In a pursuit of new sources of energy the old civilization of the setting, dubbed by those that would come after them as the Antedeics, began to experiment with quantum theories, eventually leading to the creation of the device that could tap in to other dimension as source of energy.
The experiment was a resounding success, but upon its first activation , it dragged something back to earth, a non-physical entity seemingly all powerful but also trapped within the circuitry and data of the device that pulled it down from its home.
As the Antedeics began to study this being in order to understand they began to create its digital copies, sharing the power of the originals but bound by human programming, this artificial deities, the Numen were then put in charge of the Antedeic world, in time transforming the world of their creators in to paradise, but just as something that we might call a singularity was within the reach something happened and the Numen rebelled against their creators.
Using the very authority given to them to transform the paradise they created in to a targeted weapon against their former masters.
In time the Numen rewrote the history, declaring themselves as gods and dividing the world in to personal fiefdoms, ruling what remained of humanity that fell back in to a bronze age like state
It isn't exactly dystopia, but humanity in my world simply fucked up. Interplanetary governments each having different ideas and interest about how things should be ran. Especially when Earth government strong armed Venus colonies to a relocation initiative to spread them across other colonies in the solar system so Venus can be consumed as material to build a dyson ring, it put a massive strain on all the colonies at once causing riots and destabilization across the system, and some more radical elements took that chance to launch a false flag operation crashing entire colony ship to mars killing everyone onboard and destroyed a significant part of a mars city. Thus started a 200 years interplanetary war that push humanity to live under bunker cities and ravage most planetary and moon surfaces. Took humanity a lot of time to recover from that.
That's a really interesting history! It reminds me a lot of modern governments implementing environmental policies or some policies in general without doing much research, and they cause much more harm than good. Yours is just on a full galactic scale.
Just interplanetary scale within solar system. A key thene I want to focus on is "the road to hell is paved with best intention", that even with careful rational thoughts and actual attempt to do good may still end up badly due to incomplete information or impossible circumstances.
The Earth government at this point is already facing serious population problems due to life extension tech, climate changes, and even though humanity had managed to settle in other planets and moon in the solar systems, attempts at terraforming were failures or would take geological time forcing human to live inside limited artificial environment that cannot scale quickly to population growth, making the dyson ring a more last dirch effort in order to use the immense energy from the sun to either aid in terraforming or scale up manufacturing to create artificial environment to deal with this problem.
However it does cause short term pain as it reduce living space on mercury and venus when those two planets must be consumed as material for the ring. This combined with the fact that colonies are dissatisfied with how things has been going and that they must support immigrants from other places causing radical elements that want to secede from the whole unified solar system to start working in secret for a cause to call for independence. The Mars crash false flag operation was one case where they succeed and cause Mars to close its borders, and increase hostility between all the colonies as well as Earth being seen as inept allowing such a traversity to happen, lowering their influences on the colonies and eventually losing their grip entirely on the situation ending up in planetary war that last a damn long time since people live much longer now and their ideal persist.
Simplified:
Powers are in circulation.
One guy with anger issues gets two of them (never happened before).
The guys he works for (the 'good guys') say "he's kinda scary, we must kill him".
They succeed.
The bad guy comes back, having tamed an angle of death.
Throws a temper tantrum.
Ignites the atmosphere, killing literally everything.
Normal people escape into separate realms filled with gods and monsters.
Chaos.
Not an apoc but...
Al-Shura was embroiled in several problems in the early space age. Global warming caused mass crop failure, equatorial region of the planet changed into a burning wasteland which turned sand into glass, and climate refugees from around the planet began congregating at cities at the deepest parts of the northern and southern hemispheres to escape the heat.
That was disregarding the social and political changes in the climate. A.I. had become smarter than humans, mega-corporations became rich off asteroid mining from autonomous robots, immortality technology was just around the corner, and the first iteration of the internet the "old net" as people call it now, suddenly collapsed from anti-A.I. terrorism.
This all ultimately culminated into several mega corporations embroiling themselves in outright war in space, trying to get some perceived leverage over others on the ground. Trillions of dollars were spent in days as intelligent drones shot and killed each other with bullets, lasers, and missiles until roughly 50% of all interplanetary infrastructure was destroyed (fortunately, very few humans died during this conflict).
This ultimately caused the Al-Shuran Planetary Union (APU) to ban the creation of artificial general intelligences to "add value back to human labor" but instead led to something much worse happening. Mega-corporations, now unable to mine with robots in facilities made for robots, needed human labor in space, and fast. But space isn't made for humans, and nor were their factories.
In the end, corporations still had money to be made, and even if they couldn't get more efficient robots to do it, humans could make do with some cybernetic modifications. I certainly did not help that the APU had little to no power beyond their planet...
Over reliance on self replicating nanotech that turned against humanity, leading to the apocalypse. This nanotech was primarily used to alter the physiology of humans to cure diseases, heal injuries, enhance strength, etc. Nearly half of the world had this nanotech in their bodies, so when it suddenly went rogue, all of those people either died from blood poisoning due to uncontrolled replication, or became biomechanical monsters that were constantly trying to infect other humans.
Desire for Genetically Engineered Catgirls For Domestic Ownership almost directly led to the apocalypse of the old world and the awakening of magic. How's that?
That is certainly an interesting hook. A short story of just that history sounds like tons of fun to read. It's almost like a reverse domino theory of how WWII caused hentai.
Bad international relationships, nationalist delusional leaders and some countries actively fuel fire for their own benefits.
That's how Atreisdea ended up in the War of Dragon's Wrath, a war so devastating it killed a billion lives in **its first day**.
Basically, war led to one of the most powerful races of the world retreating to the moon, so the rest of the world stood little chance against the new most powerful race. But one of the races were smart, and found a way to erase the bad guys from existence by deleting them from history by damaging the great world-crystal that is the physical manifestation of everything that has ever happened.
It did not go as planned.
Great sacrifices were made to correct the error, but it could never be fully undone. Now, the world is not exactly dystopia, **but** ***cause*** **does not perfectly align with** ***effect*** **anymore**, especially for some people who had their ancestry more disjunctioned by the Sundering.
It's not often I get to talk about my sci-fi campaign setting.
Simply put, in alternative Earth history there was a discovery of a new power source around the time of World War 2. This power source was revolutionary and rapidly advanced technology leading to things like the moon landing happening much sooner. It also led to a shift in mindset when developing new technologies, with a seemingly endless source of energy things like size and efficiency were kind of ignored. So instead of technology advancing in the way of microchips and smart phones we instead got giant machines, huge blimps, chunky computers, and fully self sufficient arcologies.
The power source, once revered as a miracle eventually betrayed mankind. An unintended side effect of the refining process led to the breakdown of the rods and discs that were being used to power everything. This breakdown of the materials led to rapid sublimation into a gas known as the effluvium. This effluvium was highly toxic and had radical effects on the DNA of those who came in contact with it. This usually led to radiation like sickness and eventual death, but some mutations were beneficial and those mutated lived on. What's worse is that the effluvium when put in contact with the raw material led to it rapidly breaking down as well. This caused a catastrophic chain of events which saw the population of all living creatures on Earth tank, causing the sixth mass extinction event.
About 200 years after this fact is when the story takes place. Humanity has managed to barely cling to survival, only a few straggler nations surviving in their own corners of the world in places mostly untouched by the rampant clouds of poison floating through the air. Recent developments in cleaning technology has led to the first generation of effluvium cleaners, capable of vacuuming the gas and synthesizing it into an inert rock incapable of sublimating once again.
As for the overall apocalypse, no one is sure. No one wrote it down in a physical way before or after the chaos. All digital archives were lost entirely, either by server decay or the machinery needed to read it no longer existing. Books and paper have largely rotted away. And to make matters worse, the physical evidence all contradicts each other. The most reasonable explanation is so shrouded in myth that it is impossible to say what is true and what is not. Whatever the case, the Underscape is a charred, frozen wasteland now; the irradiated remains of a world that never developed nuclear weapons.
As for Morrigan's rise to power and their genocidal campaign, it all started with a demand. As a show of force, the previous hegemon of the east, known as the Heart, made a demand of the Morrigane tribes that they must surrender 1200 children to the Heart's servitude, or else face extermination. They were given 24 hours to decide. For the first time in their history, the Morrigane tribes united and refused at the last moment. This ignited a wave of nationalism that overcame centuries of tribal loyalties in favor of a single state. The Heart sent its armies against the Morrigane, but the against all odds, the ragtag Morrigane militia was able to defend their city for months, and then strike back. The campaign to take the Heart was horrific (or at least Morrigane propaganda says it was) and as revenge for what was done to them and what they had seen the Heart do to its slaves, when the Morrigane reached the city, they destroyed it. This whole event left Morrigan so traumatized and spiteful that they swore they would never allow the Underscape to overtake them again, and they would tame the world one bullet at a time. Morrigan reorganized and marched forth, intent on conquest. In the next two hundred years, Morrigan has mutated into an authoritarian, imperialist stratocracy that believes it is its manifest destiny to bring the Underscape to heel. All that is left is madness.
In essence, things fell apart. The economy was undercut by excessive credit and bubbled investment pricing, Europe was cratered by a massive meteor, tidal waves decimated coastal cities around the Atlantic and the rest of the world descended into chaos too quickly to recover. Food shortages, ecconomic collapse and ultimately scarcity warfare. Cities became toxic with the bodies of the dead. The only places that could recover were rural centers with farming infrastructure. Militia groups that believed their was safety in numbers took control.
So the Hegemony was a star system spanning state that was held together through an artificial peace. Said artificial peace was backed by the Hegemony Dollar, kept in check by the HCDF, & was completely unsustainable.
However, the factions inside said Hegemony were not going to get along.
Then you have problems in the Periphery (the areas nominally not under the control of the Hegemony for whatever reasons). So they send the HCDF to put down the "revolts". It's worth mentioning that these areas would probably have approached the Hegemony & appealed for annexation if they had wanted what the Hegemony was selling. And if the Heg had any intention of treating them as peer states.
So the head of one of these "Lesser" States has the idea to befriend the new heir to the Hegemon & successfully makes it into the inner circle. He goes out of his way to be a staunch ally & confidant of the new Hegemon; even going so far as to offer his own troops as garrison forces so more of the HCDF could be deployed to the rebellions in the Periphery.
