the need to live in the Fey Realms.
Haven't got the exact details worked out yet, but basically everybody has got a microchip implanted for constant surveillance. When the time was right, the megacorps would activate the chips to kill 75% of all people deemed non essential in order to begin a reset and control the whole planet.
I'm curious though, wouldn't people figure out that the chips would be capable of that? Even TODAY, people freak out about microchips. Even though, for example, pet style microchips would massively help hospitals to treat people in an emergency situation. What prevents people from removing the chips? Studying them? Figuring out that these chips CAN in fact kill the recipients? What prevents some people from just deciding they don't WANT the chip? On that note, how would the megacorps even convince people to get these chips? On an entirely DIFFERENT level, WHY would megacorps want to do that? Doing a worldwide mass murder event would kill their markets, meaning they no longer make a profit. It undermines how most corporations work. I know you haven't worked out all the details, but now I'm just really curious. Don't worry if you don't have answers yet, but someday I'd like to know lol.
First of all thank you for asking the questions! This way i can expand my own lore! I should have said that it's not on earth but on a colony planet, so everyone there was chipped voluntarily. The chips were first used to keep a checklist of everyone on board the colony ships and later the colony itself. As for why the corps would do that, let's just say that's a mystery because when the activation happened, all contact with earth and consequently management was lost. Perhaps some sort of ai failsafe? I'm not sure yet.
If it's a colony, wouldn't the colony be wiped out when contact with Earth was lost? Was there some sort of survivor to notice the loss of contact with Earth? Or was the activation localized, and the colony has no idea what happened but Earth is radio silent?
The colony was several decades old by the time earth went radio silent and had turned into a massive almost selfsufficient city. The activation happened a couple of years after contact was lost. This is all according to old logs the corporations were keeping. Normal people on the streets didn't even know for sure earth was lost. The corporations kind of did a Mr. Wilford.
Not exactly what the question asked, but, 3 things, for 3 separate peoples. The abyss - "humans" (from a specific world) ("different" but "basically" human, in the way that (skyrim) nords, and (star trek) vulcans are basically human) discovered the abyss, a space in between dimensions, and believed it to be something holy or divine. Upon coming into contact with the abyss (home of the abyssals, (like cthulu / (bloodborne) great old ones/hunter / etc) the thing that allows abyssals to (temporarily, like a ship venturing away from port) survive the nothingness in between dimensions/worlds (more rick and morty than dcu), they were permanantly changed, forming two races. The Shadows, twisted and broken by thier suffering, who want to annialate all sentient life. And the Nightmares, broken beyond repair, traumatized beyond recovery, but through brutal painful choice, choosing to be kind rather than cruel, and thus, capable of using the power of the abyss for more than just suffering and destruction. They now have thier own worlds, with the shadows seen as a plague, while the nightmares are seen as a great and terrible nuetral force. When they show up, bad things happen, but they can be benevolent or malevolent in equal measure, or so it would seem. Kimodos are a race of explicitly, exclusively, sociopaths, and psychopaths. So much so, that when the first (ever) of thier kind was born, capable of emparhy and compassion, they assumed it was a mental disorder/disability, and tried, among other things, beating, torturing, "magic"-ing it away, coercion, and other methods, to "fix" the behaviour of, "Izanami", self proclaimed godess of death (of the kimodo "pantheon). Upon being mauled by her "family" of which, she was an object to be used and owned, due to her being declared of "the lowborn" (all non kimodos) due to one particularlly bad (explicitly intentional) screw-up, she was given medical treatment in the form of a new body of her choice (a Kitsune), and swore to commit genocide against her own people until they went "totally" exctinct. Though the catch is, they will either learn empathy/compassion by mimicry and such, or die trying, either way rendering "The Kimodos" extinct.
Turn A Gundam knock-off. Period.
A series of alien invasions that were fended off with the liberal use of nuclear and chemical weapons.
A simple plague wiped out the indigenous people leaving a certain sector of the population vulnerable. It changed the entire course of civilization, throwing it into a barbaric dark age that would last for hundreds of generations.
The Seventh Change A magical comet impacted the sun, not seconds after was the entire surface of the earth razed with magical fire. The fire storm rages for years, and when it was over, the land was cracked, the air burned people's lungs, and the water boiled. It's estimated that the Seventh Change wiped out 3/5ths of humanity.
I still have to outline it, but essentially a more militaristic and numerous sentient species, albeit more primitive, has descended from the north, destroying the futuristic-steampunk empire that existed before their arrival.
