Captnq
2014-02-04, 07:42 PM
Working on some concepts here. Please tear it apart. This was inspired by the Debunking Tippyverse thread. It is not RAW, but a theoretical framework.
Dungeons and Dragons is a curious game.
If you look at it closely and follow it to it’s logical conclusions, the world should accelerate out of control. Take the humble wall of salt spell. It should revolutionize food preservation. The Teleport circle spell makes it possible for entire armies to invade in short order. Transportation costs are nothing compared to the cost of a permanent teleport circle. If one allows beneficial spell traps, an entire city can have it’s medical and food needs taken care of. Garments woven out of illusion and fabric created from nothing become the norm. Yes, magic taken to it’s logical conclusion can only make the world a paradise without scarcity or want.
If only it was that simple.
This is about what happens after that point. This post is based on two simple questions, “How much magic is too much magic?” and “What happens afterwards?” First we will answer how much is too much, then we will get into the results.
How much magic is too much?
To answer the question, first we must answer how magic works. D&D leaves the details up in the air so individual DMs can make their own choices. Once you select a given paradigm, it limits your options. My arguments requires that I define how magic works before we can understand what happens if we have too much.
The multiverse exists as a huge wheel. Individual prime material planes may have unusual configurations, but the over all cosmology seems to follow a regular pattern. What’s consistent is the existence of the positive and negative material planes. The ebb and flow of energy through out the cosmos seems to begin at one pole and flow to the other. Either directly, or indirectly, the flow of magic is tied to the positive and negative material planes.
They are attracted to each other. Energy flows from to the other and they interact. This interaction is manipulated by those who use magic and it’s flow it altered. A spell cast, a magic item created, a magical creature that takes flight, these all require the flow of magical energy through the plane they occupy. This flow can be interrupted. Anti-magic fields and dead magic zones are examples of this magical flow being redirected and a zone of null-magic being created. It doesn’t completely destroy all magic. Extraordinary abilities still function, mind you. But the concept is basically the same
Two principals govern this paradigm of magic, Opposites attract and like repels. The flow of positive to negative energy happens because they are attracted to one another. They both flow towards one another and this flow and interaction is what allows magic to manifest to various degrees. Of course there are alternative sources of power. The elemental planes, the outer planes, divine power, and so on and so on. However, they all come back to the ebb and flow of positive to negative energy.
So what happens when you start to build a post-scarcity society? Where 9th level spells are common place and people don’t walk from city to city, but teleport at a whim? Where food is created out of magic itself and there simply is no longer an economy of a typical sort. When flying cities are easy to make, magic tends to build up. This accumulation of magical energy, be it negative or positive, starts to exert a repulsive force. The same happens if you have too much negative energy. Let us look at the three scenarios.
Too Much Positive Energy
When you have too many good aligned gods or too many wizards building too many impressive magical artifacts, you start to get a build up of positive energy. Now the scale of a normal campaign world is usually well below the limit. Even one 17th level wizard casting every spell he knows every day is not enough to cause an imbalance. (Although, in some very delicate prime material planes, this could be the case.) No, it’s about the point where flying cities and gates/teleport circles become the normal way for every day citizens to commute to work that it gets out of hand.
When this happens, it takes more and more effort for positive energy to work it’s way into the plane. The flow starts to divert and you get less and less people born with the ability to work magic. Naturally occurring magical animals start to become scarce in the wild. You don’t get large scale dead magic zones at this point, but they are possible.
Of course, the high concentration of positive energy attracts negative energy. This usually starts to manifest with a higher number of spontaneous undead creation. People who die without proper burial have a tendency to get back up. As the imbalance gets worse, even a proper burial will not stop it and spells must be cast to keep the dead from reanimating. Necromantic creatures start to manifest in the wilds and areas with large number of dead animal bodies have a tendency to spontaneously generate undead that wander off with murderous intent. Note, the manifesting undead are not controlled, nor are they driven by a need to destroy positive energy. They are a symptom of a greater problem. Sometimes the rise of undead is enough to destroy a magical empire and the situation rights itself, but this is not by design.