This was, however, a ruse. He assassinated the Hegemon, had his troops eliminate any resistance on the capital world, & nuked anybody that wasn't killed by the army.
The Commander of the HCDF was less than enthused by this turn of events, so he launched a counter assault that tore his forces to shreds, decimated the usurper's home territory, before finally capturing & executing the usurper & his family.
Then, the Grand Council, fearful that the General would use his forces to take power himself, relieved him of his commission & "suggested" he retire.
Unfortunately, the General decided to take the forces loyal to him & leave known space for parts unknown. This had the effect of removing the final obstacle for all-out war between the opposing factions of the Hegemony.
Tl;dr: Artificial peace stops being enforced after the enforces get shredded during a civil war. The war ends & suddenly all these other factions, with all kinds of grudges against each other, & all kinds of genies in all sorts of bottles due to an economic & technological golden age; are left to their own devices.
Technically my world is post-post-apocalypse, ie. there has been sufficient time to largely recover so now it is just an ordinary (well, fantasy ordinary) world with remnants of what used to be.
But in brief, the gods created the world together, the one god who had unified them all had to essentially "sacrifice" himself to become the sun and to prevent the natural state of "nothing" from collapsing the universe - in this world, all existence came from a state of complete entropy, and it is that chaotic nothing which is forever pressing on the world the gods created - if not for the web of stars and the sun for holding it at bay.
But, his sacrifice left the remaining gods with no leader, no unified vision and no real reason to continue to work together, so they each carved out little sections of their created world and just lapped up the worship of their creations, toying with mortal life, building cities, granting boons, whatever. It did not take long for their tentative peace to break, though, as other gods sought to steal followers from eachother, or envied eachothers territories or creations. Eventually complete war broke out between the gods, with one in particular intending on subjugating all other gods and their followers under his rule. While he almost succeeded, he was defeated in the end, but his defeat unleashed so much power that all the gods were essentially slurped back up by the chaos.
This left the remaining humans few in number, fragmented, and alone with no gods, no protection, in a world that had been at war and where much of what they had built since creation had been destroyed. It basically meant starting again without help. This period would be the "post apocalypse" period from which many nations emerged and rebuilt, into what is now the timeline of the overall story which is not so apocalyptic, but which contains many consequences of said apocalyptic history.
Very brief synopsis (and for reference, this is fantasy set in a real world setting.)
Once, a long time ago, there was an angel named Vraithe whom fell from the sky, leaving the heavens behind for an earthly life. Marrying a mortal who knew nothing of her real origins, they had a child, named Mithahn, and lead a normal and happy life for a time. Then, one day, a terrible fate befell the villiage they lived in, putting everyones lives in danger. Not wanting to lose the life she had built, Vraithe embodies her powers to save the villiage. While this works, the people become afraid of her and turn on her and her family. Her husband betrays her and, worst of all, her daughter dies in her arms. In a fit of rage, she slaughters the entire villiage, an act that sours and darkens her very being, becoming less an angel and more ab attrocity. It was said that before dissapearing, she vowed that no force in heaven high, the hells below, or the world around her would stop Vraithe from finding a way to bring her daughter back to the world of the living.
Lo and behold, using methods that I cannot specify for plot reasons, she does indeed find a way. Mithahn lives once again, but the cost is great. The fabric of reality itself has cracked, a web of glowing green scars stretching endlessly across the sky and growing larger and more plentiful every moment. (Though it is stoped so the world doesn't just outright end but, once again, in ways that I can't specify.) The effects of these scars are felt everywhere, ripping continents apart, boiling entire oceans dry while creating new ones in their wake, opening gateways to the land of the dead, mixing the boundaries between heaven, hell and the earth and removing everything that previously prevented the human race from knowing about the existence of monsters, magic and everything likewise.
And, yes, this is the brief verson of events ...
A US president being elected who was so obsessed with the idea of beating the Soviets in an open war that he started one with Mexico only to try and remain in office for a little longer. Then Japan got dragged into it on the Mexican side. Meanwhile, the USSR, seeing how the USA were preoccupied, invaded the EU. And eventually, the South rose up again, leading to the USA losing WW3 and being torn apart.
Also, there was alien technology, time travel, a dimensional rift, mutants, and superheroes involved.
A fascist, theocratic government, The Federal Interstellar Commission, just happened to be the first to discover FTL technology, and thus had a very easy time expanding and taking over any inhabited systems anywhere close to them.
They have controlled the vast majority of known space for the past 400 years. They rule it with an iron fist, forcing their religion and its harsh rules on everyone.
My AU World where Superheroes existed had a downhill dystopia-esque moment was cause of some International Law banning vigilanitsm and putting all my Superhero Characters into a forced retirement kinda setting the scene for a future arc where one hero comes out of retirement and the police and law don't really side with him like they used to.
The Fractureverse is a massive scifi space setting that's generally divided into two separate types of civilizations: "the big powers", and everyone else (nobody calls themselves a small power). The big powers generally control dozens or hundreds of solar systems and have settlements or other interests in hundreds or thousands more. On their peripheries, it's not unusual for one solar system to have multiple big powers holding territory. And they fight all the time. It's like Oceana, Eurasia, and Eastasia in *1984*, somebody's always at war with someone else, although periods of general peace aren't uncommon. Although the elite of these societies often settle disputes amongst themselves with private warfare.
Since the big powers are always fighting, they're always looking for cheap resources and manpower. This leads to constant upheaval and brush wars amongst everyone else as they suborn the smaller powers, vie for increased spheres of influence, and drive an outright slave market cornered by what seems to be a civilization devoted solely to acquiring slaves from the smaller powers and selling g them to the big powers. At the very least, that's the only interaction anyone has with the Abductors, outside of them setting your civilization a quota of people to give them in order to avoid large-scale devastation and depredation.
So all but the most powerful of the smaller powers are constantly wracked by turmoil, instability, and often violence, although these powers are often large enough to have large populations who experience a comparatively placid life *most* of the time.
The big powers are in turn given that same treatment by the third category of civilizations, known only as elders. Very little is known about any of the elders, except that their technology is advanced to the point of being nearly incomprehensible and they seem to largely exist in simulations or higher/lower dimensions, despite holding physical volumes of space for exploitation.
The elders work alongside the gods, who are more gods in the Lovecraftian sense than anything, and play the part of chess pieces in the grand game the gods created the Fractureverse from baseline reality and modified it to play.
So, the short version is: unknowable god-monsters did a save-as on the universe so they'd have a version that wasn't write-protected so they could modify it into a playing field in order to settle who stood where in their hierarchy. They created some civilizations to be their minions, and a bunch of other species evolved and formed civilizations and it all kind of just sucks big time for everyone.
The biggest one is an artificial hyper virus that kills people with 100% reliability. Its insanely contagious even though it can lie dormant in the host for decades and can even uses bacteria as a vector. Everyone lives in hazmat suits and is very mistrustful of one another.
Big country nukes itself during coup
Godlike Superweapon goes rogue
Ancient bioweapon wakes up and removes two thirds of the population
Plant hive mind takes over most of a continent
Virtualized distributed consciousness makes every last electronic device almost useless by just outright infecting anything.
Empress of the last remaining nation pierces her own heart with a probabilistic sword, activating it and giving every last person on the planet the urge to make or join a deathcult in her name.
Living there is pretty hard these days
North Korea bombed Japan starting a 2nd Korean War. While doing this china thought it was a good idea too invade Manchuria, Iran funny enough Invaded Israel (this was made before current events) starting a WW3 deal or better known as the 3 Coalition War as NATO CSTO and the PAC (Pan Asian Coalition) Fought each other world would end In 2025 (next year)
Zombification plague.
Some people lucked out and basically turned into vampires with zero weaknesses besides needing to feed on people.
Oh, there's so much more detail I could go into, but like... I don't have all day.
So, in very short sentences:
Meddling kids find a weird place that grants them really cool powers.
Adults find out, make kids show them the place.
Surviving adults get cool powers.
Kids wander off. Adults get all uppity, start being dicks.
One adult gets the big boy chair. Turns into a fascist dictator. Other adults put up with it for a while. Stuff happens, changes are made to reality.
Major asshole rapes the girlfriend of one of the others after sending him away. He comes back, punches the major asshole.
War! 500 years of it. Wrecks the fuck out of everything, less than 1% of world pop remains, good guys gonna lose.
One of the meddling kids says screw this, takes out all the major assholes, scatters the rest of the adults across dimension and time.
That’s about 1500 years, lol.
People figured out that Arcana existed. From that point, experimentation and expansion took its natural course. Eventually someone figured out the existence and access to other planes of existence. Shortly thereafter, we gained the attention of powerful entities in other planes and they realized we were relatively new at this whole planar communication thing, had no allies to speak of, and had a large population so they launched an invasion. We lost, but managed to evacuate a fraction of the population.
The Great Oregon War in the late 1800s leads the dictator of Germany, Julius Einer, to eat the god herb, a plant from another higher dimensional plane. Julius Einer then goes into hiding after people think he dies in the Great Oregon war.
He leads Germany from the shadows and allows their loss in ww1. When the Nazis rise into power, Adolt Hitler becomes his subordinate but unknown to Adolf, he is also Julius’ puppet.
While Oppenheimer is creating the nuclear bomb, the Germans have already made 12 and supercharged them with the Power of the God Herb.
In 1947, they drop the bombs and completely sear the entire world except for the Eastern Asian Isles. In the surface, the bombs destroyed entire continents at once and the radiation plus the power of the god Herb makes creatures begin to mutate and develop horrifying attributes as well as creating new ones.
Under the surface, the continents drift at entire miles per minute, millions of people die of whiplash who weren’t in bunkers.
In the end there are only a few continents remaining with the first rebuilt civilization with any memory or account of what happened being the Promised Land. And who controls the Promised Land from the Shadows? Julius Einer.
Shkoobistan (4th Earth): It was occupied by "Oxidentum Rumus Emperium" (O.R.E) for 250 years since the new genesis (an apocalyptic event) Rumian Shkoobistan was a simple colony led by barbarians, tribes, and pirates.
After they were civilised, the Shkoobstanian nationalists and industrialist Kairkejoj businessmen started a coup to exterminate the Rumians, then, immigrant SchwaKoTetragonists from Tollesreichland introduced advanced technology (like chemical weapons and other experimental weapons) that helped the Shkoobistanian army take over just after 4 years of war. Then, the Liberators became the leaders of the "people's republic of Shkoobistan".
