CotEotM: Apocalypses Other Than Ours

[JigokuBosatsu]

Hey all. I'm on vacation down in California, and last time I did that I got a bunch of gaming stuff done. Trying to repeat that success, and despite increased neurological difficulty, doing okay.

While I was "taking a nap" I started reading a book called The Knowledge, about rebuilding our world after it ends. Haven't gotten too far into it, but was immediately struck with the idea of what an apocalypse and its aftermath would look like in a world shaped by magic. I know there have been plenty of apocalypses in fantasy fiction, but since Castle on the Edge of the Moon is set in a "high magitek" I figured seeing some adapted strategies might be interesting.

So, Denizens, what are some of the mid- and post-apocalyptic things you might see in a magitek setting? I'll contribute some when I'm feeling a little more articulate.

[OgreBattle]

Robert E. Howard's Conan is about about the... 3rd age of civilization on earth?

1st: Non-humans, snake-men and horrible space beings rule. They raise humans as slaves. Eventually slaves rebel, learn their magic and humanity banishes them to the darkness.

2nd: Age of 'lost continents' like Atlantis and Lemuria, civilizations established by the former slaves of the old beings. Eventually the great civilizations fall into decadence and barbarian hordes smash their glass towers. Atlanteans regres into apes, knowledge is lost.

3rd: Civilization rebuilds itself, the barbarians are now the civilized. Atlanteans evolve back into humans as the Cimmerian barbarians. Barbarian hordes weaken civilization while in the far north half-human yellow haired blue eyed ape-men grow in vast strength and push downard.

4th age: the beginning of human history as we know it, the remnants of Stygia become the egyptians, the yellow haired, blue eyed apes have evolved into Europeans.

In every age there's a loss of knowledge of 'magic' while artifacts of the previous age are increasingly rare objects of power.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Some scenarios:

• Pyromancy puts a continual fire in every hearth and everburning torches in every sconce, but as the demand escalates and the maintenance-mages are stretched to their limits, a breaking point is reached, and wildfires sweep across the world. The landscape left behind is scorched and barren, what society remains is collapsing in the struggle for food, and residual pyrotic energies turn any spark into a fireball.

• Mass-produced decanters of endless water flood the world until the pressure of water outside equals the pressure of the flow from within. Previously-poor mountain regions are now the only remaining land. Mold is a serious threat to food security, and it rains all the time. Seaweed farming is the new big business. Diving expeditions raid the sunken cities for treasures. Sea monsters who grow to the size of their environment just got a bunch more lebensraum.

• Extensive use of weather control spells butterfly-effect off each other into constant, savage, howling winds that erode most of the croplands and drive large populations into sheltered valleys and underground sanctuaries that cannot possibly sustain all of them.

• Centuries of using magical light to improve productivity seems to have depleted natural light somehow. The sun dims a little more each day, and pockets of unnatural darkness emerge and spread on the land. Attempts to moderate the use of magic light are defeated by the increased demand. All too soon, the only light is magical, and keeping the crops growing uses almost the entire output. Meanwhile, in the vasty dark, the food chain is collapsing, and things that hate the sun are having a field... day.

• Manufactured teleportals and d-portals have revolutionized transport, but the abused fabric of space is fraying, and more and more often a single step might take one... anywhere. People vanishing into thin air is as destructive to communities as an increased death rate, so it's kind of like Black Death Europe, especially since settlements are a relatively small target compared to wilderness and you don't get nearly as many immigrants to replace your losses.

• Ubiquitously available illusions seemed like a pleasant diversion at first. Sure, there were jokes that the magic holodeck would destroy society in a torrent of decadence, but they were only jokes. Unlike the other scenarios, this one doesn't involve the magic itself going wrong; it's just that being unable to trust your senses or the identities of those around you is basically the end of civilization. There's no security when anyone might be anyone else, or simply invisible, or replaced by a glamor. When fraud becomes simpler and less risky than work, a lot of work doesn't get done. And the decadence thing probably contributes, too.

[JigokuBosatsu]

I like the pyromancy one. Overabundance of a useful resouce is not usually a way that things go down. Had kind of a Dark Souls vibe at first but then... BOOM FIRE EVERYWHERE

[erik]

• Elemental binding has been used for hundreds of years to power technology all over the world, bringing about prosperity and a wealth unseen in history. Unfortunately the ubiquitous devices are beginning to fail, destroying the modes of industry and means of technology while at the same time releasing extremely angry elementals whose centuries of pent up aggression can now finally be released. Imagine if all our electricity, fire, machinery and such decided to stop working and instead start killing us.

• 400 years ago techniques for granting immortality became known, and it turned out to be easy. Everyone had it done or their line tended to die out if not. Immortality through magic apparently is not without its downsides as it turns out. The longer people live the more unstable and out of touch with humanity they become. Mad ancient wizards run amok. Some reactionary states want to execute everyone over 100 just to be on the safe side.

