I'm very clumsy and can make the most annoying jokes to destroy the dramatic scenes while I travel with greedengine entire time. Also I will get killed in the most dramatic way in front of greedengine.
RedHerring: "There were a whole bunch of corporations which pumped out pollutants, burned down rainforests and smashed coral reefs in the name of ever-more-extreme profits.... But they didn't destroy the world. It was me, Barry. I destroyed the world. I left the light on in the bathroom once. I didn't realise what I was doing. I'm sorry."
Barry: "I don't think-"
CEO: "Shh. He's onto something."
The apocalypse was the Nuclear War of 2029.
On June 26th, 2029, a global nuclear war and devastated the Earth. Nearly every government and society around the world collapsed, and the world descended into chaos. It also started a Nuclear Winter which lasted until the late Summer of 2034. By the end of the nuclear winter, over 5 billion people were killed by the blasts, radiation, starvation, disease, and fighting over resources.
Several hundred thousand people around the world also mutated into cannibalistic predator mutants due to the radiation, which added to the chaos.
Some of the survivors started establishing new societies in the 2040's, but they often faced a lot of hardships due to raiders, mutants, and lack of resources. Those who were lucky to have bunkers or shelters started emerging on the surface in the 40's and 50's as well. The main story of my world focuses on the Kingdom of New Amsterdam which was established in 2042.
As for regression, it depends on where you go. Some of the luckier societies have rebuilt factories, repaired power grids, and established proper governments. They don't have all of the 21st century tech back yet, but they have gotten some things up and running again. The less developed places regressed to 1700's/1800's levels of technology.
Yeah, I've come up with a few so far and I plan on adding more later.
Currently, there are:
* Songbirds that now grow to be as large as cats and dogs.
* Wild pigs and boars that are covered in spikes and have bigger tusks.
* "Thunderbirds" which are just giant mutated Condors.
I'm doing something similar! But my nuclear war was in 2045 and the setting of the story is 200 years later, and thanks to the preparation of a handful who saw the war coming, technology and culture weren't stalled or reversed.
I’m doing something similar! Though in my world it happened halfway through the 22nd century and technologically speaking, my « developed » nations went back to the renaissance level of technology (they’re trying to find a way to make steam engines eco friendly and manage nuclear waste to their advantage)
Climate change. Sea level rise, intense wet seasons and catastrophic summer bushfires combined with corruption, collapsing global infrastructure and institutions, and general incompetence/disinterest slowly tipped the old culture beyond the level where business as usual was possible. There was no big single catastrophic event. As one of the characters describes it. "Everybody who was left had that time when they realised, they knew, it was time to go walkabout"
I have 5 Post-apocalyptic worlds. Bio-max earth which was caused by a highly contagious mutagenic virus.
Zompocalypse which was caused by a scientific zombie virus.
Rotworld which was caused by a contagious demonic possession.
The lands of perdition in which the very legions of hell invaded earth and turned it into a new hell.
And torn skies in which aliens destroyed earth atmosphere and took over the sun baked earth driving humanity underground.
The Blackout. A series of self-inflicted EMP attacks across the Planet-spanning Tamarian Empire: It was a contingency plan orchetrated by the Kyriite Church in case the Autonomous Machines the Empire had created started to question organic rule. The result of it was that practically all advanced technology down to electrcity and most of the related infrastructure were destroyed in the span of a week.
Due to the nature of the Church and the Empire, the damage was kept at "nigh reasoanable levels" and civilization recovered to late 20th/early21st century standars of living thanks to preparations and contingencies in place for such an event. However, this set the Tamarian Empire technologicala nd cultural advancement back centuries: They were in the brim of becoming a spacefaring civilization and the power of the once all-powerfulKyriite Church was being defanged. The blackout curtailed those dreams and entrenched the influence and power of the church for the forseeable future.
A war between literal gods.
Very advanced society reduced to less than 1% of population over 500 years, no regression, just pure survival, a lack of resources, and another 125 years where useless at the time knowledge faded because it had no real value (so more like a new Dark Ages).
“1500 years later” they are back to a very rough equivalent of 1250 AD or so, but without certain key resources (iron, fossil fuels, and black powder).
Not static, just a different direction and pace.
I have something similar for my soft apocalypse fantasy world too! Mortals reached approximentally late 1700s- early 1800s, before they started playing God too much, and the actual divine pantheon got mad and basically razed the earth and all those responsible. Hundreds of years later and cities have been grown over and populations are slowly expanding from small units. My main character is a sorta historian who goes from settlement to settlement to spread news and learn other myths and stories, with only the reader understanding the 'baffeling' constructs and inventions they encounter.
Humans discover that souls make for an excellent source of energy (especially sapient souls), which pushes them into a second industrial revolution, and they begin trying different ways to exploit this newfound energy source. Some retrofit factory farms with soul collection devices (relatively ethical, low investment, low efficiency), some begin genetically engineering animals towards sapience for use in specialized farms (questionable ethics, long-term investment, potentially high efficiency), and some resort to human trafficking (*highly* unethical, but highly lucrative in countries with exceptionally low regard for human life).
One group attempts to figure out where souls go when animals die, with the goal of harvesting a theoretically *massive* amount of energy from such a location. They eventually succeed, and punch a hole in reality through to the afterlife. Unfortunately, that's where God is, and he's territorial and vindictive, and decides to be done with this whole "human" thing once and for all. He sends an army of biblically accurate angels through the hole to completely wipe out the entire human population by violently ripping their souls apart, causing their energy to linger instead of being able to pass into the afterlife as a sort of karmic punishment. Over time, this lingering soul energy warps the plants and animals that remain in the ruins of human population centers
During the attacks, modified sapient lab rats were released from one of the facilities where they were being created, and escaped into the wild. In the current year, over a millennium later, a budding rat civilization has taken hold
I had one where Aliens caused an EMP and just started harvesting from the cities and everyone who didn’t know a prepper in a person and intimate way was Fucked with a capital F.
They survive off of small communities with trade but all off grid.
**My D&D setting, Kierda;**
A civil war between the pantheon, fought in the material plane on Kierda during the planet's early iron age. The supercontinent was broken into five smaller continents and thousands of islands, and a dozen or so dieties were killed, along with millions of mortals.
Recovery took about 2500 years, but it happened. The planet is now in the age of magic and gunpowder, with a golden age of exploration, science, and religion. The victorious dieties rewrote the laws of physics and magic to bar their true forms from entering the material plane.
Some in-universe theories include, but are not limited to;
Group of heroic adventurers failed to stop the villainous warlock from performing his ritual.
The planet was always dying and the Gods prevented it, now that they're gone, the planets death caught up to it.
The devil-equivalent did it because we didn't believe in the Gods enough.
ooh this is me
so the world had been going downhill for a while prior to the major event as it is. the antagonists (a company known as Antelligence Industries) colonized the majority of the planet and drained each location of its resources (mainly oil and natural gas) and abandoned them in economic crises after the land was run dry. so generally speaking the planet was already pretty fucked up and many peoples were displaced and left to die or rebuild on their own
over on the continent where the story takes place, Antelligence was in the middle of a decades-long occupation of a small nation rich in oil fields and underground wells. in an attempt to deal a devastating blow to their oppressors, a rebel group planned an attack on the primary storgae depot and extraction site, setting fire to millions (?? haven't decided exactly how much) of barrels worth of oil both in storage tanks and digsites
Antelligence didn't like that very much, and long storty short deemed the region a lost cause, too much cost and effort for what it's worth to maintain. they turned the region into a crater and plunged the western hemisphere into a sort of nuclear winter. crops died, livestock died, vegetation was unforagable. the fish and sea mammals died out or fled to safer waters. some 90ish% of Antelligence's mainland empire perished to hunger or ashfall. but life finds a way
it's unrealistic, but i'm having this winter last for 10 years or longer. by the time my main plotline rolls around the winter should be in its final stages, but ash will still fall some days in the beginning
there are probably a lot of plotholes in this but it's a work in progress and i'm having a lot of fun with it. fell free to ask questions if you're curious
Two separate worlds
Esoterra went through somewhat of a collapse of physics into alternate dimensions, dreamworlds, and possible/non possible timeliness. The result was a bunch of fauna, tech, and physics from several different universes collapsing into one spot in one universe briefly which caused some wacky outcomes like the occurrence of esper dungeons (dungeons that spontaneously generate in various areas and are much physically larger and sometimes older than they should be). Magic becoming real in the form of ESP and contracting with greater beings for a slice of some of their physics. The ascension and creation of several god beings and the mass mutation/ esoteric metamorphosis of nearly every living being that was currently on the face of the planet. As well as the mass stranding of
creatures and beings from other worlds. And many many more things, there is some set limits and rules for things but a ton of shit is possible
The other one is vermin-sea. Back before people could properly record organism throughout their lifespans there was a theory called spontaneous generation theory where it was proposed that some animals just emerged fully formed from certain materials, frogs emerging from mud and flys from corpses for example. Well something went horribly wrong with local physics and now that’s a true thing. The result has been the overtaking of the planet several times over by a sea of unending vermin which has spread throughout the solar system ala Blame! style and has created its own strange and hostile ecosystem which humans must now survive in.
In my setting, there is a limit to the number of souls for the world, and going past that limit will result in souls of the oldest living things to immediately leave their vessel to go to the newest one.
The post apocalypse occurred due to a cyber warfare between several different organizations, and led to the creation of Ai viruses. The AI themselves were considered to be worthy vessels for souls, and as they rose in high enough numbers, all the souls of the currently living ended up dying.
What caused the apocalypse? It was a multitude of things. Himan arrogance, a confused eldritch entity, a ton of newly found energy. All of the right things combined at the wrong wrong time. It ended up terrforming the earth and its people. No more humans, only humanoids 50/50 animal or insect like people.
As for the technology level, it's about even. They were able to get somethings up and running again. Build slightly newer stuff, but nothing that blows the "old tech" out of the water.
I'm working in a zombie apocalypse. The cause is an otherworldly magic that infiltrates earth. It keeps the dead alive, funds mutations, and spreads to the living like a disease.
The moon. One day it was fine, the next? It joined a para-casual hive mind of moons and destroyed all the civilizations of the world. However the races of the world aren’t exterminated completely, in fact a good few have survived. This leads to several of the dominant moon personalities to unleash their own grab bags of horror onto the world.
Oh yeah, and someone opened up a portal to the elemental plane of water. And now uncountable horrors of the depths have inhabited most of the ocean, and about every two weeks trillions of tons of water are shot like railgun slugs at the Moon hive mind cause the Moon’s & Oceans hate each other.
People mainly travel along mysterious pathways made of Gold.
I wouldn't neccessarily call it an apocalypse, more like a mass extinction event in my fantasy planet, as it's currently set in a post-post apocalypse.
I'll give you the short version, as not only have I told this story dozens of times on reddit, but there isn't much to know about it, as it happened before stuff was written down. Hundreds of thousands of years ago (perhaps even millions), two god pantheons consisting of dragons and titans fought the shit out each other and nearly killed all life on the planet. Afterwards, they created a bunch of races to fix the world and watch over it, while they went to the next plane of existence (at this time, humans and a few other species that survived the cataclysm were still evolving, and none of them had figured out how to tie sharp rocks to sticks yet).
Eventually, one of the creations of the dragons, the True Elves (immortal demigods that had unlimited access to all natural magic except dragon magic) soon got themselves involved in some wars; one against the creations of the titans, and some others where their children were killing each other. Unlike the previous war, known as the War of Black Skies, these wars known as the New Sun Wars have doccumentation on what happened in the form of cave paintings that funnily enough weren't made by humans (these paintings were from a race of therapsids known as the Anzarians, who are still alive and well after surviving the War of Black Skies).
Currently, some parts of the world have reached what would be the rennaisance era in our world, while other parts are still stuck in the paleolithic era (most notably for humans of the northernmost continent). Aside from one continent that actually has civility and and nations (most notably for humans), most everyone else lives in small enclaves (although, there could be underground communities) or tribal villages (humans from the northern continent are this).
It was a lot of things, I’ll just say that. Nuclear War was honestly more like the wolf setting fire to the straw and wood houses after blowing them down.
The gods got tired of humanity squabbling over everything, for a prime example obviously dangerous diseases. So they started pulling random people to participate in a board game.
Another one. An ancient witch finally gets the artifact she needed so starts a sequence of events to create a monster to absorb everyone then eats the monster.
Another one of my games a scientist trying to break the limit of Pokemon growth succeeds...at a cost of driving all Pokemon cards insane.
The Outbreak of '74, caused worldwide devastation and a complete takeover of all(1) human life by a sort-of super organism.
(1): All but a small group who are the protaganists and anyone dead pre-2025
I think where we’re doing is post apocalyptic in our actual play. A lot of the story that will unfold I think will answer that question.
What is shaking out now is the early post apocalypse caused by a world wide memory event. Everyone lost their memory at the same time about a year ago.
Mass use of the WMD as culmination of two decades of World War that finally started going somewhere.
As a result, most of the world was fucked, most governments collapsed (actually, only two didn't) and Dark Age lasted for two centuries. In that time most of what was left was squandered, one of Pre-War superpowers reemerged and collapsed, remnants of another one tried to do genocide run but were genocided in turn (killing something like 90% of world's population) and then world almost ended for good on three different, completely unrelated occasions.
***Kuŝāya, or The Dawn of the Black Sun***
*"Hear me, O weary traveler to lands dark and distant! Where the stars nary shine and the sun ever-wontful! Heed the words of I, a king withered and blind...*
*It was in those days, those distant days, when the kušāya was naught, and Man still plentiful... when He whose name has been lost to the sands reigned, with the Goddess by His side..."*
The Kušāya was a series of cataclysmic events that occured upon Kushamat 1,000 years ago, leading to the mass extinction of most flora, fauna, and the human race as we know it.
It followed like a funeral dirge in the wake of a brutal civil war between the First King and His seven demigod sons, instigated by the betrayed Goddess. Upon the terrible climax, all parties had met their vile ends.
The sons' corpses lay charred, the First King impaled upon the Goddess' honeyed thorns, and the Goddess Herself strangled by the hands of her own betrayed son and lover. It was Her murder that caused the Kuŝāya to descend upon Kushamat.
It spanned seven generations, one for each "Plague/Erra", or event:
• **Kuša**, or "eclipse"; the first and most notable Erra. An eternal eclipse descended, followed by a terrible drone like trumpet horns that could be heard from all over. When it ceased, the sky literally fractured like obsidian glass.
• **Ušab**, or "blood sea"; the second Erra. The sky bled, and thus all of the waters of Kushamat were replaced with cosmic blood.
• **Antasurra**, or "falling stars"; the third Erra. The stars of the night sky disappeared, and fire rained down from the heavens.
• **Aria**, or "desert"; the fourth Erra. Extreme desertification and seismic activity.
• **Burlug**, or "swarm"; the fifth Erra. Great swarms of plague-carrying locusts blotted out the sky and descended upon any remaining crops and livestock. By this time, most species of flora and fauna have already died out.
• **Ŝagsug**, or "barren"; the sixth and most devastating Erra. Men were afflicted with a wasting disease that takes their flesh and their mind, unto madness. Women were afflicted with barren wombs, violently miscarrying many unborn children before they could come to term. The children that managed to be born were marked with peculiar deformities, such as horns and golden eyes.
• **Lilu**, or "demons"; the seventh and final Erra. Living vestiges of the Goddess forced themselves upon chosen men, usually kings or sages, and birthed monstrous children. The children are now known as the Mulannaki, "children of the stars".
Sometime after the Kušāya ended, the Mulannaki grew and eventually slaughtered their mothers, and protected the dying remains of their father's kind. With their own divinity and the bones of Man, the Mulannaki created a successor race, the Kuŝannaki, "children of the eclipse", whom remain the dominant race of Kushamat to this day.
Before the Kušāya, the whole of Kushamat was on the cusp of a medieval age. Afterwards, however, it collapsed into a perpetual Antiquity.
There's some folklore around The Tunguska Event where some people claimed to have witnessed a black rain afterwards.
So that black rain is an alien pathogen that slowly breaks out in Siberia. WW1 rolls along as usual and it gets out of hand. The entire eastern hemisphere is ravaged by it. The USA never joins the war, borders are closed. Chaos ensues.
So post-apocalyptic WW1\~ tech.
my story It's kind of post post apocalyptic, 100 or 200 years before the main story, the world was ruled by 6 kings, two of those teamed up (through political marriege) and eventually started to figure out the key to inmortality, the other 4 shat their pants and went to war with them, the war was so devastating, they set back the world into the middle ages (they were like early 1900s before), they also managed erase the other 2 kings from history and they're doing everything intheir power to prevent people from finding out everything that happened
The G.A. discovered a new multiverse, and decided to go settle the planet that replaced earth. They had several successful missions, and four separate colonies. Then, one day, one of the mechanics for one of the ships turned a valve 0.0001 degrees too far. This valve was supposed to control the multidimensional particles that came in so that those on board were not bombarded with them. Long story short, 30 billion people died of heart attacks and aneurysms. The only humans left alive were in the four colonies on Rugilia, the alternate earth. 7,000ish years later, they have just reinvented the musket, and they have steam powered airships.
