Apocalyptic events.

[radberry]

What apocalyptic events have happened in your world to change it? Has your world recovered or is it still in a post-apocalyptic state?

My example: My setting has had a few apocalypses. one is that when people become too technologically advanced the world will rearrange itself splitting continents and forming new ones and resetting the world to an early bronze age level. The major apocalyptic event that has changed my world for the foreseeable future though is a curse placed on the planet which has a chance of raising any person that dies as an undead ghoul that seeks to kill any other creature the curse can raise. This curse was placed so far in the past that people just view it as a fact of life and have adapted around it, most population centers are heavily fortified and farmers having their houses built on stilts or having a robust second story that can be easily barricaded.

 

[pmmg]

Whilst I do love abandoned and post-apocalyptic worlds, not currently writing one.

I did start a series on one that had been nuked to very few survivors. There were zombies and a small number of Vampires roaming it, and not getting along, but I fear it was all lost in a computer disaster. I may go back to it in time. I dont know. I might have one of the zombie stories still, as I wrote it somewhat recently comparatively.

Since I like abandoned worlds. I try to leave them that way and not junk it up with survivors wandering in and out. (Which so many abandoned stories dont seem to be able to do.)

Perhaps the most dramatic effect of the radiation was that it turned to sky yellow, and there was a fog over most of the urban centers that was hazardous to be near.

There are few stories I lost in the computers disaster, of the two I still want back, this one about vampires is one of them.

 

[Prince of Spires]

The gods had a war when one of them tried to dominate the others. During the fight they wrecked the place. It happens when gods fight...

One appocalypse story idea I have is where in an attempt to combat all the plastic polution, humanity develops a plastic eating virus. Which works realy, really well, and spreads faster than anticipated. Which may sound harmless enough, until you figure out that almost any form of modern technology has some form of hydro-carbons in it...

 

[ClearDragon]

I have a fantasy world that was partially destroyed by a giant battle between supernatural beings. The damage was so severe that even the fertility of the soil was permanently degraded and even though the people once had late medieval level knowledge and technology they didn't recover and are pretty much in a slowly getting worse dark age.

 

[Renè Williams]

It's only hinted at in my current WIP, but in the second book I'll be taking readers to the continent of OtherSide a.k.a Terron (Lydians call it OtherSide, inhabitants call it by it's ancient name, Teron). While some of nature has begun to reclaiming process, it's clear that there was an apocalyptic event in prehistory (My planets history only goes back 2-3 thousands years, at which time there was a world-wide conscious reset and all anyone knows is the knowledge the ancients left behind, whether it's true or false) . In the Wilds of Lydia Major, nature can be vicious. On OtherSide, it's downright cruel and brutal and pretty much impossible for a even a very powerfully Gifted human to survive for more then a few days, max. The cities are smaller and all towns are pretty much at constant risk of being over run by plants and animals. There's a different paradigm where they really almost solely on magitek rather then magick itself, and using a Gift is basically outlawed, everyone must register, have a tracer put on them, etc if they have a Gift.

Looking at the map of Lydia Major, it's clear something happened there too, although it's unclear of exactly when. There's what appears to be a sort of crater that's well over 1000k across (Think Gulf of Mexico, but landlock and no water in it) called The Scar. Many basic types of magick/gift don't fuction, or don't function well, within it (You cannot use a portal to enter it, it stops you right at the mesa's surrounding it, for instance, and anyone with a Gift but below a certain internal Aether threshold pretty much cannot activivate them) and there's few creatures that roam it for this reason as well, all dangerous and starving.

And i just wrote a line last night that hints at a catastrophe that turned the northeaster most island-nation of Lydia Major into a volcanic wasteland (I only mention it was destroyed 2000 years before but on the map at the opening of the book, you see the large volcanic island)

 

[skip.knox]

Nothing at the world level. I try to keep that word in reserve, to use it only in its original sense. For more secular, modern stuff, I prefer catastrophe. And in that sense, when something big happens to your family or neighborhood or village, then that's catastrophic, and it doesn't really matter if it's happening elsewhere as well. And in that sense, there are catastrophes happening throughout the history of Altearth.

 

[ThinkerX]

There have been different forms of apocalypses in my worlds.

A Lovecraftian Apocalypse ended the civilizations of the alien races that terraformed the main planet and brought in other races as servitors and experimental subjects. The aliens are almost extinct, but many of their artifacts remain.

Large nomadic tribes roam the mostly unmapped plains that dominate much of the main world's southern hemisphere. Every century or so, many of these tribes will form into great hordes that attack the civilized realms to the north. These invasions have both toppled and created empires - and forced the civilized countries to 'go large' to have sufficient population and resources to withstand such assaults.

