Destruction on a ludicrous scale

Hrmmm...

Rifts or portals to the negative energy plane are opened on and in the sun itself, causing it to collapse. Or perhaps the positive energy plane causing the sun to explode. either way, the prime cannot survive without the sun.
 

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The Grumpy Celt said:
Hrmmm...

Rifts or portals to the negative energy plane are opened on and in the sun itself, causing it to collapse. Or perhaps the positive energy plane causing the sun to explode. either way, the prime cannot survive without the sun.

Hrmm... I don't know if I'd be too sure of that in a D&D world... I mean with all the magic and crazy abilities people have...
 


Scribble said:
Hrmm... I don't know if I'd be too sure of that in a D&D world... I mean with all the magic and crazy abilities people have...

Hrmph... I don't care how much dodge and evasion you have, if the sun explodes into a nova or collapses into a black hole, unless you've got plane shift, you're in trouble. That breaks apart planets, had a DC of infinity and does a goggle d4 damage.
 

To more fully explain the Stargate thing, it was essentially the increasingly-common sci-fi trope of the Nova Bomb: drop a device into the star that eliminates enough of its mass, or changes its quantum properties enough, that one of the forces that keeps a "healthy" star in balance and burning weakens or disappears. Stars depend on a balance between the gravity of all that hot gas collapsing under its own collective weight, and the incredible force of the ultrahot gas in the stellar core undergoing nuclear fusion and trying to blow up like an absurdly huge nuke.

If you halt the nuclear reactions somehow, then the star will collapse under its own gravity and compress into something like a neutron star or black hole; the shock of the changes the matter goes through during the change will actually cause the outer layers of the star to blow off in a final cataclysmic explosion. This is one type of supernova. If you merely stop the exploding nuclei from producing any pressure, the star actually expands to become a red giant for a few million years, swallowing and vaporizing any planets that happen to be orbiting close enough (like Earth for example), and then eventually blowing off the outer layers in a less-intense explosion that can be expected to burn off the atmospheres and seas of any planets that didn't get swallowed by the giant directly. The core is left as a white dwarf in this case, and this is what is referred to as a nova. It's what our own sun is expected to do in about 5 billion years.

If, OTOH, you weaken the gravity somehow, or cancel it out completely, the pressure from the exploding stellar core will basically turn the star into the expanding explosion of plasma one would normally expect from a nuke the size of a hundred planets. Sometimes this could leave a stellar remnant behind, sometimes not- it depends on how you explain the cancel-out-gravity problem, since we don't know any way to do that today.

On Stargate SG-1, they sent the stargate dialed open to the "black hole planet"- encased in a force field so as to prevent premature detonation- into the local star. The force-field would wink out when its machinery was overloaded by conditions deep within the star, and by that point the gate would be close enough to the stellar core to start siphoning off mass from it. This, in turn, would weaken the gravity of the star sufficiently to cause it to explode as described above.

In Star Trek: Generations (sorry to raise the specter of this movie, but it is relevant), it was explained that the Trilithium nova bomb worked along the first principle: it disrupts the nuclear reactions going on in the stellar core and thus causes the star to prematurely implode/explode as a supernova.

The Supernova Bomb introduced in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series of books used the gravity principle in reverse. Rather than weaken the gravity, it greatly increased the explosion pressure within each stellar core so that the balance was undone that way; it did this by being a "junction box in hyperspace" which would apparently link the stellar cores of "every major sun" together all at once, which would mean that every such star would have not only its own pressure to contend with, but also the pressure of every other star thus linked- and obviously that would destabilize the stars affected. The Supernova Bomb was specifically designed as an "ultimate weapon" capable of destroying the universe.
 

Kae'Yoss said:
Or the core of the planet will explode? Or, if that's too Sci-Fi for you, let the giant beast (the Tarrasque's Mother) wake up and eat its way out of its prison. (Did I mention that the Tarrasque's just a little baby practically fresh out of its egg and tiny compared to a grown-up specimen?)
Conveniently, somebody already took this idea from Chrono Trigger (the game uses a similar scenario for world destruction, for those who don't know- the beast that "hatches" is called Lavos) and actually statted it up using rules from the Immortals Handbook Bestiary. So if you want to go this route, you have stats for the monster should you need them. :) Check it out.
 

Converge three tachyon beams in separate time periods, rupture the subspace barrier, and start an anti-time reaction. Oh, wait...
 


The Grumpy Celt said:
Hrmph... I don't care how much dodge and evasion you have, if the sun explodes into a nova or collapses into a black hole, unless you've got plane shift, you're in trouble. That breaks apart planets, had a DC of infinity and does a goggle d4 damage.

Well, I'm not trashing your idea.. And besides it's your game... :P I'm simply saying that sometimes it seems the laws of physics from our world can't always really be applied to a place like say, The Forgotten Realms... I mean if God's attacking the world directly tend not to change things all that much... An exploding sun? "Elmonster cleanup on aisle three please..."

I say this also because you have to remember certain characters in the world can survive a freefall from outerspace into a pool of lava... Physics ain't all that in D&D... :p

But it's your game man. If you think it's cool it's cool./ I'm just some dude on a message board. :p
 

Cause the Prime material to no longer meet one of the prerequisites for continued existence.

Given that your the DM, you can pretty much justify anything you want within that context.

If existence requires that an object be perceptible by a sentient being, you can cause an object to cease to exist by destroying all sentient beings capable of perceiving it.

If your version of the D&D cosmology has a god that "Looks upon all that exists", you could find a way to make that god to no longer 'look' at the prime material plane, causing it to cease to exist.

If the prime material plane exists because the gods created it, than there is probably some way to either convince them to unmake it, or to go about disassembling it yourself.

You could induce a spontaneous existence failure simply by moving out of town, taking all game related materials with you, and failing to inform your gaming friends of your new contact info.

END COMMUNICATION
 

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