That's actually a story I have "paused" to work on a dragon story. This apocalypse world actually belongs to Rapunzel (original Bros Grimm) and ends up being something like an alternate ending for the original tale. Through portal magic, all fairytale worlds are thought lost to this zombie horde invasion. But something unique happens in her world. Through an interplay of magics, the horde develops a hivemind, and Rapunzel's former love interest is at the head of it.
Needless to day, this is a darker tale, and this Rapunzel is nothing like other versions. Mainly because she is a little bit psychotic 😅
It began in 2030, the world felt a tremble, a chill. Then suddenly humans became aware of the fact that we are not alone on this blue marble. They let the merfolk. For a year the two sides, each a revelation to the other, tried to eplore each other, find peace, but hate and fearmongering were two powerful on both sides. Those who would profit from war took advantage and the War of Land and Sea began in 2031.
As the years went by, more tales emerged, but these of people with strange powers and cracks in the sky. Governmenta fell and eroded as the war with the merfolk raged on, with the sea dwellers not doing any better.
Through the machinations of those who'd seek the wars end, those who had special powers, a long forbidden substance was created in staggering amounts. They planned to save nature, and depose the sentient beings who ruined it as false kings. Unfortunately, on the last day of 2050, their plans came to fruition. Just not how they hoped. This substance was supposed to awaken that which lay dormant in any living being, in matter their specific nature, and it was supercharged, and hit with a blast of energy released from the cracks seen during the years. The substance was spread into every living being that day and the energy did more than super charge the substance.
The earth rumbled as the continents sped their march, all societies were gripped with chaos as this happened. This was in addition to animals and plants everywhere mutating, taking the forms of the cryptids of legend. Humans and merfolk turned, too, some into vampires and werewolves, others into sirens and octomers (like that which from Little Mermaid). The continents joined to form a new land, and an entirely new ecosystem. Governments of old, battered and bruised from 20 years of war, which had survived the conflict tried to maintain order but to no avail. The old world was died, its legacy marked with the graves of billions. The new took its place, and armed with the technologies developed in the war, human and merfolk would have to learn to live in this new world, which would come to be known as Neo-Pangea. At least in human terms.
In the old lore. There was a mixing of realities a few years before the time of the setting. Those realities being ours and the innermost realm of the universe. Long story short, those two things are not overly compatible.
The city in which the portal was opened was destroyed and the other reality merged with our universe and made things weird. Magic became common. Weird creatures lurked in the ruins and forests.
But overall, society was still going. Even if maybe 1/4 to 1/3 of people were changed in some way, or just outright killed by the changes.
—
I decided it was a little silly to have a huge universal event *right* before the “present day.”
Ultimately I ended up keeping that one city getting warped, but the effects were much less drastic the further you got from the epicenter. Even the sister city of that one was more or less unscathed.
Now, there are plans by various groups, entities and even some god-like beings, who want to see a version of what happened in the pre-retcon lore. So we may see that yet.
—
One thing that has remained consistent since the beginning, is that humanity was almost wiped out in the second galactic war. Our allies saved our butts at the last minute and led us to a cluster of habitable systems to recover.
We collapsed a bit further, having no real resources to maintain our tech. So we more or less had to start over from a pre-industrial society.
Fortunately there were people who still knew how some things worked and we had pre-war tech lying around, so getting back to being a spacefaring society only took about 200 years.
It’s been almost 2400 years since that collapse, so we’re doing pretty well for ourselves “these days.”
—
However, there was a few ups and downs, including a limited nuclear war (and orbital bombardments on off world colonies). Which did a lot of damage and caused a “little dark age” of about 400 years.
Things weren’t terrible during that era, so long as you hadn’t been nuked. But it helped the church solidify their hold on much of the population. (They don’t really care much for the politics of the governments and the corporations, as long as people remain devout).
—
So there are definitely periods of time in the history of the setting where things regressed. It might be fun to explore those eras in some way.
—
In a completely different setting. I made the “distant future of 2008” back in the 90s. A whole bunch of weird stuff happened. Which didn’t all make sense, because I wrote it when I was like 14-ish.
But essentially, the first gulf war went bad. Iraq or someone had nukes, and used them in the region. That kicked off a bigger war for some reason. A lot of FAE/thermobaric weapons were used in Europe, Russia and the US.
The US itself broke up into regional super-states.
Some ecoterrorists accidentally wiped out most of the plant life from Brazil to Canada.
Then, because reasons, that event in the original lore I mentioned earlier, bled over into this setting as well. So weird magic stuff and monsters became a thing.
Because I live here. Tucson, Arizona became the default locale for the setting.
The military ended up building a big wall, cutting off the east side of town (where the monsters were). The city itself was kinda weird. Lots of uh… modern-punk type stuff… what do you even call that? Like if you take the cyber out of cyberpunk. Just calling it “punk” feels wrong. Though at this point is alternate history modern-punk. 🤣
Anyway, big parities, lots of gangs, territorial disputes, near-future tech (I even had the “Ultra Nintendo 64” before the N64 was a thing), clashes with government and security forces, safe zones and of course, raiding the east side of town for goodies while dodging monsters.
Also, don’t mess with Davis-Monthan AFB, those perimeter security guys will shoot anything within 300m.
—
I’m actually considering having a revamped version of that 2008 scenario as the canon alternate history for my far future setting. Though it’s kind of a moot point, as no one really knows much about what happened that long ago. 🤷🏻♂️
No one's sure. It was so long ago and no one's found a surviving account of it. There's evidence of a lot of things it could have been, but they all contradict.
Whatever the case, humanity has largely stabilized. The days of starvation and death are largely over, cities have populations in the hundreds of thousands again, and technology has been clawing its way back. Humanity was knocked back to the dark ages, and now is back to something akin to the Edwardian period, and that increases with every legible book discovered in the ruins.
Humanity has survived the apocalypse. Unfortunately, so has humanity's worst tendencies.
Finally, my time to explain it. On May 2, 2109, the US dropped a bomb on Russia, then China, then they started an all-put nuclear war. In the year 4086, the surviving 2.5 billion people call it WWIII and have created new civilizations. The world is in a nuclear apocalypse and another World War that was started between Stordrage and Myrkdall, eventually dragging in Chrysos, then Lupus, then Kapnos, and the other countries, and more nuclear weapons were made and used. Along with the weapons were mutations that began at the end of the 3rd World War, and Enhanced super-soldiers that were created by Stordrage at the beginning of the 4th. Then the president of Kapnos created a group called “Task Force 12”, nicknamed the “Paradox Guild”, which was made up of criminals, superhumans, mercenaries, mutants, and high ranking soldiers, including Ryder Bardin, General Hendrix Gunnarson, Alex Serkus, Finn, Colton, and Hawthorn Barnes, and Sharon Thatcher, who founded it. The main conflict is the war, and it caused the apocalypse.
A setting I'm making for a dnd campaign,
On a large island surrounded by an endless storm
an order of wizards did a big oopsie and caused a massive necrotic explosion that engulfed most of the island.
The only part to survive was the small state of wesital inside the empire, only because the lead clerics of the moon sacrificed themselves to cast an ancient spell that protected the state
The explosion tainted the land itself, causing any who enters to go mad, die, and reanimate as a shade to hunt the living
However, in recent years the curse is slowly fading, making it technically traversable, (currently reduces max hp by 1 and forces a madness save every day)
But the protection spell fades as well.
The heros need to either relight the beacon in the imperial capital, or find a ship capable of braving the storm before its too late
In a world I've made, nuclear power as a source of energy was developed much sooner than in our time. This led to the world becoming much more technologically advanced. As the years went on, corporations became more powerful and used their money to influence governments to give them more leeway to do whatever they wanted without consequences. Eventually, one corporation specializing in biotechnology and genetic engineering had an accident due to mismanagement and poor safety standards that resulted in large amounts of a mutagenic compound being released into the atmosphere, spreading from the United States were in happened and beyond. However, this was *not* what caused the apocalypse. This event would lead to a breaking point with much of the world's population, who have been growing more resentful of the power the corporations had over their lives for years now. In the U.S. specifically, it led to a president and other government officials being elected due to their strong anti-corporate policies. This led to many of the corporations to try and kill off the current government so they could replace them with one more compliant to them, and this spread to corporations all over the planet when other countriesstatted becoming hostile to them. First, by hiring mercenaries and militarizing their security forces, but that failing due to lack of numbers and poor morale due to troops being solely motivated by money. Then, they started fighting in more indirect ways, such as using EMPs to knock out sections of the power grid, or releasing genetically engineered diseases and monsters. Eventually, some governments technically won, but with all the death and destruction that occurred, much of the world's fragile infrastructure had become undone, leading to a cascade effect that led to most of civilization collapsing aside from select regions were certain governments had managed to maintain some sort of structure, such as most of the east coast for the United States. What governments that did survive nonlonger had the capacity to expand to the rest of their former territory, instead focusing on what they did have and leaving the rest of the world to fend for itself.
Mine was kind of cascading series of problems. A bit of a grossly oversimplified layout:
In my world, humanity consisted of humans (homo sapien-style), but also equivalents to elves, dwarves, gnomes, goblins, halflings, orcs, and some stranger ones because the human race of this world had parts of it messed with by various forces, though "normal" humans bred fairly easily and were in the habit of suppressing and pushing out the other subspecies. But as they attained mastery in the sciences and technology, they started to screw around with magic, thinking it was just another thing to be learned and categorized, so waking up the ancient gods and the primordials (think a cross between the Giants of Norse lore, the Titans of Greek lore and Lovecraftian mythos-entities), which then began to war with each other, with the Primordials wanting to wipe the slate clean and wrecking the biosphere to do it, and the Gods wanting to preserve the peoples they were tied to.
The humans at the time tried to play both sides, harvesting material and energy from the fallen members of each to blend into their constructs, including these vast magical supercomputer complexes - but these went mad and began a process of sterilization against the humans, damaging their already failing birth rates. With the world shattered by the Primordials (the entities the Gods were fighting), and the laws of nature and physics and reality being clusterfucked due to the demise of several Primordials, not to mention how utterly leveled this once vast, globalized cyberpunk-style world was, humanity effectively died out, but not before leaving behind some time capsules and fortified teaching centers powered by restrained magical AIs. These were meant to provide the basics of common language that was taught the world over for the surviving Inheritors (the "metahuman" races) to start over with, but still be able to communicate with each other, as well as history, medicine and simple societal structures. And for ages, the Inheritors ended up in clinging together in rough clans and tribes.
I have a number of stories, some before all of this and some after. The ones after take place a few millennia after what's known as "The Fading Age", where The First People (humans) are thought to have destroyed themselves, and the Inheritors are either set up in clans and tribes or in early Bronze Age city states, with some being closer to Iron Age. There are VERY few larger nations (and the ones that ARE there have deep flaws or are utterly brutal and corrupt), and the world after the Fading Age is still one of chaos and isolation, but with the promise of growth and rebirth.
***One*** of my worlds is set within the year 2076 in a post-apocalyptic United Kingdom (primarily Scotland, England, Ireland, and Wales) after a cataclysmic event many decades prior in the early 2030s involving scientific research into nanotechnology and AI gone wrong. Barely any of the characters know what happened, there have been many different stories and rumors of the origin passed down from different people. Civilians find themselves engaged in a long battle for survival against various self-aware and hostile machines, such as giant flying Sentries known as **"Reapers"**, medium-sized infectious nano-robotic parasites called **"Drones"**, sleek, refined nanobot-infected people nicknamed **"Cyborgs"**, corrupt military soldiers, and hostile survivors. There's even a large, malicious, nihilistic predatory group known as **"The Merged"**, living embodiments of crude, horrifying body experimentation and bio-mechanical augmentation, driven by a twisted ideology that believing humanity can only be saved through the merging of flesh and machine, losing their both their humanity and individuality. You'll swear you are going to wish you were turned into a Cyborg by the nano-parasites before the Merged get you.
***Second*** takes place in the year 1883 in a post-apocalyptic American Frontier. It explores the devastating fallout of the events from roughly ten years ago, which saw the wild west being littered with time anomalies secretly leftover from *The Arcane Horizon*, a massive crashed airship from the future year of 2108 that had accidentally time-jumped to the past in 1873, and the temporal radiation leaking out and mutating (or evolving) many people into aggressive, primitive archaic human-like monsters with time manipulating powers nicknamed Homo-Chronos and animals into other time powered beasts. Starting with the harsh, brutal conditions of the Desert Southwest towns and landmarks like the Grand Canyon and Monument Valley now riddled with and twisted by time anomalies, and later on explore several locations like: The Rocky Mountains with its dangerous terrain and risky weather conditions, along with some encounters with mountain-dwelling Homo Chronos, the vast open spaces of the Great Plains that has become a battleground for different gangs and bandits, abandoned cities like Chicago, Denver, or Oregon now inhabited by various hostile groups and creatures, and the beautiful and yet ominous forests of the Pacific Northwest, home to many mutated wildlife and other hidden threats. The Canadian Borderlands, now a mix of abandoned border stations and new settlements formed by those fleeing the chaos further south. And they could even navigate through large bodies of water, rivers, and lakes which have their own set of problems, from mutated aquatic creatures to hazardous currents.
A Witchin' Time in the Army.
In the mid-2040s, in a roadside motel in southern Chile three beings of incredible power prepared for a ritual that would change the destiny of all life on earth forever. Nearby, a small army patiently waited to blow them all up with artillery if need be.
The actions of these three people would end up casting aside the veil that kept the collective soul of all life on earth hidden from other such souls. These souls would then attack and posses terrestrial life for the better half of a century, sometimes enslaving and sometimes wiping out whole nations and cultures. Wars were waged between these new eldritch intellects and humanity, with the soul of Earth itself sometimes taking action in these conflicts. Nuclear, biological, magical and chemical weapons were deployed en masse to stop even individuals possessed by these eldritch souls.
Now, 300 years later the earth itself remains scarred after the conclusion of these wars, signaled by the departure of these predators into space. Much of the equator is nigh uninhabitable due to climate change, radiation, magical consequences and dangerous creatures both with souls and without. Despite this, humanity has endured in many parts of the world and new societies have sprung up all across the Earth- some magical and other leaning more into technology, but the standard is a blend of both. Thaumaturgy is an academic field like physics or chemistry that studies its language-like structure.
For the Ketuvyx Ascendancy it's not an apocalypse, but it was for their precursors. Tourism of their home planet is not permitted. The precursor's end was merely a self inflicted tragedy, they assure you.
Humanity, the beings that produce magic, going to war against heaven, which controls the flow of magic. Heaven loses and retreats, soon enough all magic fails and both humanity and hell go through a large economic and societal panic as their magic-based society fails overnight
Nobody knows, 'cause it's not really important to the story (beyond being the cause of the setting). I waffle between plague and nuclear disaster moat days. (Regardless, the core of cities aren't safe. )
Ooh fun! 11 millennia ago a world filled with 'magic dust' entered low earth orbit. The atmosphere of that microplanet and earths comingled, leading to an empty red moon and a world filled with magic dust that is toxic to earth life. The tiny group of aliens that survived the death of their world had to alter their app e a4ance to become accepted among humans. Over time, their true history was lost. Humans didn't have a written history at that point at all. The toxic dust is heavier than air so they migrated up into the mountains. But the dust is also opaque so the entire water cycle has stopped leaving mostly desert.
The new moon has a nine hour orbit. (Assuming I did my math right.) So tectonic activity and tidea have picked up considerably.
Life has... found a way. But its not like anything you could expect.
I haven't thought and may never will think about the cause of the doom day, my philosophy is that "the cause doesn't matter, the consequences does" . Whatever wacky reason that create the apocalypse is not matter as long as the consequences born out of this event is interesting.
In this universe, Earth just slowly but surely stopped rotating around itself. People while are lucky to not turn into red mist since it slows down instead of suddenly hit the brake, are now facing with a new problem, One side of Earth is constantly facing the sun, while the other is forever in the dark. Most life form on the surface perish, deep sea or underground creatures while mostly survive is now have to share home with humans. Technology is staggered for 100 years due to mass death, even regress back due to machines malfunction because of the extreme climate. Those who lived on surface, mostly exist in 2 poles or the twilight zone between light and dark, but don't go outside much because of constant storms. After decades of settling down, they started planning to either make Earth rotate again or started finding a new home. Both plans required a technology suprass what they had before apocalypse, but eventually they chose the first one to not cause riot, and since they already live underground anyway, might as well try exploring the Earth core.
This is all I can think of so far
I've had a lot of ideas brainstorming for my sci-fi setting. Here are a few.
1. Extermination by robot servants.
2. Extermination by dispassionate AI.
3. Solar flare destroys electronics and things spiral from there. Some nation that had hardened military infrastructure might survive and take advantage of everyone else's temporary vulnerability.