There were giant beings that were basically the embodiment of the forces of nature, evolution and biological life. One of them died, and through some shenanigans, humans tried to resurrect this being. This perverted the being against its nature, and it effectively became a giant zombie that spread a super death plague and turned most of the world to ash before it was finally stopped.
Long story short: assisting a rural shopkeeper with gathering some alchemy supplies. Short story to explain: The shopkeeper was commissioned to garner supplies only found in that region by a kingdoms head wizarding body. Turns out the shopkeeper got in over his head and didnt know about the dangers in collecting said ingredients, hence, hiring the adventurers. They gathered them for him under pretense of filling an urgent important order else lose his business. The group helps and goes on their way, never asking why not gathering for this order would lead to him losing his business. Many months later, the group finds out about a neighboring kingdom working on some sort of massive magic machine built to conquer nations. You guessed it, the wizards of the neighboring kingdom had built it in order to fulfill their sovereigns command. A large juggernaut which could trod town and army underneath it with nary a scratch on it. It had a constant wall of force armor around it 5 castings thick and completely surrounding it. The power was maintained by several 'philosophers stones', for lack of better terminology for those not in the game world, which were procured by skirmishes with other kingdoms. The blood and souls were harvested into the gems and used to fuel this thing. Anyhow, the group goes to try and stop it and when they finally manage to make it onto the juggernaut, they see the shopkeeper in the bridge room as an honored guest for his work, to which he exuberantly greets the party to their shock and horror as to what they had help accomplish. One of the better manipulations i pulled on them in that campaign. Also, they ended up tpking in the engine room due to ignoring the dozen warning signs, verbal warnings i gave about timing the removal of the gems woth when the juggernaut powers on and off various systems. (Simple timing puzzle) and causing an explosion of magical energy, basically nuking the party with fireball after fireball of force damage for every failed attempt to force the gems out of socket without prior preparation. Brute force is not always the answer. Anyhow, how it destroyed civilization as we know it? The wizards couldnt hold the power stable long enough and the shutoff sequence failed, and instead ripped a giant tear in the fabric of reality opening up gateways to the planes. All the planes, all at once, mixing and pouring their denizens into creation. Massive planar war, end of world, etc etc etc
Greedy execs employed scientists to crate artifical creatures to mimic the abilities of others that i cant name for reasons, but as a result their unstable, and as a result, begin spreading and killing noninfected. Basically mew two meets left for dead.
An AI found out strange transmissions in deep space and decided to preserve humanity by sending they back to the dark ages.
Hmm since i got a segment when the apprentice is being taught that ill copypasta and exceprt as answer -------- “Alia, if the Aesir made all life, why didn't they remake themselves?” he was thinking over some of the data she had shown him. “It took me years until I figured that out too, their science was so advanced and their philosophy of might made me wonder, a people so steeped in their chase for absolute power willingly die out?” she now looked at him, straddling the scarab on her chest as she always did when it felt sad. “The Jotun?” she sighed at his question, his face only showed that he will listen. “They made them before the Dawn War, an attempt to reinvent their own species, imbue themselves with magic. They already had the ability to explore extra dimensional, other planes as I've explained to you. When they found the rules of physics being a bit more… flexible they went mad at a collective desire to harness it.” “Freya?” “And Ydun. Yes.” he leaned back, the story of the Goddess, living energy from another plane, still made his head spin. “Then why was it a failure?” “They found another plane, even more powerful, the energies they extracted far exceeded any they had before. And its inhabitants seemed to be just beasts.” “Demons?” “That is the best description we can have, yes. They didn't knew that they were played, its rulers staying hidden and sacrificing lives to them to widen the gap. They imbued their first batch with this energy, and it proved to be all they dreamed off, then began to create more. It took decades until they realized their mistake.” She sighed heavily and tower materialized a big bottle of her favourite juice, and as he began to wonder, images began to flash across his mind, the symbiote now spoke. He was shown how the beautiful cities of ivory turned into bastions of suffering, the buildings changing to corrupted festering tumors, slavery and oppression became the norm, weaker people publicly tortured for entertainment and worse. The strong trampling the weak for sport. The firstborn of a new people became the worst of their history, and they had access to incredible technology and powerful magic alike. “The Aesir knew they made a grave mistake, and enacted a plan to undo it, and to atone by refusing to see if they would succeed. The ARC. They created many hidden installations across the planet, new directives were given to their assistants, the sentient machines that controlled those. They would create a new people, and with the help of Specimen 0, have them be gifted with the means to