when the Rite of Annihilation is performed during a total planetary alignment.
2
if the majority of living souls on the planet pray for it.
3
when human civilization achieves the goal for which it was originally designed by entities beyond comprehension: concentrating platinum into an easily harvested form.
4
with the first and final casting of the spell Power Word: End.
5
when the angels of justice finally manage to argue past their deadlock with the angels of mercy for the destruction of the world.
6
when an emperor unites all the kingdoms of the world under one crown and decrees it.
7
when the old gods are unchained from their chthonian prison.
8
when the Gloaming Horn is blown with enough force to topple castle walls.
9
if the four ur-temples at the corners of the earth are desecrated.
10
under conditions lost to mortal knowledge.
11
if ever the gods’ supply of spilled blood and sacrifices wavers.
12
when the last elf fades from the world.
13
when the fruit of the Tree of Anti-Life is fed to a would-be messiah.
14
in order to censor the spread of an ultimate cosmic secret.
15
when an act so vile is committed that the universe rejects itself.
16
when one of the thirty-six truly righteous people in the world is made to believe that they are what they are despite their deep humility.
17
at the time predetermined at the world’s creation. Manipulating the golden Doomsday Clock might accelerate or delay this inevitable date.
18
when the three pieces of the End-Bringer’s Blade are reunited.
19
when the seal at the bottom of the Tomb of Worlds is broken.
20
when the Questing Beast is caught and killed by an unworthy knight.
D20
This apocalypse is most wished to be brought about by
1
a militant secret society of skeptics who believe it to be necessary to reveal the illusory nature of the world.
2
a disgraced order of paladins who believe this will save the world from an oncoming eon of evil and degeneration.
3
a coterie of wizards who seek to usurp the gods by becoming the creators of a new universe.
4
a genie bound to the wish of a misanthrope.
5
an ultraterrestrial para-deity trapped within the world in a cycle of reincarnation in wretched mortal forms.
6
an ultranationalist faction confident that they can preserve their own lands as a habitable sliver while the rest of the world is wiped away.
7
an uncanny intelligent machine from the future, seeking to prevent its own abominable construction.
8
the demiurge, architect of falsehood, who wishes to shape a new material reality to entrap more luminous souls.
9
a fanatical popular movement based on a peculiar interpretation of scripture, wherein the apocalypse will result in a utopia.
10
an infamous company of veteran mercenaries who desire an end to all conflict.
11
a dryad-like creature bound to ferns instead of trees, who wants to deny the world usurped from them to the seeded and the flowered.
12
a ghost who would rather see the world destroyed than move further from their treasured past.
13
a union of overworked zeitgeists who want the turning of the ages stopped for an unmeasurable non-eon.
14
a beloved, preternaturally-talent composer who desires the apocalypse as the coda to their greatest symphony yet.
15
an immortal alchemist who has become terminally bored with everything.
16
a nihilist social club.
17
a possessing curse bound to kill all the descendants of someone who betrayed its creator tens of thousands of years ago. Most people are now descended from that someone.
18
a necromancer who will establish a kingdom of the dead from the bones of the old world.
19
invaders from a parallel timeline of secondary possibilities, seeking to supplant their primaries.
20
a vengeance-crazed fallen hero who thinks it is the only way to destroy the phylactery of their nemesis, a geolich.
D20
An omen heralding this apocalypse
1
is artists finding no inspiration for pleasant work, but an abundance of it for the harsh and hideous.
2
is sterility across all kinds of animals.
3
is the earth welling blood when dug or ploughed.
4
is all birdsong becoming the same threnody.
5
is the moon appearing as a glaring bloodshot eye.
6
is the living dreaming of the dead mourning for them.
7
is livestock being born as insatiable meat-eaters.
8
is an autumn without end.
9
is idols and icons spontaneously weeping black ichor.
10
is misrule in all kingdoms.
11
is colour dimming and darkness deepening.
12
is the rebuilding of the True Sanctum, which will be the sole, hotly contested place untouched by the apocalypse.
13
is fresh corpses rising to dig their own graves.