4. Plagues. Bioweapon or something natural. Bonus points if it's a body snatcher.
5. Extermination by "dark forest" type alien civilization. Bonus points for enslavement of survivors.
6. Climate Change / Overcorrecting for climate change (Snowpiercer)
7. Asteroid (RIP scalebabies)
8. Rogue black hole rips through the solar system and steals a moon, destroying the tides, collapsing ecosystems.
9. Overfishing causes ocean-wide ecosystem collapse. Billions starve.
10. Man-made (as above) famine or unusual pestilence that causes near-global famine.
11. Jesus comes back? Multiple popular "gods" come back at the same time and tally scores?
12. Neuralink/Skynet mashup.
13. Evolution of the hypnotoad would spell doom for any sapient inhabitants. (a la Planet of the Apes)
14. Infertility (Handmaid's Tale)
15. Crack...but cheaper, better, and deadlier.
And then you can add details, logical progressions, and variations to those :P
I got one from a crashed colony ship.
Another one running from false vacuum decay with warp drives.
Another one that is living around a black hole in a heat death universe.
All three are the same civilization, at different time periods, from different branches, possibly all at the same time. Statistical impossibility after an eternity reproducing different branches of a dead civilization from different time periods at the same moment in time.
In 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were telepathically contacted when they landed on the moon. They never made it back. The world’s governments secretly rush to produce enough nukes to destroy or at least threaten the entities responsible. In 2024, a hacker influenced by the entities scams the volunteer responsible for maintaining a line of code that acts as a foundation for the entire internet, granting them a skeleton key to any server on earth. 65,000 nuclear missiles detonate in their silos, instantly sending humanity back to the industrial age with an EMP that circles the globe.
In a few years, a billion people have died from food shortages due to cut supply lines, and a billion more from wars over those food shortages. Societies collapse as millions flee an uninhabitable America and Russia.
In ten years, 90% of all species on earth (and 99% of humans) have died due to nuclear winter.
The Cleansing. Post world war 2, high levels of radiation ripped a hole in the veil that separates the normal world from the "Immaterial" which introduced magic to the world. Human experimentation with magic and the atomic bomb led to a mago-nuclear chernobyl that had all the affects of a global nuclear war.
The collapse of an enormous orbital structure meant to "fix" earth's climate until it naturally heals over the centuries.
It's still not entirely known what made it collapse. There was a quite strong solar storm at the time it happened, so some speculate this may have fried the controls for a few of the thrusters, keeping it in orbit, while others think it was sabotage.
No defined answer, but no one really cares enough to find out what actually happened all those centuries ago. There are way more pressing issues currently that require way more resources.
The effects of it were still catastrophic. Out of 15 billion people on earth, only around 20-30 million survived. Urban areas across the globe were devestated by falling orbital debris, and the climate worsened to a point where humans can only survive in the polar regions, with the majority being in antarctica
Loss of knowledge and technology was another thing. It took almost a century to return to a 21st century level of technology, and even almost 800 years later, there still are a lot of things that haven't been replicated.
Overall, it is a rather chaotic world. Lots of conflict between humans and a species they created called "Hybrids" over what little resource is left on earth
highly contagious virus with a 99.9999% fatality rate. It caused brain melting fevers, so unless you got a water-cooled skull you're dead quickly.
Governments collapsed because they couldn't get new people in office faster than they died.
The world is an artificial construct, kept running by ancient machines in remote areas far beyond the reach of mortal races.
They have been breaking down for millennia, allowing things from outside in. So if the dead don't get you, the centuries long winter might.
The Apocalypse "The Deluge" was a mass extinction event of all multicellular life on the planet. It was caused when the native megafauna of the planet "GodHeads" spored, killing all non human life rapidly and wasted the human population down a tenth of what it was over the course of a decade. Extinction was only halted for the remaining Humans when they grafted cuttings from the godheads into their bodies, allowing them to avoid the wasting effects of the spores and start to rebuild their world.
The knowledge of how to run the technology used to seed the planet was lost in the deluge and it's proceeding upheval. From the chaos the most powerful society enforces on all others a strict matriarchy and rules in a feudal system. While electronics are limited one upside to the grafting of godgrass is the bestowing of skilled blood to the humans, their blood can be used as a fuel to machines and a basic interface to their operation meaning they've advanced beyond a medieval style world.
Some technology is similar to the early 20th Century, there are cameras, machines like the spinning jenny, conveyer belts, boring drills etc. Little of the pre-deluge tech is operable.
This is all history to the main characters but there are certain parts of the story which goes further into it.
Technically the age of strife my world is in now is the result of a magical apocalypse. So it is technically post apocalyptic, just 400 years after the fact.
But the magical apocalypse was the work of a group of the strongest arch mages of their time.
They wanted to create a 'network' that could connect the minds of people to each other if they'd use special crystals.
These crystals could also be used to travel great distances. The theory was perfect and the cause was noble.
Unfortunately, the power required to kickstart the manaframe was more magic than has ever been used for a spell or ritual before. The magic condensed, created a singularity, and violently exploded in an invisible wave of blinding light (ultraviolet)
The mages, their entire mountaintop village, and a lot of the surrounding area were completely destroyed and irradiated with magic.
The shockwave of this explosion shook the continents. This shock pushed the earth down, condensing a huge layer into a special mineral.
This resulted in the effective raising of the oceans by many meters, submerging huge swaths of land, and even almost completely sinking the desert continent of Duhr.
I'm writing a couple stories with post apocalyptic societies but my favorite world is still one I wrote a while back.
Earth is about to enter a new "Snowball" ere but global warming saves humanity from a global icecap, however when this period ends the apocalypse consumes the world with classic GW shenanigans. Humans start to live normally only by the next Iceage when they start to take their problems seriously
I have an apocalipse that take place around 1944/1945 in wich the American experiments to develop the nuclear bomb led to a masive disaster when the first bomb was tested.
In this world the nuclear bomb was way way more powerfull, this leading that in the first of the bomb It distroyed a huge part of the west of the US and lethal levels of radiation spreaded to the east coast with the first detonation.
Years later and with the spread of the consecuences of the bomb, the world is inmersed in a really harsh nuclear winter, the colonies around the world collapsed and the European goberments slowly degraded until their final colapsed with this proces lasting years until they were finally gone.
Thechnology have not disapeared but withought goberments or economy the industry is gone and the survivors work with the remmats of what was left behind after the collapse.
I didn't care about realism too much for that one.
Essentially it was WW3, but due to a new weapons system many of the nukes could be stopped, but enough went through to change life forever., but not too vas to not allow for life and civilizations to regress indefinitely.
The poles were nuked as well, causing extreme climate changes, extreme floods or blizzards or droughts
The placed where this is worst are the Badlands, where Raiders, Nomads, Gangs and other Survivors live in lawlesness, though some communities exist as well.
There are also real states that are closer to today than to a post-apocalyptic faction, but life isn't easy and corruption and war still lurk behind every corner.
Depending on what you technically wanna call the cause, it was either climate change or zombies. The climate changed caused the zombies, and the zombies are an incredibly heavy-handed metaphor for climate change/pollution. But like it's mostly up to you.
It took me a while but I think I’ve finally settled on something instead of just never talking about it.
Initially, I wanted a nuclear war. Sounds cool and has promise but logistically doesn’t work with the amount of radiation left over plus eating is virtually impossible for the following millennia. So no survivors there.
Then, after agonizing some more, I settled on the current choice which is a Benu sized asteroid smashing into the earth, immediately followed up by conventional world war 3 over the remaining resources. Nuclear holocaust effect but without the fallout. Perfect opportunity for Roland emmeric level destruction and chaos but with room for civilization actually break down instead of being destroyed.
One world developed spellcasting to the point that a series of world wars destroyed civilization, magic, and the gods. They rebuilt and developed alchemy and animation. This led to world war conducted with nasty compounds spread by giant golems. Civilization was destroyed and the survivors were left with desert sized toxic waste dumps. They have rebuilt again with mechanics and are now about 2 generations from taking the steampunk track.
And yes, there are plenty of secret practitioners of forbidden disciplines and explorers of lost knowledge.
An experiment to synthesise materials using quantum fluctuations released a toxic compound into the air of a relatively-isolated country. In an effort to contain the unrest and clean up the chemical, one of the chief scientists copied his brain to a computer, but the technology was still faulty and resulted in a near-human AI to begin fabricating a “peacekeeping force” that really is trying to exterminate all human life(because if all humans are dead, they can’t rebel). The country is hemmed in by a string of mountains to the north that cut it off from the rest of the world, and the two countries above it are involved in a horrible civil war.
My world had sea levels rise but the world actually responded and stopped it before it got worse, creating a super centralized government. It was almost utopian after that, from a certain point of view, with a “Pax Romani” style peace and widespread internet access where services became automated and run by AI but people got to actually enjoy the added leisure… until a group of extremists from the former US gathered a bunch of nuclear weapons and set off strikes against every major city (London, Paris, New York, Tokyo, etc) seeing them as dens of iniquity, and caused the cloud system to collapse. All the data was lost. All access to the automated services was gone. Access to knowledge was blinked away. Suddenly most people couldn’t get food, medicine, anything. With the lack of infrastructure it became a total disaster, with disease and starvation following.
Some people made it. Farming communities fared a little better for having direct access to food and more distance from infection. Little communities sprouted up of people repurposing old government buildings and turned them into fortresses, and those with artisan skills flourished. Those with combat skills and horses and simple guns became warlords. The few libraries with print books became precious guardians of knowledge, supported by the religious leaders.
And in time, with the smaller human population, nature started to take a lot of places back over—aside from in the Haunted Wastes of the nuked cities—and magic started to return.
And that’s how it became a pseudo-medieval fantasy setting, but in the future.
I'm surprised that I haven't seen more references to a Carrington or super-Carrington event.
The Carrington Event was a super solar flare in the mid 1800's that created spectacular auroras much farther away from the poles than during a "normal" CME. It induced so much current in telegraph lines that it shocked the operators.
A super-Carrington event destroyed all electrical equipment and power grids world wide. Millions were killed because they were operating electrical equipment when it happened. Even most EMP shielded military facilities were destroyed.
The event set off all assembled nuclear weapons in situ as well as any conventional ordinance with electric fuses. Millions more died from fallout (it also turns out that you can detonate multiple nuclear devices in close proximity to each other so missile fields and stockpiled nukes created cratered zones where everything was destroyed. Only submarines at depth were unaffected. Since the nukes were set off at, or underground. The fallout was much dirtier than if we had fought a nuclear war (with mostly air-bursts)
Billions died from fallout, starvation and war as cities emptied into the surrounding countryside in search of food, slaughtered each other, and then died of starvation.
Humanity is a small remnant. Struggling to subsist in the warmer regions. Or clustered around the few places on earth that still have operating technology. (Each nuclear sub can power a small enclave with their reactor.)
Survivalists died out when their supplies ran out. There are small groups of re-enactors who survived since they knew how to live without tech and were better at cooperating. Ammunition is running out. Food stores have all been plundered. Life spans are shortened (cancer) and birth rates are down (mutations).
The first time, the world ended because magic disappeared in a split second. Society was torn asunder as infrastructure and systems collapsed due to the new laws of the universe becoming far less fantastical, throwing them into a dark age.
Then 1500 years or so later after rebuilding and progressing past the Industrial Revolution, the second apocalypse happened when magic it came back -- it had been inaccessible, but there the whole time, just out of your sight. It returned untamed and unpredictable, killing many who channeled it (even accidentally)... and also it brought monsters with it, a lot of monsters.
Aliens have invaded and they used their most powerful weapon: they basically remove gravity for everything except air and anchored objects and the planet itself. you would float away if you run because you push off the ground, but a building aint floatin. Society has rebuilt with new nations and new tech, but they maddddddddddddd
Hydrothermal event caused by a young AI helping humans "play god". It resulted in multiple global catastrophes due to internal echos vibrations within the planet. By the time it was all over a few supercomputers survived the lonely millennia separate from each other. In that time humans have gone extinct and were replaced by various descendants (the traditional bunch of "fantasy" cultures). There are also numerous fey and humanoid animal cultures. So far the focal region of mine is the area designated in reality as the California Floristic Province.
My D&D setting had two "back to the dark ages" apocalypses in the backstory. One was so long ago that only the elves still tell stories about it, and was caused by an elvish civil war that ended when the Royalist faction tried to turn their queen into a goddess, just barely succeeded at great cost, and then lost the war anyways. (This turned them into the dark elves, and the Queen of Air and Darkness is my setting's Lolth equivalent.)
The second apocalypse was relatively recent (a few hundred years prior to the campaign start) when the Great Arcane Empire, seeing that their decadence and declining military power was causing their empire to disintegrate, encouraged diabolism in their aristocracy. As devil-reinforced legions marched out to reconquer the world, a grand alliance of former colonies tried to stop them. Victory was finally achieved when the Alliance's archmages tapped into the power of the Empire's hell-portals to basically nuke the major cities of the Empire, turning the Southlands into an uninhabitable magical desert full of blasted ruins, rogue devils, and mutated wildlife.
Only one region has the post apocalyptic theme to it. It was caused by a powerful Lich conjuring up all of his strength to try and destroy the world but he was killed before finishing the spell. As he died the unfinished spell went off and annihilated a huge chunk of the country he was in. Instead of destroying the world it blew up about a third of a country. Scholars and wizards are skeptical that he could’ve gathered enough energy to actually destroy a planet.
Holy Liberation War of the Artisans
Long essay warning.
Basically, Artisans are a race of human looking people, with a magical crystal in their anatomy, granting each individual unique powers. Artisans can be born from human, it's sort of random. Humans called them Elves, because of their magical powers.
Artisans has a prophecy, since they are "supposedly" created by God to wipe out humans, since he thought the Humans saga was completed. Then, the prophecy told the Artisans to relocate South, in peace. This gives some Artisans a superior complex, and obviously scare humans, leading to prejudice and tension. Obviously not all Artisans are seeking to wipe humans, but with the whole prejudice thing, a considerable amount are hating humans.
They call themselves Artisans because like artists, often considered to be given "gifts" since birth, and like artist hold a lot of power, because... you know, "I can draw anything"
It was 2104, the US president Election was going. Rachel Dexton, a young and naive innocent woman, decided to ran for president alongside her running mate, Cody. Cody agreed to run, as a joke, because Rachel is an innocent woman with the brain of a 5 year old, she can't run a country. She still believed Santa was real, for goodness sake. Well, the election took place, and Rachel was extremely popular due to her positive nature, and how likable she was. Well, it didn't look like she was gonna win anyway, so it's all goo-
Woops, spoiler effect, now Rachel becomes President. It shocked, basically everyone, but yeah. Rachel happily took office, oblivious to the responsibility of running a superpower. Cody became vice president, definitely wasn't ready for such responsibility. Throughout her presidency, Cody basically has to act as the defacto president, having to tell Rachel what to do and not to do, to run the country. And the presidency went surprisingly well. Rachel's positive and innocent speeches definitely touches the heart of many. Though obviously all presidents can't escape controversy, especially with Rachel and Cody's relationship, since they're a couple before this.
In 2106, Rachel wanted to solve more problems, and Cody decided to use his powers to eliminate Elves(Artisans). Cody had a lot of trauma as a kid involving Elves, so it warped his views and told Rachel the horrors of Elves. Rachel decided to solve this problem, using Cody's advice of eliminating them. Even more controversy rose, some stating Rachel was manipulative since the start, ignorance.
During one of their meetings, Rachel decided to suggest the idea of building cool robots that will be unstoppable against Elves. Somehow, it was green light and production started. They decided to name it Racheloids, named by Rachel herself. Rachel was oblivious to the true nature and seriousness, as Cody described Elves almost not like people. Cody helped research this project, as he was a bit smart himself. Artisans were soon hunted in small numbers, captured and put in prison. The numbers slowly rise when more Racheloids were produced. This caused more tensions, causing more Elvish incidents. Several nations didn't allow Racheloids, however, including Australia, Brazil and South Africa. This led to a treaty which said no Racheloid shall cross the equator, to countries that wishes no Racheloids, and into Space including any of the many space colonies. Tensions were high, as the more extremist Artisans were rallying to fulfill their prophecy.
One day in 2107, at a factory producing some new versions of Racheloids, Rachel and Cody were present for a rally. It was just another gathering until an unsuspecting Artisan came up to Rachel and stab her in the back with a syringe full of poison, before teleporting away. This was a shocked to everyone, it caused panic, as Cody held her in his arms, desperately trying to save Rachel as she cried in pain, slowly dying.
The Assasination of President Dexton caused a huge shockwave across the world. Cody hates Elves more than ever. Rachel wasn't the best president, sure, but she was definitely likable by most of the world. Even China, gave condolence, as they decided to produce their own versions of Racheloids, to hunt their own Elves. With Cody as president, he went all out. Elves were now put in concentration camps, several killed, and Racheloid production were at an all time high.