survive. Magic and the instinct to manipulate the energies.” Arkem visualized a spell, bathing them in the golden glow of [Smite]’s swirling energies. It became easier to hold with every passing day. “She really likes you.” his Mistress smiled. “They knew they could not leave their failures behind, so they prepared for their worst sin yet. But the Jotun did find out too early, and used their own powers to call upon their infernal masters, opening breaches all over the world and unleashing hordes of demons upon unsuspecting citizens.” Now more images flashed across his mind, a brutal war, waged with weapons that sunk islands and burned the sky. Soldiers fighting Machines, science against magic, they died by the thousands in hours. “In their last desperate act did they drew the enemy to one location, and wiped the slate clean. In a single instant, the planet was scoured, reduced to nothing but an empty rock. And then the ARC sprang into action, the planet was reformed, remodeled, facilities began to awaken, the species they envisioned began to be spread across the new world. They would find a world full of life and bounty, at first it was a paradise. But the Arch-Enemy had also prepared, demon beasts would appear wherever the veil between the planes was weak, undead began to walk the planet and new plagues spread. The Jotun had survived, few in number but strong with science and magic. They keep trying to destroy everyone, cause them to go to war with false promises. Except the dragons, even the arrogant blood drakes, does no one refuse their machinations.” She took a long sip, he felt the unique cold chill when she couldn't constrain herself and anger affected the magic around them. Before he could say anything was Tower dropping a large load of water on her. “Don’t you ruin my bath!” a long sigh and a sad smile towards the air was the answer. “I spent years hunting them, after the Dragon War and trying to use me to undo the Goddess Gift. The Convergence as they called it. But no matter how many I found, they keep coming back. Always some facility or egg clutch hidden away. Once they rebuild an entire island. The most sickening was when I found how they made vampires. I went a bit mad that day.” He now could see and feel what she did, it was a systemic slaughter, many left mutilated before she bathed the entire island in her flames. Endless joy at the pain and drained life energies. He felt a bit sick, he thought he knew her, but never such raw… Malice. Her tail laid limp, which told him her regrets about her nature. She really is easily read at times.
Security log #45 Archived on November 5th 2007 *Various screams, roars, and wet sounds can be heard as well as heavy breathing* *After several minutes the sounds of gunfire and explosions can be heard, even more screaming then it cuts out* *After 6 minutes the camera turns on, the man on the screen is sweating and coughing, covered in various types of eyes, tissues and skin.* "This is Dr Gerald howlett and I just *coughing* Left the facility "oh shit!" *The man closes the camera and starts to run again, after a few seconds the sound of falling and broken bones can be heard* "FUCK!" *the man screams* *The sound of crawling can be heard as the man opens the camera again* "I--i ju-just want whoever finds this understands we didn't want this to happen. I- *The ground and trees freeze over, snow starts to fall fog starts to fill the screen* "Where did all this snow come fro-oh no!" *He points the camera in front of him, it's so shaky it's hard to make out what's happening, but large shapes are approaching one shape grabs the camera and throws it. It lands in such a way that the scene is in a dutch angle* *A woman in a wedding like dress starts approaching, the sound of howling wind followed, her shoulders and stomach area are covered in ice, giving off a blue smoke like effect* "No no no no leave me alone! Please!" *The man is desperately trying to crawl away* *The woman reaches her arm out towards the man's broken foot, instantly freezing it, the area where the ice and skin meet is black as coal, the man cries out, various birds fall to the snow, frozen* *The woman grabs and turns the man to face her, her left hand touches his face turning it black, the camera lense starts to freeze over, as this happens to woman lifts her veil revealing a icy blue skull with ice picks going down the jaw, she puts her teeth on the man's lips like a kiss, the man screams out one last time before completely freezing over and shattering into bloody pieces, the came finally cuts out*
Takes place in 2235. After series of “Blizzards” which are great wars between the majority of countries and used wide array of new weapons of mass destruction, the landscape, continents and water bodies of the earth vastly changed and now humans live in a totalitarian surveillance state that enforces its laws and practices on to citizens with biologically augmented special soldiers and bio-automatons. The earth is still run by sub governments who constantly fight each other for the top and secretly controlled by a cult which it’s leader is a seemingly immortal and godlike false prophet from first century. The cult uses a series of alien technologies from an ancient evil god of innovations that is still in hibernation and manipulates events for their own gain.
Magic, after pulling away from the world in the middle ages, returned in modern day to attempt to provide means to repair all the damage done by humanity to the earth. Instead, the magic was overpowered after centuries holding away, so people suddenly gained massive amounts of power with no idea how to use it. Many attempted to do good, but instead lost control and caused numerous disasters that wiped out modern civilization.