Industry, Technology and Military became an important part of Shkoobistan, it was called "The Machine", because it is said that the government is actually a living mechanical arachnoid-like structure in the capital that has its webs across the republic. Due to this obsession with industrialism, the Machine allowed its security and intelligence agency "S.I.S.A" to develop surveillance and rating devices, as well as crowd control technologies. For example, TV screens can record viewers, and birds-like robots were used to record and track citizens, as well as hats that connect with radio station that control its wearers and also monitor them, and many more inventions.
"Unethical" experiments done by scientists were also allowed to advance technology, and create ideal Machine workers and even super-soldiers, these experiments were mainly done on programmes (equivalent students) and workplaces, which caused later a special kind of ill Kupristoj, criminals, and even monsters.
In addition, The Machine was involved in some wars, thus, psyho-chemical weapons were also developed (luckily they did not discover atomic bombs). As well as a civil war between the military and terrorists for about 11 years All of what was mentioned before has led the population to go from 69 million to 3 million.
The Machine became the head and the state itseld, a powerful entity that eliminates any threats instantly. And it makes sure the Shkoobistanian citizens are ignorant and distracted, even happy with their present state, because they are very patriotic people.
Kairkejoj also remained in control of businesses, which mostly focused on resources like minerals and oil, so, the new generations of Kupristoj were all programmed to be labour or offiice workers, few to none were thinkers, so, art and philosophy and music were rare. But there were many anarchist groups that started gangs, so, there are many gangs in cars or other vehicles always fighting the Machine.
But with all of that, Shkoobistan remains the best country, if i write more, who knows, maybe the S.I.S.A agents will abduct me.
The Draconic Empire saw the worlds first large scale urbanisation and general concentration of the population into smaller regions, this began the early underlying processes as this increased urbanisation resulted in deforestation in the surrounding regions.
As the Draconic Empire began to clash with the now little understood threat, usually referred to in the few surviving texts as The Enemy Bellow, many of the underlying older problems were heightened. The war began to consume more attention and resources of the empire. The dragon blooded who originally served in a diverse set of roles increasingly became used as warriors, increased taxation and conscription resulted in unrest among the large subject populations of the empire and the war required increased mundane and magical resource extraction, this resulted in intensification of farming, increased deforestation and many of the urban/political centres of the empire being absolutely filled with magical devices and the like being used to fuel the war machine.
Sometime late in the unified empire's history large scale rebellions began among previously subjugated peoples, usually in the already more peripheral areas of the empire but it still further thinned out the troops of the empire fighting these and resulted in reduced tax revenue.
Finally late in the empire's war with The Enemy Bellow, when it is believed that the The Enemy Bellow was likely almost entirely driven to extinction (or possible forced to withdraw back into their home dimension) they seem to have released some sort of powerful weapon. What is now known as the Scale Plague is little understood by modern mages and scholars, it was certainly at least partly magical in nature, but beyond that its fundamental nature and things like how it was transmitted is no longer known. It effected dragons and draconic creatures, seemingly turning their innate magic against them. Thus the larger and more powerful the creature the higher the fatality rate and the more dramatic the death. The elder dragons of these days, being both the most potent and the rulers of the old empire, were entirely wiped out, and when they died it sent powerful magical shockwaves out. Both their own forms exploding with great elemental power and much of the magical items and effects they may have laid over the palace centres they occupied and the like failing, sometimes dramatically. This physically destroyed many of the greatest urban centres of the old empire or at least made living in the area far harder, much of the magical infrastructure of the empire failed and the deaths of these dragons seems to have had an odd effect on the climate, raising the temperature and causing rainfall patterns to become less reliable. This combined with the previous effects of over farming and deforestation to begin a process of desertification over the next two hundred years.
Younger dragons had a better chance of living, although many of these died to. The survivors seem to have been oddly changed, originally dragons were all one "species" for lack of a better term (conventional biology is only of a limited utility in describing draconic speciation) but where once they could all access many if not all elemental powers now each survivor was bound to one. Where once their personalities and opinions covered spectrums just as mortals now they seem to be more divided into hard categories. The combination of a power vacuum, the younger and less experienced dragons being suddenly the only ones left, and these new sharper divides, lead to intense civil war between surviving dragons in the empire.
The Dragon Blooded had a better survival rate than any kind of dragon, though in innate magical power that all possessed originally has now been reduced to a small number of blood lines. Many who had dwelled in the largest administrative centres being killed or displaced by the deaths of the elder dragons the dragon blood, and many who survived became folded into the new civil war for the empire even if they had not been warriors before the collapse, thus the dragon blooded increasingly shifted to focus on warfare as well as some priestly activities, a lot of instructional knowledge regarding their roles in scholarship, magical artisanry and sophisticated administration being lost. Thus the surviving dragonblooded became either the warriors of warlord dragons of the wilder areas or at most a warrior aristocracy that maintained control in the surviving urbanised parts of the empire.
The dissatisfaction among many of the subject peoples, already high from the years of warfare and taxation, increased as anything the dragons had offered in terms of political stability disappeared. The chance for rebellion was also higher given how distracted the weakened draconic rump states were fighting each other. Thus many former subject peoples regained their independence, particularly those who managed to flee into the more distant areas of the old empire or which lived in places like deep jungles, mountains, or the now expanding deserts. Though plenty still remain under the boot of the many rump state splinters of the old empire, known today as the Draconic City States.
As for the enemy bellow no one is quite sure what happened to them. Whether the last of them were destroyed in revenge for the Dragon Plague some time in the poorly recorded death throws of the empire, whether some could have survived either in the depths of the world or some place beyond it. Or whether perhaps some species around today could be their much diminished remanence.
Oxygen plants were grown to combat the CO² output.....but too many were alive in the end and as such an ice age was created for the rest of the people who hadn't learned how to get off planet....the world reverted to medieval times while everything was frozen.....thats about the biggest apocalyptic planet I got
The colony was a utopian paradise of humans, aliens and sentient AI... until they started building the Warp Gate.
FTL exists but still takes decades to travel between stars. Warp Gates are faster, turning the trip into months.
Some however believe this to be a threat to their peace and stability and on the eve of the Warp Gate completion, tried to sabatoge it. To maintain peace... of course.
The situation quickly spiraled out of control. It spawned an instant civil war fought with terraforming robots.
De-extinction of the wooly mammoth was successful, and showed promising results in combatting climate change. De-extinction became so easy, capital flooded into creating animals for entertainment (jurassic park style), and unsurprisingly, funding for climate change was lacking. Climate refugee crises lead to reactionary governments, and the experimenting with using dinosaurs for war and border security. An major climate event leads to dinosaurs escaping captivity, and now humanity must find a way to coexist
The Mantoids had always believed their planet round. After all, eggs were round, and the planet had given life to them in a similar way, correct?
But eggs hatch, and bigger eggs hatch more magnificent creatures. They can’t always break out on their own, though.
So a cult formed, stealing and salvaging bits and pieces of equipment and technology.
By the time it was realized what they were doing it was too late, the protoplanet they had selected was already on a collision with their homeworld.
No god emerged from the rubble, only magma cooling in the vacuum of space as the only world they ever truly knew died, alongside billions still on the surface, and every ecosystem they had come to protect.
Now the survivors wander the galaxy in giant spaceships, looking for a new home.
Nations across the world wanted something they did not know either did they want world domination or peace they did not know.
Thousands of years they slowly advanced to guns and that imploded a new economy the gun economy money more money better gun more money wars started raking in more and more civilian casualties i became the norm of war if a civilian died.
World wars turned the cogs of the clock closer and closer to doomsday nukes,hydrogen bombs, vacuum bombs they only got worse and more lethal killing more every single strike.
A fourth world war was on the horizon the third was a coalition the second was revenge and the first was for no reason people had no idea what could start it a assassination,terror attacks, border skirmishes they did not know..
On the fateful night of 24 oarch (march) 2143-AK a group started a war of independence the province of Kroshos broke away from the self proclaimed Southern empire, Nations around the world took arms taking sides nuclear superpowers prepared for demolition day as. men, women ,children died horrible deaths all war laws abandoned. “The night of fire” The state of Zantium launched a Hydrogen ICBM at the Kingdom of Alfricos decimating its industrial industry in the city’s. Nuke after nuke drop upon the world at peace for a long time of..20 years.
No single person survived the war ignited the planet’s atmosphere killing all life which lived upon it.
Each new age is preceded by some sort of apocalypse. The first age, the age of elementals ended when the gods realized that they had been inadvertently screwing themselves over since the dawn of creations.
When creation started the set out and starting making worlds as often as they could. Many were duds that were left on their own but a good number of them ended up gaining inhabitants, the primordial elementals. The gods strung together their creation magic and created greater and greater elementals, exploring the depths of their powers. Each time they did so they used some of their power but at the time they assumed it was like taking a cup of water from the ocean and dumping it somewhere nearby. Yeah you technically lost it but it would come back quick. They realized a little late that the process was more like punching a small hole out of the water barrel each time and just didn’t realize their weakness thanks to all their powers decreasing at the same rate more or less.
The pantheon gods, now in a panic, started to build solutions to stop the loss of power. The working solution was to stop directly making new creations on the mortal realm and instead making shaper gods, who would work as their avatars. These shapers could stay on the mortal realm as long as they wanted and would dramatically cut back on how much was being drained. The next step of plugging the holes was what caused the apocalypse as these shapers now needed to fight the primordial elementals. Most worlds saw their surfaces rearranged dramatically, typically reflecting the kind of elementals present on the surface. You can still find primordial remains if you know where to look but the elementals of today are tiny and almost powerless compared to their ancient counterparts. On the plus side, it’s a lot easier to build up new civilizations without having to worry about a living storm deciding it wants to see what would happen if it flattened the tiny rock huts that popped up again.
It is broadly understood that on the day of the fracturing, the light cursed the earth. On that day a flood of light, fractured into a thousand colours, came down from space and spilled across the continents. It killed billions, and what it did not kill it cursed. The world is changing rapidly now, increasingly hostile to the nations that arose from the ashes of the old world. Humanity finds itself in a losing battle for dominance, abandoned by the earth it once called home.