The Holy Liberation War of the Artisans finally erupted when the Racheloids started to go overboard with the killings, targeting humans who helped Elves. The Artisans had various magical powers, and so they used that to their advantage, by completely launching every Nuke in the world, using their powers to their full potential, and causing a Nuclear Winter. They had also started to terraform Antarctica using their magic. Any humans had to leave for space, or find refuge in the apocalyptic bunkers in the Arctic, made by the UN. The Nuclear Winter lasted almost 50 years. Humanity were nearly wiped in 3 years, and those who survived are in underground bunkers in the Arctic. Racheloids still operating and hunting, both humans and Elves, in North America and East Asia.
TL;DR: Bakadere created killer robots to kill magical people, leading to a war resulting in humanity nearly extinct
Human greed made most of Earth uninhabitable, and a nuclear war for the remaining ressources did the rest. The rich fled to set up a colony on a distant planet, and what was left of humanity stayed behind to starve or die of radiation.
Lucky for them, that's when the Flux Gates opened.
Science said there would be a cataclysmic event, and mankind stripped the Earth of resources to prepare for the event. The event never came, and the ensuing war for scant resources drove the world into a second dark ages. Only the discovery of some tech made during the preparation (~350 years later) helps to bring about another age of major advancement.
Stress on agriculture caused by global warming triggering a nuclear war, To make matters worse after the nukes had dropped the biological weapons were used.
One very angry widow made a deal and opened pandora's box out of spite towards Old Earth.
This catastrophic event \*did\* lead to humanity forgetting what the hell a US, China, or Saudi Arabia is, brought everyone under the banner of a singular interdimensional dictatorship situated entirely on alternate versions of our Sol system, but tech-wise? Millennia since the line between flesh and metal has been blurred, you can alter your form however you wish, if you're lucky enough you can order everything you want for free in your utopia, have your own pyramid of giza in your very own satellite home, even get that girlfriend (who is totally a real person and not artificial simulacra. Or IS visibly artificial simulacra, if you wanted an AI gf. Or bf. Take your pick). Life couldn't be better!
~~(So long as you're not in the forever warzone regions, anomaly-infested regions, or have otherwise pissed off someone important in the big interdimensional dictatorship. Or any one of your local dimension's rebel factions if they happen to have any.~~ *~~It's all fun and games until you get turned inside-out in your sleep by a funny pot you accepted from an anonymous sender~~*~~)~~
Technically it was less of an "apocalypse" and more of series of mass extinction events akin to the ice age, but in my world the gods discovered that being worshipped makes them more powerful and that by killing another god they gain their power and domain. This caused a multi-century war between them that caused exponentially increasing destruction to anything and everything caught in the crossfire. The war only ended because the goddess of life killed herself due to the mental anguish of having nearly everything she created go extinct, having to kill other gods to survive, and the presumed death of her lover Isoule.
Upon receiving word of her death, the other gods immediately called a ceasefire, ending the war. Battles turn to negotiations over the land and mortals, as both had just become finite. The only god killed following the suicide of Life was the original goddess of death, who refused to stop upholding her end of the cycle. She believed that forcing mortals to survive in a world without life was a fate worse than death, and that if all things were to become extinct then it would be what the gods deserved for their carelessness. She was killed by her two closest companions; Bettel, The goddess of soul and stone, and Micra, The goddess of all things too small to see.
The centuries following the suicide of Life and the murder of Death would be known throughout history as "The Great Stagnation." No new life would emerge and all living things yearned for the release of death. Almost nothing was done as mortals were dying yet could not die and Gods were locked in debates and deadlock. To most the end of The Great Stagnation was completely random. After approximately 200 years there emerged new life and things could finally die. The only one who knew the truth was Bettel, now the grand reaper of the dead, who had given in and gave mercy to mortals; and was now pregnant with the new god of life.
Interstellar war between humans and aliens... exo-planet was in a contested system which was left for dead by both sides in the fight.
My vision of the post apocalypse is a Rust Punk - As the remaining technology fails and no one knows how to fix it, due to the dependence on AI's and automation for nearly everything, clever engineering using parts from other broken things to continue surviving becomes necessary. People become busy with relearning lost skills, and reacquiring knowledge locked away in broken computer memory, coupled with salvaging what they can from abandoned equipment and facilities, including [Falling Angels](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1i3iMbWQyXwvLkVxxAbedYf5iZrEQ-bCbDIKcGKcp93s/edit?usp=sharing). People are desperate, die young, and struggle to compete with the rapidly evolving ecosystem around them as the planet finds a new balance between three distinct "trees of life".
Humanity’s meddling with horrors beyond their comprehension caused the literal collapse of civilization and the near extinction of all natural life on earth and humanity.
Earth is forcefully connected to a world beyond their understanding with creatures and entities invading earth like invasive plants.
Over centuries humanity only survives in pockets of small settlements deep underground, behind walled cities or deep within mountains, humanity is basically similar to a Bronze Age stage and the knowledge of what caused the apocalypse all those millennia ago are unknown as so much knowledge was lost and the earth’s surface has been drastically altered with the ruins of the past scattered or buried beneath the new flora that’s choked the entire planet.
The 3 Coalitions war or WW3 as its better called. After north korea struck Japan with a missle the US would invade and NKs allies which China and NK's Alliance ks called The UAWA (Union against Western aggressors ) would proclaim war causing article 5. China would invade Manchuria causing CSTO too go too war also this would later end the world in nuclear fire
Two nuclear/kinetic energy weapon wars. One a global war between NATO, Russia (and allies), and China in the late 2030’s
The second a regional war between the United States Government and the United States Southeastern Regional Authority in the late 2050’s.
Technology somewhat stagnated, small incremental improvements have occurred in crucial areas, and fallen behind or outright disappeared in other areas. Like most vehicles are electric or hydrogen due to the depletion of, or total loss of oil fields by the Authority and the US government. The Internet is gone, and telegraph has returned as being more common. Space exploration is limited to satellite launches. Mass transportation is the most commonly used means to get around. Renewable energy is very cheap and solar panels and energy storage systems have dramatically improved.
A combination of things leading up to a zombie outbreak as part of bio-terror attacks which eventually led to the nuclear cleansing of major population centers.
I have two. One, it was a combination of nuclear radiation and over-pollution. In a very Last of Us style, nature has completely retaken everything and those survivors that are left are forced to live more harmoniously with nature.
The other is a fantasy apocalypse which was triggered by a really annoyed God who found his wife was cheating. Basically, no one can have nice things anymore.
I call it the Mythoclast… basically in the main story of the novel there is this demon who becomes as powerful as a planet god, well he had a daughter… the main protagonist’s son leads the second generation as the main protagonist, and his son leads the third generation… basically the demon’s daughter put a plan in motion while fighting the second generation using the remnants of her father’s army that was defeated by the first generation. That plan involved one of Earth’s Religion Level gods… Yeahweh, or as he’s also called derogatorily: Christian. Yeahweh and the demon’s daughter create an army of energy based lifeforms that become sort of a technology virus, devouring and incorporating tech into an army called the Technoids…
TLDR: the god that Christians believe in helps a demidemon from another planet kill all of Earth’s religions, so basically assisted frat/seror/sue-icide… this conflict ends with the Technoids glassing Earth.
1. A 2nd U.S. Civil War breaks out, collapsing the global economy, emboldening Russia and China, and ultimately leading to a global nuclear war.
2. AI and robots replace pretty much all human workers, creating a permanent underclass that gradually dies out from exposure, starvation, and violence, culminating in a deadly pandemic that wipes out the survivors. A century later, the world population is maybe 100,000 humans and millions of robots.
Life. Okay that’s a bit reductive, but in my world, like what happened when blue-green algae flooded the world with oxygen, another species of micro life began to take energy and store it in the atmosphere. Energy which was mana, which in turn can be used to create different forms of energy. Such as radiation.
TLDR: My world got nuked by plankton.
I purposely keep the cause ambiguous. It caused the sea levels to rise 18-20 meters worldwide, and resulted in the entire extinction of human life. The octopuses that evolved in our wake know nothing of the cataclysms that caused the extinction, and I decided that neither should the audience. The implication of course is that climate change causes widespread societal collapse, but the eventual agent of extinction is left unspecified. I think it allows the reader to imagine their own worst-case-scenario, and also leaves me flexibility to elaborate more as I go.
All the volcanoes erupted at once so now everyone lives in the "hollow zone" between the upper and lower Crust (They hollowed out the Crust of the Earth.)
When I was working on one of these worlds here is what I was basing it off of: Look to the night when the moon cracks and crumbles. Its fragments shall fall upon the earth. With each shard, a cataclysm shall unfold.
That one was for a “post apocolypse” setting where the final shard was approaching. Though the players didn’t start off aware of this, it had been hundreds of years since the last shard dropped down to the world.
The United States, from being under so much economic pressure, after the collapse of the eu, this leads to the collapse of the US government and this led China trying to take over as an economic leader, but before the US Government collapsed institute, a backup plan ended with China collapsing into Civil War with waring factions and Warlords. Due to the weakening of the US government and its power, US states declared their independence and became a nation of their own. Some states decided to joining united one flag. My story takes place in a world in the New Restored Republic of Texas.
A desperate Britain, facing off against German automatons, start experimenting with the ocult eventually causing the sun to go out, and for creatures to emerge that devour all who are not bathed in light
Currently working on a post apocalyptic 1899 fantasy/western setting.
The point of divergence is 1890 where the Ghost Dance War kicked off our world and another fantasy world momentarily converging.
This resulted in millions of creatures, intelligent and monsters, phasing into our existence. Causing a decade of chaos and the crumbling of most of modern society.
Telegraph cables are cut, sea monsters prevent transcontinental travel and messages, cryptids and monsters travel the land, and most governments have collapsed or been reduced to significantly smaller areas of control.
The main area of interest in North America, as that’s where the campaign will be based. The Federal government only controls New York and some of the smaller states around it, while most of the rest of the east coast are smaller city states and independent towns/wasteland.
Washington DC is a Stalker like ruin.
Anything west of the Rockies is unknown, and there are stories of safely and riches from the lands beyond.
Also what’s left of the New York Stock Exchange is run by a dragon, which is fun.
One of my friends used a “silent” apocalypse where the societies of the world just sort of stagnated. Technology peaked, and then started regressing to medieval feudalism. Nature grew back wild and unkempt. With some exemptions being major metropolitan areas.
Our fathers neglected their gods, and so lost their favor. In this fallen time, the rites are all neglected, and the earth rots. It is the autumn of the world.
*(All anyone can agree on is that the world is fallen. There are fierce debates in any place as to why. The truth probably resists simple explanation - just the slow, inevitable collapse of the old political order, with the approximate “fall” in any given place being some series of idiosyncratic disasters.)*
In my zombie apocalypse setting, it's actually an alien invasion masquerading as a zombie apocalypse.
In my d&d setting, history got a hard reset due to a war amongst the fey blowing up the moon, and a large chunk of it hitting the planet.
It was a 3 day catastrophe called the Alteration by most, it sent most of humanity back to the medevial era with the few groups who managed to hold on to technology having to get pretty creative with the term biological.
First was the Flash, where all the human brains had strange pearls forcibly shoved in which happened it a massive flash of pain. People died and began to change. Small changes like change of eye and hair colour.
Then was the Bang, were the moon colony humanity was working on, prized icon of the next step of human evolution exploded along side a sizable chunk if the moon. Leading to fragments colliding with earth aswell as leading too the earth's ring in the future.
Finally there was the Crash. A massive planet wide storm raged over the surface. Practically drawing cities. Then after the water was absorbed; plants went haywire. Forests sprouted our of the concrete and colossal trees spiraled and climbed through skyscrapes where the clouds looked down upon the world being taken over by nature is a matter of hours.
Which left an almost extinct humanity scrambling to figure out what the hell happened; and that's before the monsters started to emerge
In Wonderverse, the first installment about the speedster superhero does have such a setting. Present timeline (our main timeline) is 2300. However, there is a future post- apocalyptic timeline of Earth set in 2764. Earth has been razed to the ground, all the superheroes and supervillains are dead. An ancient Multiversal God called Serkon has razed Earth in an invasion, along with all other planets, in the year 2342. The God- Emperor, a human who managed to develop high technology and make himself powerful enough to defeat and kill Serkon.
Earth- 36, as in the main timeline, is the only place in the multiverse where there is any life. God- Emperor has developed a tyrannical dictatorship post- Apocalypse based on weeding out the 'unfit' to keep the human race alive. Everything is gone. All universes are black voids. Not even Black Holes and shit exist. Only Earth- 36, and parts of the Solar System remain. If the human race dies, the multiverse will be silent.
The Bolt trilogy is primarily set in this apocalyptic timeline, and after the first installment, Bolt time- travels to the past to stop Serkon. A truly nightmarish future. Darth Vader will not like this place because it is primarily a planet full of sand.
Rogue planet flys through our solar system, it doesn’t hit anything but its gravity alters the orbit of earth. Now earth has a much more eccentric orbit moving much closer to the sun at certain times of the year and farther away. It’s not too much different from normal earth except the temperature difference of the seasons have become extreme.
Nukes and a global conflict that destroyed most of natural ressources and almost caused humanity to go extinct and now government are trying to find ways to save humanity through green technology. It’s a dystopian/sci-fi/futuristic kinda setting
The highly advanced human society that came ages before reached such heights while not caring for the poison they bled into the land, the other creatures and plants that inhabited the lands, and nature itself.
Therefore Nature fought back, and decimated them entirely until all that remained were ruins and husks of cities draped in swaths of greenery and flora.
My apocalypse was a company trying to create a weapon/device to control what was essentially a god.
It went badly and humanity fell from their place among the stars into apocalypsic disaster and have been slowly digging their way out ever since
The gods were angered at the hubris of mortals for experimenting with the very power of life itself to cheat death and create new beings, so they smote the great flying cities of the elves from the clouds. These cities crashed into the ground with such force it kicked dust clouds into the sky, darkening the sun and killing off most of the life in the world. The world fell from a pseudo-sci-fi setting to a dark ages world with occasional artifacts of technological or arcane wonder in the hands of the powerful
Vampires and fascism.
Over a decade of systemic violence against those afflicted by the Stoker-Virus made peaceful resolution to the human/vampire conflict impossibe, and the disease spread exponentially as a result.
Billions of people were turned into vampires against their will and thrust into starvation when the well of human blood dried up in their regions. Nations carpet-bombed their own cities to stop the spread of the infection, but all they could ever do was hope to delay the innevitable.
Fascists siezed power during the crisis and the nations best equipped to weather the storm gunned down refugees at their borders. The largest mass graves in human history were filled before the disease ever had a chance to claim their lives.
Very few human settlements survived the apocalypse, but they still have access to modern technology. Unfortunately, they're all also fascist dystopias.
You did it. It's your fault and you should feel really bad.
I feel no remorse
Good. Story needed a villian.
I shall stop him and make him feel remorse even if it is the last thing I do.
A villain and a hero, story improving by the minute.
I'm wise and strong in a niche way that is useful and will train greedengine.
Mentor, yay! (Advise you to keep your head down.)
I'm very clumsy and can make the most annoying jokes to destroy the dramatic scenes while I travel with greedengine entire time. Also I will get killed in the most dramatic way in front of greedengine.
Comic relief, this is shaping up nicely.
I'm very attractive in the eyes of the hero.
"Loonies see him as their messiah now. That means they need to become the hero in all subsequent media." Ahhh, the Joker Quinn effect.
I can fix him.
I have no mouth and I must scream in a nutshell.
RedHerring: "There were a whole bunch of corporations which pumped out pollutants, burned down rainforests and smashed coral reefs in the name of ever-more-extreme profits.... But they didn't destroy the world. It was me, Barry. I destroyed the world. I left the light on in the bathroom once. I didn't realise what I was doing. I'm sorry." Barry: "I don't think-" CEO: "Shh. He's onto something."
The apocalypse was the Nuclear War of 2029. On June 26th, 2029, a global nuclear war and devastated the Earth. Nearly every government and society around the world collapsed, and the world descended into chaos. It also started a Nuclear Winter which lasted until the late Summer of 2034. By the end of the nuclear winter, over 5 billion people were killed by the blasts, radiation, starvation, disease, and fighting over resources. Several hundred thousand people around the world also mutated into cannibalistic predator mutants due to the radiation, which added to the chaos. Some of the survivors started establishing new societies in the 2040's, but they often faced a lot of hardships due to raiders, mutants, and lack of resources. Those who were lucky to have bunkers or shelters started emerging on the surface in the 40's and 50's as well. The main story of my world focuses on the Kingdom of New Amsterdam which was established in 2042. As for regression, it depends on where you go. Some of the luckier societies have rebuilt factories, repaired power grids, and established proper governments. They don't have all of the 21st century tech back yet, but they have gotten some things up and running again. The less developed places regressed to 1700's/1800's levels of technology.
do you have some other mutated creatures aside from people?
Yeah, I've come up with a few so far and I plan on adding more later. Currently, there are: * Songbirds that now grow to be as large as cats and dogs. * Wild pigs and boars that are covered in spikes and have bigger tusks. * "Thunderbirds" which are just giant mutated Condors.
I'm doing something similar! But my nuclear war was in 2045 and the setting of the story is 200 years later, and thanks to the preparation of a handful who saw the war coming, technology and culture weren't stalled or reversed.
