D20 Apocalypse: Other Ways to End the World?

[Dark Psion]

What other ways can you create an Apocalypse in the style of the new book?

Magical Apocalypse: What was it Shadowrun? A world where magic returned to the world and almost ended it. With the return of magic, technology might fail. Remember the Visonaries Toys and Cartoon? Or in time magic might slowly become technology, like in GURPS Technomancer.

Y2K: What if all Technology just failed? It would make a good " feels real" setting, no magic, psionics or robots,....unless that is what caused the failure.

Genetic Evolution: What if Mutants are the next stage in evolution and thet leads to a revolution of the X-Men: Days of Future Past style.


What other resources can you think of for a ruined earth?

Day of the Triffids: First came the plants, then the meteor showers and the human race was almost entirely rendered blind plant food.

Mighty Samson: An old Gold Key comic book my dad had. A Gamma World like setting with a Scientist, his beautiful daughter and Samson, a mutant with great strength and endurance. Together they explore a ruined earth.

The Time Machine: No mater what version, the Morlocks make a great enemy. What if the human race actually became seperate races like the Morlocks and the Eloi?

Cadillacs and Dinosaurs: Welcome to the Xenozoic age. Who says the future has to make sense, maybe this is the future of the world of Jurasic Park?

 

[DnDChick]

I had an apocalyptic campaign idea called Fractured Time. Experiments into time travel resulted in the breakdown of the time barrier. The past met the present. Intangeble boundaries between the years crumbled and all merged into one. Much of the planet was destroyed, leaving the survivors in a world made up of a bizarre patchwork quilt of time. The Mongol Hoard roamed the plains of America on motorcycles, a powerful Roman centurion took over New York City and renamed it Nova Roma, and dinosaurs stalked the deep south. You could be in a Viking village one day, walk for a day, and find yourself in a relatively normal suburb from 1951. Your camp might get strafed by biplanes from WWI while you return fire with modern rocket launchers.

My players weren't interested, and we never played a single game. Ah well ... lol

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

What other ways can you create an Apocalypse in the style of the new book?

...

Y2K: What if all Technology just failed? It would make a good " feels real" setting, no magic, psionics or robots,....unless that is what caused the failure.

Along this theme, there is a novel that came out recently called Fitzpatrick's War. It takes place many years after the collapse of modern civilization. And there is a man-inflicted apocalypse in the book's history that goes something like this:

Spoiler

In the near history, there is a movement among certain people in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and other anglo nations to return to the "yeoman farmer" ideal. They begin relocating out to rural areas that have been depopulated due to most people moving to mega urban centers. They aren't one to give up on technology entirely and some scientists who sympathize with the "Yukons" (called such because people felt that the "Yukons" were so far from civilization they might as well have moved to the Yukon) developed some impressive new inventions to defend themselves from the predations of outsiders because "Yukon" society is pretty self-sufficient and intact while the rest of the world is falling apart.

Strife breaks out around the world, a tyrant rises in the U.S. government who wants to take from the "Yukons" what they have. Doing so provokes war all over, especially in the U.S. as Yukons are left to defend themselves. However, the Yukons weren't unprepared, in fact were preparing for something like this eventually. The Yukon scientists had launched a network of satellites which were for "communication". The satellites had an new invention of theirs that could, when turned on, cause electricity to go haywire.

With war upon the Yukons, and the survival at stake, they turn on their satellite network, shutting down electricity use around the planet. The Yukons keep the satellites on for months and months.

Nothing with electricity could work. No AC, no refrigeration, no transportation. Industrial agriculture is dead. Modern hospitals are useless. Industry is dead. People die by the hundreds of millions as humanity fights to survive and feed itself.

The Yukons eventually turn it off (bringing electricity back to normality), and they survived the whole storm prepared as they were living in electricity-free settlements. They just had an ace-in-the-hole to take it away from everyone else if they needed to.

Needless to say, the world doesn't return to electricity, instead adopts steam.

It's an interesting book, and the above spoiler is in the history of the novel that is reveals over the course of time. The victors hide the true history of things and gloss over much of the vileness that had to happen for them to win. It is the revealing of it over the course of the book where you realize that a man-induced apocalypse happened, and the people who did it were still around watching to make sure the planet doesn't get out of hand again, else they need to do it all over again.

 

[Roudi]

Zombies.

Sources: any George A. Romero zombie film.

The dead returning to life make a great world-ender. Actually, the upcoming Year of the Zombie will show us all just how well the undead can bring the world to it's knees.