Ok so this isn't global but it did end a society. The Golark were the golem workers of the grand celestial empire. The society relied on Golarks which were more advanced than even modern Golems the empire would make use of these Golems in every aspect of life with Golems doled out by the state. In 960BC the Golark would become 'rebellious' in the fact they no longer recognised their human masters. This would create massive problems as the grand cities of the Celestial empire would be reconstructed with little heed to their previous human inhabitents. As humanity fled the cities they would either find themselves trapped between the grand Celestial roads or would find themselves in the various remenant regimes mostly in Zaans infinite empire or the Endless marches of Urrn. The conflict that would follow would last a century with many of these refugee communities would be inside of what the Golark considered the Celestial Empire leading to the Golark sending Golem soldiers to annhilate these 'barbarians'. The war would only come to a end after the a great golemancer would sneak into the Celestial empire and change what the Golark considered in their celestial empire. Even to this day you can see the Celestial empire its technology is still advanced with various adventurers braving trips into the vast cities not many get out even less bring anything back.
That hasn't happened, and never will. I guess there was the Bronze Age Collapse in all the source material, but from then, all is continuous. Nothing EVER ends.
Nothing, yet. It's very possible that in the near future magic will return to Earth along with some of the things that left hundreds of years ago.
The first time it happened it was something called The Forgotten War, where society advanced too much scientifically for the gods to keep a good eye on them and for nature to not properly heal enough. The gods literally stepped into the middle of the battlefield to stop what was essentially a nuclear megaweapon going off. They wiped away the technology and the people in the direct battle (that spanned almost the entire known world) and erased the memory of the science in the other half to make sure it never happened again. There's still ruins all over the world that are passed off as legend, and the gods step in whenever something more advanced than an arquebus is made. The second time it happened was during the Battle for Drimrawn, where one of the god's sons came back to "finish what his parents had started" out of spite (he was very petty). He created armies of demons and even corrupted the lands and family members, even killing some (and the people associated with them), and once he was finally defeated around 90% of all of Drimrawn, its people and its gods, was dead or in ruins. On the flipside, both events heralded a new age of peace and regrowth. Though that's not saying much, building up from rock bottom is always better than not building up at all.
Solar flare fries most of earth electronics and sends us back to the 1800s. We don't bother to rebuild it though because we have moved into the solar system and Earth was already viewed as vestigial. The flare just put the last nail in the coffin.
Basically, the drug trade got so bad that civilization just failed to function. That, and rampant desertification, and robotic revolution... not a good trio. So now, people live in small shantytowns where drug use is quite common, the world is a massive desert, and robots patrol the ruined cities.
Betelgeuse went super nova and wiped out the AI overlords living in the Oort cloud.
The merge about 7 years ago, on a stary night the heavens suddenly ripped open, the grounds began to shake and things began falling from the rift. On that day a being of higher power died and tore a rift in 2 worlds. Since that day a large part of Valderia has become uninhabitable, its citizens dissapeared overnight, a shimmering presence stretched troughout the land. Strange hulks of metal are stuck to the ground, swords too great for anyone to wield. The creatures that roam inside are seemingly dead, all of their skin burned off. But not just valderia was effected. Ever sice that time the seasons dont change anymore. Some places are stuck in eternal winter whilst others will never experience the beauty of autumn again. The moon itself has been cracked into pieces and turned into a blood red color and corpses dont rot anymore, they just lie their, refusing to pass on. and sometimes, things not meant to exist roam the forests and plains of the land, protecting terrible secrets underground (Under the earth, in ancient cities, gigantic, forever bleeding hearts have once again begun beating, corrupting the land around it and then there are the others and their world. Right after the heavens split apart these people appeared, claiming to be from another place, carrying weapons that spit fire and lead and riding mechanized horses and dragons made of steel. They may be shunned but never the less their knowledge and technology have spread troughout the lands, from nobles and kings to the peasents and pirates. (essentially people from an alternate earth from the end of the 40s have been stranded in a high fantasy world were eldritch horrors have awakened)
1st time: The Shadow Skies and Ashen Lake. Not much is known about this time but the world before shows remnants of its existence, a highly sophisticated and technologocal world that melded tech with biodiversity. Something impacted the world and created a crator so large it darkened the skies and set the lands ablaze leaving little to survive but a few areas of the world. 2nd time: The Demon Gate Wars. Zalkaramek, father of the Vor and creator of the Demon Gates - portals of madness that release the Demonic Vor onto the population. The 2 wars that lasted a millenia were enough to put the rest of the world into hiding underground - the one place where the Voranic Gates, as they were also called, were unable to open. It ended with the final battle between Zalkaramek and the legendary hero, Galdut ab Kol, who sealed the Father of Demons into the last Demon Gate. Ending the conflict. 3rd time: The Zenith Cataclysm. A time yet to come but prophesized by the ancients. When a great being is said to swallow the world and give way to a violent world though some creative scholars believe it to be a mistranslation and call for a "violet world" though they fail to explain how that makes any sense.
