D&D 5E Pick Thy Apocalypse

In the world I was planning the apocalypse is the Astral Plane that was the plane that was the glue that held the other planes in place vanished, so in places other planes have collided with the Prime Material plane and you can literally step from one plane into another sometimes without realising it.

The elemental plane of water constantly drains into the prime material plane, but thankfully also drains out into the void destroying much of the water, but also into the plane of fire turning to steam and leading to violent storms and currents.

Basically not just the world but the whole of D&D cosmology is screwed.
 

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I'm a fan of apocalypses that happened for understandable reasons, but which were still really bad.

As an example, if I ever run 13A, I have custom Icons for a post-post-apocalypse, where the world is now beginning to "rise" again, but the nature and success of that return are in doubt. The Thirteenth Age is an age of dawn, but is it a golden one or soaked in blood?

The Eleventh Age did not view itself as a "golden" age, but for those who endured its end and the horrors that followed, it came to be seen as one. It was an age of strife, but also an age of achievement. The dragonborn of the northern continents subsumed—by both diplomacy and conquest—the entirety of the landmass accessible to them. However, their navy was significantly inferior to that of the humans from the southern continent, so there was a tense peace (or, more accurately, cold war until one side or the other could wrest clear advantage.) Then, seemingly the gods themselves intervened, and a massive typhoon swept through the Girdle Ocean, destroying much of the humans' fleet in mere days. Within a month, dragonborn soldiers were already making a beachhead. The humans, unwilling to accept their inevitable defeat, resorted to darker and darker means to preserve their freedom, until finally, in an act of colossal blood magic, they sacrificed over ten thousand slaves simultaneously in order to tear open a portal straight to Hell, from which the pact-bound armies of darkness could fight off the invaders.

Unfortunately, the pact was of course extremely manipulative, and protected ONLY humans, not any other race or creature. Whenever any human resisted, they were slaughtered (or worse...) as much as the invaders were. And as the demons so gleefully noted, you'd be surprised what you can live through.

In less than a year, the southern continent was completely lost, and by the next, the dragonborn empire was on the verge of total collapse. The Icons gathered together to do something. All of them, even the twisted and evil ones, because they all knew the entire world was at stake. The Lich King and Great Gold Wyrm proposed a radical solution, a spell that would combine all their powers and completely seal the world off from extraplanar entities and forces. Desperate, and each thinking this would eventually give them an opportunity for a better bargain later, they agreed, and the Lich King cast the spell himself, flaring out in the process and seemingly ending his existence.

But he had deceived them, because the Sun is also a planar influence! So the Golden Age fell, the Age of the Sun died as a whimper in the twilight, and the Dark Age, or the Age of Ice, followed in its wake. The world slowly froze, and the remaining Icons bickered and feuded and scraped for the last vestiges of heat and life and magic. A vicious stalemate no one could break, until the Great Gold Wyrm had had enough. The petty squabbles, and the shame of having helped cause such suffering, embittered him against the other Icons, and he felt forced to unilaterally act. As one of the architects of the spell, he was able to break it and take its phenomenal power into himself, becoming more powerful than any other Icon...and then he filled the World-Wound himself, body and soul. Now he fights to protect the world, and inspire heroes to help bring an age of light...but the spell's power will not last forever.

A new sun rises over a world pulled back from the brink, changed unimaginably by war and horror and darkness and bitter, bitter cold. Tombs and monuments dot the land, the last vestiges of those who did not survive the Dark Age. The Dragon Empire is long, long dead—but hushed whispers say the Courtesan is the Emperor's heir, and her loose trade league the seed of a second Empire. Her recent alliance with the newest holder of the Storm Captain mantle has done nothing to quell these rumors. But dark forces still lurk, and the Pale Lady in the shadows of grave and tomb may prove that the Lich King's gambit has not yet run its course....
 

On this day we celebrate Saint Percival, the Savior who over 1,000 years ago sacrificed himself to bring peace and prosperity to the realm. He single-handily closed the Portal of Ruin by exploding his staff of the magi inside its magical aura. This set off a chain of events that exploded the other portals burning much of the realm, but saving the future that we enjoy today.

Rumors speak of a piece of that staff being found and signaling a possible future war returning. We ask brave heroes to seek out these rumors and gather the pieces of old to prevent the prophesy from coming true.
 

A massive ritual used by a nation's top mages with the intention of bringing in a massive quantity of planar energy for them to use. Instead, it brought in the planes themselves, creating massive portals tears and manifest zones worldwide, with creatures flooding in en masse from the feywild, shadowfell, and all the outer and elemental planes.

In some regions they acted as invasive species, crashing the local ecology. In others, disparate groups immediately came into conflict with each other and with those who were already there. One whole continent became a new front in the Blood War.

When the dust finally mostly settled, populations were way down but diversity of species was way up, and while most of the world's civilisations are gone, it's also an unofficial crossroads for small groups of planar travellers who use its still-existing portals as shortcuts between realms.
I'm playing in a similar game. It's post apocalyptic but in a more regional way. We play dwarves who have been sealed in Dwarf-Home for generations, underground. Occasionally, a great ritual is done to pull a 'star' down from the heavens - essentially, it brings down a meteor. Then an extraction team is sent out to gather the rare metals of that meteor and many of the relics and ancient artifacts are made of this metal - the secrets of its forging are known to a select few.