Too Much Negative Energy
Sometimes evil wins. Negative energy is just as useful as positive energy and can do many of the same things. Who needs food when everyone is undead? Who needs a flying city when you make your city out of bones and the whole thing walks around? A negative energy imbalance often results in large numbers of undead, but more importantly, a skeletal work force.
This is often the sign of an out of balance society. When every bone is seen as something to animate and put to work. Doors made of skeletons that open when you approach. Carts that have bone horses, or have bone axles that don’t need to be pulled. Furniture made from bones that walks around to where you need it, or conforms to your body shape for maximum comfort. On a small scale, this isn’t a problem. On a large scale, bone fed into animate dead spell traps becomes the backbone of society’s work force. Cheap, eternal labor at no cost other then the resetting animate dead spell trap.
Of course this leads to the problem of too much negative energy. Like positive energy, negative energy starts to avoid the plane in question. Undead no longer spontaneously form. Undead start to de-animate without warning, suddenly crumbling to dust. It starts on the lower forms of undead first. Mindless undead are those most prone to de-animation. Higher forms of undead, the intelligent ones, start to suffer as well. An increased hunger for life force by whatever means they consume it. Ignore the hunger for too long, you start to crumble.
Of course this attracts more positive energy. The sun may burn a little bit brighter. Some days, the undead might find that indirect sunlight is enough to harm them. Undead normally immune to sunlight might find themselves smoking should they find themselves in direct sunlight. Furthermore, more and more spontaneous spell casters will appear. Sorcerers and favored souls will suddenly discover they have the ability to cast spells.
Wildlife will become more fierce. The few remaining wilds that remain un-ravaged by the undead will become savage and fierce. Creatures may develop the ability to channel cure light wounds and other spontaneous spell-like abilities. Note, they won’t have a built in hatred of undead or negative energy, but they could provide a destabilizing force against an undead empire.
The Gods Respond
Often at this stage, the gods will step in and take action. If they do not, then usually Gods from nearby prime material planes will take note of the growing imbalance and “drop a dime”, warning them about the problem. The steps gods will take at this point vary, but can range from “tree-hugging eco-babble” to “destroy the offending empire.” However, occasionally, either the gods are unable, unwilling, or not present to correct the imbalance. When this happens, it can advance to the next stage.
Too Much Magic
The exact point is left up to the DM, but it will happen sooner or later in any plane that has achieved maximum magical saturation, if things are allowed to stay out of balance for too long. The exact nature of the imbalance varies.
• Perhaps a holy god of good creates a world of peace and harmony by completely destroying all things “evil” and anything undead. All negative energy is driven from the plane. With all the negative energy gone, there is nothing to attract more positive energy. Magic in general avoids the plane.
• Perhaps the undead completely swarm the planet, murdering all life except for the holding pens where they keep human slaves. The sun itself has been destroyed or a giant shield is in place preventing the light from reaching the planet. With all the positive energy gone, there is nothing to attract more negative energy. Again, magic in general avoids the plane.
• Perhaps the inhabitants have struck some sort of bargain, where positive energy and negative energy users have a form of stalemate. Kindly wizards floating above the clouds in cities of gold without want or need. Below the rolling black clouds, a hellscape of eternal darkness where necromancers dwell and research eldritch lore in cyclopean tombs. With the plane swollen with both positive and negative energy, both forms of energy are diverted away, flowing around the offending plane and no longer through it.
This is the point where a universe reaches a tipping point. A tippyverse has reached the upward boundaries of what magic can tolerate. Abused and stretched to the breaking point, magic starts to fail. The first sign of the approaching magical drought is the appearance of dead magic zones. Every plane has them, but now they are appearing spontaneously, and usually in out of the way areas.
Magic has a tendency to accumulate in areas such as cities. These act as “knots” in the flow of magic. The “tears” in the fabric of the world occur at the mid-point between large concentrations of magic. Think of it like the tide going out. Cities tend to be at the “lowest” point. So where ever there isn’t large concentrations of magic will be a “high” point, and the first to be exposed as the water runs out. Of course, the problem is this makes it harder to detect the problem. A few out of the way dead magic zones are hardly a problem, but it’s only the beginning.