• Ancient monsters have slumbered between dimensions for aeons. It turns out that widespread magic on industrial scales had either enough potency or just stumbled upon the right harmonics to start waking kaiju that now walk the land leaving destruction in their wake. There is contention that if all magic is stopped then the monsters will return to their deathless slumber, while others worry that it is too late and the only hope is to develop ever stronger magics to deal with these monsters.

• Death is only the beginning. In lieu of life extension techniques, infection with a necromantic disease that reanimates a body upon death while retaining the original intelligencegives a new lease on unlife. Unlife actually isn't so bad, or at least it wasn't until a group of anti-undead luddites started a crusade against the peaceful undead kingdoms. War rages with the world divided between the necromancy kingdoms and the rabid forces of light.

• The oceans are draining. Some assholes from another dimension have found a way to tap your planet for their own designs. Rains are becoming scarce. Croplands are now wasted dust bowls. Starvation and warring over the remaining water sources rage on. Rifts have appeared at the bottom of ocean trenches in order to use it as a supply source. Do they know they're doing it to your planet? Do they care?

• The mages are listening. All communication is being monitored by complex spells that report to the magistocracy. Even thoughts are not secure with use of telepathy by magical overlords. 1984 with wizards.

• Oops. It turns out the wizards aren't even running the show in the magistrocracy. Their spells achieved sentience in the form of a super intelligence, the overmind. It has dominated the ruling council and is ratcheting up its oppression of humanity in order to develop obtuse projects. People are disappeared and placed into insane murder dungeon cubes and the like for reasons no one can decipher (and very few even know it is happening at all). Most people don't suspect the true state of affairs as their media is controlled by the overmind.

[Dogbert]

Also, 4E.

4E's Faerun is literally thrown back to the mud middle ages after Mystra's death if the facebook game that preceeded Neverwinter Online is any indicative (formerly glorious Waterdeep had become a Detroit-like dump with everyone dressed in earthen colors and no more magic fountains or running water).

[Josh_Kablack]

Let me go with an alternate take on Dimensional Gates and Teleportals and such:

The use of transportation magics revolutionized trade, making it easy to ship goods across the known world, items which were scarce luxuries fit only for high nobility just a generation or two previous became easily attainable by farmers and merchants of even modest means. However this meant that producers were competing with similar producers from the entire world, and comparative advantage meant that every region had to over-specialize in using the advantages of their own climate, terrain and natural resources.

When shipping costs are negligible, Kansas will undercut you on the price of wheat and you'd better get out of the bread business and into mining ore, cutting timber or growing grapes for wine or something.

This also meant a great loss of bio-diversity to invasive species which hitched rides with human cargo and the world headed towards a single biome (See Norweigen Rat vs dodo, tuatara and land lobster; See also: Kudzu vs American South, Racoons vs Germany; Rabbits vs Australia, etc)


And then The Great Plague hit. It spread rapidly through portal networks and killed off more than half of humanity and due to reduced diversity, a sizeable chunk of common domesticated animals.

Society no longer had the resources to run the portal networks. Furthermore, the panic caused by the plague caused fragmentation as some settlements attempted to destroy all gates and ward their town against transit magic in order to isolate themselves from the infection. Others attempted to continue running the old order with the few who were left. A third movement was to abandon the cities entirely and go live in the wild places, away from any known settlement where none had reason to try and transmagic to.

So the post-apocalyptic setting has a populace awed by the wonders of the old civilization, yet terrified of the transit magics and portals which brought the plague. It has barbarians who live in smaller hunter gatherer tribes in the wilds, but who have oral traditions of what their ancestors did in the glorious days of the old empire. It has ghost towns where the plague lies dormant waiting to strike again, and it has other ghost towns where they collapsed due to overspecialization and the inability to rediscover self-sufficiency. It has other settlements which were able to isolate themselves and become self-sufficient, but which are rigidly xenophobic and many of which have one single magictechnology which is still at the pre-collapse level - but due to their isolation, they lag behind the general tech level of the rest of the setting. It has cargo cults trying to reactivate the portal network to receive the wonders their ancestors did.
And it may have a secret order of "wizards" who still hold on to a small but functional portal network, seeing themselves as the sole heirs to civilization and trying to expand their network back to what it was before the blight, without caring about the savages they need to eliminate to reclaim what is rightfully theirs.

[Longes]

Magitech lead to mass production, and to the creation of benevolent AIs and robots. Rapid technological growth left most people unemployed. Starved and jobless massess began rioting, robot-owners busted out the death gas, one thing lead to another and everyone died.

[JigokuBosatsu]

everyone died

Remind me not to let you MC.

[pragma]

I like josh's apocalypse. A variation of it might not require the plague. If every city was hyperspecialized in production of one thing and the portal network went out for some reason, you're left with a bunch of cities that can't survive on their own. Social order breaks down and people revert to barbarism to stay alive.

Also, consider reading Mistborn. The apocalypse in that book is essentially: "a 20th level magical character is an oppressive dick."