The problem is the meteor has regional effects that can be catastrophic.

Recently, Dwarfhome has been decimated by A massive explosion and fire, caused by some titanic elemental and the residence have hardly had time to escape. We were sent to recover a few of the relics before it was fully destroyed and rendez-vous with the other dwarven populace who escaped. They are now refugees in a foreign, hostile land. Gnolls rule huge swaths of the lands, the elves - only a myth in dwarven stories - have long been extinct and the effects of the meteor has caused portals to open all over, causing the elemental planes to bleed into the mortal plane. The area, is remote, on the edge of the human lands and cut off from the more civilized human kingdom and their King, for some reason, refuses to send aid to its people.

***

Because we are Dwarves who have never left Dwarfhome, everything is new. There's no need to have much campaign background - we, as players, are learning the ways of the world at the same time as our characters. We are tasked to rendez-vous with the Dwarves but are constantly beset upon by enemies. Gnolls who hold human prisoners. We often have to make hard choices: do we help these people or do we race back to our kin?

The landscape is desolate because of something the elves did several millenia earlier as well as the effects of the portals flooding huge swaths of lands with strange muck and belching out mephits and other creatures. There's ruins of the giants dotting the lands. The giants are just shadows of their former selves: Nothing but hulking brutes but the ruins hint that they were once a powerful, cultured and magical society.
 

Easy: Dragons.

Robert E Howard (being a bigot notwithstanding) initially had the ancient Valusians, the serpentfolk of his 'Alternate Earth' setting with Conan and all, offend the gods by having them essentially wipe out entire species of peoples by genetic modification millions upon millions of years ago.

In response, the gods of those species unleashed a truly terrible cataclysm on the world: Dragons (dinosaurs). The Valusians couldn't fight against the giant monsters and survive so they became a subterranean species hiding in the dark places of the world and stewing over their fallen empire.

EVENTUALLY the gods decide to start over on Earth and wipe out the dragons before the coming of giants and eventually humans.

So... what if in your setting, the dragons were the apocalyptic wrath of the gods unleashed upon the world to destroy the halflings for whatever it is they did in that ancient past... and when there were no halflings to eat (because they went into hiding) the dragons largely turned on each other, wiping out entire flights of dragons in epic wars that set the sky afire.

And when it was over, the world reached a sort of peace where the dragons that remain, still as powerful as they ever were, are just in -tiny- numbers because they keep fighting when they run into each other. They've carved the world into their own territories and isolated themselves outside of mating and other specific interactions...

And the halflings and other heritages have repopulated the world in between their various Hellmountains and Monsterswamps. You don't go to X mountain because of the Red Dragon Phlethelegos or the Y swamp because of the acid fields of the Black Dragon Ussurriax. Sure their minions, kobolds and the like, raid villages near those locations, but what are you gonna do about it?

If you go in to do a Kobold Cleanup to push them back, the dragons destroy your kingdom for harming their 'servants'. The best you can do is keep your head down and hope not to accidentally cause another apocalyptic attack.
 


I've had two apocalypses. Well, sort of one and a half.

In the first, which happened before any campaign, it was an escalation of a war with advanced magic. Competing nations developed different methods of destroying one another. One pulled down asteroids to destroy cities, causing widespread devastation but having relatively little long lasting impact. The other developed the equivalent of magical nukes, causing vast areas of destruction and in the hardest hit locations (or just locations that were unlucky) wild magic zones. Only a tiny percentage of

Civilization gradually rebuilt in the areas of the former destruction because while much was destroyed, environmental hazards were not long lasting. In areas hit by the latter magical nukes, there was far more disruption of the natural order. While many of the places have healed over the centuries, others are still twisted and malformed. Dangerous and largely inhabited only by monstrous creatures and aberrations, few dare to tread in these areas. Other areas have seemingly recovered but still have echoes of past destruction.

The more recent sort-of apocalypse was caused by a war between the gods, the start of Ragnarok that was cut short in large part because of the actions of the PCs. During this period roughly 2/3 of the population was wiped out but there was never a complete collapse of civilization. The remaining aftereffects of the war have largely faded away with time. I did this for a couple of reasons, one was to have that ongoing apocalypse campaign (this was 4E where we went to 30th level and I wanted something with epic level stakes), but the other was to simply make the world more dangerous.

So I thought about what I wanted out of those apocalyptic events and kind of went from there. What's the aftermath going to be? What long-lasting impact on the world will it have? How does it shape the narrative of the world?
 

Not only Dark Sun may be a great source of inspiration, but also "Broken Weaven" by Cubicle 7

If the magic is dying, then some players could ask psionic mystics, incarnum soulmelders or other type of power instead classic spellcaster classes. We shouldn't blame them.

Why not a failed formian planar invasion? Or a rebellion of sentient constructs. Or an epidemic by a biological weapon, And the cure could be poisoned by the elites to become a toxin in the arrival of a different disease with the opposite effects.
 

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