If drastic actions are taken at this point, the damage can be reversed. Basically you need to start chucking every bit of magic you can find into a sphere of annihilation. Better still, you need to contact the god of magic and sacrifice every bit of magic on the planet to him/her/it in hopes he has enough energy to fix the fabric of reality before it’s too late. Chances are that if it’s gotten this bad, nobody is suddenly going to have a change of heart. The gods have either caused the problem, or failed in their duty.
Normally at this point the neighbors take notice. Left unattended, the problem will get BAD. Then like rats fleeing a sinking ship, anyone with any levels will leave the dying plane and seek shelter elsewhere, bringing with them the very attitudes that caused the problem in the first place. If you can’t keep your own plane sanitary, let me assure you, nobody else wants you.
A number of pantheons through out the multiverse keep an eye on these sorts of things. Usually they will give a friendly heads up to whatever gods rule there, then a stern warning, then perhaps some threats. Once it reaches this point, the gods take a more drastic approach. There are two options:
• They can disrupt the harmonics of the entire plane.
• They can kill all magic in the target plane.
Option 1: Isolation
Usually this is done with planes that still have active gods. The pantheon alliance is made up a wide number of gods or all faiths and alignments. Needless to say, they don’t agree on anything. Getting them to work together is next to impossible, and invading a plane with entrenched gods ruling there is an iffy proposition. Furthermore, agreeing who gets control of the plane afterwards never works. So the solution is simple containment, rather then overt force.
The offending plane is given a solid divine “whack”, sort of like using a putter on a golf ball. This has two effects. One, it starts the plane moving through the astral plane and “out of the way”. This helps to clear up any issues with the flow of magical energy to any of it’s neighbors. Two, it causes the universe in question to start “vibrating” at a different pitch. This has the immediate effect of severing every gate and/or extra-dimensional connection. It also makes plane shift impossible, because every known “vibration” is now scrambled. Anyone trying to gate from inside is going to fail, for a while at any rate. A while being anywhere from decade to a millennia, but a few centuries is usually par for the course.
It is believed that usually when a plane has become a “tippyverse”, it’s doomed. So all the other gods need to do is move it out of the way of the normal flow of magic and let it implode. While this process does not harm anyone inside the target plane directly, those who rely on extra-dimensional movement for resources and power notice right away. And while the “whack” doesn’t accelerate the continuing loss of magic, it certainly causes the inhabitants to panic.
How do they normally solve a problem? You guessed it, with MAGIC. Using magic to try and fix the problem usually just accelerates the process and dead magic zones become more and more common. Within a matter of years, the dead magic zones cover 99% of the planet.
Option 2: Kill all magic
If there are no gods left alive in the offending plane, the pantheon alliance usually uses a more direct approach. Dimensional compression. This usually involves getting something with a bit of weight to it, a personal demi-plane will do. The alliance usually keeps a few planes drifting about the astral plane just for this purpose. Said plane is given a divine “whack”. Then another. Then another. Then another. The goal is to give is a good amount of momentum. Then a few more whacks to make sure it safely makes it through the astral plane without hitting anything else by accident, and then you line it up to ram the offending plane.
The impact has no direct effect on the inhabitants of the plane itself. Lined up correctly, it will hit at a perfect ninety degrees to the axis of magic and both planes will compress, losing a dimension in the process. There is no massive explosion or release of energy. The universe just loses a dimension for a while. Imagine that you could take a cube and turn it into a flat piece of paper. That’s what happens to both universes, except the goal is to compress the target universe's dimension of magic.
The result is the entire target plane becomes a dead magic zone. Extraordinary abilities still function, but spells, spell-like, and supernatural abilities all fail. Artifacts continue to function, since they contain their own “internal” dimension of magic, but any mundane magic created by mortals fails. Even epic magic fails, unless it is powered by an artifact.
The result is a “cooling off” period of a few centuries. The thought is that the plane in question will “settle down” and when the plane returns to it’s natural shape, it won’t have as big of a snarl and magic will flow naturally again. Oh, not every part of the world will be a dead magic zone, but 99% of it will be, and that’s good enough.