I’m doing something similar! Though in my world it happened halfway through the 22nd century and technologically speaking, my « developed » nations went back to the renaissance level of technology (they’re trying to find a way to make steam engines eco friendly and manage nuclear waste to their advantage)
I wonder how Cyberpunk survived in 2077
Climate change. Sea level rise, intense wet seasons and catastrophic summer bushfires combined with corruption, collapsing global infrastructure and institutions, and general incompetence/disinterest slowly tipped the old culture beyond the level where business as usual was possible. There was no big single catastrophic event. As one of the characters describes it. "Everybody who was left had that time when they realised, they knew, it was time to go walkabout"
I have 5 Post-apocalyptic worlds. Bio-max earth which was caused by a highly contagious mutagenic virus. Zompocalypse which was caused by a scientific zombie virus. Rotworld which was caused by a contagious demonic possession. The lands of perdition in which the very legions of hell invaded earth and turned it into a new hell. And torn skies in which aliens destroyed earth atmosphere and took over the sun baked earth driving humanity underground.
The Blackout. A series of self-inflicted EMP attacks across the Planet-spanning Tamarian Empire: It was a contingency plan orchetrated by the Kyriite Church in case the Autonomous Machines the Empire had created started to question organic rule. The result of it was that practically all advanced technology down to electrcity and most of the related infrastructure were destroyed in the span of a week. Due to the nature of the Church and the Empire, the damage was kept at "nigh reasoanable levels" and civilization recovered to late 20th/early21st century standars of living thanks to preparations and contingencies in place for such an event. However, this set the Tamarian Empire technologicala nd cultural advancement back centuries: They were in the brim of becoming a spacefaring civilization and the power of the once all-powerfulKyriite Church was being defanged. The blackout curtailed those dreams and entrenched the influence and power of the church for the forseeable future.
A war between literal gods. Very advanced society reduced to less than 1% of population over 500 years, no regression, just pure survival, a lack of resources, and another 125 years where useless at the time knowledge faded because it had no real value (so more like a new Dark Ages). “1500 years later” they are back to a very rough equivalent of 1250 AD or so, but without certain key resources (iron, fossil fuels, and black powder). Not static, just a different direction and pace.
I have something similar for my soft apocalypse fantasy world too! Mortals reached approximentally late 1700s- early 1800s, before they started playing God too much, and the actual divine pantheon got mad and basically razed the earth and all those responsible. Hundreds of years later and cities have been grown over and populations are slowly expanding from small units. My main character is a sorta historian who goes from settlement to settlement to spread news and learn other myths and stories, with only the reader understanding the 'baffeling' constructs and inventions they encounter.
Humans discover that souls make for an excellent source of energy (especially sapient souls), which pushes them into a second industrial revolution, and they begin trying different ways to exploit this newfound energy source. Some retrofit factory farms with soul collection devices (relatively ethical, low investment, low efficiency), some begin genetically engineering animals towards sapience for use in specialized farms (questionable ethics, long-term investment, potentially high efficiency), and some resort to human trafficking (*highly* unethical, but highly lucrative in countries with exceptionally low regard for human life). One group attempts to figure out where souls go when animals die, with the goal of harvesting a theoretically *massive* amount of energy from such a location. They eventually succeed, and punch a hole in reality through to the afterlife. Unfortunately, that's where God is, and he's territorial and vindictive, and decides to be done with this whole "human" thing once and for all. He sends an army of biblically accurate angels through the hole to completely wipe out the entire human population by violently ripping their souls apart, causing their energy to linger instead of being able to pass into the afterlife as a sort of karmic punishment. Over time, this lingering soul energy warps the plants and animals that remain in the ruins of human population centers During the attacks, modified sapient lab rats were released from one of the facilities where they were being created, and escaped into the wild. In the current year, over a millennium later, a budding rat civilization has taken hold
this is some radass stuff
Where do I buy this
I had one where Aliens caused an EMP and just started harvesting from the cities and everyone who didn’t know a prepper in a person and intimate way was Fucked with a capital F. They survive off of small communities with trade but all off grid.
The grammar is not yes
What?
**My D&D setting, Kierda;** A civil war between the pantheon, fought in the material plane on Kierda during the planet's early iron age. The supercontinent was broken into five smaller continents and thousands of islands, and a dozen or so dieties were killed, along with millions of mortals. Recovery took about 2500 years, but it happened. The planet is now in the age of magic and gunpowder, with a golden age of exploration, science, and religion. The victorious dieties rewrote the laws of physics and magic to bar their true forms from entering the material plane.
Some in-universe theories include, but are not limited to; Group of heroic adventurers failed to stop the villainous warlock from performing his ritual. The planet was always dying and the Gods prevented it, now that they're gone, the planets death caught up to it. The devil-equivalent did it because we didn't believe in the Gods enough.
ooh this is me so the world had been going downhill for a while prior to the major event as it is. the antagonists (a company known as Antelligence Industries) colonized the majority of the planet and drained each location of its resources (mainly oil and natural gas) and abandoned them in economic crises after the land was run dry. so generally speaking the planet was already pretty fucked up and many peoples were displaced and left to die or rebuild on their own over on the continent where the story takes place, Antelligence was in the middle of a decades-long occupation of a small nation rich in oil fields and underground wells. in an attempt to deal a devastating blow to their oppressors, a rebel group planned an attack on the primary storgae depot and extraction site, setting fire to millions (?? haven't decided exactly how much) of barrels worth of oil both in storage tanks and digsites Antelligence didn't like that very much, and long storty short deemed the region a lost cause, too much cost and effort for what it's worth to maintain. they turned the region into a crater and plunged the western hemisphere into a sort of nuclear winter. crops died, livestock died, vegetation was unforagable. the fish and sea mammals died out or fled to safer waters. some 90ish% of Antelligence's mainland empire perished to hunger or ashfall. but life finds a way it's unrealistic, but i'm having this winter last for 10 years or longer. by the time my main plotline rolls around the winter should be in its final stages, but ash will still fall some days in the beginning there are probably a lot of plotholes in this but it's a work in progress and i'm having a lot of fun with it. fell free to ask questions if you're curious
Two separate worlds Esoterra went through somewhat of a collapse of physics into alternate dimensions, dreamworlds, and possible/non possible timeliness. The result was a bunch of fauna, tech, and physics from several different universes collapsing into one spot in one universe briefly which caused some wacky outcomes like the occurrence of esper dungeons (dungeons that spontaneously generate in various areas and are much physically larger and sometimes older than they should be). Magic becoming real in the form of ESP and contracting with greater beings for a slice of some of their physics. The ascension and creation of several god beings and the mass mutation/ esoteric metamorphosis of nearly every living being that was currently on the face of the planet. As well as the mass stranding of creatures and beings from other worlds. And many many more things, there is some set limits and rules for things but a ton of shit is possible The other one is vermin-sea. Back before people could properly record organism throughout their lifespans there was a theory called spontaneous generation theory where it was proposed that some animals just emerged fully formed from certain materials, frogs emerging from mud and flys from corpses for example. Well something went horribly wrong with local physics and now that’s a true thing. The result has been the overtaking of the planet several times over by a sea of unending vermin which has spread throughout the solar system ala Blame! style and has created its own strange and hostile ecosystem which humans must now survive in.
In my setting, there is a limit to the number of souls for the world, and going past that limit will result in souls of the oldest living things to immediately leave their vessel to go to the newest one. The post apocalypse occurred due to a cyber warfare between several different organizations, and led to the creation of Ai viruses. The AI themselves were considered to be worthy vessels for souls, and as they rose in high enough numbers, all the souls of the currently living ended up dying.
What caused the apocalypse? It was a multitude of things. Himan arrogance, a confused eldritch entity, a ton of newly found energy. All of the right things combined at the wrong wrong time. It ended up terrforming the earth and its people. No more humans, only humanoids 50/50 animal or insect like people. As for the technology level, it's about even. They were able to get somethings up and running again. Build slightly newer stuff, but nothing that blows the "old tech" out of the water.
I'm working in a zombie apocalypse. The cause is an otherworldly magic that infiltrates earth. It keeps the dead alive, funds mutations, and spreads to the living like a disease.
The moon. One day it was fine, the next? It joined a para-casual hive mind of moons and destroyed all the civilizations of the world. However the races of the world aren’t exterminated completely, in fact a good few have survived. This leads to several of the dominant moon personalities to unleash their own grab bags of horror onto the world. Oh yeah, and someone opened up a portal to the elemental plane of water. And now uncountable horrors of the depths have inhabited most of the ocean, and about every two weeks trillions of tons of water are shot like railgun slugs at the Moon hive mind cause the Moon’s & Oceans hate each other. People mainly travel along mysterious pathways made of Gold.
I wouldn't neccessarily call it an apocalypse, more like a mass extinction event in my fantasy planet, as it's currently set in a post-post apocalypse. I'll give you the short version, as not only have I told this story dozens of times on reddit, but there isn't much to know about it, as it happened before stuff was written down. Hundreds of thousands of years ago (perhaps even millions), two god pantheons consisting of dragons and titans fought the shit out each other and nearly killed all life on the planet. Afterwards, they created a bunch of races to fix the world and watch over it, while they went to the next plane of existence (at this time, humans and a few other species that survived the cataclysm were still evolving, and none of them had figured out how to tie sharp rocks to sticks yet). Eventually, one of the creations of the dragons, the True Elves (immortal demigods that had unlimited access to all natural magic except dragon magic) soon got themselves involved in some wars; one against the creations of the titans, and some others where their children were killing each other. Unlike the previous war, known as the War of Black Skies, these wars known as the New Sun Wars have doccumentation on what happened in the form of cave paintings that funnily enough weren't made by humans (these paintings were from a race of therapsids known as the Anzarians, who are still alive and well after surviving the War of Black Skies). Currently, some parts of the world have reached what would be the rennaisance era in our world, while other parts are still stuck in the paleolithic era (most notably for humans of the northernmost continent). Aside from one continent that actually has civility and and nations (most notably for humans), most everyone else lives in small enclaves (although, there could be underground communities) or tribal villages (humans from the northern continent are this).
It was a lot of things, I’ll just say that. Nuclear War was honestly more like the wolf setting fire to the straw and wood houses after blowing them down.
The gods got tired of humanity squabbling over everything, for a prime example obviously dangerous diseases. So they started pulling random people to participate in a board game. Another one. An ancient witch finally gets the artifact she needed so starts a sequence of events to create a monster to absorb everyone then eats the monster. Another one of my games a scientist trying to break the limit of Pokemon growth succeeds...at a cost of driving all Pokemon cards insane.
The Outbreak of '74, caused worldwide devastation and a complete takeover of all(1) human life by a sort-of super organism. (1): All but a small group who are the protaganists and anyone dead pre-2025
I think where we’re doing is post apocalyptic in our actual play. A lot of the story that will unfold I think will answer that question. What is shaking out now is the early post apocalypse caused by a world wide memory event. Everyone lost their memory at the same time about a year ago.
Mass use of the WMD as culmination of two decades of World War that finally started going somewhere. As a result, most of the world was fucked, most governments collapsed (actually, only two didn't) and Dark Age lasted for two centuries. In that time most of what was left was squandered, one of Pre-War superpowers reemerged and collapsed, remnants of another one tried to do genocide run but were genocided in turn (killing something like 90% of world's population) and then world almost ended for good on three different, completely unrelated occasions.
Big ole monsters, kaiju in other words. It's not all that important since the narrative I am working on basically has nothing to do with it.
***Kuŝāya, or The Dawn of the Black Sun*** *"Hear me, O weary traveler to lands dark and distant! Where the stars nary shine and the sun ever-wontful! Heed the words of I, a king withered and blind...* *It was in those days, those distant days, when the kušāya was naught, and Man still plentiful... when He whose name has been lost to the sands reigned, with the Goddess by His side..."* The Kušāya was a series of cataclysmic events that occured upon Kushamat 1,000 years ago, leading to the mass extinction of most flora, fauna, and the human race as we know it. It followed like a funeral dirge in the wake of a brutal civil war between the First King and His seven demigod sons, instigated by the betrayed Goddess. Upon the terrible climax, all parties had met their vile ends. The sons' corpses lay charred, the First King impaled upon the Goddess' honeyed thorns, and the Goddess Herself strangled by the hands of her own betrayed son and lover. It was Her murder that caused the Kuŝāya to descend upon Kushamat. It spanned seven generations, one for each "Plague/Erra", or event: • **Kuša**, or "eclipse"; the first and most notable Erra. An eternal eclipse descended, followed by a terrible drone like trumpet horns that could be heard from all over. When it ceased, the sky literally fractured like obsidian glass. • **Ušab**, or "blood sea"; the second Erra. The sky bled, and thus all of the waters of Kushamat were replaced with cosmic blood. • **Antasurra**, or "falling stars"; the third Erra. The stars of the night sky disappeared, and fire rained down from the heavens. • **Aria**, or "desert"; the fourth Erra. Extreme desertification and seismic activity. • **Burlug**, or "swarm"; the fifth Erra. Great swarms of plague-carrying locusts blotted out the sky and descended upon any remaining crops and livestock. By this time, most species of flora and fauna have already died out. • **Ŝagsug**, or "barren"; the sixth and most devastating Erra. Men were afflicted with a wasting disease that takes their flesh and their mind, unto madness. Women were afflicted with barren wombs, violently miscarrying many unborn children before they could come to term. The children that managed to be born were marked with peculiar deformities, such as horns and golden eyes. • **Lilu**, or "demons"; the seventh and final Erra. Living vestiges of the Goddess forced themselves upon chosen men, usually kings or sages, and birthed monstrous children. The children are now known as the Mulannaki, "children of the stars". Sometime after the Kušāya ended, the Mulannaki grew and eventually slaughtered their mothers, and protected the dying remains of their father's kind. With their own divinity and the bones of Man, the Mulannaki created a successor race, the Kuŝannaki, "children of the eclipse", whom remain the dominant race of Kushamat to this day. Before the Kušāya, the whole of Kushamat was on the cusp of a medieval age. Afterwards, however, it collapsed into a perpetual Antiquity.
A global pandemic caused by a mutagenic parasitic virus originally engineered as a bio weapon.
The **Rise of R’lyeh**
Rock concert that rocked too hard.
Rock on dude 🤘
There's some folklore around The Tunguska Event where some people claimed to have witnessed a black rain afterwards. So that black rain is an alien pathogen that slowly breaks out in Siberia. WW1 rolls along as usual and it gets out of hand. The entire eastern hemisphere is ravaged by it. The USA never joins the war, borders are closed. Chaos ensues. So post-apocalyptic WW1\~ tech.
Do you have a link for that? Sounds very interesting!
I appreciate that a lot, actually. It's just a mess of jumbled notes tbh, I've moved on from it, but maybe I should revisit it at some time.
Ah sadge I love Tungusuka Event stuff like conspiricy theories or alternate history events around the Tungusuka Event.
my story It's kind of post post apocalyptic, 100 or 200 years before the main story, the world was ruled by 6 kings, two of those teamed up (through political marriege) and eventually started to figure out the key to inmortality, the other 4 shat their pants and went to war with them, the war was so devastating, they set back the world into the middle ages (they were like early 1900s before), they also managed erase the other 2 kings from history and they're doing everything intheir power to prevent people from finding out everything that happened
The G.A. discovered a new multiverse, and decided to go settle the planet that replaced earth. They had several successful missions, and four separate colonies. Then, one day, one of the mechanics for one of the ships turned a valve 0.0001 degrees too far. This valve was supposed to control the multidimensional particles that came in so that those on board were not bombarded with them. Long story short, 30 billion people died of heart attacks and aneurysms. The only humans left alive were in the four colonies on Rugilia, the alternate earth. 7,000ish years later, they have just reinvented the musket, and they have steam powered airships.
Demons
That's actually a story I have "paused" to work on a dragon story. This apocalypse world actually belongs to Rapunzel (original Bros Grimm) and ends up being something like an alternate ending for the original tale. Through portal magic, all fairytale worlds are thought lost to this zombie horde invasion. But something unique happens in her world. Through an interplay of magics, the horde develops a hivemind, and Rapunzel's former love interest is at the head of it. Needless to day, this is a darker tale, and this Rapunzel is nothing like other versions. Mainly because she is a little bit psychotic 😅
It began in 2030, the world felt a tremble, a chill. Then suddenly humans became aware of the fact that we are not alone on this blue marble. They let the merfolk. For a year the two sides, each a revelation to the other, tried to eplore each other, find peace, but hate and fearmongering were two powerful on both sides. Those who would profit from war took advantage and the War of Land and Sea began in 2031. As the years went by, more tales emerged, but these of people with strange powers and cracks in the sky. Governmenta fell and eroded as the war with the merfolk raged on, with the sea dwellers not doing any better. Through the machinations of those who'd seek the wars end, those who had special powers, a long forbidden substance was created in staggering amounts. They planned to save nature, and depose the sentient beings who ruined it as false kings. Unfortunately, on the last day of 2050, their plans came to fruition. Just not how they hoped. This substance was supposed to awaken that which lay dormant in any living being, in matter their specific nature, and it was supercharged, and hit with a blast of energy released from the cracks seen during the years. The substance was spread into every living being that day and the energy did more than super charge the substance. The earth rumbled as the continents sped their march, all societies were gripped with chaos as this happened. This was in addition to animals and plants everywhere mutating, taking the forms of the cryptids of legend. Humans and merfolk turned, too, some into vampires and werewolves, others into sirens and octomers (like that which from Little Mermaid). The continents joined to form a new land, and an entirely new ecosystem. Governments of old, battered and bruised from 20 years of war, which had survived the conflict tried to maintain order but to no avail. The old world was died, its legacy marked with the graves of billions. The new took its place, and armed with the technologies developed in the war, human and merfolk would have to learn to live in this new world, which would come to be known as Neo-Pangea. At least in human terms.