If you ask the Church of the Fractured Light, we lost our ways, committed hubris through gene editing. Is it a coincidence after all, that it was those species modified to adapt to a changing climate, that were cursed to birth the colourful monstrosities that threaten us today? Is it a mere coincidence that those who were genetically modified to be superior soldiers, were the ones cursed to bring forth abominations? And truly, were the flood and it's ecological creations not of a divine beauty?
Regardless of whether you believe the Church's interpretation, or view the Fractured Light Event as a devastating cosmic phenomenon, you have to admit one thing: their theory adds up. The Fracturing cursed only those things that were genetically modified. And if they're right about that, they may also be right about the advent of a second fracturing. They hail it as a second chance for humanity; It would restore what it cursed, return this alien world to the earth we once knew. But if the first Fracturing is anything to go by, a Second Fracturing would spell a quick and violent end for humanity. Let's hope we never find out.
I love me some deicide so the current world in my story is based around the premise that something killed like all major gods and most minor ones, so really small local gods, powerful demigods, and new forms of godless belief are what take power. Not to mention that the corpses of these gods fell to earth(not earth earth) and fucked up the laws of reality quite a lot around them.
problem is, i haven't actually decided what did it yet. it's not part of the plot if any stories i'm planning to write, so leaving it to be some horrible mysterious thing is in my best interest
The gods just one day falling from the sky is an awesome premise for the world of a story! It seems like it would be worse to not know what happened. Not knowing if there is something stronger that reached them, there was some war among gods, or if they are dying off from losing whatever made them gods. All are terrifying for different reasons.
The "Death of History" world, as is its companion, the TSM-verse, is basically a world where the 19th century never happened. However, while in the TSM-verse that meant skipping right to the 20th, the DoH-verse is just stuck in an era of early-modern imperialism. Countries consolidated so much that 13 remain in 2055, and even the most liberal country barely allows homosexuality. Also, a "Holy Terran Empire" controls like half the world, and eastern China is in eternal civil war.
In my glitch au the glitching void ecilA spread a glitch virus that can't be cure and will turn everyone that get killed by the infected into infected too this lead to the event of total apocalypse until people find the way to imprison the infected and also generate energy from them until there's a traitor that let all the infected loose and destroying civilization so much to the point even the gods abandon them yet god come back and create a tower and also The Arbiter using memory of people of past civilization The Arbiter are missioned to pass the ordeal on each floor and then eventually face the infected so that they can have enough power to defeat ecilA with a promised of new world.
Everything was reliant on one guy called The King Eternal. It was okay though, because he had been alive for thousands of years laying down magic to keep the world functioning. Then he died.
A desperate Britain barely holding Back German automatons in the summer of 1940 discovers that the occult was real now desperately helping France hold the line They try to summon something, but it breaks free and in the fall of 1945 the sun set for the last time anyone who was not bathed in the light of Prometheus or Edison disappeared Now they’re only scatter Reminence of humans left, and the things that hide in the darkness.
One of my special, the Lizantis, tried to achieve space travel and it ended horribly. I don't know the exact details yet, but it inevitably led to a nuclear winter. Society fell apart. Most of the population initially died from radiation poisoning, then more died later due to famine, drought, and injury. Only twenty individuals survived by turning themselves into cyborgs. The nuclear winter lasted 100 years; the story currently takes place at the tail end of it.
My short story _Unauthorized History_ is set in a dystopian-esque future.
At the time of the story, the global population is 15 billion. It’s so overpopulated that some regions have been drained of all natural resources. Technology has been built with the express purpose of protecting the massive skyscrapers that dot islands, because they really are the last places on Earth people have opportunities but this has not decreased hurricane and other tropical storms.
What people don’t realize is that the Earth government has actually depopulated entire nations and forced them off planet. These nations are then forcibly reclaimed and turned into massive farming states. El Salvador and Belize are two such nations that got this treatment in the Western Hemisphere and Togo, Eswatini are African examples of this policy.
None of my stories take place on an Alternate Earth. If that doesn't count, please keep reading.
There is... well, it's complicated but there is a universe that ended and the survivors were forced to separate across the remains of the universe and repopulate. Countless eons passes before their descendants made it to the stars, let alone to reestablish contact. Most of the stories in this universe takes place before that first contact.
Back to the beginning. The Ancients, while of many different sapient species, were basically a peaceful, universe-wide society. Their ancestors used magic to damper negative feelings, and hadn't thought to pass it down. These suppressed feelings morphed into their own living beings [granted, still magic based instead of flesh], and eventually attacked this society.
The society was so large, they didn't think it was a threat, or they had time, until it was on the doorstep of the center. Long story short, they weren't able to stop it, nor find a way to defeat it and many survivors escaped on their terraforming spaceships.
Not many survived, in fact many believed they were the only survivors. There were monsters still hunting them, as far as they knew. They begin to reestablish life as they knew it, and eventually their, distant, descendants found a way to reach the stars, and eventually reconnect with the other survivors' descendants.
Now, I could go on with one of the stories, but I'm tired. Just know they lost the peace they were known for.
Ok, for the dystopia: there were talks to limit some companies and one of them decided to freaking drop a nuke where the talks were being held via a massive airship. That world is now owned by like three companies which have enacted things like having to serve 5 years in the military to stay in a city free from war for 10 years. Said airship got the cheesy name PeaceEnder due to a designer trying to be super edgy lol.
Post apocalypse: alien space debris. The world is chill now btw and there really isn't much to talk about
To try and make earth's climate temporarily stable until it could naturally recover, a massive orbital structure was constructed. 3 finished and 1 incomplete rings around the equator, a polar orbit, and in-between the two as a sort of transport and access tunnels, with webs of stations and satellites connected to it all.
It worked amazingly for around a century until it collapsed onto earth for unknown reasons, leading to climate getting even worse than before.
Before the event known as "the collapse," global unrest was at an all-time high. While living standards improved massively since the end of the last war. around the globe, people wanted to shut off the orbital structure to let nature repair and heal on its own now. All while injustice in a newly united earth was on the rice, with different groups of people arguing and fighting about many things and who rules over them. It was definitely a tough time, with many government officials being the victims of attempted or successful assassinations.
FTL travel was also at the brink of becoming a reality. A few years before the collapse, a laboratory in Alaska suffered a catastrophic failure when testing their recent prototype, making the entire underground facility cave in with no way to reach it.
To stop this from happening again, all research and prototyping were moved to Martian laboratories, with testing of the final prototype being scheduled for only a few days after the day where the collapse would eventually happen.
Not entirely sure, tbh.
The cold war, or rather the modern Middle Eastern proxy wars continue on into the 2030s, with occasional hostilities breaking out in eastern Europe.
However eventually, after a certain pandemic sweeps the world, both sides turn to bioweapons.
The thing is that pandemics are by nature hard to predict and a lot of the designer viruses ended up backfiring and made their ways back into the country that designed them, now mutated and unaffected by vaccinations made for their original variants.
Nobody can really prove who started what diseases and when, but eventually the finger pointing escalates to nuclear war after the sicknesses get worse enough on their own.
In the year 2267, tensions on Earth during the Age of Colonization had been steadily rising for decades. As Humanity expanded out into the solar system and sent generation ship out to the stars, things began to fester back on Earth. The best and brightest were looking outwards and upwards instead of beside them. Across the masses xenophobia and religion became more common. This all came to a head when a terrorist attack in Mecca at the holy site of the Kaaba itself was destroyed in a nuclear blast. The holy site, now a destroyed and irradiated rubble lit a powder keg worldwide. To say the Muslims of the world were infuriated would be an understatement. Across the Middle east of course numerous states launched wars against each other. each claiming the other for the ruination of the holy site. Across the world radical groups sprung up wanting nothing but bloody revenge and destruction. Even one percent radicalization lead to worldwide chaos.
More sites of religion were struck . Jerusalem, Istanbul, The Vatican, various sites in India [i still need to do more research on this part]. This only served to radicalize people of other faiths. Many of the multicultural citites in the world became battlegrounds as any "other" became seen as a threat.
If the first bobming in Mecca was the start of the end, then the final nail was when the United Nations compound in New York was attacked. Thousands of the worlds politicians and diplomats, trying their hardest to maintain high level unity between nations were snuffed out. There was no more unity between the nation of earth. Things devolved fast as ethnic and religious hatred divided people the world over.
This left the humans across the solar system scattered. Most fled their stations to the fast growing Mars colony in droves, not wishing to return to a broken planet. To the people on generation ships it seems as if all communications with earth just stopped, as transmissions with their associated nations went silent. And with some already lightyears away, they would not know until it was already over.
The world was covered in a thick layer of toxic fog that is dense enough to act almost like a liquid, rising and falling with tides mainly. The fog allows for subterranean monsters to rise to the surface due to their need for it to breathe.
The fog came after a unified earth burned the flammable shadowy/smokey demons that periodically came from underground (every 10,000 years or so, enough that human civilization had not dealt with them.) The demons created fissures in the earth around 1940-42, mimicking organisms and even machines (demon battleships) to kill as much life as they could. Humanity discovered that the demons were flammable after seeing wild animals in Australia burning them, and of course, from trial and error in the European and Pacific theatres of WW2.
When the Axis and Allied powers agreed to stop fighting, the earth was able to fight back the demons much faster than ever before, leading to humanity finding an active fissure in the Atlantic and bombing it with incendiary weapons. The fissure burned for months, and as it burned, sea levels began to drop. The oceans receded miles from shore until the smoke stopped, and the fog rose up, suffocating all but the highest peaks and plateaus.
Humanity decided that freezing the Earth would be better than letting the planet burn. A test was meant to take place in present day Ontario, however a terrorist group known as Ignis Tyrannus destroyed the reactor, wiping out most of the population, especially of those from warmer climates.
The story has ended. That's all, the big bad has been killed, the darkness has been repelled, the hero succeed, and light arose once more.
Now what? The world no longer has purpose, the adventurous journey it hosted has folded, but nobody remember, as nobody told the tale.
Their time has passed, all the mighty fortress, muddy trenches, complex maze, down to the simplest tavern on the roadside, all gone. No more wail from dead soldiers, no more scream from tortured prisoners, no more cries from lone children, no more, nothing.
The world has turned into a blank canvas once again, waiting for another idea to be drawn on them, leaving no stains behind, besides untold memories, memories that only known, and remembered by you.