Option 3: Ignore the problem
There is a third option of course. Ignore the problem. The multiverse is huge and the gods can’t watch everything. Sometimes a plane is fragile and it doesn’t take nearly as much magic to break it as other planes. Some planes can take a whole lot of abuse, but when it snaps, it goes down hill FAST. For whatever reason, the pantheon alliance either can't come to an agreement, or they just plain miss the problem. When this happens, the problem goes unchecked. Usually this results in the inhabitants becoming much more aggressive about finding magic. Once they begin to notice the huge rents in the fabric of reality and the resulting dead magic zones, they might decide to do something about it.
Run Away
This is a common response. Simply get up and go. Take whatever it is you really like about your home plane and leave. You got a flying city? Fly it to another universe where there isn’t as much hassle. The problem is that you aren’t fixing the problem. Furthermore, you are likely to just repeat the process all over again, especially if you didn’t learn why the dead magic problem was occurring in the first place.
Also, Gods of other planes don’t like interlopers. Flying your city into some other plane, especially when you are arrogant enough to tool around the cosmos in a flying city, usually offends the locals. This can end violently if you are too prideful. Humbling yourself before the local gods might work, but typically they’ll want you to dismantle your city. This doesn’t often go over very well.
No, the best way to run away from the problem is to just slip away as a lone spell caster. Set up a small magical base somewhere in the multiverse and just get back to whatever it is that you do to keep yourself amused. This is by far the most common outcome.
Fight It
Pride come before the fall, and sometimes people just don’t know when to quit. This is usually the point where the REALLY BIG magical devices come out. For example, that giant glowing thing in the sky. I think people call it “the Sun”. Now that thing seems to be just chock full of energy. I bet THAT could keep my unseen servant running for a while.
Such methods of “cannibalizing” the energy sources of your home plane rarely work. All they do is accelerate the process. The setting of Dark Sun is a perfect example of what happens when the process of cannibalizing magic goes too far. Worse is what happens when someone figures out the real problem. If they decide they aren’t going anywhere, and they are GOING to fix this plane, then it comes down to getting magic from SOMEWHERE. That usually involves raiding other dimensions.
Imagine your world is a typical D&D setting. Then a giant flying city appears overhead. Next thing you know, every living thing for a thousand miles is dead and converted into magical energy, stored in the flying cities’ batteries. Flying constructs go out to collect all the bones. The bones make excellent raw materials, don’t you know. That is the sort of thing that could happen when a high magic plane starts to get desperate. Hence why the pantheons tend to work together on this sort of problem. Nobody wants flying energy collecting cities draining other planes of magic. This sort of thing needs to get nipped in the bud.
Conclusion
Under this framework, while the Tippyverse might be considered a forgone conclusion, by adding a cosmological level of scarcity to magic, we bring the cosmological imbalance back in line with the standard D&D model.
Dungeons and Dragons is a curious game.
If you look at it closely and follow it to it’s logical conclusions, the world should accelerate out of control. Take the humble wall of salt spell. It should revolutionize food preservation. The Teleport circle spell makes it possible for entire armies to invade in short order. Transportation costs are nothing compared to the cost of a permanent teleport circle. If one allows beneficial spell traps, an entire city can have it’s medical and food needs taken care of. Garments woven out of illusion and fabric created from nothing become the norm. Yes, magic taken to it’s logical conclusion can only make the world a paradise without scarcity or want.
If only it was that simple.
This is about what happens after that point. This post is based on two simple questions, “How much magic is too much magic?” and “What happens afterwards?” First we will answer how much is too much, then we will get into the results.
How much magic is too much?
To answer the question, first we must answer how magic works. D&D leaves the details up in the air so individual DMs can make their own choices. Once you select a given paradigm, it limits your options. My arguments requires that I define how magic works before we can understand what happens if we have too much.
The multiverse exists as a huge wheel. Individual prime material planes may have unusual configurations, but the over all cosmology seems to follow a regular pattern. What’s consistent is the existence of the positive and negative material planes. The ebb and flow of energy through out the cosmos seems to begin at one pole and flow to the other. Either directly, or indirectly, the flow of magic is tied to the positive and negative material planes.