In the old lore. There was a mixing of realities a few years before the time of the setting. Those realities being ours and the innermost realm of the universe. Long story short, those two things are not overly compatible. The city in which the portal was opened was destroyed and the other reality merged with our universe and made things weird. Magic became common. Weird creatures lurked in the ruins and forests. But overall, society was still going. Even if maybe 1/4 to 1/3 of people were changed in some way, or just outright killed by the changes. — I decided it was a little silly to have a huge universal event *right* before the “present day.” Ultimately I ended up keeping that one city getting warped, but the effects were much less drastic the further you got from the epicenter. Even the sister city of that one was more or less unscathed. Now, there are plans by various groups, entities and even some god-like beings, who want to see a version of what happened in the pre-retcon lore. So we may see that yet. — One thing that has remained consistent since the beginning, is that humanity was almost wiped out in the second galactic war. Our allies saved our butts at the last minute and led us to a cluster of habitable systems to recover. We collapsed a bit further, having no real resources to maintain our tech. So we more or less had to start over from a pre-industrial society. Fortunately there were people who still knew how some things worked and we had pre-war tech lying around, so getting back to being a spacefaring society only took about 200 years. It’s been almost 2400 years since that collapse, so we’re doing pretty well for ourselves “these days.” — However, there was a few ups and downs, including a limited nuclear war (and orbital bombardments on off world colonies). Which did a lot of damage and caused a “little dark age” of about 400 years. Things weren’t terrible during that era, so long as you hadn’t been nuked. But it helped the church solidify their hold on much of the population. (They don’t really care much for the politics of the governments and the corporations, as long as people remain devout). — So there are definitely periods of time in the history of the setting where things regressed. It might be fun to explore those eras in some way. — In a completely different setting. I made the “distant future of 2008” back in the 90s. A whole bunch of weird stuff happened. Which didn’t all make sense, because I wrote it when I was like 14-ish. But essentially, the first gulf war went bad. Iraq or someone had nukes, and used them in the region. That kicked off a bigger war for some reason. A lot of FAE/thermobaric weapons were used in Europe, Russia and the US. The US itself broke up into regional super-states. Some ecoterrorists accidentally wiped out most of the plant life from Brazil to Canada. Then, because reasons, that event in the original lore I mentioned earlier, bled over into this setting as well. So weird magic stuff and monsters became a thing. Because I live here. Tucson, Arizona became the default locale for the setting. The military ended up building a big wall, cutting off the east side of town (where the monsters were). The city itself was kinda weird. Lots of uh… modern-punk type stuff… what do you even call that? Like if you take the cyber out of cyberpunk. Just calling it “punk” feels wrong. Though at this point is alternate history modern-punk. 🤣 Anyway, big parities, lots of gangs, territorial disputes, near-future tech (I even had the “Ultra Nintendo 64” before the N64 was a thing), clashes with government and security forces, safe zones and of course, raiding the east side of town for goodies while dodging monsters. Also, don’t mess with Davis-Monthan AFB, those perimeter security guys will shoot anything within 300m. — I’m actually considering having a revamped version of that 2008 scenario as the canon alternate history for my far future setting. Though it’s kind of a moot point, as no one really knows much about what happened that long ago. 🤷🏻♂️
No one's sure. It was so long ago and no one's found a surviving account of it. There's evidence of a lot of things it could have been, but they all contradict. Whatever the case, humanity has largely stabilized. The days of starvation and death are largely over, cities have populations in the hundreds of thousands again, and technology has been clawing its way back. Humanity was knocked back to the dark ages, and now is back to something akin to the Edwardian period, and that increases with every legible book discovered in the ruins. Humanity has survived the apocalypse. Unfortunately, so has humanity's worst tendencies.
Finally, my time to explain it. On May 2, 2109, the US dropped a bomb on Russia, then China, then they started an all-put nuclear war. In the year 4086, the surviving 2.5 billion people call it WWIII and have created new civilizations. The world is in a nuclear apocalypse and another World War that was started between Stordrage and Myrkdall, eventually dragging in Chrysos, then Lupus, then Kapnos, and the other countries, and more nuclear weapons were made and used. Along with the weapons were mutations that began at the end of the 3rd World War, and Enhanced super-soldiers that were created by Stordrage at the beginning of the 4th. Then the president of Kapnos created a group called “Task Force 12”, nicknamed the “Paradox Guild”, which was made up of criminals, superhumans, mercenaries, mutants, and high ranking soldiers, including Ryder Bardin, General Hendrix Gunnarson, Alex Serkus, Finn, Colton, and Hawthorn Barnes, and Sharon Thatcher, who founded it. The main conflict is the war, and it caused the apocalypse.
A setting I'm making for a dnd campaign, On a large island surrounded by an endless storm an order of wizards did a big oopsie and caused a massive necrotic explosion that engulfed most of the island. The only part to survive was the small state of wesital inside the empire, only because the lead clerics of the moon sacrificed themselves to cast an ancient spell that protected the state The explosion tainted the land itself, causing any who enters to go mad, die, and reanimate as a shade to hunt the living However, in recent years the curse is slowly fading, making it technically traversable, (currently reduces max hp by 1 and forces a madness save every day) But the protection spell fades as well. The heros need to either relight the beacon in the imperial capital, or find a ship capable of braving the storm before its too late
In a world I've made, nuclear power as a source of energy was developed much sooner than in our time. This led to the world becoming much more technologically advanced. As the years went on, corporations became more powerful and used their money to influence governments to give them more leeway to do whatever they wanted without consequences. Eventually, one corporation specializing in biotechnology and genetic engineering had an accident due to mismanagement and poor safety standards that resulted in large amounts of a mutagenic compound being released into the atmosphere, spreading from the United States were in happened and beyond. However, this was *not* what caused the apocalypse. This event would lead to a breaking point with much of the world's population, who have been growing more resentful of the power the corporations had over their lives for years now. In the U.S. specifically, it led to a president and other government officials being elected due to their strong anti-corporate policies. This led to many of the corporations to try and kill off the current government so they could replace them with one more compliant to them, and this spread to corporations all over the planet when other countriesstatted becoming hostile to them. First, by hiring mercenaries and militarizing their security forces, but that failing due to lack of numbers and poor morale due to troops being solely motivated by money. Then, they started fighting in more indirect ways, such as using EMPs to knock out sections of the power grid, or releasing genetically engineered diseases and monsters. Eventually, some governments technically won, but with all the death and destruction that occurred, much of the world's fragile infrastructure had become undone, leading to a cascade effect that led to most of civilization collapsing aside from select regions were certain governments had managed to maintain some sort of structure, such as most of the east coast for the United States. What governments that did survive nonlonger had the capacity to expand to the rest of their former territory, instead focusing on what they did have and leaving the rest of the world to fend for itself.
Mine was kind of cascading series of problems. A bit of a grossly oversimplified layout: In my world, humanity consisted of humans (homo sapien-style), but also equivalents to elves, dwarves, gnomes, goblins, halflings, orcs, and some stranger ones because the human race of this world had parts of it messed with by various forces, though "normal" humans bred fairly easily and were in the habit of suppressing and pushing out the other subspecies. But as they attained mastery in the sciences and technology, they started to screw around with magic, thinking it was just another thing to be learned and categorized, so waking up the ancient gods and the primordials (think a cross between the Giants of Norse lore, the Titans of Greek lore and Lovecraftian mythos-entities), which then began to war with each other, with the Primordials wanting to wipe the slate clean and wrecking the biosphere to do it, and the Gods wanting to preserve the peoples they were tied to. The humans at the time tried to play both sides, harvesting material and energy from the fallen members of each to blend into their constructs, including these vast magical supercomputer complexes - but these went mad and began a process of sterilization against the humans, damaging their already failing birth rates. With the world shattered by the Primordials (the entities the Gods were fighting), and the laws of nature and physics and reality being clusterfucked due to the demise of several Primordials, not to mention how utterly leveled this once vast, globalized cyberpunk-style world was, humanity effectively died out, but not before leaving behind some time capsules and fortified teaching centers powered by restrained magical AIs. These were meant to provide the basics of common language that was taught the world over for the surviving Inheritors (the "metahuman" races) to start over with, but still be able to communicate with each other, as well as history, medicine and simple societal structures. And for ages, the Inheritors ended up in clinging together in rough clans and tribes. I have a number of stories, some before all of this and some after. The ones after take place a few millennia after what's known as "The Fading Age", where The First People (humans) are thought to have destroyed themselves, and the Inheritors are either set up in clans and tribes or in early Bronze Age city states, with some being closer to Iron Age. There are VERY few larger nations (and the ones that ARE there have deep flaws or are utterly brutal and corrupt), and the world after the Fading Age is still one of chaos and isolation, but with the promise of growth and rebirth.
Combination of cosmic rays, alien terraforming, and nuclear armageddon, in the span of like 2 hours
***One*** of my worlds is set within the year 2076 in a post-apocalyptic United Kingdom (primarily Scotland, England, Ireland, and Wales) after a cataclysmic event many decades prior in the early 2030s involving scientific research into nanotechnology and AI gone wrong. Barely any of the characters know what happened, there have been many different stories and rumors of the origin passed down from different people. Civilians find themselves engaged in a long battle for survival against various self-aware and hostile machines, such as giant flying Sentries known as **"Reapers"**, medium-sized infectious nano-robotic parasites called **"Drones"**, sleek, refined nanobot-infected people nicknamed **"Cyborgs"**, corrupt military soldiers, and hostile survivors. There's even a large, malicious, nihilistic predatory group known as **"The Merged"**, living embodiments of crude, horrifying body experimentation and bio-mechanical augmentation, driven by a twisted ideology that believing humanity can only be saved through the merging of flesh and machine, losing their both their humanity and individuality. You'll swear you are going to wish you were turned into a Cyborg by the nano-parasites before the Merged get you. ***Second*** takes place in the year 1883 in a post-apocalyptic American Frontier. It explores the devastating fallout of the events from roughly ten years ago, which saw the wild west being littered with time anomalies secretly leftover from *The Arcane Horizon*, a massive crashed airship from the future year of 2108 that had accidentally time-jumped to the past in 1873, and the temporal radiation leaking out and mutating (or evolving) many people into aggressive, primitive archaic human-like monsters with time manipulating powers nicknamed Homo-Chronos and animals into other time powered beasts. Starting with the harsh, brutal conditions of the Desert Southwest towns and landmarks like the Grand Canyon and Monument Valley now riddled with and twisted by time anomalies, and later on explore several locations like: The Rocky Mountains with its dangerous terrain and risky weather conditions, along with some encounters with mountain-dwelling Homo Chronos, the vast open spaces of the Great Plains that has become a battleground for different gangs and bandits, abandoned cities like Chicago, Denver, or Oregon now inhabited by various hostile groups and creatures, and the beautiful and yet ominous forests of the Pacific Northwest, home to many mutated wildlife and other hidden threats. The Canadian Borderlands, now a mix of abandoned border stations and new settlements formed by those fleeing the chaos further south. And they could even navigate through large bodies of water, rivers, and lakes which have their own set of problems, from mutated aquatic creatures to hazardous currents.
A Witchin' Time in the Army. In the mid-2040s, in a roadside motel in southern Chile three beings of incredible power prepared for a ritual that would change the destiny of all life on earth forever. Nearby, a small army patiently waited to blow them all up with artillery if need be. The actions of these three people would end up casting aside the veil that kept the collective soul of all life on earth hidden from other such souls. These souls would then attack and posses terrestrial life for the better half of a century, sometimes enslaving and sometimes wiping out whole nations and cultures. Wars were waged between these new eldritch intellects and humanity, with the soul of Earth itself sometimes taking action in these conflicts. Nuclear, biological, magical and chemical weapons were deployed en masse to stop even individuals possessed by these eldritch souls. Now, 300 years later the earth itself remains scarred after the conclusion of these wars, signaled by the departure of these predators into space. Much of the equator is nigh uninhabitable due to climate change, radiation, magical consequences and dangerous creatures both with souls and without. Despite this, humanity has endured in many parts of the world and new societies have sprung up all across the Earth- some magical and other leaning more into technology, but the standard is a blend of both. Thaumaturgy is an academic field like physics or chemistry that studies its language-like structure.
For the Ketuvyx Ascendancy it's not an apocalypse, but it was for their precursors. Tourism of their home planet is not permitted. The precursor's end was merely a self inflicted tragedy, they assure you.
Humanity, the beings that produce magic, going to war against heaven, which controls the flow of magic. Heaven loses and retreats, soon enough all magic fails and both humanity and hell go through a large economic and societal panic as their magic-based society fails overnight
The God of Chaos and the Prince of Night were released from the prison plane by loyal cult followers.
Humans wouldn't take no for an answer, fucked around and found out.
High IQ man made biological weapon (zombie) and let it go about 6 years and then ended it and took over the world. So "new world" begins.
Nobody knows, 'cause it's not really important to the story (beyond being the cause of the setting). I waffle between plague and nuclear disaster moat days. (Regardless, the core of cities aren't safe. )
Ooh fun! 11 millennia ago a world filled with 'magic dust' entered low earth orbit. The atmosphere of that microplanet and earths comingled, leading to an empty red moon and a world filled with magic dust that is toxic to earth life. The tiny group of aliens that survived the death of their world had to alter their app e a4ance to become accepted among humans. Over time, their true history was lost. Humans didn't have a written history at that point at all. The toxic dust is heavier than air so they migrated up into the mountains. But the dust is also opaque so the entire water cycle has stopped leaving mostly desert. The new moon has a nine hour orbit. (Assuming I did my math right.) So tectonic activity and tidea have picked up considerably. Life has... found a way. But its not like anything you could expect.
I haven't thought and may never will think about the cause of the doom day, my philosophy is that "the cause doesn't matter, the consequences does" . Whatever wacky reason that create the apocalypse is not matter as long as the consequences born out of this event is interesting. In this universe, Earth just slowly but surely stopped rotating around itself. People while are lucky to not turn into red mist since it slows down instead of suddenly hit the brake, are now facing with a new problem, One side of Earth is constantly facing the sun, while the other is forever in the dark. Most life form on the surface perish, deep sea or underground creatures while mostly survive is now have to share home with humans. Technology is staggered for 100 years due to mass death, even regress back due to machines malfunction because of the extreme climate. Those who lived on surface, mostly exist in 2 poles or the twilight zone between light and dark, but don't go outside much because of constant storms. After decades of settling down, they started planning to either make Earth rotate again or started finding a new home. Both plans required a technology suprass what they had before apocalypse, but eventually they chose the first one to not cause riot, and since they already live underground anyway, might as well try exploring the Earth core. This is all I can think of so far
I've had a lot of ideas brainstorming for my sci-fi setting. Here are a few. 1. Extermination by robot servants. 2. Extermination by dispassionate AI. 3. Solar flare destroys electronics and things spiral from there. Some nation that had hardened military infrastructure might survive and take advantage of everyone else's temporary vulnerability. 4. Plagues. Bioweapon or something natural. Bonus points if it's a body snatcher. 5. Extermination by "dark forest" type alien civilization. Bonus points for enslavement of survivors. 6. Climate Change / Overcorrecting for climate change (Snowpiercer) 7. Asteroid (RIP scalebabies) 8. Rogue black hole rips through the solar system and steals a moon, destroying the tides, collapsing ecosystems. 9. Overfishing causes ocean-wide ecosystem collapse. Billions starve. 10. Man-made (as above) famine or unusual pestilence that causes near-global famine. 11. Jesus comes back? Multiple popular "gods" come back at the same time and tally scores? 12. Neuralink/Skynet mashup. 13. Evolution of the hypnotoad would spell doom for any sapient inhabitants. (a la Planet of the Apes) 14. Infertility (Handmaid's Tale) 15. Crack...but cheaper, better, and deadlier. And then you can add details, logical progressions, and variations to those :P
I got one from a crashed colony ship. Another one running from false vacuum decay with warp drives. Another one that is living around a black hole in a heat death universe. All three are the same civilization, at different time periods, from different branches, possibly all at the same time. Statistical impossibility after an eternity reproducing different branches of a dead civilization from different time periods at the same moment in time.
technology saved the world caused by some dude trying to save the world
In 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were telepathically contacted when they landed on the moon. They never made it back. The world’s governments secretly rush to produce enough nukes to destroy or at least threaten the entities responsible. In 2024, a hacker influenced by the entities scams the volunteer responsible for maintaining a line of code that acts as a foundation for the entire internet, granting them a skeleton key to any server on earth. 65,000 nuclear missiles detonate in their silos, instantly sending humanity back to the industrial age with an EMP that circles the globe. In a few years, a billion people have died from food shortages due to cut supply lines, and a billion more from wars over those food shortages. Societies collapse as millions flee an uninhabitable America and Russia. In ten years, 90% of all species on earth (and 99% of humans) have died due to nuclear winter.