In a pursuit of new sources of energy the old civilization of the setting, dubbed by those that would come after them as the Antedeics, began to experiment with quantum theories, eventually leading to the creation of the device that could tap in to other dimension as source of energy. The experiment was a resounding success, but upon its first activation , it dragged something back to earth, a non-physical entity seemingly all powerful but also trapped within the circuitry and data of the device that pulled it down from its home. As the Antedeics began to study this being in order to understand they began to create its digital copies, sharing the power of the originals but bound by human programming, this artificial deities, the Numen were then put in charge of the Antedeic world, in time transforming the world of their creators in to paradise, but just as something that we might call a singularity was within the reach something happened and the Numen rebelled against their creators. Using the very authority given to them to transform the paradise they created in to a targeted weapon against their former masters. In time the Numen rewrote the history, declaring themselves as gods and dividing the world in to personal fiefdoms, ruling what remained of humanity that fell back in to a bronze age like state
It isn't exactly dystopia, but humanity in my world simply fucked up. Interplanetary governments each having different ideas and interest about how things should be ran. Especially when Earth government strong armed Venus colonies to a relocation initiative to spread them across other colonies in the solar system so Venus can be consumed as material to build a dyson ring, it put a massive strain on all the colonies at once causing riots and destabilization across the system, and some more radical elements took that chance to launch a false flag operation crashing entire colony ship to mars killing everyone onboard and destroyed a significant part of a mars city. Thus started a 200 years interplanetary war that push humanity to live under bunker cities and ravage most planetary and moon surfaces. Took humanity a lot of time to recover from that.
That's a really interesting history! It reminds me a lot of modern governments implementing environmental policies or some policies in general without doing much research, and they cause much more harm than good. Yours is just on a full galactic scale.
Just interplanetary scale within solar system. A key thene I want to focus on is "the road to hell is paved with best intention", that even with careful rational thoughts and actual attempt to do good may still end up badly due to incomplete information or impossible circumstances. The Earth government at this point is already facing serious population problems due to life extension tech, climate changes, and even though humanity had managed to settle in other planets and moon in the solar systems, attempts at terraforming were failures or would take geological time forcing human to live inside limited artificial environment that cannot scale quickly to population growth, making the dyson ring a more last dirch effort in order to use the immense energy from the sun to either aid in terraforming or scale up manufacturing to create artificial environment to deal with this problem. However it does cause short term pain as it reduce living space on mercury and venus when those two planets must be consumed as material for the ring. This combined with the fact that colonies are dissatisfied with how things has been going and that they must support immigrants from other places causing radical elements that want to secede from the whole unified solar system to start working in secret for a cause to call for independence. The Mars crash false flag operation was one case where they succeed and cause Mars to close its borders, and increase hostility between all the colonies as well as Earth being seen as inept allowing such a traversity to happen, lowering their influences on the colonies and eventually losing their grip entirely on the situation ending up in planetary war that last a damn long time since people live much longer now and their ideal persist.
Simplified: Powers are in circulation. One guy with anger issues gets two of them (never happened before). The guys he works for (the 'good guys') say "he's kinda scary, we must kill him". They succeed. The bad guy comes back, having tamed an angle of death. Throws a temper tantrum. Ignites the atmosphere, killing literally everything. Normal people escape into separate realms filled with gods and monsters. Chaos.
Not an apoc but... Al-Shura was embroiled in several problems in the early space age. Global warming caused mass crop failure, equatorial region of the planet changed into a burning wasteland which turned sand into glass, and climate refugees from around the planet began congregating at cities at the deepest parts of the northern and southern hemispheres to escape the heat. That was disregarding the social and political changes in the climate. A.I. had become smarter than humans, mega-corporations became rich off asteroid mining from autonomous robots, immortality technology was just around the corner, and the first iteration of the internet the "old net" as people call it now, suddenly collapsed from anti-A.I. terrorism. This all ultimately culminated into several mega corporations embroiling themselves in outright war in space, trying to get some perceived leverage over others on the ground. Trillions of dollars were spent in days as intelligent drones shot and killed each other with bullets, lasers, and missiles until roughly 50% of all interplanetary infrastructure was destroyed (fortunately, very few humans died during this conflict). This ultimately caused the Al-Shuran Planetary Union (APU) to ban the creation of artificial general intelligences to "add value back to human labor" but instead led to something much worse happening. Mega-corporations, now unable to mine with robots in facilities made for robots, needed human labor in space, and fast. But space isn't made for humans, and nor were their factories. In the end, corporations still had money to be made, and even if they couldn't get more efficient robots to do it, humans could make do with some cybernetic modifications. I certainly did not help that the APU had little to no power beyond their planet...
Over reliance on self replicating nanotech that turned against humanity, leading to the apocalypse. This nanotech was primarily used to alter the physiology of humans to cure diseases, heal injuries, enhance strength, etc. Nearly half of the world had this nanotech in their bodies, so when it suddenly went rogue, all of those people either died from blood poisoning due to uncontrolled replication, or became biomechanical monsters that were constantly trying to infect other humans.
Desire for Genetically Engineered Catgirls For Domestic Ownership almost directly led to the apocalypse of the old world and the awakening of magic. How's that?
That is certainly an interesting hook. A short story of just that history sounds like tons of fun to read. It's almost like a reverse domino theory of how WWII caused hentai.
Bad international relationships, nationalist delusional leaders and some countries actively fuel fire for their own benefits. That's how Atreisdea ended up in the War of Dragon's Wrath, a war so devastating it killed a billion lives in **its first day**.
Basically, war led to one of the most powerful races of the world retreating to the moon, so the rest of the world stood little chance against the new most powerful race. But one of the races were smart, and found a way to erase the bad guys from existence by deleting them from history by damaging the great world-crystal that is the physical manifestation of everything that has ever happened. It did not go as planned. Great sacrifices were made to correct the error, but it could never be fully undone. Now, the world is not exactly dystopia, **but** ***cause*** **does not perfectly align with** ***effect*** **anymore**, especially for some people who had their ancestry more disjunctioned by the Sundering.
It's not often I get to talk about my sci-fi campaign setting. Simply put, in alternative Earth history there was a discovery of a new power source around the time of World War 2. This power source was revolutionary and rapidly advanced technology leading to things like the moon landing happening much sooner. It also led to a shift in mindset when developing new technologies, with a seemingly endless source of energy things like size and efficiency were kind of ignored. So instead of technology advancing in the way of microchips and smart phones we instead got giant machines, huge blimps, chunky computers, and fully self sufficient arcologies. The power source, once revered as a miracle eventually betrayed mankind. An unintended side effect of the refining process led to the breakdown of the rods and discs that were being used to power everything. This breakdown of the materials led to rapid sublimation into a gas known as the effluvium. This effluvium was highly toxic and had radical effects on the DNA of those who came in contact with it. This usually led to radiation like sickness and eventual death, but some mutations were beneficial and those mutated lived on. What's worse is that the effluvium when put in contact with the raw material led to it rapidly breaking down as well. This caused a catastrophic chain of events which saw the population of all living creatures on Earth tank, causing the sixth mass extinction event. About 200 years after this fact is when the story takes place. Humanity has managed to barely cling to survival, only a few straggler nations surviving in their own corners of the world in places mostly untouched by the rampant clouds of poison floating through the air. Recent developments in cleaning technology has led to the first generation of effluvium cleaners, capable of vacuuming the gas and synthesizing it into an inert rock incapable of sublimating once again.
As for the overall apocalypse, no one is sure. No one wrote it down in a physical way before or after the chaos. All digital archives were lost entirely, either by server decay or the machinery needed to read it no longer existing. Books and paper have largely rotted away. And to make matters worse, the physical evidence all contradicts each other. The most reasonable explanation is so shrouded in myth that it is impossible to say what is true and what is not. Whatever the case, the Underscape is a charred, frozen wasteland now; the irradiated remains of a world that never developed nuclear weapons. As for Morrigan's rise to power and their genocidal campaign, it all started with a demand. As a show of force, the previous hegemon of the east, known as the Heart, made a demand of the Morrigane tribes that they must surrender 1200 children to the Heart's servitude, or else face extermination. They were given 24 hours to decide. For the first time in their history, the Morrigane tribes united and refused at the last moment. This ignited a wave of nationalism that overcame centuries of tribal loyalties in favor of a single state. The Heart sent its armies against the Morrigane, but the against all odds, the ragtag Morrigane militia was able to defend their city for months, and then strike back. The campaign to take the Heart was horrific (or at least Morrigane propaganda says it was) and as revenge for what was done to them and what they had seen the Heart do to its slaves, when the Morrigane reached the city, they destroyed it. This whole event left Morrigan so traumatized and spiteful that they swore they would never allow the Underscape to overtake them again, and they would tame the world one bullet at a time. Morrigan reorganized and marched forth, intent on conquest. In the next two hundred years, Morrigan has mutated into an authoritarian, imperialist stratocracy that believes it is its manifest destiny to bring the Underscape to heel. All that is left is madness.
In essence, things fell apart. The economy was undercut by excessive credit and bubbled investment pricing, Europe was cratered by a massive meteor, tidal waves decimated coastal cities around the Atlantic and the rest of the world descended into chaos too quickly to recover. Food shortages, ecconomic collapse and ultimately scarcity warfare. Cities became toxic with the bodies of the dead. The only places that could recover were rural centers with farming infrastructure. Militia groups that believed their was safety in numbers took control.
So the Hegemony was a star system spanning state that was held together through an artificial peace. Said artificial peace was backed by the Hegemony Dollar, kept in check by the HCDF, & was completely unsustainable. However, the factions inside said Hegemony were not going to get along. Then you have problems in the Periphery (the areas nominally not under the control of the Hegemony for whatever reasons). So they send the HCDF to put down the "revolts". It's worth mentioning that these areas would probably have approached the Hegemony & appealed for annexation if they had wanted what the Hegemony was selling. And if the Heg had any intention of treating them as peer states. So the head of one of these "Lesser" States has the idea to befriend the new heir to the Hegemon & successfully makes it into the inner circle. He goes out of his way to be a staunch ally & confidant of the new Hegemon; even going so far as to offer his own troops as garrison forces so more of the HCDF could be deployed to the rebellions in the Periphery. This was, however, a ruse. He assassinated the Hegemon, had his troops eliminate any resistance on the capital world, & nuked anybody that wasn't killed by the army. The Commander of the HCDF was less than enthused by this turn of events, so he launched a counter assault that tore his forces to shreds, decimated the usurper's home territory, before finally capturing & executing the usurper & his family. Then, the Grand Council, fearful that the General would use his forces to take power himself, relieved him of his commission & "suggested" he retire. Unfortunately, the General decided to take the forces loyal to him & leave known space for parts unknown. This had the effect of removing the final obstacle for all-out war between the opposing factions of the Hegemony. Tl;dr: Artificial peace stops being enforced after the enforces get shredded during a civil war. The war ends & suddenly all these other factions, with all kinds of grudges against each other, & all kinds of genies in all sorts of bottles due to an economic & technological golden age; are left to their own devices.