They are attracted to each other. Energy flows from to the other and they interact. This interaction is manipulated by those who use magic and it’s flow it altered. A spell cast, a magic item created, a magical creature that takes flight, these all require the flow of magical energy through the plane they occupy. This flow can be interrupted. Anti-magic fields and dead magic zones are examples of this magical flow being redirected and a zone of null-magic being created. It doesn’t completely destroy all magic. Extraordinary abilities still function, mind you. But the concept is basically the same
Two principals govern this paradigm of magic, Opposites attract and like repels. The flow of positive to negative energy happens because they are attracted to one another. They both flow towards one another and this flow and interaction is what allows magic to manifest to various degrees. Of course there are alternative sources of power. The elemental planes, the outer planes, divine power, and so on and so on. However, they all come back to the ebb and flow of positive to negative energy.
So what happens when you start to build a post-scarcity society? Where 9th level spells are common place and people don’t walk from city to city, but teleport at a whim? Where food is created out of magic itself and there simply is no longer an economy of a typical sort. When flying cities are easy to make, magic tends to build up. This accumulation of magical energy, be it negative or positive, starts to exert a repulsive force. The same happens if you have too much negative energy. Let us look at the three scenarios.
Too Much Positive Energy
When you have too many good aligned gods or too many wizards building too many impressive magical artifacts, you start to get a build up of positive energy. Now the scale of a normal campaign world is usually well below the limit. Even one 17th level wizard casting every spell he knows every day is not enough to cause an imbalance. (Although, in some very delicate prime material planes, this could be the case.) No, it’s about the point where flying cities and gates/teleport circles become the normal way for every day citizens to commute to work that it gets out of hand.
When this happens, it takes more and more effort for positive energy to work it’s way into the plane. The flow starts to divert and you get less and less people born with the ability to work magic. Naturally occurring magical animals start to become scarce in the wild. You don’t get large scale dead magic zones at this point, but they are possible.
Of course, the high concentration of positive energy attracts negative energy. This usually starts to manifest with a higher number of spontaneous undead creation. People who die without proper burial have a tendency to get back up. As the imbalance gets worse, even a proper burial will not stop it and spells must be cast to keep the dead from reanimating. Necromantic creatures start to manifest in the wilds and areas with large number of dead animal bodies have a tendency to spontaneously generate undead that wander off with murderous intent. Note, the manifesting undead are not controlled, nor are they driven by a need to destroy positive energy. They are a symptom of a greater problem. Sometimes the rise of undead is enough to destroy a magical empire and the situation rights itself, but this is not by design.
Too Much Negative Energy
Sometimes evil wins. Negative energy is just as useful as positive energy and can do many of the same things. Who needs food when everyone is undead? Who needs a flying city when you make your city out of bones and the whole thing walks around? A negative energy imbalance often results in large numbers of undead, but more importantly, a skeletal work force.
This is often the sign of an out of balance society. When every bone is seen as something to animate and put to work. Doors made of skeletons that open when you approach. Carts that have bone horses, or have bone axles that don’t need to be pulled. Furniture made from bones that walks around to where you need it, or conforms to your body shape for maximum comfort. On a small scale, this isn’t a problem. On a large scale, bone fed into animate dead spell traps becomes the backbone of society’s work force. Cheap, eternal labor at no cost other then the resetting animate dead spell trap.
Of course this leads to the problem of too much negative energy. Like positive energy, negative energy starts to avoid the plane in question. Undead no longer spontaneously form. Undead start to de-animate without warning, suddenly crumbling to dust. It starts on the lower forms of undead first. Mindless undead are those most prone to de-animation. Higher forms of undead, the intelligent ones, start to suffer as well. An increased hunger for life force by whatever means they consume it. Ignore the hunger for too long, you start to crumble.
Of course this attracts more positive energy. The sun may burn a little bit brighter. Some days, the undead might find that indirect sunlight is enough to harm them. Undead normally immune to sunlight might find themselves smoking should they find themselves in direct sunlight. Furthermore, more and more spontaneous spell casters will appear. Sorcerers and favored souls will suddenly discover they have the ability to cast spells.