14
is oracles and soothsayers all screaming at once before falling dead.
15
is the birth of prodigal infants able to speak and walk from the moment of their first breath.
16
is an endless storm of locusts scouring the land back and forth.
17
is ploughs spontaneously reforging themselves into swords.
18
is cities being overrun with wilderness and feral creatures.
19
is the appearance of a comet like a bloody pennant.
20
is a sickening miasma sweeping through the lowlands.
D20
When this apocalypse occurs,
1
giants will rise from the sea and trample cities and mountains to dust.
2
the stars will rain down, burning away the forests and the seas.
3
the barrier between worlds will wear thin and tear, merging a corner of the multiverse into a mind-bending mosaic.
4
light will fade from the heavens and all the world will become the larder of monsters swarming up from its shadow.
5
an army of hollowed men will be raised, wielding weapons yet unseen to scourge the earth clean.
6
the moon will crack as if an egg and release unclean radiance that transmutes all things exposed to it.
7
a slow and steady plague of petrification will sweep the globe. Refugees from stone nations will hack up sand from bloody lungs, all triumphs lost to Ozymandian crumbling.
8
complexity will flatten until only an infinite featureless plane exists. Higher thought will be one of the first things to go.
9
things will begin to decay while still living, the only way to stave it off for a time being to devour another living thing.
10
the world will be swallowed by a tempest. The land will be drowned by sky-high waves and vapourized beneath volleys of lightning.
11
all water will become bitter and undrinkable, the soil will lose its goodness, and the glare of the sun will intensify until everywhere is a bleached desert.
12
all people will become utterly atomized and alienated from each other, irrevocably separated into personal realities that can only contact each other through horrific violence.
13
a veil will be lifted, and everything up until that point will seem to have been very silly. People will laugh themselves to death, or not bother with anything further until it all falls apart.
14
every pantheon’s Götterdämmerung will kick off at once.
15
the perfect cancer will metastasize, an immortal disease that assimilates all life within it.
16
the meek shall inherit the earth, and the strong shall devour the meek’s reward.
17
fire will spread from the world’s core, and ice from its poles. Everything will be destroyed in their collision.
18
sense and causality will dissolve as if all the world were a dream.
19
sorcerous ability will appear at random in people, in frequency and potency never before seen. Their magically-backed whims will tear reality asunder.
20
the tools and machines of humanity will sprout new forms and complexities at an accelerating rate, coating first the planet and then the sun, ushering in the obsolescence of mere meat.
D20
In the aftermath of this apocalypse
1
the continuity of time itself will break and turn upon itself.
2
all will decline, crumbling over eons into the void.
3
the few survivors will shed their lowly flesh and ascend.
4
the world will return to primal innocence, as it was in the beginning.
5
the lands of the living and the lands of the dead will switch their places, and ghostly throngs will feel their pulse quicken once again.
6
the cosmos will reset to the day before it kicked off, with everyone retaining fractured memories of it.
7
hyperdimensional vulture-analogues will pick over the wreckage.
8
the planet will explode and fill the cosmos with its shards of new kinds of being.
9
the dregs of the world left over will drain down to become a new layer of the Abyss.
10
there will only be goblins left.
11
a circle of skalds will attempt to save some part of the world by singing its stories into other realities.
12
the world will be quarantined by the proper authorities to prevent its spread.
13
the world’s countless ghosts and sundered futures will merge and be extruded into other worlds as destrudinous psychic sludge.
14
most of the world will be reborn through random fluctuations in thermodynamic equilibrium many eons hence.
15
the luckiest survivors will sail on celestial winds into the new world born from the old’s ashes.
16
the dead world will be raised as a necrokosmos by an arch-necromancer in another universe.
17
a new ecosystem with new peoples will emerge, adapted to the changed reality.
18
the most interesting survivors will be put in an ultraterrestrial zoo.
19
the world and its ending will repeat, diminished and degraded each time, as though remembered by a senile god.
20
explorers will come from unreached elsewhere and marvel at what once was.
The weirder bits are 100% my jam, but all of this is great
ReplyDelete