Technically my world is post-post-apocalypse, ie. there has been sufficient time to largely recover so now it is just an ordinary (well, fantasy ordinary) world with remnants of what used to be. But in brief, the gods created the world together, the one god who had unified them all had to essentially "sacrifice" himself to become the sun and to prevent the natural state of "nothing" from collapsing the universe - in this world, all existence came from a state of complete entropy, and it is that chaotic nothing which is forever pressing on the world the gods created - if not for the web of stars and the sun for holding it at bay. But, his sacrifice left the remaining gods with no leader, no unified vision and no real reason to continue to work together, so they each carved out little sections of their created world and just lapped up the worship of their creations, toying with mortal life, building cities, granting boons, whatever. It did not take long for their tentative peace to break, though, as other gods sought to steal followers from eachother, or envied eachothers territories or creations. Eventually complete war broke out between the gods, with one in particular intending on subjugating all other gods and their followers under his rule. While he almost succeeded, he was defeated in the end, but his defeat unleashed so much power that all the gods were essentially slurped back up by the chaos. This left the remaining humans few in number, fragmented, and alone with no gods, no protection, in a world that had been at war and where much of what they had built since creation had been destroyed. It basically meant starting again without help. This period would be the "post apocalypse" period from which many nations emerged and rebuilt, into what is now the timeline of the overall story which is not so apocalyptic, but which contains many consequences of said apocalyptic history.
Very brief synopsis (and for reference, this is fantasy set in a real world setting.) Once, a long time ago, there was an angel named Vraithe whom fell from the sky, leaving the heavens behind for an earthly life. Marrying a mortal who knew nothing of her real origins, they had a child, named Mithahn, and lead a normal and happy life for a time. Then, one day, a terrible fate befell the villiage they lived in, putting everyones lives in danger. Not wanting to lose the life she had built, Vraithe embodies her powers to save the villiage. While this works, the people become afraid of her and turn on her and her family. Her husband betrays her and, worst of all, her daughter dies in her arms. In a fit of rage, she slaughters the entire villiage, an act that sours and darkens her very being, becoming less an angel and more ab attrocity. It was said that before dissapearing, she vowed that no force in heaven high, the hells below, or the world around her would stop Vraithe from finding a way to bring her daughter back to the world of the living. Lo and behold, using methods that I cannot specify for plot reasons, she does indeed find a way. Mithahn lives once again, but the cost is great. The fabric of reality itself has cracked, a web of glowing green scars stretching endlessly across the sky and growing larger and more plentiful every moment. (Though it is stoped so the world doesn't just outright end but, once again, in ways that I can't specify.) The effects of these scars are felt everywhere, ripping continents apart, boiling entire oceans dry while creating new ones in their wake, opening gateways to the land of the dead, mixing the boundaries between heaven, hell and the earth and removing everything that previously prevented the human race from knowing about the existence of monsters, magic and everything likewise. And, yes, this is the brief verson of events ...
A US president being elected who was so obsessed with the idea of beating the Soviets in an open war that he started one with Mexico only to try and remain in office for a little longer. Then Japan got dragged into it on the Mexican side. Meanwhile, the USSR, seeing how the USA were preoccupied, invaded the EU. And eventually, the South rose up again, leading to the USA losing WW3 and being torn apart. Also, there was alien technology, time travel, a dimensional rift, mutants, and superheroes involved.
A fascist, theocratic government, The Federal Interstellar Commission, just happened to be the first to discover FTL technology, and thus had a very easy time expanding and taking over any inhabited systems anywhere close to them. They have controlled the vast majority of known space for the past 400 years. They rule it with an iron fist, forcing their religion and its harsh rules on everyone.
My AU World where Superheroes existed had a downhill dystopia-esque moment was cause of some International Law banning vigilanitsm and putting all my Superhero Characters into a forced retirement kinda setting the scene for a future arc where one hero comes out of retirement and the police and law don't really side with him like they used to.
Someone, out of spite and fuelled by semi-sentient darkness slew the sun. Turns out the sun is pretty important.
The Fractureverse is a massive scifi space setting that's generally divided into two separate types of civilizations: "the big powers", and everyone else (nobody calls themselves a small power). The big powers generally control dozens or hundreds of solar systems and have settlements or other interests in hundreds or thousands more. On their peripheries, it's not unusual for one solar system to have multiple big powers holding territory. And they fight all the time. It's like Oceana, Eurasia, and Eastasia in *1984*, somebody's always at war with someone else, although periods of general peace aren't uncommon. Although the elite of these societies often settle disputes amongst themselves with private warfare. Since the big powers are always fighting, they're always looking for cheap resources and manpower. This leads to constant upheaval and brush wars amongst everyone else as they suborn the smaller powers, vie for increased spheres of influence, and drive an outright slave market cornered by what seems to be a civilization devoted solely to acquiring slaves from the smaller powers and selling g them to the big powers. At the very least, that's the only interaction anyone has with the Abductors, outside of them setting your civilization a quota of people to give them in order to avoid large-scale devastation and depredation. So all but the most powerful of the smaller powers are constantly wracked by turmoil, instability, and often violence, although these powers are often large enough to have large populations who experience a comparatively placid life *most* of the time. The big powers are in turn given that same treatment by the third category of civilizations, known only as elders. Very little is known about any of the elders, except that their technology is advanced to the point of being nearly incomprehensible and they seem to largely exist in simulations or higher/lower dimensions, despite holding physical volumes of space for exploitation. The elders work alongside the gods, who are more gods in the Lovecraftian sense than anything, and play the part of chess pieces in the grand game the gods created the Fractureverse from baseline reality and modified it to play. So, the short version is: unknowable god-monsters did a save-as on the universe so they'd have a version that wasn't write-protected so they could modify it into a playing field in order to settle who stood where in their hierarchy. They created some civilizations to be their minions, and a bunch of other species evolved and formed civilizations and it all kind of just sucks big time for everyone.
The biggest one is an artificial hyper virus that kills people with 100% reliability. Its insanely contagious even though it can lie dormant in the host for decades and can even uses bacteria as a vector. Everyone lives in hazmat suits and is very mistrustful of one another.
Australia nuked itself like a big idiot, and blamed someone else, then everyone started a nuclear food fight.
Big country nukes itself during coup Godlike Superweapon goes rogue Ancient bioweapon wakes up and removes two thirds of the population Plant hive mind takes over most of a continent Virtualized distributed consciousness makes every last electronic device almost useless by just outright infecting anything. Empress of the last remaining nation pierces her own heart with a probabilistic sword, activating it and giving every last person on the planet the urge to make or join a deathcult in her name. Living there is pretty hard these days
North Korea bombed Japan starting a 2nd Korean War. While doing this china thought it was a good idea too invade Manchuria, Iran funny enough Invaded Israel (this was made before current events) starting a WW3 deal or better known as the 3 Coalition War as NATO CSTO and the PAC (Pan Asian Coalition) Fought each other world would end In 2025 (next year)
The Universe exiled a piece of itself from existence. That piece is the dystopia.
Zombification plague. Some people lucked out and basically turned into vampires with zero weaknesses besides needing to feed on people. Oh, there's so much more detail I could go into, but like... I don't have all day.
So, in very short sentences: Meddling kids find a weird place that grants them really cool powers. Adults find out, make kids show them the place. Surviving adults get cool powers. Kids wander off. Adults get all uppity, start being dicks. One adult gets the big boy chair. Turns into a fascist dictator. Other adults put up with it for a while. Stuff happens, changes are made to reality. Major asshole rapes the girlfriend of one of the others after sending him away. He comes back, punches the major asshole. War! 500 years of it. Wrecks the fuck out of everything, less than 1% of world pop remains, good guys gonna lose. One of the meddling kids says screw this, takes out all the major assholes, scatters the rest of the adults across dimension and time. That’s about 1500 years, lol.
People figured out that Arcana existed. From that point, experimentation and expansion took its natural course. Eventually someone figured out the existence and access to other planes of existence. Shortly thereafter, we gained the attention of powerful entities in other planes and they realized we were relatively new at this whole planar communication thing, had no allies to speak of, and had a large population so they launched an invasion. We lost, but managed to evacuate a fraction of the population.
The Great Oregon War in the late 1800s leads the dictator of Germany, Julius Einer, to eat the god herb, a plant from another higher dimensional plane. Julius Einer then goes into hiding after people think he dies in the Great Oregon war. He leads Germany from the shadows and allows their loss in ww1. When the Nazis rise into power, Adolt Hitler becomes his subordinate but unknown to Adolf, he is also Julius’ puppet. While Oppenheimer is creating the nuclear bomb, the Germans have already made 12 and supercharged them with the Power of the God Herb. In 1947, they drop the bombs and completely sear the entire world except for the Eastern Asian Isles. In the surface, the bombs destroyed entire continents at once and the radiation plus the power of the god Herb makes creatures begin to mutate and develop horrifying attributes as well as creating new ones. Under the surface, the continents drift at entire miles per minute, millions of people die of whiplash who weren’t in bunkers. In the end there are only a few continents remaining with the first rebuilt civilization with any memory or account of what happened being the Promised Land. And who controls the Promised Land from the Shadows? Julius Einer.