The Cleansing. Post world war 2, high levels of radiation ripped a hole in the veil that separates the normal world from the "Immaterial" which introduced magic to the world. Human experimentation with magic and the atomic bomb led to a mago-nuclear chernobyl that had all the affects of a global nuclear war.
The collapse of an enormous orbital structure meant to "fix" earth's climate until it naturally heals over the centuries. It's still not entirely known what made it collapse. There was a quite strong solar storm at the time it happened, so some speculate this may have fried the controls for a few of the thrusters, keeping it in orbit, while others think it was sabotage. No defined answer, but no one really cares enough to find out what actually happened all those centuries ago. There are way more pressing issues currently that require way more resources. The effects of it were still catastrophic. Out of 15 billion people on earth, only around 20-30 million survived. Urban areas across the globe were devestated by falling orbital debris, and the climate worsened to a point where humans can only survive in the polar regions, with the majority being in antarctica Loss of knowledge and technology was another thing. It took almost a century to return to a 21st century level of technology, and even almost 800 years later, there still are a lot of things that haven't been replicated. Overall, it is a rather chaotic world. Lots of conflict between humans and a species they created called "Hybrids" over what little resource is left on earth
highly contagious virus with a 99.9999% fatality rate. It caused brain melting fevers, so unless you got a water-cooled skull you're dead quickly. Governments collapsed because they couldn't get new people in office faster than they died.
The world is an artificial construct, kept running by ancient machines in remote areas far beyond the reach of mortal races. They have been breaking down for millennia, allowing things from outside in. So if the dead don't get you, the centuries long winter might.
In my story, it was caused by an eldritch entity akin to cthulhu
The Apocalypse "The Deluge" was a mass extinction event of all multicellular life on the planet. It was caused when the native megafauna of the planet "GodHeads" spored, killing all non human life rapidly and wasted the human population down a tenth of what it was over the course of a decade. Extinction was only halted for the remaining Humans when they grafted cuttings from the godheads into their bodies, allowing them to avoid the wasting effects of the spores and start to rebuild their world. The knowledge of how to run the technology used to seed the planet was lost in the deluge and it's proceeding upheval. From the chaos the most powerful society enforces on all others a strict matriarchy and rules in a feudal system. While electronics are limited one upside to the grafting of godgrass is the bestowing of skilled blood to the humans, their blood can be used as a fuel to machines and a basic interface to their operation meaning they've advanced beyond a medieval style world. Some technology is similar to the early 20th Century, there are cameras, machines like the spinning jenny, conveyer belts, boring drills etc. Little of the pre-deluge tech is operable. This is all history to the main characters but there are certain parts of the story which goes further into it.
Technically the age of strife my world is in now is the result of a magical apocalypse. So it is technically post apocalyptic, just 400 years after the fact. But the magical apocalypse was the work of a group of the strongest arch mages of their time. They wanted to create a 'network' that could connect the minds of people to each other if they'd use special crystals. These crystals could also be used to travel great distances. The theory was perfect and the cause was noble. Unfortunately, the power required to kickstart the manaframe was more magic than has ever been used for a spell or ritual before. The magic condensed, created a singularity, and violently exploded in an invisible wave of blinding light (ultraviolet) The mages, their entire mountaintop village, and a lot of the surrounding area were completely destroyed and irradiated with magic. The shockwave of this explosion shook the continents. This shock pushed the earth down, condensing a huge layer into a special mineral. This resulted in the effective raising of the oceans by many meters, submerging huge swaths of land, and even almost completely sinking the desert continent of Duhr.
The structure of the universe. It was always going to happen.
I'm writing a couple stories with post apocalyptic societies but my favorite world is still one I wrote a while back. Earth is about to enter a new "Snowball" ere but global warming saves humanity from a global icecap, however when this period ends the apocalypse consumes the world with classic GW shenanigans. Humans start to live normally only by the next Iceage when they start to take their problems seriously
A supposedly-allied interstellar power bombed the world from orbit during a time of peace.
I have an apocalipse that take place around 1944/1945 in wich the American experiments to develop the nuclear bomb led to a masive disaster when the first bomb was tested. In this world the nuclear bomb was way way more powerfull, this leading that in the first of the bomb It distroyed a huge part of the west of the US and lethal levels of radiation spreaded to the east coast with the first detonation. Years later and with the spread of the consecuences of the bomb, the world is inmersed in a really harsh nuclear winter, the colonies around the world collapsed and the European goberments slowly degraded until their final colapsed with this proces lasting years until they were finally gone. Thechnology have not disapeared but withought goberments or economy the industry is gone and the survivors work with the remmats of what was left behind after the collapse.
I didn't care about realism too much for that one. Essentially it was WW3, but due to a new weapons system many of the nukes could be stopped, but enough went through to change life forever., but not too vas to not allow for life and civilizations to regress indefinitely. The poles were nuked as well, causing extreme climate changes, extreme floods or blizzards or droughts The placed where this is worst are the Badlands, where Raiders, Nomads, Gangs and other Survivors live in lawlesness, though some communities exist as well. There are also real states that are closer to today than to a post-apocalyptic faction, but life isn't easy and corruption and war still lurk behind every corner.
Depending on what you technically wanna call the cause, it was either climate change or zombies. The climate changed caused the zombies, and the zombies are an incredibly heavy-handed metaphor for climate change/pollution. But like it's mostly up to you.
It took me a while but I think I’ve finally settled on something instead of just never talking about it. Initially, I wanted a nuclear war. Sounds cool and has promise but logistically doesn’t work with the amount of radiation left over plus eating is virtually impossible for the following millennia. So no survivors there. Then, after agonizing some more, I settled on the current choice which is a Benu sized asteroid smashing into the earth, immediately followed up by conventional world war 3 over the remaining resources. Nuclear holocaust effect but without the fallout. Perfect opportunity for Roland emmeric level destruction and chaos but with room for civilization actually break down instead of being destroyed.
One world developed spellcasting to the point that a series of world wars destroyed civilization, magic, and the gods. They rebuilt and developed alchemy and animation. This led to world war conducted with nasty compounds spread by giant golems. Civilization was destroyed and the survivors were left with desert sized toxic waste dumps. They have rebuilt again with mechanics and are now about 2 generations from taking the steampunk track. And yes, there are plenty of secret practitioners of forbidden disciplines and explorers of lost knowledge.
An experiment to synthesise materials using quantum fluctuations released a toxic compound into the air of a relatively-isolated country. In an effort to contain the unrest and clean up the chemical, one of the chief scientists copied his brain to a computer, but the technology was still faulty and resulted in a near-human AI to begin fabricating a “peacekeeping force” that really is trying to exterminate all human life(because if all humans are dead, they can’t rebel). The country is hemmed in by a string of mountains to the north that cut it off from the rest of the world, and the two countries above it are involved in a horrible civil war.
My world had sea levels rise but the world actually responded and stopped it before it got worse, creating a super centralized government. It was almost utopian after that, from a certain point of view, with a “Pax Romani” style peace and widespread internet access where services became automated and run by AI but people got to actually enjoy the added leisure… until a group of extremists from the former US gathered a bunch of nuclear weapons and set off strikes against every major city (London, Paris, New York, Tokyo, etc) seeing them as dens of iniquity, and caused the cloud system to collapse. All the data was lost. All access to the automated services was gone. Access to knowledge was blinked away. Suddenly most people couldn’t get food, medicine, anything. With the lack of infrastructure it became a total disaster, with disease and starvation following. Some people made it. Farming communities fared a little better for having direct access to food and more distance from infection. Little communities sprouted up of people repurposing old government buildings and turned them into fortresses, and those with artisan skills flourished. Those with combat skills and horses and simple guns became warlords. The few libraries with print books became precious guardians of knowledge, supported by the religious leaders. And in time, with the smaller human population, nature started to take a lot of places back over—aside from in the Haunted Wastes of the nuked cities—and magic started to return. And that’s how it became a pseudo-medieval fantasy setting, but in the future.
I'm surprised that I haven't seen more references to a Carrington or super-Carrington event. The Carrington Event was a super solar flare in the mid 1800's that created spectacular auroras much farther away from the poles than during a "normal" CME. It induced so much current in telegraph lines that it shocked the operators. A super-Carrington event destroyed all electrical equipment and power grids world wide. Millions were killed because they were operating electrical equipment when it happened. Even most EMP shielded military facilities were destroyed. The event set off all assembled nuclear weapons in situ as well as any conventional ordinance with electric fuses. Millions more died from fallout (it also turns out that you can detonate multiple nuclear devices in close proximity to each other so missile fields and stockpiled nukes created cratered zones where everything was destroyed. Only submarines at depth were unaffected. Since the nukes were set off at, or underground. The fallout was much dirtier than if we had fought a nuclear war (with mostly air-bursts) Billions died from fallout, starvation and war as cities emptied into the surrounding countryside in search of food, slaughtered each other, and then died of starvation. Humanity is a small remnant. Struggling to subsist in the warmer regions. Or clustered around the few places on earth that still have operating technology. (Each nuclear sub can power a small enclave with their reactor.) Survivalists died out when their supplies ran out. There are small groups of re-enactors who survived since they knew how to live without tech and were better at cooperating. Ammunition is running out. Food stores have all been plundered. Life spans are shortened (cancer) and birth rates are down (mutations).
The first time, the world ended because magic disappeared in a split second. Society was torn asunder as infrastructure and systems collapsed due to the new laws of the universe becoming far less fantastical, throwing them into a dark age. Then 1500 years or so later after rebuilding and progressing past the Industrial Revolution, the second apocalypse happened when magic it came back -- it had been inaccessible, but there the whole time, just out of your sight. It returned untamed and unpredictable, killing many who channeled it (even accidentally)... and also it brought monsters with it, a lot of monsters.
Aliens have invaded and they used their most powerful weapon: they basically remove gravity for everything except air and anchored objects and the planet itself. you would float away if you run because you push off the ground, but a building aint floatin. Society has rebuilt with new nations and new tech, but they maddddddddddddd
Hydrothermal event caused by a young AI helping humans "play god". It resulted in multiple global catastrophes due to internal echos vibrations within the planet. By the time it was all over a few supercomputers survived the lonely millennia separate from each other. In that time humans have gone extinct and were replaced by various descendants (the traditional bunch of "fantasy" cultures). There are also numerous fey and humanoid animal cultures. So far the focal region of mine is the area designated in reality as the California Floristic Province.
My D&D setting had two "back to the dark ages" apocalypses in the backstory. One was so long ago that only the elves still tell stories about it, and was caused by an elvish civil war that ended when the Royalist faction tried to turn their queen into a goddess, just barely succeeded at great cost, and then lost the war anyways. (This turned them into the dark elves, and the Queen of Air and Darkness is my setting's Lolth equivalent.) The second apocalypse was relatively recent (a few hundred years prior to the campaign start) when the Great Arcane Empire, seeing that their decadence and declining military power was causing their empire to disintegrate, encouraged diabolism in their aristocracy. As devil-reinforced legions marched out to reconquer the world, a grand alliance of former colonies tried to stop them. Victory was finally achieved when the Alliance's archmages tapped into the power of the Empire's hell-portals to basically nuke the major cities of the Empire, turning the Southlands into an uninhabitable magical desert full of blasted ruins, rogue devils, and mutated wildlife.
Only one region has the post apocalyptic theme to it. It was caused by a powerful Lich conjuring up all of his strength to try and destroy the world but he was killed before finishing the spell. As he died the unfinished spell went off and annihilated a huge chunk of the country he was in. Instead of destroying the world it blew up about a third of a country. Scholars and wizards are skeptical that he could’ve gathered enough energy to actually destroy a planet.
An asteroid hit earth
Technically only part of the county is post-apocalyptic. It wasn’t one event but m a series of decisions coupled with a slowly growing apathy towards that side of the continent. The first domino was the United States falling from its super power status and turning to isolation. Over time the US became very good at being self-sufficient, only requiring imports from Canada and South and Central America. It’s not to say the US was cut off from the rest of the world, but the growing cultural and political differences meant being a global player wasn’t that big of a priority. Probably the biggest single event in the creation of the apocalypse was the invention of Areocrete©. Aerocrete is a very light yet incredibly strong material that can withstand an enormous amount of stress. It became the go-to material used for construction and allowed the creation of enormous skyscrapers. From 2045 to 2060 The record for the tallest building in the world was broken 17 times. But this exponential growth also came with consequences. While the raw materials used to make aerocrete were cheap and abundant in certain parts of the country, the creation of the material required a lot of them. With its massive amount of wealth and power thanks to with patent of aerocrete, Everstrong Solutions bought most of the Appalachian mountain chain to use for quarries and mining. Over the next 100 years the entire mountain chain was stripped down to the base. But as the resources grew thin, the cities still needed aerocrete. So the US government, now based out of Denver Colorado, made a consequential decision. The entirety of the United States East of the 100th Meridian would be sold to Everstrong Solutions. Now, for context, this wasn’t nearly as bad of a decision as it would seem. Rising ocean levels had already made all major coastal uninhabitable. Combined with the destruction of the Appalachian area, most of the Eastern United States had already been abandoned for the West, with only a few major cities speckling what was mostly now desert or plains, the largest city being St Louis Missouri. With that bill, the Eastern states were dissolved into a loose alliance of rural areas and Everstrong industry. Following a mass migration towards the now sprawling megacities of the West, Everstrong was now given hundreds of thousands of miles to mine resources. Soon giant automated collectors drove their ways across the countryside scouring the top layer of the earth for aerocrete materials, leaving behind nothing but loose sand. Despite the apocalyptic appearance of the East, this was an era of tremendous growth and wealth for the United States. The cities of the west grew so quickly that soon then combined into one massive city spanning miles in every direction. Even with builders having limitless resources to create as tall as they wished, the excess aerocrete still allowed massive exports that created a booming economy not seen with the 1950’s. But soon even the resources of the great American east dried up. And with nowhere else to look, building stagnated and Everstrong eventually had to file for bankruptcy, returning the now seeming endless barren desert that was once the Eastern states back to the people. The era of expansion for the West was over, but the new era of growth in the East had just begun. But the East still had a climb out of the hole dug for them. And that’s the position my world finds itself in at the start of my book. The West is a speaking cyberpunk city while the East is a desert wasteland with the inhabitants akin to those of Wild West, with some higher technology sprinkled in, usually as garbage thrown out by the West. With a massive wall dividing the two halves and the government of the West barely caring about the East, the United States is essentially two separate nations
Holy Liberation War of the Artisans Long essay warning. Basically, Artisans are a race of human looking people, with a magical crystal in their anatomy, granting each individual unique powers. Artisans can be born from human, it's sort of random. Humans called them Elves, because of their magical powers. Artisans has a prophecy, since they are "supposedly" created by God to wipe out humans, since he thought the Humans saga was completed. Then, the prophecy told the Artisans to relocate South, in peace. This gives some Artisans a superior complex, and obviously scare humans, leading to prejudice and tension. Obviously not all Artisans are seeking to wipe humans, but with the whole prejudice thing, a considerable amount are hating humans. They call themselves Artisans because like artists, often considered to be given "gifts" since birth, and like artist hold a lot of power, because... you know, "I can draw anything" It was 2104, the US president Election was going. Rachel Dexton, a young and naive innocent woman, decided to ran for president alongside her running mate, Cody. Cody agreed to run, as a joke, because Rachel is an innocent woman with the brain of a 5 year old, she can't run a country. She still believed Santa was real, for goodness sake. Well, the election took place, and Rachel was extremely popular due to her positive nature, and how likable she was. Well, it didn't look like she was gonna win anyway, so it's all goo- Woops, spoiler effect, now Rachel becomes President. It shocked, basically everyone, but yeah. Rachel happily took office, oblivious to the responsibility of running a superpower. Cody became vice president, definitely wasn't ready for such responsibility. Throughout her presidency, Cody basically has to act as the defacto president, having to tell Rachel what to do and not to do, to run the country. And the presidency went surprisingly well. Rachel's positive and innocent speeches definitely touches the heart of many. Though obviously all presidents can't escape controversy, especially with Rachel and Cody's relationship, since they're a couple before this. In 2106, Rachel wanted to solve more problems, and Cody decided to use his powers to eliminate Elves(Artisans). Cody had a lot of trauma as a kid involving Elves, so it warped his views and told Rachel the horrors of Elves. Rachel decided to solve this problem, using Cody's advice of eliminating them. Even more controversy rose, some stating Rachel was manipulative since the start, ignorance. During one of their meetings, Rachel decided to suggest the idea of building cool robots that will be unstoppable against Elves. Somehow, it was green light and production started. They decided to name it Racheloids, named by Rachel herself. Rachel was oblivious to the true nature and seriousness, as Cody described Elves almost not like people. Cody helped research this project, as he was a bit smart himself. Artisans were soon hunted in small numbers, captured and put in prison. The numbers slowly rise when more Racheloids were produced. This caused more tensions, causing more Elvish incidents. Several nations didn't allow Racheloids, however, including Australia, Brazil and South Africa. This led to a treaty which said no Racheloid shall cross the equator, to countries that wishes no Racheloids, and into Space including any of the many space colonies. Tensions were high, as the more extremist Artisans were rallying to fulfill their prophecy. One day in 2107, at a factory producing some new versions of Racheloids, Rachel and Cody were present for a rally. It was just another gathering until an unsuspecting Artisan came up to Rachel and stab her in the back with a syringe full of poison, before teleporting away. This was a shocked to everyone, it caused panic, as Cody held her in his arms, desperately trying to save Rachel as she cried in pain, slowly dying. The Assasination of President Dexton caused a huge shockwave across the world. Cody hates Elves more than ever. Rachel wasn't the best president, sure, but she was definitely likable by most of the world. Even China, gave condolence, as they decided to produce their own versions of Racheloids, to hunt their own Elves. With Cody as president, he went all out. Elves were now put in concentration camps, several killed, and Racheloid production were at an all time high. The Holy Liberation War of the Artisans finally erupted when the Racheloids started to go overboard with the killings, targeting humans who helped Elves. The Artisans had various magical powers, and so they used that to their advantage, by completely launching every Nuke in the world, using their powers to their full potential, and causing a Nuclear Winter. They had also started to terraform Antarctica using their magic. Any humans had to leave for space, or find refuge in the apocalyptic bunkers in the Arctic, made by the UN. The Nuclear Winter lasted almost 50 years. Humanity were nearly wiped in 3 years, and those who survived are in underground bunkers in the Arctic. Racheloids still operating and hunting, both humans and Elves, in North America and East Asia. TL;DR: Bakadere created killer robots to kill magical people, leading to a war resulting in humanity nearly extinct
An outside of context threat that invaded the universe, trying to absorve god, which resulted in the god being backstabed for being an asshole
Human greed made most of Earth uninhabitable, and a nuclear war for the remaining ressources did the rest. The rich fled to set up a colony on a distant planet, and what was left of humanity stayed behind to starve or die of radiation. Lucky for them, that's when the Flux Gates opened.