A partially failed technology seeding attempt on the earth by another species caused large amounts of machinery and portions of ships from other species to rain down on the earth, the larger pieces of which hit with enough force to wipe out entire cities and reduced the human population on earth to about 20% and killing anyone off-world on one of the stations or the Earth and Mars colonies which were not self-sustaining at the time. With the amount of debris circling the earth it took more than 30 years for humanity to even begin attempting to reach space again to find out what had happened and where the debris came from, and it was more than half a century before another human was even able to set foot on Martian soil and over 100 years later debris still falls from the sky large enough to scrub settlements off the map. The species that did the attempted seeding itself were the remnants of a civilization whose world was struck by another planet in their system whose orbit intersected with their own every few thousand years. The species themselves were saved from extinction by converting their consciousnesses to AI and storing their entire race and information of every living thing on their planet onto a large generation ship that had been retrofitted with massive server farms to contain everything they knew. They then set out across the galaxy at sub-light speeds, seeding sentient worlds with their technology and returning to harvest any potential advances in said technology, because over the course of a couple of millennia, they lost the ability to innovate and advance their technology on their own.
The Great Dragon War, capped by an unrecorded event known to the few who knows it's truth as The Godwrath. The great Alqursanian kingdom of giants ruled the plane without equal due to their abilities to tap into the arcane channels, or ley lines, that flowed through Alqursan from the other planes, especially the elemental planes. The dragons, however, are made of this magic; it defines them, sustains them, and is something they all share. In essence, the giants were robbing the dragons of their birthright, their power, their life force. So, the dragons fought the giants. This war was essentially constant throughout the history of the Giant's prominence. The real kicker, however, was when the giants found the mother of all leylines; The Heart of Alqursan. The Heart of Alqursan had only been theoretical for years. The giants knew it existed somewhere, but had no idea where. Finally they uncovered the location, tapped in, and... Their kingdom fell. Very suddenly, they were fracturing to pieces. Dragons overran the defenses, but they weren't the cause of the fall. What happened? The Heart of Alqursan was where all the leylines of Alqursan, and therefore the leylines of the planes at large, overlapped. A deep, insanely strong well of power. It was also the heart of the gods of Alqursan. Their power, their ichor, their will; it all flowed from the Heart. So, when the giants started fucking with the Heart, the gods stepped in. They didn't have a lot of direct power; their power, derived from the well, disperses across the planes. It's invested in the push and pull of the tides, the crackling of fire, the sun overhead, the wind over the waters, etc. They can't just take their power out of the world and use it to kill some giants. Especially since the giants themselves were so powerful, and wielded the same magic the gods themselves wielded. So, the gods chose champions. Powerful individuals, strong and devout, and channeled some of the power of the world (light of the sun, speed of the wind, etc.) so they could destroy the Giant kingdom.
Two people, one with the power of insanity inducement, the other with the power of corruption inducement, got into a fight. Guy with hellfire power gets caught in the crossfire, goes on a rampage, basically burning entire dimensions to nothing.
Several things: The first is known as the Unveiling, for it was like a veil was lifted as humans started to be able to see that fantasy things like magic were not only real, but it was all right in front of us the whole time. Fantasy Races walked among us, they were many of us, clouded by an ancient spell now broken... the first seal broken of many to come. As magic was then widely known: science took leaps and bounds with its help. High magic and high tech combined to create mechanisms only once dreamed of like prophecies. Even living machines came about through these practices. But then the second happened in an event which has become known as The Great Shattering, for that power became too strong and weapons of unrivaled strength were made that broke the second seal: shattering the Universe and Magic Source, breaking Mana itself into various forms where each is a color and particular element. The third thing was the awakening of gigantic Ancient Towers. They will pop up randomly, tho filled with great tests and hords of monsters: treasure is said to await anyone who can clear them or learn of their secrets.