The main landmass of the secondary world is a ribbon of dirt and rock, usually only a few dozen miles in width, but encircling the entire planet - 25,000 miles. City-states and strung-out empires dot this bizarre landmass, populated by half a dozen different races. A gigantic tsunami spawned by an exploding mountain that sank an island continent wreaked havoc on the secondary world, effectively ending the alien civilization that presided over puppet states of humans, goblins, and other races. It also soured many of those people on sea travel. Even now, a thousand years later, few mariners will sail out of sight of land, and it is a commonly held view that what islands are known to exist are cursed, doomed to be dragged beneath the waves.

 

[skip.knox]

Putting a bit more thought into it, I guess I would have to class the invasion of the Roman Empire by a quarter million goblins would count as a catastrophe. The real catastrophe wasn't so much the invasion of the horde itself, because that was turned away at the gates of Constantinople. The real catastrophe was the killing of the Gniva, who gave the horde cohesion, because after that the remaining goblins scattered across the eastern marches of the Empire and eventually all across Europa. They were never a Horde again, but they were a constant and sometimes serious danger. visiting small catastrophes upon villages and even towns for centuries.

 

[Orc Knight]

One of my current stories has suffered a couple. Had at least one Fantasy setting set post apocalypse. Though the current one has suffered at least two, with several other catastrophes along the way. The first was less brimstone and fire (it got there, via nuclear exchanges), but more a slow death by starvation via environmental catastrophes. Humanity survived that, made it back into space, got into a big three way war over independence for the Martian and Luna colonies. Which ended more or less with Earth fighting against itself after setting up some key rail gun station platforms for protection for a big war that never came. And, as of nearly the year 4000, it's back to as normal as it gets.

 

[Prince of Spires]

The real catastrophe was the killing of the Gniva, who gave the horde cohesion

Do they have prophecies foretelling the return of a new Gniva?

 

[CupofJoe]

I had a story where there was a shared story of a comet impact [think Tunguska but much bigger!].
I wanted it to be along the lines of the ancient civilisations here that have similar but subtly different Great Flood stories.
In the story, there were rumours [aren’t there always] that at the place where the comet had hit the earth, the land had turned into a diamond sea.
So the adventurers were to set off and wind their way across half a world to find the diamonds.
Each chapter or two was going include a different but intertwining myth about the impact, that got less and less romantic and more and more cataclysmic.
I'm not sure how it was going to end.
I got lost in the back stories and the whole thing stalled.
this day, I have some very pretty maps where I tried to work out how where and when a comet hit and how much damage it could do.
I liked the idea of it barely skimming the surface. I think 7 -8 degrees of impact [almost horizontal to the ground] gave a “small” crater but a massive air blast and earthquake.
The surrounding damage would stretch for hundreds if not thousands of miles.

Might go back to it one day…

 

[Mad Swede]

The setting most of my stories are based in went through a civil war a few years prior to the stories happening. That's more than apocalyptic enough when you think through the consequnces for people as individuals and for the country as a whole, particularly if, like me, you've served on peacekeeping missions in the Balkans and Africa.

 

[skip.knox]

Do they have prophecies foretelling the return of a new Gniva?

No, but Altearth goblins don't have a literature or form societies. There was once a lively debate as to whether goblins were a Folk or were a kind of animal. Their eventual extinction rendered the debate moot.

That said, there have been multiple Gnivas in the past, according to archeologists. Normally goblins were widely distributed, but once in a while a kind of leader emerges, and that leader is called the Gniva. Think of it as if cicadas or locusts somehow gained a leader for a time. When the Gniva dies, the Horde dissolves.

 

[Jackarandajam]

The gods had a war when one of them tried to dominate the others. During the fight they wrecked the place. It happens when gods fight...

One appocalypse story idea I have is where in an attempt to combat all the plastic polution, humanity develops a plastic eating virus. Which works realy, really well, and spreads faster than anticipated. Which may sound harmless enough, until you figure out that almost any form of modern technology has some form of hydro-carbons in it...

For some reason my brain translated this as "humanity develops a virus that causes them to eat plastic."
Some really fascinating visuals off of that.

 

[rubixxcube]

The main gods of my world have the..unfortunate tendency to "cleanse" the world by deleting massive groups of humans(often a specific nation) for various reasons. The most common being A, they feel threatened by lower Celestial beings, B, they feel there are too many countries, C, humanity has become too advanced for their liking, or D, lesser gods or mortals have discovered "unsavory" information.

On the other hand if you want to go to a galactic scale, there are giant serpents(Think gargantuan leviathans from Subnautica, but roughly the size of a solar system) that eat stars and planets. If one decides your home is lunch everyone basically dies, because it's nearly impossible to deter them, much less kill them. Especially because those that CAN kill them have more important things to attend to, or have lost rationality by that point and don't care.