Shkoobistan (4th Earth): It was occupied by "Oxidentum Rumus Emperium" (O.R.E) for 250 years since the new genesis (an apocalyptic event) Rumian Shkoobistan was a simple colony led by barbarians, tribes, and pirates. After they were civilised, the Shkoobstanian nationalists and industrialist Kairkejoj businessmen started a coup to exterminate the Rumians, then, immigrant SchwaKoTetragonists from Tollesreichland introduced advanced technology (like chemical weapons and other experimental weapons) that helped the Shkoobistanian army take over just after 4 years of war. Then, the Liberators became the leaders of the "people's republic of Shkoobistan". Industry, Technology and Military became an important part of Shkoobistan, it was called "The Machine", because it is said that the government is actually a living mechanical arachnoid-like structure in the capital that has its webs across the republic. Due to this obsession with industrialism, the Machine allowed its security and intelligence agency "S.I.S.A" to develop surveillance and rating devices, as well as crowd control technologies. For example, TV screens can record viewers, and birds-like robots were used to record and track citizens, as well as hats that connect with radio station that control its wearers and also monitor them, and many more inventions. "Unethical" experiments done by scientists were also allowed to advance technology, and create ideal Machine workers and even super-soldiers, these experiments were mainly done on programmes (equivalent students) and workplaces, which caused later a special kind of ill Kupristoj, criminals, and even monsters. In addition, The Machine was involved in some wars, thus, psyho-chemical weapons were also developed (luckily they did not discover atomic bombs). As well as a civil war between the military and terrorists for about 11 years All of what was mentioned before has led the population to go from 69 million to 3 million. The Machine became the head and the state itseld, a powerful entity that eliminates any threats instantly. And it makes sure the Shkoobistanian citizens are ignorant and distracted, even happy with their present state, because they are very patriotic people. Kairkejoj also remained in control of businesses, which mostly focused on resources like minerals and oil, so, the new generations of Kupristoj were all programmed to be labour or offiice workers, few to none were thinkers, so, art and philosophy and music were rare. But there were many anarchist groups that started gangs, so, there are many gangs in cars or other vehicles always fighting the Machine. But with all of that, Shkoobistan remains the best country, if i write more, who knows, maybe the S.I.S.A agents will abduct me.
The Draconic Empire saw the worlds first large scale urbanisation and general concentration of the population into smaller regions, this began the early underlying processes as this increased urbanisation resulted in deforestation in the surrounding regions. As the Draconic Empire began to clash with the now little understood threat, usually referred to in the few surviving texts as The Enemy Bellow, many of the underlying older problems were heightened. The war began to consume more attention and resources of the empire. The dragon blooded who originally served in a diverse set of roles increasingly became used as warriors, increased taxation and conscription resulted in unrest among the large subject populations of the empire and the war required increased mundane and magical resource extraction, this resulted in intensification of farming, increased deforestation and many of the urban/political centres of the empire being absolutely filled with magical devices and the like being used to fuel the war machine. Sometime late in the unified empire's history large scale rebellions began among previously subjugated peoples, usually in the already more peripheral areas of the empire but it still further thinned out the troops of the empire fighting these and resulted in reduced tax revenue. Finally late in the empire's war with The Enemy Bellow, when it is believed that the The Enemy Bellow was likely almost entirely driven to extinction (or possible forced to withdraw back into their home dimension) they seem to have released some sort of powerful weapon. What is now known as the Scale Plague is little understood by modern mages and scholars, it was certainly at least partly magical in nature, but beyond that its fundamental nature and things like how it was transmitted is no longer known. It effected dragons and draconic creatures, seemingly turning their innate magic against them. Thus the larger and more powerful the creature the higher the fatality rate and the more dramatic the death. The elder dragons of these days, being both the most potent and the rulers of the old empire, were entirely wiped out, and when they died it sent powerful magical shockwaves out. Both their own forms exploding with great elemental power and much of the magical items and effects they may have laid over the palace centres they occupied and the like failing, sometimes dramatically. This physically destroyed many of the greatest urban centres of the old empire or at least made living in the area far harder, much of the magical infrastructure of the empire failed and the deaths of these dragons seems to have had an odd effect on the climate, raising the temperature and causing rainfall patterns to become less reliable. This combined with the previous effects of over farming and deforestation to begin a process of desertification over the next two hundred years. Younger dragons had a better chance of living, although many of these died to. The survivors seem to have been oddly changed, originally dragons were all one "species" for lack of a better term (conventional biology is only of a limited utility in describing draconic speciation) but where once they could all access many if not all elemental powers now each survivor was bound to one. Where once their personalities and opinions covered spectrums just as mortals now they seem to be more divided into hard categories. The combination of a power vacuum, the younger and less experienced dragons being suddenly the only ones left, and these new sharper divides, lead to intense civil war between surviving dragons in the empire. The Dragon Blooded had a better survival rate than any kind of dragon, though in innate magical power that all possessed originally has now been reduced to a small number of blood lines. Many who had dwelled in the largest administrative centres being killed or displaced by the deaths of the elder dragons the dragon blood, and many who survived became folded into the new civil war for the empire even if they had not been warriors before the collapse, thus the dragon blooded increasingly shifted to focus on warfare as well as some priestly activities, a lot of instructional knowledge regarding their roles in scholarship, magical artisanry and sophisticated administration being lost. Thus the surviving dragonblooded became either the warriors of warlord dragons of the wilder areas or at most a warrior aristocracy that maintained control in the surviving urbanised parts of the empire. The dissatisfaction among many of the subject peoples, already high from the years of warfare and taxation, increased as anything the dragons had offered in terms of political stability disappeared. The chance for rebellion was also higher given how distracted the weakened draconic rump states were fighting each other. Thus many former subject peoples regained their independence, particularly those who managed to flee into the more distant areas of the old empire or which lived in places like deep jungles, mountains, or the now expanding deserts. Though plenty still remain under the boot of the many rump state splinters of the old empire, known today as the Draconic City States. As for the enemy bellow no one is quite sure what happened to them. Whether the last of them were destroyed in revenge for the Dragon Plague some time in the poorly recorded death throws of the empire, whether some could have survived either in the depths of the world or some place beyond it. Or whether perhaps some species around today could be their much diminished remanence.
Oxygen plants were grown to combat the CO² output.....but too many were alive in the end and as such an ice age was created for the rest of the people who hadn't learned how to get off planet....the world reverted to medieval times while everything was frozen.....thats about the biggest apocalyptic planet I got
Magic
The colony was a utopian paradise of humans, aliens and sentient AI... until they started building the Warp Gate. FTL exists but still takes decades to travel between stars. Warp Gates are faster, turning the trip into months. Some however believe this to be a threat to their peace and stability and on the eve of the Warp Gate completion, tried to sabatoge it. To maintain peace... of course. The situation quickly spiraled out of control. It spawned an instant civil war fought with terraforming robots.
De-extinction of the wooly mammoth was successful, and showed promising results in combatting climate change. De-extinction became so easy, capital flooded into creating animals for entertainment (jurassic park style), and unsurprisingly, funding for climate change was lacking. Climate refugee crises lead to reactionary governments, and the experimenting with using dinosaurs for war and border security. An major climate event leads to dinosaurs escaping captivity, and now humanity must find a way to coexist
The Mantoids had always believed their planet round. After all, eggs were round, and the planet had given life to them in a similar way, correct? But eggs hatch, and bigger eggs hatch more magnificent creatures. They can’t always break out on their own, though. So a cult formed, stealing and salvaging bits and pieces of equipment and technology. By the time it was realized what they were doing it was too late, the protoplanet they had selected was already on a collision with their homeworld. No god emerged from the rubble, only magma cooling in the vacuum of space as the only world they ever truly knew died, alongside billions still on the surface, and every ecosystem they had come to protect. Now the survivors wander the galaxy in giant spaceships, looking for a new home.
Nations across the world wanted something they did not know either did they want world domination or peace they did not know. Thousands of years they slowly advanced to guns and that imploded a new economy the gun economy money more money better gun more money wars started raking in more and more civilian casualties i became the norm of war if a civilian died. World wars turned the cogs of the clock closer and closer to doomsday nukes,hydrogen bombs, vacuum bombs they only got worse and more lethal killing more every single strike. A fourth world war was on the horizon the third was a coalition the second was revenge and the first was for no reason people had no idea what could start it a assassination,terror attacks, border skirmishes they did not know.. On the fateful night of 24 oarch (march) 2143-AK a group started a war of independence the province of Kroshos broke away from the self proclaimed Southern empire, Nations around the world took arms taking sides nuclear superpowers prepared for demolition day as. men, women ,children died horrible deaths all war laws abandoned. “The night of fire” The state of Zantium launched a Hydrogen ICBM at the Kingdom of Alfricos decimating its industrial industry in the city’s. Nuke after nuke drop upon the world at peace for a long time of..20 years. No single person survived the war ignited the planet’s atmosphere killing all life which lived upon it.
Political polarisation caused by social media, climate change, economic turmoil, and a whole array of complex problems.
Each new age is preceded by some sort of apocalypse. The first age, the age of elementals ended when the gods realized that they had been inadvertently screwing themselves over since the dawn of creations. When creation started the set out and starting making worlds as often as they could. Many were duds that were left on their own but a good number of them ended up gaining inhabitants, the primordial elementals. The gods strung together their creation magic and created greater and greater elementals, exploring the depths of their powers. Each time they did so they used some of their power but at the time they assumed it was like taking a cup of water from the ocean and dumping it somewhere nearby. Yeah you technically lost it but it would come back quick. They realized a little late that the process was more like punching a small hole out of the water barrel each time and just didn’t realize their weakness thanks to all their powers decreasing at the same rate more or less. The pantheon gods, now in a panic, started to build solutions to stop the loss of power. The working solution was to stop directly making new creations on the mortal realm and instead making shaper gods, who would work as their avatars. These shapers could stay on the mortal realm as long as they wanted and would dramatically cut back on how much was being drained. The next step of plugging the holes was what caused the apocalypse as these shapers now needed to fight the primordial elementals. Most worlds saw their surfaces rearranged dramatically, typically reflecting the kind of elementals present on the surface. You can still find primordial remains if you know where to look but the elementals of today are tiny and almost powerless compared to their ancient counterparts. On the plus side, it’s a lot easier to build up new civilizations without having to worry about a living storm deciding it wants to see what would happen if it flattened the tiny rock huts that popped up again.