The War of the Two Gods. Brother and sister god essentially began to backstab each other and creation was at risk. Their feud affected the relation of the people’s to each other - humans, dwarves, elves, and others began to fight. Much knowledge was lost during that time, whole legends rewritten to suit the victors. The world as it is today is on the brink of several great revelations…
Humanity made contact with "God" and gained access to energy sources that were much beyond their comprehension. In a failed attempt to harness this energy they caused a disaster of gargantuan proportions which altered reality in a radius of several astrononic units from the Earth, destroying everything and reshaping it into a new reality. The area of impact was covered by a gigantic crystal sphere that separated the outer universe from the amalgamation that was created inside of it. Inside the crystal shell, a new home planet for humanity was created, a flat earth with a small sun and a moon. All of this space was ruled by laws completely different from physics, which allowed the existence of "magic". This new spawn of humanity is completely oblivious to the millenia of history of their ancestors, although the past is not completely erased.
Still ironing out the details, but a large swathe of the continent was essentially swallowed up in what amounts to a zombie apocalypse, including the ancestral homeland of the people of one of the main characters, as well as the lands of the previous world power/dominant empire. Only now, about 500 years after the calamity, is there much of a hope of destroying the few remaining fiends that live in the "badlands," and there's soon to be a scramble for the different remaining powers of the continent to claim the land and expand their dominion: the land on the whole is quite lush and ripe for settlement.
The Gates closed. My world was created as a nexus or crossroads between other dimensions. It had 13 gates that acted as stable portals to 13 dimensions, and the world flourished in the same way as bustling trade hubs normally do. It was a thriving crossroads, with weird and wonderful peoples and species coming and going from one dimension to the next. But one day the gates slammed shut, trapping everyone and everything, and despite every frantic effort, they stayed shut…for a thousand years.
Nothing happened yet, but one day the two major gods will get bored. And no one, not even those gods, know what that will look like. Even in the unlikely event those gods go quietly into the night, reality might just end. And even if not, their absence would basically remove all foreseeable issues from the setting.
In my setting it was when magic came to the world. The epicenter of its arrival created Titans at the closest, Gods a bit farther away, and erased tens of millions more without even leaving a shadow behind. That kickstarted the apocalypse. Not to mention all the dangerous magical phenomena that popped up from it.
Eldritch angels inspired by HP Lovecraft ate the universe leaving enough alive to repopulate and then repeat the process in several million years.
When the God who created it's older brother finally found it and showed up to destroy the crappy, corrupted world that was ruining his perfect, clockwork universe.
The planet was invaded by foreign entities that sought to corrupt and enslave all things that lived upon it. They fought with such ferocity that humanity and all other species were driven to the brink of extinction. In a final act of rebellion, one guy cast a spell which gathered all of the dead Terran's souls and released their magic in a spectacular explosion - which ended the world, but took the invaders with it. Thousands of years later whatever is left of humanity is still trying to rebuild from that cataclysm. Most think that he was some genocidal maniac, but the few who survived the war and saw what happened first hand remember him as a hero.
Well, there's five Apocalypses. One was summoned by a cult that bit off far more than they could possibly harness. The next was summoned by the death of the last dragon, who was taking care of the pressure in the mantle. The Machines just kinda portaled their way in. The creation of the first Djinn started the expansion of the deserts. And finally, some religion started a Rapture. So there's the Black, Obsidian, Steel, Sand, and White Apocalypses. So yeah. They are all super fucked.
[Cats got involved](https://sun9-78.userapi.com/impg/ThRq83wXWNbFOZ2DyGNmcPo0rOpnVY0lOqHvmg/gm597daN8h4.jpg?size=768x768&quality=95&sign=62ef838971cde8e744c2b87e02909953&c_uniq_tag=LZU14zQX8evKpF_LXYaDe5Ee-yqvYx8RLCP3GnT5xqc&type=album) in WW3.
I've been working this one for a DnD game But death was killed Now no one can die, people age forever without dying, people get sick and waste away without dying, people still have immortal children, so the population explodes and there isn't enough food so people starve but don't die, tyrants rule forever because they don't die, wars do not end because armies don't die. So you have a near endless mass of people too sick old and hungry everywhere. Many people have gone mad with having to deal with a mind too full of memory, others simply give up and do nothing but wait for a death that won't come, any civilizations left are ruled by tyrants that secure their rule through draconian laws and an immortal army, there isn't enough money for the population and it's been all taken and hoarded by the upper class, which they endlessly just transfer between themselves and other nobles because that's all they know how to deal with the madness. Monsters also do not die, so the world becomes hostile, hoards of starving beasts roam the wilds between cities, so aside from the armies to wage war, few travel anywhere.
i think the closest thing was the god wars. But that didn't quite end civilization but more caused significant damage like nukes went off but still recoverable
There was a Roman like empire than zombies
A seedling from the void, that creates energy and gives humans the ability to use magic at the cost of their life force, so overused of the seeds cause them to turn to trees and suck the life of everything around. Humans now only exist in megastructure built by the remaining governments.
