"Dying" Settings

Tell me about your apocalyptic settings, /tg/. I want to hear about the events that ended your settings' worlds, how their peoples met their grim fate, and how life's flicker of hope is slowly being snuffed out.

Was it the doing of scornful gods? Did man's hubris catch up to him? Did technology get out of control? Was it just an uncaring universe said, "Frick you?"

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  1. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    One of the gods ate the light of the sun. Everything has gone to shit above ground and there are only a few underground cities barely surviving.

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      Does it still output some emissions, or is it completely gone? I was thinking a world like that where the sun no longer shines light in the visible spectrum so the planet is perpetually covered in darkness, but it's still warm and plantlife still undergoes photosynthesis.

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      I know my GM doesn't post here, so it's wild that you and him had the same idea

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        If I were asked if I posted here, I would deny it too.

  2. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    There was a war between the gods of good and evil. Most of them died, leaving only the gods of smaller things to pick up the pieces. The Goddess of the Hearth is now in charge of making sure physics keeps working, for example.
    Most of the gods are wholly unqualified for the new responsibilities they have, but the alternative is just letting everything collapse in on itself.

  3. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    A new generation bomb was dropped, causing light from the sun to stop behaving like an electromagnetic wave and cause it to trickle down onto Earth. Said light is toxic and a seedbed for various malevolent organisms.
    Survivors do get out of their underground shelters during night, carefully avoiding contact with any liquid light. Other sources of light like lanterns and such aren't affected.
    Light slowly evaporates during the night, so there are a few hours during dawn in which the outside is practicable anew.
    During the day, shelters are functionally under a sea of liquid light.

  4. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    It was an age of opulence and prosperity; nobody had to worry about going hungry.
    The White Empress Aries had a benevolent, but strict rule. Contribute to society, and you would have a home in her empire; whether it was making music, craftsmanship, hunting, giving guided tours of the dangerous outlands, amongst other things.
    What killed this society was not rebellion, or a gradual state of callousness, or an inside coup, or even unrest. The people in ground zero had no idea they were even dead.
    An experiment went wrong, one that Aries herself was presiding on; she had both a vested interest in the subject and due cause for concern.
    Fusion. Specifically, permanent fusion between humans.
    See, society had warriors in the past fuse together to create a form greater than the sum of its base parts, to turn the tides of a losing battle or to display power, but it was always temporary. Aries herself had performed fusion many times during her career as a conquerer, in fact.
    The researchers had set up their laboratory in pursuit of a way to make a permanent fusion, not knowing the dangers it posed.
    . . .

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      . . .
      It wasn't really the permanence of the fusion that made it dangerous, but rather the willingness to permanently lose their identity as individuals. The four subjects, codenamed Ruby, Sapphire, Topaz, and Emerald, expressed great interest in the experiment, too, but there was no way to remove that underlying instinct, the uncertainty, that would corrupt the process. Their most primal desires to live created an internal competition between their minds, even as their bodies reconfigured into a single entity. As their wills clashed, no new personality could emerge; a berserk, mechanical humanoid is all that resulted from the process. A heartless destroyer, with no reason, no logic.
      The entire civilization was wiped out from that central point, as the entity released its rage in a radiating, spherical wave of power.
      Because of the strength she accumulated over the years, Aries only barely survived; unconscious, missing limbs, nearly torn to shreds.
      Her exceptional empathy, and state of unconsciousness, allowed her to hear the millions confused voices of the lingering minds whose code had yet to disperse.
      They didn't know they were dead, then they didn't know why they were dead, then they wanted justice.
      For the first time, humanity was united not just through compliance, but down to their very wills they all wanted the same thing. And so Aries asked them: "will you join me?"
      As the mechanical entity was recovering, it was alerted by the sudden culmination of energy and will surging into a single point, a vortex so great the entity was almost flung off its feet. Before it could react, Aries had forsaken her identity to become a collective; floating before the malicious machine was a woman with wings spread wide, glowing in an almost divine light, and exuding an aura of ultimate power.
      While The Angel's raw strength exceeded the machine's almost 1000000 : 1, it was near impervious to physical damage, and of course it couldn't hurt her.
      . . .