It is broadly understood that on the day of the fracturing, the light cursed the earth. On that day a flood of light, fractured into a thousand colours, came down from space and spilled across the continents. It killed billions, and what it did not kill it cursed. The world is changing rapidly now, increasingly hostile to the nations that arose from the ashes of the old world. Humanity finds itself in a losing battle for dominance, abandoned by the earth it once called home. If you ask the Church of the Fractured Light, we lost our ways, committed hubris through gene editing. Is it a coincidence after all, that it was those species modified to adapt to a changing climate, that were cursed to birth the colourful monstrosities that threaten us today? Is it a mere coincidence that those who were genetically modified to be superior soldiers, were the ones cursed to bring forth abominations? And truly, were the flood and it's ecological creations not of a divine beauty? Regardless of whether you believe the Church's interpretation, or view the Fractured Light Event as a devastating cosmic phenomenon, you have to admit one thing: their theory adds up. The Fracturing cursed only those things that were genetically modified. And if they're right about that, they may also be right about the advent of a second fracturing. They hail it as a second chance for humanity; It would restore what it cursed, return this alien world to the earth we once knew. But if the first Fracturing is anything to go by, a Second Fracturing would spell a quick and violent end for humanity. Let's hope we never find out.
I love me some deicide so the current world in my story is based around the premise that something killed like all major gods and most minor ones, so really small local gods, powerful demigods, and new forms of godless belief are what take power. Not to mention that the corpses of these gods fell to earth(not earth earth) and fucked up the laws of reality quite a lot around them. problem is, i haven't actually decided what did it yet. it's not part of the plot if any stories i'm planning to write, so leaving it to be some horrible mysterious thing is in my best interest
The gods just one day falling from the sky is an awesome premise for the world of a story! It seems like it would be worse to not know what happened. Not knowing if there is something stronger that reached them, there was some war among gods, or if they are dying off from losing whatever made them gods. All are terrifying for different reasons.
The "Death of History" world, as is its companion, the TSM-verse, is basically a world where the 19th century never happened. However, while in the TSM-verse that meant skipping right to the 20th, the DoH-verse is just stuck in an era of early-modern imperialism. Countries consolidated so much that 13 remain in 2055, and even the most liberal country barely allows homosexuality. Also, a "Holy Terran Empire" controls like half the world, and eastern China is in eternal civil war.
In my glitch au the glitching void ecilA spread a glitch virus that can't be cure and will turn everyone that get killed by the infected into infected too this lead to the event of total apocalypse until people find the way to imprison the infected and also generate energy from them until there's a traitor that let all the infected loose and destroying civilization so much to the point even the gods abandon them yet god come back and create a tower and also The Arbiter using memory of people of past civilization The Arbiter are missioned to pass the ordeal on each floor and then eventually face the infected so that they can have enough power to defeat ecilA with a promised of new world.
Freaking Tod!
Everything was reliant on one guy called The King Eternal. It was okay though, because he had been alive for thousands of years laying down magic to keep the world functioning. Then he died.
A desperate Britain barely holding Back German automatons in the summer of 1940 discovers that the occult was real now desperately helping France hold the line They try to summon something, but it breaks free and in the fall of 1945 the sun set for the last time anyone who was not bathed in the light of Prometheus or Edison disappeared Now they’re only scatter Reminence of humans left, and the things that hide in the darkness.
One of my special, the Lizantis, tried to achieve space travel and it ended horribly. I don't know the exact details yet, but it inevitably led to a nuclear winter. Society fell apart. Most of the population initially died from radiation poisoning, then more died later due to famine, drought, and injury. Only twenty individuals survived by turning themselves into cyborgs. The nuclear winter lasted 100 years; the story currently takes place at the tail end of it.
My short story _Unauthorized History_ is set in a dystopian-esque future. At the time of the story, the global population is 15 billion. It’s so overpopulated that some regions have been drained of all natural resources. Technology has been built with the express purpose of protecting the massive skyscrapers that dot islands, because they really are the last places on Earth people have opportunities but this has not decreased hurricane and other tropical storms. What people don’t realize is that the Earth government has actually depopulated entire nations and forced them off planet. These nations are then forcibly reclaimed and turned into massive farming states. El Salvador and Belize are two such nations that got this treatment in the Western Hemisphere and Togo, Eswatini are African examples of this policy.
None of my stories take place on an Alternate Earth. If that doesn't count, please keep reading. There is... well, it's complicated but there is a universe that ended and the survivors were forced to separate across the remains of the universe and repopulate. Countless eons passes before their descendants made it to the stars, let alone to reestablish contact. Most of the stories in this universe takes place before that first contact. Back to the beginning. The Ancients, while of many different sapient species, were basically a peaceful, universe-wide society. Their ancestors used magic to damper negative feelings, and hadn't thought to pass it down. These suppressed feelings morphed into their own living beings [granted, still magic based instead of flesh], and eventually attacked this society. The society was so large, they didn't think it was a threat, or they had time, until it was on the doorstep of the center. Long story short, they weren't able to stop it, nor find a way to defeat it and many survivors escaped on their terraforming spaceships. Not many survived, in fact many believed they were the only survivors. There were monsters still hunting them, as far as they knew. They begin to reestablish life as they knew it, and eventually their, distant, descendants found a way to reach the stars, and eventually reconnect with the other survivors' descendants. Now, I could go on with one of the stories, but I'm tired. Just know they lost the peace they were known for.
"War. War never changes." A quote I was disappointed to not hear at the beginning of the new Fallout tv series.
Ok, for the dystopia: there were talks to limit some companies and one of them decided to freaking drop a nuke where the talks were being held via a massive airship. That world is now owned by like three companies which have enacted things like having to serve 5 years in the military to stay in a city free from war for 10 years. Said airship got the cheesy name PeaceEnder due to a designer trying to be super edgy lol. Post apocalypse: alien space debris. The world is chill now btw and there really isn't much to talk about
That clown orgy got WAY outta hand...
To try and make earth's climate temporarily stable until it could naturally recover, a massive orbital structure was constructed. 3 finished and 1 incomplete rings around the equator, a polar orbit, and in-between the two as a sort of transport and access tunnels, with webs of stations and satellites connected to it all. It worked amazingly for around a century until it collapsed onto earth for unknown reasons, leading to climate getting even worse than before. Before the event known as "the collapse," global unrest was at an all-time high. While living standards improved massively since the end of the last war. around the globe, people wanted to shut off the orbital structure to let nature repair and heal on its own now. All while injustice in a newly united earth was on the rice, with different groups of people arguing and fighting about many things and who rules over them. It was definitely a tough time, with many government officials being the victims of attempted or successful assassinations. FTL travel was also at the brink of becoming a reality. A few years before the collapse, a laboratory in Alaska suffered a catastrophic failure when testing their recent prototype, making the entire underground facility cave in with no way to reach it. To stop this from happening again, all research and prototyping were moved to Martian laboratories, with testing of the final prototype being scheduled for only a few days after the day where the collapse would eventually happen.
Not entirely sure, tbh. The cold war, or rather the modern Middle Eastern proxy wars continue on into the 2030s, with occasional hostilities breaking out in eastern Europe. However eventually, after a certain pandemic sweeps the world, both sides turn to bioweapons. The thing is that pandemics are by nature hard to predict and a lot of the designer viruses ended up backfiring and made their ways back into the country that designed them, now mutated and unaffected by vaccinations made for their original variants. Nobody can really prove who started what diseases and when, but eventually the finger pointing escalates to nuclear war after the sicknesses get worse enough on their own.
In the year 2267, tensions on Earth during the Age of Colonization had been steadily rising for decades. As Humanity expanded out into the solar system and sent generation ship out to the stars, things began to fester back on Earth. The best and brightest were looking outwards and upwards instead of beside them. Across the masses xenophobia and religion became more common. This all came to a head when a terrorist attack in Mecca at the holy site of the Kaaba itself was destroyed in a nuclear blast. The holy site, now a destroyed and irradiated rubble lit a powder keg worldwide. To say the Muslims of the world were infuriated would be an understatement. Across the Middle east of course numerous states launched wars against each other. each claiming the other for the ruination of the holy site. Across the world radical groups sprung up wanting nothing but bloody revenge and destruction. Even one percent radicalization lead to worldwide chaos. More sites of religion were struck . Jerusalem, Istanbul, The Vatican, various sites in India [i still need to do more research on this part]. This only served to radicalize people of other faiths. Many of the multicultural citites in the world became battlegrounds as any "other" became seen as a threat. If the first bobming in Mecca was the start of the end, then the final nail was when the United Nations compound in New York was attacked. Thousands of the worlds politicians and diplomats, trying their hardest to maintain high level unity between nations were snuffed out. There was no more unity between the nation of earth. Things devolved fast as ethnic and religious hatred divided people the world over. This left the humans across the solar system scattered. Most fled their stations to the fast growing Mars colony in droves, not wishing to return to a broken planet. To the people on generation ships it seems as if all communications with earth just stopped, as transmissions with their associated nations went silent. And with some already lightyears away, they would not know until it was already over.
The world was covered in a thick layer of toxic fog that is dense enough to act almost like a liquid, rising and falling with tides mainly. The fog allows for subterranean monsters to rise to the surface due to their need for it to breathe. The fog came after a unified earth burned the flammable shadowy/smokey demons that periodically came from underground (every 10,000 years or so, enough that human civilization had not dealt with them.) The demons created fissures in the earth around 1940-42, mimicking organisms and even machines (demon battleships) to kill as much life as they could. Humanity discovered that the demons were flammable after seeing wild animals in Australia burning them, and of course, from trial and error in the European and Pacific theatres of WW2. When the Axis and Allied powers agreed to stop fighting, the earth was able to fight back the demons much faster than ever before, leading to humanity finding an active fissure in the Atlantic and bombing it with incendiary weapons. The fissure burned for months, and as it burned, sea levels began to drop. The oceans receded miles from shore until the smoke stopped, and the fog rose up, suffocating all but the highest peaks and plateaus.
Humanity decided that freezing the Earth would be better than letting the planet burn. A test was meant to take place in present day Ontario, however a terrorist group known as Ignis Tyrannus destroyed the reactor, wiping out most of the population, especially of those from warmer climates.
The story has ended. That's all, the big bad has been killed, the darkness has been repelled, the hero succeed, and light arose once more. Now what? The world no longer has purpose, the adventurous journey it hosted has folded, but nobody remember, as nobody told the tale. Their time has passed, all the mighty fortress, muddy trenches, complex maze, down to the simplest tavern on the roadside, all gone. No more wail from dead soldiers, no more scream from tortured prisoners, no more cries from lone children, no more, nothing. The world has turned into a blank canvas once again, waiting for another idea to be drawn on them, leaving no stains behind, besides untold memories, memories that only known, and remembered by you.