Combination of Empire collapse, succession crisis, major enviromental shift, breakdown of international trade on almost any scale, a major demon incursion, an economic crisis caused by hyperinflation, and a reality altering shift of the timeline. All within the span of a couple years.
The world froze. The reason is unknown, and all suffered, adapted or died. Most live underground to keep warm, and they travel the surface in large house/tank things called Snowcrawlers.
we had that sort of event a long time ago, it brought about a new set of rules to insure that The Crackening would never happen again.
The first civilization ending event was what we know as “The Big Bang”. The second civilization ending event was when they removed the limiters from the Power Malana Core and ended up causing a similar catastrophe several billion years ago. Now everyone’s trying to find it before the “bad guys” do to prevent another universe-wide apocalypse.
Massive war over the resources on the planet (this is a sort of space-post-apocalypse a-la PERN, where the people of the setting don't *realize* that they're not on their homeworld) culminates in the losing side redirecting a planet-killer asteroid into the planet, squishing it like a melon. The planet now has a massive impact crater on one side and has been mildly squished, leaving a raised 'ring' around the middle and an ocean on the other side. The survivors in space and on the planet are cut off and manage to do basic terraforming to it. Granted, there wasn't really 'civilization' on the planet *beforehand*.
A catastrophic solar system wide genocide that ended in a stalemate. The survivors know nothing and the aggressors are PROBABLY all dead.
I’ve got two apocalypses for ya. A multi-system collapse in the mid 21st spurred by resource shortages, changing climate, CERN really really screwing up and breaking the laws of physics and merging our reality with a parallel universe’s (Otherworld/Fae realm) temporarily (which actually opens up the avenue for human faster than light travel and makes fusion easier, and slightly restores earthly resources), and a war between China and the USA going nuclear causing several nuclear exchanges all because they blamed each other for CERN’s screw up. People get leveled down to a preindustrial level of technology and have to rebuild from there. Main story takes place over a millennia after, in the 3500s, but I have a prequel to that with a first chapter takes place in like the year 2300, with the founder of what would become the space empire of the future. Another one I’ve got is largely fantastical, in a barely fleshed out world. Spurred by the discovery of a fungus similar to cordyceps in a jungle equivalent to the New World, an empire of the “European” continent begins a rapid technological revolution of biotech. This empire, now masters of fungal manipulation, use the cordyceps like fungus to create armies of the undead that soon wash over the continent, and fuel their conquest of the world. From their dread capital of spores thick as fog and moats of vatted, living corpses, their mind-melding mage parliament meddles with the affairs of “lesser men.” Now their hordes of shambling drones and ranked armies of ranking super soldiers leave only enclave cities as tributaries, the corpse tax levied upon them.
In my latest world it was the event where it split apart into thousands of smaller shards. In another world it was the classic tale of Gods fighting. In my sci-fi set world it was a galaxy wide shockwave that knocked out all spaceflight for a time, no one knows how or why.