 

[DMH]

I have used some varients of the post-nuke war:

[Ice Age] http://alternityrpg.net/onlineforums/index.php?showtopic=1321

[New York is a swamp] http://alternityrpg.net/onlineforums/index.php?showtopic=1698

And non nuke war:

[Using Toxyderms as the cataclysm] http://alternityrpg.net/onlineforums/index.php?showtopic=2855

[Alien invasion in 1455] http://alternityrpg.net/onlineforums/index.php?showtopic=3308

[A thread similar to this one] http://alternityrpg.net/onlineforums/index.php?showtopic=1280

 

[Stormborn]

There are lots of interesting variations on the Alien Invasion Theme. There are the aliens who use a generational ship to come to earth to colonize it, only to discover that the natives are far more numerous and advanced thanexpected. This leads to an alien invasion by peoples who aren't really any more technologically advanced than us. Ultimatly, a stableized setting would have zones of alien control, like indepident nations scattered across the earth.

Invasion by aliens at an earlier point in time can also be interesting. Either playing duringthe time period, or later. Having the War of the Worlds be real, either the book or the radio version, would have drastically altered technology and maybe there are still som aliens roaming out there. In Authority, Warren Ellis has a world where aliens had landed durign the renissance and intermarried with humans. Now a hybrid caste rules the world from a decadant England.

Which leads me to the next example: Invasion by an Alternate Reality. A USA that embraced manifest destiny and has conqured most of its earth and is looking to "assist" and "pacify" its multiverse sisters. A CSA/Nazi Germany joint task force that is multiverse hoping looking for new worlds to conqure. Or even intelligent velociraptors from a world where the asteroid never hit earth.

In a supers game you could have a world where the good guys didn't win the last Crisis, and the world is nearlly devistated by the superhuman wars, ruled by super villans/super heroes turned warlords.

Oh yeah, zombies, or possibly vampires, is a good one.

Lucifer's Hammer/Armeggedon/etc. style asteroid impact.

Cthulhu wakes up.

 

[Turanil]

Cthuloid and Mind Flayers.

So, use d20 Modern and d20 Apocalypse for rules, then CoC d20 for creatures and magic, plus Mind Flayers (just because I love them ).

So, all people live in a hot and almost desert world with a post-apocalyptic flair. The sky is always dark, full of cloud, and space beyond is never seen again. Then, nobody remembers clearly what happened in the past; however, everybody have recurring nightmares about "something" in the past. Then, as events go, the world much changed, and there is horrid alien out there (mind flayers, etc.).

What really happened is this: it's not post apocalyptic Earth, but the true Venus planet. A conspiracy had of all times prevented the truth be known, that under the clouds the planet is livable. There live a race of Cthuloid aliens (including mid flayers...) that regularly abduct people and bring them on Venus for their own dark purposes. But people have forgotten what happened, and believe they are on Earth after an apocalypse.

 

[Nuclear Platypus]

There's also the Invasion of the Mole Men / Morlocks / <favorite underground race> wiping out the surface or a different sort of alien invasion involving Nazis and their experiments with the occult / aliens who've recently come out of hibernation.

Up from the depths, 30 stories high... GODZILLA! GODZILLA! Yeah, I suppose you could use the mutant iguana from the American version but why limit yourself to just one? Crank up the Mortal Kombat soundtrack and prepare yourself for... KAIJU KOMBAT (hold the babalities please)! There was also that videogame where you got to play dinosaurs (sorta) and eat villagers for points. It wasn't Rampage but a fighter.

Don't forget the apocalypse (indirectly) caused by a rapidly mutating 'superflu' like Stephen King wrote about. Slightly different is a computer virus able to mutate or even some sort of technoorganic virus.

The earth's orbit is somehow altered or the sun changes (too much or not enough energy) causing various climate changes, etc.

Imagine this -

The year: 1994. From out of space comes a runaway planet, hurtling between the Earth and the Moon, unleashing cosmic destruction! Man's civilization is cast in ruin!
Two thousand years later, Earth is reborn...
A strange new world rises from the old: a world of savagery, super science, and sorcery.

Think it'd work?

 

[Stormborn]

The earth's orbit is somehow altered or the sun changes (too much or not enough energy) causing various climate changes, etc.

Imagine this -

The year: 1994. From out of space comes a runaway planet, hurtling between the Earth and the Moon, unleashing cosmic destruction! Man's civilization is cast in ruin!
Two thousand years later, Earth is reborn...
A strange new world rises from the old: a world of savagery, super science, and sorcery.

Think it'd work?

You have been looking at all the requests for Thundarr the Barbarian d20 in the "What I wish were made into a game..." thread, haven't you?

 

[Tetsubo]

I had one GW campaign that was started with a giant EMP. Some religious nutjob had a device created that would use the sun to generate a giant EMP. His thought was to return Earth to "Eden" prior to high technology. The device was flown at the sun, detonated and used the sun's magnetic fileld to make an EMP that wiped out pretty much all higher technology that was hardened. A bit of hand waving that...