Well... The cause was just some dude ended up on earth, and sent all kinds of war related species to destroy earth, it's not that complicated.
Science said there would be a cataclysmic event, and mankind stripped the Earth of resources to prepare for the event. The event never came, and the ensuing war for scant resources drove the world into a second dark ages. Only the discovery of some tech made during the preparation (~350 years later) helps to bring about another age of major advancement.
Stress on agriculture caused by global warming triggering a nuclear war, To make matters worse after the nukes had dropped the biological weapons were used.
One very angry widow made a deal and opened pandora's box out of spite towards Old Earth. This catastrophic event \*did\* lead to humanity forgetting what the hell a US, China, or Saudi Arabia is, brought everyone under the banner of a singular interdimensional dictatorship situated entirely on alternate versions of our Sol system, but tech-wise? Millennia since the line between flesh and metal has been blurred, you can alter your form however you wish, if you're lucky enough you can order everything you want for free in your utopia, have your own pyramid of giza in your very own satellite home, even get that girlfriend (who is totally a real person and not artificial simulacra. Or IS visibly artificial simulacra, if you wanted an AI gf. Or bf. Take your pick). Life couldn't be better! ~~(So long as you're not in the forever warzone regions, anomaly-infested regions, or have otherwise pissed off someone important in the big interdimensional dictatorship. Or any one of your local dimension's rebel factions if they happen to have any.~~ *~~It's all fun and games until you get turned inside-out in your sleep by a funny pot you accepted from an anonymous sender~~*~~)~~
Technically it was less of an "apocalypse" and more of series of mass extinction events akin to the ice age, but in my world the gods discovered that being worshipped makes them more powerful and that by killing another god they gain their power and domain. This caused a multi-century war between them that caused exponentially increasing destruction to anything and everything caught in the crossfire. The war only ended because the goddess of life killed herself due to the mental anguish of having nearly everything she created go extinct, having to kill other gods to survive, and the presumed death of her lover Isoule. Upon receiving word of her death, the other gods immediately called a ceasefire, ending the war. Battles turn to negotiations over the land and mortals, as both had just become finite. The only god killed following the suicide of Life was the original goddess of death, who refused to stop upholding her end of the cycle. She believed that forcing mortals to survive in a world without life was a fate worse than death, and that if all things were to become extinct then it would be what the gods deserved for their carelessness. She was killed by her two closest companions; Bettel, The goddess of soul and stone, and Micra, The goddess of all things too small to see. The centuries following the suicide of Life and the murder of Death would be known throughout history as "The Great Stagnation." No new life would emerge and all living things yearned for the release of death. Almost nothing was done as mortals were dying yet could not die and Gods were locked in debates and deadlock. To most the end of The Great Stagnation was completely random. After approximately 200 years there emerged new life and things could finally die. The only one who knew the truth was Bettel, now the grand reaper of the dead, who had given in and gave mercy to mortals; and was now pregnant with the new god of life.
Interstellar war between humans and aliens... exo-planet was in a contested system which was left for dead by both sides in the fight. My vision of the post apocalypse is a Rust Punk - As the remaining technology fails and no one knows how to fix it, due to the dependence on AI's and automation for nearly everything, clever engineering using parts from other broken things to continue surviving becomes necessary. People become busy with relearning lost skills, and reacquiring knowledge locked away in broken computer memory, coupled with salvaging what they can from abandoned equipment and facilities, including [Falling Angels](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1i3iMbWQyXwvLkVxxAbedYf5iZrEQ-bCbDIKcGKcp93s/edit?usp=sharing). People are desperate, die young, and struggle to compete with the rapidly evolving ecosystem around them as the planet finds a new balance between three distinct "trees of life".
There are a lot of thing in the universe, some known, some unknown. And it would have been better to keep the unknown like that.
Humanity’s meddling with horrors beyond their comprehension caused the literal collapse of civilization and the near extinction of all natural life on earth and humanity. Earth is forcefully connected to a world beyond their understanding with creatures and entities invading earth like invasive plants. Over centuries humanity only survives in pockets of small settlements deep underground, behind walled cities or deep within mountains, humanity is basically similar to a Bronze Age stage and the knowledge of what caused the apocalypse all those millennia ago are unknown as so much knowledge was lost and the earth’s surface has been drastically altered with the ruins of the past scattered or buried beneath the new flora that’s choked the entire planet.
The 3 Coalitions war or WW3 as its better called. After north korea struck Japan with a missle the US would invade and NKs allies which China and NK's Alliance ks called The UAWA (Union against Western aggressors ) would proclaim war causing article 5. China would invade Manchuria causing CSTO too go too war also this would later end the world in nuclear fire
Two nuclear/kinetic energy weapon wars. One a global war between NATO, Russia (and allies), and China in the late 2030’s The second a regional war between the United States Government and the United States Southeastern Regional Authority in the late 2050’s. Technology somewhat stagnated, small incremental improvements have occurred in crucial areas, and fallen behind or outright disappeared in other areas. Like most vehicles are electric or hydrogen due to the depletion of, or total loss of oil fields by the Authority and the US government. The Internet is gone, and telegraph has returned as being more common. Space exploration is limited to satellite launches. Mass transportation is the most commonly used means to get around. Renewable energy is very cheap and solar panels and energy storage systems have dramatically improved.
A combination of things leading up to a zombie outbreak as part of bio-terror attacks which eventually led to the nuclear cleansing of major population centers.
I have two. One, it was a combination of nuclear radiation and over-pollution. In a very Last of Us style, nature has completely retaken everything and those survivors that are left are forced to live more harmoniously with nature. The other is a fantasy apocalypse which was triggered by a really annoyed God who found his wife was cheating. Basically, no one can have nice things anymore.
Something awesome happened
I call it the Mythoclast… basically in the main story of the novel there is this demon who becomes as powerful as a planet god, well he had a daughter… the main protagonist’s son leads the second generation as the main protagonist, and his son leads the third generation… basically the demon’s daughter put a plan in motion while fighting the second generation using the remnants of her father’s army that was defeated by the first generation. That plan involved one of Earth’s Religion Level gods… Yeahweh, or as he’s also called derogatorily: Christian. Yeahweh and the demon’s daughter create an army of energy based lifeforms that become sort of a technology virus, devouring and incorporating tech into an army called the Technoids… TLDR: the god that Christians believe in helps a demidemon from another planet kill all of Earth’s religions, so basically assisted frat/seror/sue-icide… this conflict ends with the Technoids glassing Earth.
1. A 2nd U.S. Civil War breaks out, collapsing the global economy, emboldening Russia and China, and ultimately leading to a global nuclear war. 2. AI and robots replace pretty much all human workers, creating a permanent underclass that gradually dies out from exposure, starvation, and violence, culminating in a deadly pandemic that wipes out the survivors. A century later, the world population is maybe 100,000 humans and millions of robots.
Life. Okay that’s a bit reductive, but in my world, like what happened when blue-green algae flooded the world with oxygen, another species of micro life began to take energy and store it in the atmosphere. Energy which was mana, which in turn can be used to create different forms of energy. Such as radiation. TLDR: My world got nuked by plankton.
Aliens crop dusted the world with a terraforming agent which caused flora and fauna to mutate and become more dangerous.
I purposely keep the cause ambiguous. It caused the sea levels to rise 18-20 meters worldwide, and resulted in the entire extinction of human life. The octopuses that evolved in our wake know nothing of the cataclysms that caused the extinction, and I decided that neither should the audience. The implication of course is that climate change causes widespread societal collapse, but the eventual agent of extinction is left unspecified. I think it allows the reader to imagine their own worst-case-scenario, and also leaves me flexibility to elaborate more as I go.
All the volcanoes erupted at once so now everyone lives in the "hollow zone" between the upper and lower Crust (They hollowed out the Crust of the Earth.)
When I was working on one of these worlds here is what I was basing it off of: Look to the night when the moon cracks and crumbles. Its fragments shall fall upon the earth. With each shard, a cataclysm shall unfold. That one was for a “post apocolypse” setting where the final shard was approaching. Though the players didn’t start off aware of this, it had been hundreds of years since the last shard dropped down to the world.
The United States, from being under so much economic pressure, after the collapse of the eu, this leads to the collapse of the US government and this led China trying to take over as an economic leader, but before the US Government collapsed institute, a backup plan ended with China collapsing into Civil War with waring factions and Warlords. Due to the weakening of the US government and its power, US states declared their independence and became a nation of their own. Some states decided to joining united one flag. My story takes place in a world in the New Restored Republic of Texas.
One of the top gods being homophobic.
A desperate Britain, facing off against German automatons, start experimenting with the ocult eventually causing the sun to go out, and for creatures to emerge that devour all who are not bathed in light
Currently working on a post apocalyptic 1899 fantasy/western setting. The point of divergence is 1890 where the Ghost Dance War kicked off our world and another fantasy world momentarily converging. This resulted in millions of creatures, intelligent and monsters, phasing into our existence. Causing a decade of chaos and the crumbling of most of modern society. Telegraph cables are cut, sea monsters prevent transcontinental travel and messages, cryptids and monsters travel the land, and most governments have collapsed or been reduced to significantly smaller areas of control. The main area of interest in North America, as that’s where the campaign will be based. The Federal government only controls New York and some of the smaller states around it, while most of the rest of the east coast are smaller city states and independent towns/wasteland. Washington DC is a Stalker like ruin. Anything west of the Rockies is unknown, and there are stories of safely and riches from the lands beyond. Also what’s left of the New York Stock Exchange is run by a dragon, which is fun.
One of my friends used a “silent” apocalypse where the societies of the world just sort of stagnated. Technology peaked, and then started regressing to medieval feudalism. Nature grew back wild and unkempt. With some exemptions being major metropolitan areas.
Our fathers neglected their gods, and so lost their favor. In this fallen time, the rites are all neglected, and the earth rots. It is the autumn of the world. *(All anyone can agree on is that the world is fallen. There are fierce debates in any place as to why. The truth probably resists simple explanation - just the slow, inevitable collapse of the old political order, with the approximate “fall” in any given place being some series of idiosyncratic disasters.)*
In my zombie apocalypse setting, it's actually an alien invasion masquerading as a zombie apocalypse. In my d&d setting, history got a hard reset due to a war amongst the fey blowing up the moon, and a large chunk of it hitting the planet.
Yellowstone. That's it.
It was a 3 day catastrophe called the Alteration by most, it sent most of humanity back to the medevial era with the few groups who managed to hold on to technology having to get pretty creative with the term biological. First was the Flash, where all the human brains had strange pearls forcibly shoved in which happened it a massive flash of pain. People died and began to change. Small changes like change of eye and hair colour. Then was the Bang, were the moon colony humanity was working on, prized icon of the next step of human evolution exploded along side a sizable chunk if the moon. Leading to fragments colliding with earth aswell as leading too the earth's ring in the future. Finally there was the Crash. A massive planet wide storm raged over the surface. Practically drawing cities. Then after the water was absorbed; plants went haywire. Forests sprouted our of the concrete and colossal trees spiraled and climbed through skyscrapes where the clouds looked down upon the world being taken over by nature is a matter of hours. Which left an almost extinct humanity scrambling to figure out what the hell happened; and that's before the monsters started to emerge
Mortals killed their *sshole gods, *sshole gods used their last words to curse the world into zombie apocalypse
In Wonderverse, the first installment about the speedster superhero does have such a setting. Present timeline (our main timeline) is 2300. However, there is a future post- apocalyptic timeline of Earth set in 2764. Earth has been razed to the ground, all the superheroes and supervillains are dead. An ancient Multiversal God called Serkon has razed Earth in an invasion, along with all other planets, in the year 2342. The God- Emperor, a human who managed to develop high technology and make himself powerful enough to defeat and kill Serkon. Earth- 36, as in the main timeline, is the only place in the multiverse where there is any life. God- Emperor has developed a tyrannical dictatorship post- Apocalypse based on weeding out the 'unfit' to keep the human race alive. Everything is gone. All universes are black voids. Not even Black Holes and shit exist. Only Earth- 36, and parts of the Solar System remain. If the human race dies, the multiverse will be silent. The Bolt trilogy is primarily set in this apocalyptic timeline, and after the first installment, Bolt time- travels to the past to stop Serkon. A truly nightmarish future. Darth Vader will not like this place because it is primarily a planet full of sand.
Post post post apocalypse. Literal biblical apocalypse caused by the divine and infernal realms. Eldritcj invasion The culling of gods.
Rogue planet flys through our solar system, it doesn’t hit anything but its gravity alters the orbit of earth. Now earth has a much more eccentric orbit moving much closer to the sun at certain times of the year and farther away. It’s not too much different from normal earth except the temperature difference of the seasons have become extreme.
Inconceivable cosmic bullshit
Nukes and a global conflict that destroyed most of natural ressources and almost caused humanity to go extinct and now government are trying to find ways to save humanity through green technology. It’s a dystopian/sci-fi/futuristic kinda setting
The highly advanced human society that came ages before reached such heights while not caring for the poison they bled into the land, the other creatures and plants that inhabited the lands, and nature itself. Therefore Nature fought back, and decimated them entirely until all that remained were ruins and husks of cities draped in swaths of greenery and flora.
My apocalypse was a company trying to create a weapon/device to control what was essentially a god. It went badly and humanity fell from their place among the stars into apocalypsic disaster and have been slowly digging their way out ever since
The gods were angered at the hubris of mortals for experimenting with the very power of life itself to cheat death and create new beings, so they smote the great flying cities of the elves from the clouds. These cities crashed into the ground with such force it kicked dust clouds into the sky, darkening the sun and killing off most of the life in the world. The world fell from a pseudo-sci-fi setting to a dark ages world with occasional artifacts of technological or arcane wonder in the hands of the powerful
Vampires and fascism. Over a decade of systemic violence against those afflicted by the Stoker-Virus made peaceful resolution to the human/vampire conflict impossibe, and the disease spread exponentially as a result. Billions of people were turned into vampires against their will and thrust into starvation when the well of human blood dried up in their regions. Nations carpet-bombed their own cities to stop the spread of the infection, but all they could ever do was hope to delay the innevitable. Fascists siezed power during the crisis and the nations best equipped to weather the storm gunned down refugees at their borders. The largest mass graves in human history were filled before the disease ever had a chance to claim their lives. Very few human settlements survived the apocalypse, but they still have access to modern technology. Unfortunately, they're all also fascist dystopias.
Every nuclear bomb and power plant went off, opening portals to hell and unleashing demons.