The End of the World? How would you do it?

[Wyztrix]

I'm currently running a new campaign in my homebrew setting and am 3 games into it but considering i'm going to be leaving my area for quite a while at the end of the summer I've decided to pack it in so to speak...that is to say the world is gonna end.

Just wondering if anybody here has destroyed their own world before and how they went about it? Any Advice on truely world shattering stories people have played with and how they worked out would be most helpfull. Just trying to get some insight as to what pitfalls to watch out for.

The two major problems i see croping up are 1:The world is gonna die no matter what the players do and as a gm who doesn't like to pre-determine an ending, I feel like I'm disregarding my players (some of which could think of quite reasonable ways of stopping it) and 2:Losing some of my beloved well established characters, obviously whenever I GM again I can make new ones but hey I'm destroying my entire setting here.

I didn't know i was gonna do this when i wrote my campaign but at least i set the stage for something truely epic anyway. I suppose another reason for destroying a few years of gaming background is...I am simply not happy with my setting and want to rework from the ground up my current one has just gotten a bit too incoherent for me. Not to say i don't enjoy it and my players have great fun with it too but this fairytail ain't gonna have a happy ending.

As the players gain a bit more power and begin to understand whats going on I think maybe the best I'm gonna be able to offer is to be able to save some of the people via some sort of evacuation elsewhere but where to? Hmmm gives me a neat idea for a game though, other prime material world is flooded by refugees fleeing the destruction of their own world...

Well thanx for listening and any advice would be appreciated, if i get a few responses I'll go into more detail of the actual plot.

Oh yeah hello to all the enworlders with this being my first post and all

 

[RavenSinger]

I'm a little unclear as to what your concerns are. If you need to destroy the world, then destroy it in as graphic a detail as you like. My question is: why do you need to "destroy the world" if all you really need to do is end the campaign?

However, if your bent is to run a campaign about the "End Times", and you want to make it so that the End will come no matter what, my question as a player would be: then why should I care about the world if there is nothing I can do to save it? Your idea about giving them some people to save is a good one. You must help your players identify and achieve a goal, otherwise people/players lose interest.

--RS

 

[Devin Parker]

I'd definitely be careful with this. Apocalyptic endings can be fun and all, but your players may feel cheated or otherwise dissatisfied if they feel as though everything they've done has been for nothing, and that they leave no legacy behind.

Here's an idea, going with the possibility that the PCs may be able to save some folks. It's your standard huge earthshaking ritual - the PCs learn about it through some cryptic means, finding out that if they can complete this ritual, it'll basically initiate some sort of divine rapture: perhaps only those people in the world who are innocent and/or pure of heart will be saved by celestial beings, leaving the rest of the world - and the world's cruel, wicked, or otherwise guilty - to perish along with the world. (Of course, the obvious question may become "Why wouldn't the good gods do this anyway? Why the ritual?")

Or perhaps the ritual (or an artifact) is some sort of God-Engine, with the power to create a new world. By "activating" the artifact, the PCs create an escape-hatch, as it were. Magical portals appear all over the world, leading to this newly-created realm...or those aforementioned Celestials snatch certain people away to place them in this new world. In this case, you have the chance to use some of those NPCs you don't want to let go of; somehow they managed to get to the new place. The new place, of course, could be the new setting you wanted to make...

It becomes more exciting if it's a race against time - the PCs have to find this God-Engine, figure out how to activate it, and allow enough time for people to escape before whatever Cataclysm befalls the game world.

What I would recommend, though, in order to make it truly epic, would be to include a niggling little detail in the ritual - the PCs have to sacrifice their souls to create the new world. Perhaps their spirits will be absorbed into the fabric of this new planet? Perhaps their souls will provide the fuel that powers the artifact? In order to be properly heroic, you'd probably want to ensure that the souls to be sacrificed would have to be offered willingly...

Just a thought, anyway. Whatever you do, allow the PCs to know that their actions haven't been in vain.