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        . . .
        She could see the futility in fighting the entity. After what seemed like days, she decided to attack a more mercurial aspect of the machine. Her empathetic powers had been amplified by her own fusion, and she was able to feel the faintest distinction of four parts of the machine's psyche.
        Using a power more akin to telekinesis than the energy projection everyone was familiar with, she latched onto the four distinct wills, and tore them from each other. However, instead of reverting back to Ruby, Sapphire, Topaz, and Emerald, the body crystallized around each of the wills, shrinking down into densely-packed gemstones. A bit of cosmic irony, which was lost on The Angel, who was flustered at her inability to completely destroy the gemstones.
        Rather than continue trying to break them, she cast them off to opposing edges of the cataclysmic crater.
        Once she calmed herself, the sorrow and hopelessness settled in; while she was the perfect culmination of her people and their beloved Empress, the hollow hole in her heart was deeper than the barren crater where her empire used to be.
        She would eventually go on to using her power to restore nature, but she would keep the secrets of her past to herself, even as humanity reasserted itself through the ages.

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      . . .
      It wasn't really the permanence of the fusion that made it dangerous, but rather the willingness to permanently lose their identity as individuals. The four subjects, codenamed Ruby, Sapphire, Topaz, and Emerald, expressed great interest in the experiment, too, but there was no way to remove that underlying instinct, the uncertainty, that would corrupt the process. Their most primal desires to live created an internal competition between their minds, even as their bodies reconfigured into a single entity. As their wills clashed, no new personality could emerge; a berserk, mechanical humanoid is all that resulted from the process. A heartless destroyer, with no reason, no logic.
      The entire civilization was wiped out from that central point, as the entity released its rage in a radiating, spherical wave of power.
      Because of the strength she accumulated over the years, Aries only barely survived; unconscious, missing limbs, nearly torn to shreds.
      Her exceptional empathy, and state of unconsciousness, allowed her to hear the millions confused voices of the lingering minds whose code had yet to disperse.
      They didn't know they were dead, then they didn't know why they were dead, then they wanted justice.
      For the first time, humanity was united not just through compliance, but down to their very wills they all wanted the same thing. And so Aries asked them: "will you join me?"
      As the mechanical entity was recovering, it was alerted by the sudden culmination of energy and will surging into a single point, a vortex so great the entity was almost flung off its feet. Before it could react, Aries had forsaken her identity to become a collective; floating before the malicious machine was a woman with wings spread wide, glowing in an almost divine light, and exuding an aura of ultimate power.
      While The Angel's raw strength exceeded the machine's almost 1000000 : 1, it was near impervious to physical damage, and of course it couldn't hurt her.
      . . .

      tl;dr

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      . . .
      It wasn't really the permanence of the fusion that made it dangerous, but rather the willingness to permanently lose their identity as individuals. The four subjects, codenamed Ruby, Sapphire, Topaz, and Emerald, expressed great interest in the experiment, too, but there was no way to remove that underlying instinct, the uncertainty, that would corrupt the process. Their most primal desires to live created an internal competition between their minds, even as their bodies reconfigured into a single entity. As their wills clashed, no new personality could emerge; a berserk, mechanical humanoid is all that resulted from the process. A heartless destroyer, with no reason, no logic.
      The entire civilization was wiped out from that central point, as the entity released its rage in a radiating, spherical wave of power.
      Because of the strength she accumulated over the years, Aries only barely survived; unconscious, missing limbs, nearly torn to shreds.
      Her exceptional empathy, and state of unconsciousness, allowed her to hear the millions confused voices of the lingering minds whose code had yet to disperse.
      They didn't know they were dead, then they didn't know why they were dead, then they wanted justice.
      For the first time, humanity was united not just through compliance, but down to their very wills they all wanted the same thing. And so Aries asked them: "will you join me?"
      As the mechanical entity was recovering, it was alerted by the sudden culmination of energy and will surging into a single point, a vortex so great the entity was almost flung off its feet. Before it could react, Aries had forsaken her identity to become a collective; floating before the malicious machine was a woman with wings spread wide, glowing in an almost divine light, and exuding an aura of ultimate power.
      While The Angel's raw strength exceeded the machine's almost 1000000 : 1, it was near impervious to physical damage, and of course it couldn't hurt her.
      . . .