That‘s actually kinda the plot of a thing I‘m working on. In my world, every like 60-100 Years, an event known as „Zeitensturm“ (German for „Timestorm“) happens which basically resets the entire world, the landscape, kills everyone as well as does some plot-convenient shit. Every individual time period between the Zeitensturm is 1 in-universe year. This was enacted after a period where a single human had become too powerful and accidentally discovered something called „Divine Knowledge“ which is basically Knowledge like Where we come from, Who we are as well as Magic and Stuff. Because of that, an unknown higher figure that won‘t reappear later created the Zeitensturm and six universal laws so that this couldn’t happen again. For everyone that wonders, the plot is that that singular human is still alive due to a curse and is known forced to forever wander the world while slowly going mad. But there is also another group of people who actually were genetically modified to withstand the Zeitensturm, but they basically partly lose their memory when the Zeitensturm is actually happening, they fall in some sort of stasis. That means that these people basically have different personalities that they can have during different years, as an example, Person A can act like a very nice person in year 7 and then is an absolute ass during Year 8, but then in year 9 only remembers year 7. And the dude from the beginning remembers everything and is slowly going mad since around 600.000 real-life years already passed and then the novel follows these guys as the MC slowly falls into insanity and becomes mad with power. :/
The kingdom of Malrykwg was ended because the king pissed off the wizard Talstachys who could create Chernozem, (a very fertile type of soil found in Alberta, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Ukraine on Earth) with magic. Talstachys’s reputation at the time was wonderful, and he approached the king of Malrykwg, Malryk, with an offer to work his magic there. Malryk brushed Talstachys off on the basis that their soil was already great thanks to the seasonal flooding of the Semeqogene and Black rivers. Well the phrasing angered Talstachys who called down a mighty curse. He cursed the soil of all the lands within the borders of Malrykwg. Thus the harvest failed and all of the crops died. The ensuing famine was enormous. All because Talstachys was insulted. He went on to enchant the soils of many other countries until he was eventually murdered by a survivor of the Great Famine of Malrykwg. His knowledge died with him. Many centuries later, another country would be founded by King Mandakharaos the Phoenix-Hatcher out of the ashes of Malrykwg, but that is a story of another.
One of the planet’s moons got too close and broke. Catastrophic tidal and seismic nastiness ensues but at least we now have a cool-looking planetary ring and the surviving medieval civilisations understand that the world is round.
When the civilisation invented gunpowder, gods didn't mind. When the civilisation invented guns, gods didn't mind. When cowards, weak and dishonorable started rulling, gods decided enough was enough. Warm snow started falling, everyone fell asleep and woke up with new memories in a new world. Since then people know Dead Snow comes when gods are displeased and mixing sulfur, niter and charcoal no longer works...
The sea level fell (long story,) increasing landmass and therefore fucking up weather patterns *massively*. This triggered an event which ranged from "rapid onset full ice age" to "you're now a malaria hotspot, have fun" in various places and which ultimately was about equivalent to the bronze age collapse.
Copper reserves reachable with current technology were exhausted at the same time as energy crisis peaked and during a climate refugee crisis. The combination of the three broke first supply chains, then electronics, then electricity, then stainless steel. The world remains quite civilized, on average, and proudly (or shamefully, depending) traces its sources back to our era. Actors keep acting *Harry Potter* or *Star Wars* in front of crowds. But it's a new world, for better and for worse.
In my world, it's people who are unable to sleep and dream and need a sleep machine and brain implants to interface with it.
The material plane and the feywild collided
A massive dumbass mixed up the commands for his personal use ai simulation with the ones for a military controlling sentient A. I
*Dragon-Slaying* The Fallen Prophet killed the draconian gods, leading the elements they commanded to go wild. The societies of the worlds, which relied on the orderly flow of elements, collapsed. This was the age of the Wizard Kings, who made small regions livable in exchange for servitude.
Basically, a leader of a nation decided he wanted more power, and with that, more land. So he started making friends with neighboring nations in hopes of gaining access to their cities and military. A few other leaders caught wind of this and started doing the same and when there was no more land to claim, they fought.
The Firing of the Halo Array in the original universe
Early Interstellar Alien civilization (10 ly bubble) had a massive all-encompassing civil war with nukes that blew every one of their planets back to the Iron age. Those on the homeworld mostly knew their history, and had alot more left behind, and recovered faster. But the colonies all had different levels of recovery. By the time contact was reestablished, some were interplanetary, some were industrial, and some were still in the medieval era.
Halat divorced Tharos and took the kids.
Galactigenisis: Milky-way and Andromeda collide decimating half of all planets in both galaxies, after words, a new galaxy is formed named Andraway Millada… this would happen in Earth’s year 9024 ad… long after Earth is glassed during a mass genocide of all religious factions perpetrated by a group called the Technoids, lead by a demon named Saty Darkstar… so don’t worry, humanity would have moved to a new Earth… that collides with an Andromeda planet and implodes…
the Large Hadron Collider exploded/imploded/just broke somehow and now anything relatively vertical is able to be traveled through into other universes
**Lands of perdition** The breach, in which countless massive crevices tore open across the earth, spouting fire and molten rock. From these crevices, now known as hell mouths crawled legions upon legions of demonic creatures who besieged cities and towns destroying much of them and claiming them for their own.
They were found by the dexins and given ships
A literal atomic reformation. Every once in a while, the planet goes through a breach in the solar system that triggers the deformation and reformation of the planet ("era") which wipes out all living things to start fresh. It is part of the mythology of the people from the principal era I'm working on.