D&D General Fantasy Equivalent of the Nuke

[UngainlyTitan]

I am a big fan of cold war espionage surrounding nuclear secrets -- mostly the real world stuff (but some fiction, too). I have long toyed with the idea of trying to create a fantasy campaign that fits embraces that genre, but I often get stuck on what the right equivalent of the bomb should be. Assuming D&D-isms (even if the game that I would use isn't strictly D&D), what do you think would make a good stand in for the nuclear weapon in such a scenario?

The one I keep going back to is dragon eggs. Like, the presumption is dragons are gone but eggs remain behind. Someone has figured out how to hatch them, though, and once hatched the dragons are loyal servants of the crown that hatched them(I am assuming some sort of "land magic" in the explanation). Also, these are not just dragons, but city buster dragons.

What do you think would make a good "nuclear weapon" equivalent in a D&D inspired fantasy setting? Remember, the pointof the thing is to drive espionage and fun spy action to try and acquire or preserve such secrets.

I think that most of the responses are getting the basics wrong. They are focusing on the bomb and not getting its nature right.
They key element of nuclear weapons in the real world is that the physics is pretty straight forward but the engineering and construction is difficult and needs a strong manufacturing base to accomplish.
The bottlenecks to effective Canned Sunshine is production of sufficient raw materials in the required purities and the manufacture of precision components needed to make that material go Bang rather than Fizz.

Both of these need a substantial industrial base and the ability to mass manufacture precision components and that is just for the bomb.
The delivery systems (rockets and bombers) also need even more precision mass manufacturing capacity.

This means a lot of interesting technical secrets known to varying degrees by an awful lot of people, giving plenty of targets for various intelligence and counter intelligence agencies to get their teeth into.
The complete opposite of the small cabal of arcanists that have the Apocalypse Spell (Like the "Rain of Colourless Fire")

This world is going to be closer to Ebberon but even less D&D'ish. The states are stronger and have much more control of their borders and internal policing. No untamed frontiers, magic is less trad D&D and more steampunk/artificer based.
Little or no high level magic (spells past 5th level or so).

 

[dvstig]

Some ideas

Altar of divine rage
A meticulously crafted altar in suitable metals and rare materials infused with divine energy from a god of rage and fury, "consecrated" in a (holy number -1) sacrifices.
To trigger it need a last sacrifice of an enraged person "blessed" with a lv2 divine spell, during a suitable ceremony (religion check dc15?)

Primary Effect:
Waves of divine energy causing everything in range (15km/10 miles diameter) to strike out in indisrimitive fury and rage. This effect continue for some days before weakening.
Lingering effect:
For decades to come, the altar will randomly emit weaker versions of the rage, making permanent reclamig of the aria extremely difficult.

Planar disposition engine
Based from a combination of a spelljammer engine, Gate spells and and the fundamentals of demiplanes, this intricate arcane device was originally considered a failed protect, until a desperate war wizard noticed the effect of a deliberate overload will cause.
The device needs a significant time to charge up, and a significant final jolt of arcane energy to detonate.

Primary effect:
Instead of plain shift itself it will instead shift in another planes property in a large aria. The plane in question is random, and the device will continue to shift to new places every couple of minutes, cycling through many planes before running out of energy. ( in practical terms the aria will be hit by new natural disaster every 10-20 minutes for a couple of hours.)
Lingering Effect:
Planar boundaries in the aria weakened and other planes spontaneously bleed over for some centuries to come.

 

[MarkB]

I'm suddenly reminded of Larry Niven's short story The Magic Goes Away. It had the premise that magic is a natural resource drawn from the surrounding world, and it's apocalyptic scenario was the development of a relatively simple means of deliberately consuming and expending all magic in a large area.

The principle was simple - a device that would draw in magical energy in a small area, then use that magic to power itself up and draw more power in, cascading in a positive feedback loop until an entire area became the equivalent of an anti-magic zone.

That could be a pretty terrible threat to an Eberron-style wide magic setting. Having all magic become inert within a major city could cripple it, or worse - in the short story, it caused the fall of Atlantis.

It is pretty setting-specific, of course.

 

[Alzrius]

The Scroll of Tarrasque Summoning also springs to mind. Because assuming the Tarrasque were to stay in the region, it's going to be uninhabitable for a while. And if it doesn't, isn't that mutually-assured destruction?

I prefer the talisman of final destruction, a single-use magic item from the adventure "Sleeping Dragon," by Bill Slavicsek, (Dungeon #48) which summons the Tarrasque to you and lets you give it one order, which it carries out for 1d6+8 days, after which there's a 50% chance that it goes back into hibernation...and a 50% chance that it immediately seeks to destroy the talon's user.

Also, in Reverse Dungeon (affiliate link) there are single-person recreations of rain of colorless fire and invoked devastation, which while less powerful than the originals, can potentially be learned by a PC. Casting either deals Hit Dice of damage equal to the caster's level, over an area a number of miles in diameter equal to the caster's level...though it also kills the caster in the process.