      >steven universe
      I threw up. Frick you anon

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        >I threw up.
        Based sentence. Not so much the rest of your post. How can we have more throw up AND Steven Universe on this board?

  5. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Earth started being terraformed by some automated alien probe so advanced it was essentially magic. We blew up the probe by tossing 50+ nukes at it, and we thought that solved the problem. But over the next few years, things started to get... weird. Weather got stranger, species started quietly dying off without any apparent cause. Astronomers detected that the moon was changing orbit, moving slightly further away. It turns out THAT was happening because the gravity of the Earth was diminshing, as a result of Earth *losing mass*. Air and water was just going away. Like the planet had sprung a leak.

    The game is set 11 years later after the probe, and the surface of the Earth is lifeless. There is no air. There is no water. The planets and animals are dead, but the bodies are just sitting there well preserved years later because there isn't enough bacteria left to decompose anything. The only people left are in special shielded shelters and arcologies, sending out reclamation teams to bring back resources from the dead cities. Even the dead bodies get brought back in trucks, vital biomass needed to prop up the artifical ecosystems that keep the shelters alive for another year.

    We are building a colony ship that might be able to take a few hundred of us to another star. We don't know if that will actually work out, but its a plan. The remaining scientists are desperately trying to understand what actually happened to Earth, and their best guess is that when we blew up the probe it was already too late, whatever process it set in motion just kept going on without it, uncontrolled and haywire.

    In the giant pit that used to be the pacific ocean, something is building itself. We are *pretty sure* its going to be the probe when its done, but we don't know when that will happen. A lot of people are arguing that we should let the probe finish its work, whatever alien ecosystem it is designed to reformat the world into can't be any worse than Earth is already.

  6. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Tell us about your dying thread, OP.

  7. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    >all Midgards across the multiverse rhyme
    >but don't repeat
    >this particular one was invaded by demons and nearly consumed
    >the Vanir and dwarves bring human slaves to fight the demons
    >eventually win, bring the floating parts of the world physically back together with elf magic
    >revolution, more demon invasions, drama
    >sages discover a way to create gates that limit interplanar travel
    >lock the demons out
    >the same magic channels natural ley lines into artificial grids
    >everyone casts for daily things, everything is awesome
    >couple hundred years of high culture
    >the grids cause mutations, sometimes horrid ones
    You are here.
    >the peaceful core empire is fracturing into civil war over monetary policy and differences in magical capability
    >something else in the universe is coming to shut off the Demon Gates
    Icelandic tales/Gamma World/Lovecraft with Napoleonic/Star Trek styling.

  8. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    D20 modern good for this sort of RPG?

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      D20 modern isn’t good for anything.

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      I've heard Genesys is good for it, but I've never used it.

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      d20 modern with d20 apocalypse sourcebook could be fun if you don't mind basically playing D&D 3.5

  9. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    The players blew up the world in a Delta Green game I was running. They encountered a fairly obviously crazy guy who had dreams of putting on a play from this creepy book he found. Instead of killing or capturing the guy and confiscating the book, which I thought would have been the obvious thing for them to do, they decided to help this guy put on the play, which, as it turns out, summons Azathoth to Earth midway through the second act.

  10. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Earth got invaded by aliens, the not-XCOM project failed, so now there's a runaway scrape with humans building colony ships to slingshot themselves out into the galaxy away from what's becoming a genocide. The players are trying to make it back to the underground hanger where one such ship is being assembled with a drive from a downed alien ship so they can get the hell out of dodge.

    After the first ships shot out of orbit, the aliens have shifted their strategy from bombing population centers into rubble to employing a doomsday weapon. None of the players know what it's going to do, but it's causing worsening weather anomalies which are causing havoc on the biospheres around the earth. Monsoons in the Sahara, Blizzards in Mexico, and the water levels are rising quickly.

    We stopped with the players finding some science nerds who started cataloging the DNA of various earth flora and fauna, everyone was trying to decide if they should toss some of their looted alien ordinance from their convoy to make room for the databanks the eggheads have. It would put them at a combat disadvantage, but the idea of being able to clone earth species if they actually make it to a new world is very intriguing.

  11. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Frick, I can't believe Treasure copied Steven Universe when they made Gunstar Heroes!

  12. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Shit, Akira Toriyama copied Steven Universe when he made his characters fuse, too!

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