 

[Merkuri]

What I would recommend, though, in order to make it truly epic, would be to include a niggling little detail in the ritual - the PCs have to sacrifice their souls to create the new world. Perhaps their spirits will be absorbed into the fabric of this new planet? Perhaps their souls will provide the fuel that powers the artifact? In order to be properly heroic, you'd probably want to ensure that the souls to be sacrificed would have to be offered willingly...

I like this idea... you could say that the new world needs "seed" souls to get started, otherwise it'll just be a barren ball of rock (or something else inhospitible). Make it seem like the souls get utterly destroyed in this process, their essense being consumed and used to make the new world, but in the end tell the players that their characters' souls have become the gods of the new world. The machine needed souls not as raw materials, but as the creative drive behind the new world. I think that would be a fitting and surprising (if you do it right) end to a campaign world, and if your group wants to continue playing while you're gone they can use this new campaign setting where each of their old characters is a god of something they picked.

 

[Blackrat]

Well I didn't destroy the world entirely but the main continent got pretty much wiped out. most of the continent was actually formed on the back of an extremely colossal dragon that had been sleeping for millions of years and was starting to wake up. The first signs were earthquakes all around the continent and the burned strip of land some hundred miles long infront the head of the dragon. Then when it eventually woke up and took to wings the oceans rushed to the gap left by its body and formed a new sea where the inlands had once been. The cities and villages of the inlands were quickly dropped from the dragons back and crashed to the ground or sea.

 

[The Edge]

Hmm, tricky. I can imagine a pretty intense scene. What the players are doing in this I can't think of right now.

If I was going to do something like that, I think I'd give signs of the other planes falling apart first. Fire clashing with water, earth cracking apart with enourmous voids, and that stuff. Rather than demons raining down on the matierial plane to destroy it, they would be fleeing their own planes, cuasing brief havoc before the matierial goes as well. There would be spirts, lots of spirits. And flying demon snakes the length of rivers. Angels would be trying to calm everything. Thats before the uninverse gets black hole-ified, with everything joining into one, before starting again.

Erm... dunno. Headache. Listen to the others sugestions. Interesting idea though.

 

[Bardsandsages]

Well, I seem to remember the outrage when White Wolf ended the Old World of Darkness (even though they had always said they were eventually going to, nobody believed they would). And these were gamers who WANTED to play angst So if you've been running your standard D&D fare and suddenly turn the game into a no-win-you-all-die-and-there's-nothing-you-can-do scenario, you risk ticking people off.

You don't have to destroy the world...just civilization. I once set up a modern game where the first few sessions the party was doing the typical adventure stuff, and then I just had a nuclear war break out. The party had been in the basement of a hospital talking with the coroner about a dead body (the hospital was build over an old bomb shelter--so the basement was actually the bomb shelter). One minute they are investigating a string of murders, the next they are confronted with mutants and just finding drinkable water. They ended up rounding up other survivors and eventually finding a safe place to rebuild.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I'm currently designing a campaign that has an ELE (extinction-level event) is the starting point- Illithids from the future are going to perturb a planet in the solar system to use its gravity to redirect asteroids at the PC's planet, wiping out most of the surface civilizations.

Their goal will be helping to rebuild things...but also (if played right) be to undo the campaign's starting point by travelling in time.

Maybe even to kill all Mind Flayers everywhere and everywhen.

In your case, you're ending the campaign with Ragnarok...but even with Ragnarok, there were survivors.

I'd say find a way to leave the door open to future adventures in the game world, either as survivors of the event, or as people "out of time" who are striving to undo the apocalypse.

 

[The Edge]

You don't have to destroy the world...just civilization. I once set up a modern game where the first few sessions the party was doing the typical adventure stuff, and then I just had a nuclear war break out.

I've gota try something like that some day.

 

[DreadArchon]

"The world is ending and the party needs to find out a way to escape through the planes to somewhere safe." That's how I would do it.