 

[jgsugden]

....This is interesting because while devastating it might no destructive. That region is suddenly living in the mundane medieval period. Ewww. But what if they started developing technology...?...

Then you have a story with technology. I have a 40 year old setting. There is a Weave Dead region of 'space' with worlds that have developed technology. One is essentially Gamma World, another is a Modern World, and the last is a 1900s era technology world that is struggling to fend off invaders from the Far Realm and Supernatural Threats (as the Supernatural, in my world, is not tied to the weave and thus operates in magic dead areas). I rarely tie them into my main setting adventures on my primary world, but technically they are part of the same cosmology and there are beings that can, and do, access the technology of these worlds.

It doesn't break the game. It just opens up different potential stories.

 

[MonsterEnvy]

The day of mourning in eberron is pretty much the result of a Hiroshima type thing nobody aimed responsibility for in eberron

Maybe, there is no for sure source or cause for the Mourning other than what individual DMs decide.

 

[tetrasodium]

Maybe, there is no for sure source or cause for the Mourning other than what individual DMs decide.

aimed was a typo of claimed. I was talking about result of how both ended their respective wars & left everyone a bit aghast at the thought that it could happen again was very much an analog though. All of the possible hints at how it could have been triggered make for fertile ground to draw inspiration from

 

[Reynard]

aimed was a typo of claimed. I was talking about result of how both ended their respective wars & left everyone a bit aghast at the thought that it could happen again was very much an analog though. All of the possible hints at how it could have been triggered make for fertile ground to draw inspiration from

The Mourning works great for the other nuke plot line: getting it first, or stopping others from getting it. If the world assumes the Mourning happened because some weapon research went awry, it might stop the war but it won't stop the hunt for the weapon. That's a fun, cool story, buy not really the one I'm interested in.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Final Fantasy XIV has you covered. The nuke-equivalent is primals, also known as "eikons," "eidolons," "kami," or "summoned deities." But "primal" is the most common term used in-game, so I'm sticking with that.

Avoiding spoilers (because boy howdy are there a ton on this subject), a primal is a being created through a ritual which consumes a very large quantity of aether (the raw material of magic, souls, life, etc.) As part of the ritual, the people performing it express their fervent devotion to whatever deity they value most, e.g. the first primal the player character faces is Ifrit, the fiery semi-reptilian deity of the Amalj'aa. This devotion, through the ritual, transforms the provided aether into a magical construct that retains the full force of all the energy put into it, and is capable of incredible feats of magic and destruction (or creation, for the few that actually care about that.)

Unfortunately, there are three extremely serious problems with the creation of a primal. They are, in no particular order:

1. Because primals are created by fervent worship, they are born with an intense desire to force other beings to follow them as well--they are jealous gods. This makes them extremely aggressive and dangerous (hence why most are destructive rather than constructive.) In most cases, primals are summoned by desperate groups looking for salvation from their troubles, so the destruction generally has a salvific/righting-wrongs edge to it that makes the situation even more difficult.
2. Due to the specific nature of the summoning ritual...the being created can mind control (usually called "Tempering") anyone nearby. Only a very few people are immune to this effect, the player character being one of them. You literally only need to be physically close to the primal and they can temper you, making you (at absolute best) a fanatically devoted worshiper, and at worst zombie-like or even catatonic. No one has ever found a cure for tempering, and tempered people cannot be allowed to live, as their very existence empowers and sustains the primal, which is bad because...
3. Primals innately drain the aether of the land around them. They are, in effect, an unstable magical reaction slowly "burning up" the aether they're made of. If they don't get new sources of it, they'll die--so they constantly absorb aether from the land and even from people. If a primal is allowed to run amok for an extended period of time, an entire region could be sucked dry of aether, leaving a barren wasteland, devoid of life. (All life in FFXIV requires a steady flow of aether in and out--if the aether is removed or ceases flowing, life simply ends.)

It's got all the "fallout destroys the land" of actual nuclear weapons, plus the fact that literally the only thing you need is ritual knowledge, a truckload of aether (usually in the form of crystals, which are basically solidified aether), and fervent belief. And then you add on top of it the horrifying effects of tempering and how that makes primals not only self-sustaining but with an active regeneration source (tempered people don't stop being tempered when the primal is destroyed; they'll actively do everything in their power to restore their primal overlord.) For the rotten cherry on top of this garbage sundae, as noted, the people most likely to summon primals are those who have already been abused, hunted, coerced, pushed into a corner, or faced with extinction (whether by happenstance or by extermination), so it's not even like these people don't have a reason, they absolutely DO, they're just turning to the WORST possible tool they could because they believe they don't have any other options.

And finally, as the sauce atop this garbage sundae? There's a cult of weird immortal jerks, the Ascians, who are responsible for making sure that every disenfranchised group the world over knows exactly how to perform these summonings, and even how to power them up with ritual sacrifice of other people.

Primals. They're the perfect magical nuclear weapon analogue.

 

[seebs]

There's the locate city nuke. The combination of metamagic feats that allows you to turn a relatively easy spell into something that kills most creatures in a hundred mile radius is probably pretty dangerous.