Wildlife will become more fierce. The few remaining wilds that remain un-ravaged by the undead will become savage and fierce. Creatures may develop the ability to channel cure light wounds and other spontaneous spell-like abilities. Note, they won’t have a built in hatred of undead or negative energy, but they could provide a destabilizing force against an undead empire.
The Gods Respond
Often at this stage, the gods will step in and take action. If they do not, then usually Gods from nearby prime material planes will take note of the growing imbalance and “drop a dime”, warning them about the problem. The steps gods will take at this point vary, but can range from “tree-hugging eco-babble” to “destroy the offending empire.” However, occasionally, either the gods are unable, unwilling, or not present to correct the imbalance. When this happens, it can advance to the next stage.
Too Much Magic
The exact point is left up to the DM, but it will happen sooner or later in any plane that has achieved maximum magical saturation, if things are allowed to stay out of balance for too long. The exact nature of the imbalance varies.
• Perhaps a holy god of good creates a world of peace and harmony by completely destroying all things “evil” and anything undead. All negative energy is driven from the plane. With all the negative energy gone, there is nothing to attract more positive energy. Magic in general avoids the plane.
• Perhaps the undead completely swarm the planet, murdering all life except for the holding pens where they keep human slaves. The sun itself has been destroyed or a giant shield is in place preventing the light from reaching the planet. With all the positive energy gone, there is nothing to attract more negative energy. Again, magic in general avoids the plane.
• Perhaps the inhabitants have struck some sort of bargain, where positive energy and negative energy users have a form of stalemate. Kindly wizards floating above the clouds in cities of gold without want or need. Below the rolling black clouds, a hellscape of eternal darkness where necromancers dwell and research eldritch lore in cyclopean tombs. With the plane swollen with both positive and negative energy, both forms of energy are diverted away, flowing around the offending plane and no longer through it.
This is the point where a universe reaches a tipping point. A tippyverse has reached the upward boundaries of what magic can tolerate. Abused and stretched to the breaking point, magic starts to fail. The first sign of the approaching magical drought is the appearance of dead magic zones. Every plane has them, but now they are appearing spontaneously, and usually in out of the way areas.
Magic has a tendency to accumulate in areas such as cities. These act as “knots” in the flow of magic. The “tears” in the fabric of the world occur at the mid-point between large concentrations of magic. Think of it like the tide going out. Cities tend to be at the “lowest” point. So where ever there isn’t large concentrations of magic will be a “high” point, and the first to be exposed as the water runs out. Of course, the problem is this makes it harder to detect the problem. A few out of the way dead magic zones are hardly a problem, but it’s only the beginning.
If drastic actions are taken at this point, the damage can be reversed. Basically you need to start chucking every bit of magic you can find into a sphere of annihilation. Better still, you need to contact the god of magic and sacrifice every bit of magic on the planet to him/her/it in hopes he has enough energy to fix the fabric of reality before it’s too late. Chances are that if it’s gotten this bad, nobody is suddenly going to have a change of heart. The gods have either caused the problem, or failed in their duty.
Normally at this point the neighbors take notice. Left unattended, the problem will get BAD. Then like rats fleeing a sinking ship, anyone with any levels will leave the dying plane and seek shelter elsewhere, bringing with them the very attitudes that caused the problem in the first place. If you can’t keep your own plane sanitary, let me assure you, nobody else wants you.
A number of pantheons through out the multiverse keep an eye on these sorts of things. Usually they will give a friendly heads up to whatever gods rule there, then a stern warning, then perhaps some threats. Once it reaches this point, the gods take a more drastic approach. There are two options:
• They can disrupt the harmonics of the entire plane.
• They can kill all magic in the target plane.
Option 1: Isolation
Usually this is done with planes that still have active gods. The pantheon alliance is made up a wide number of gods or all faiths and alignments. Needless to say, they don’t agree on anything. Getting them to work together is next to impossible, and invading a plane with entrenched gods ruling there is an iffy proposition. Furthermore, agreeing who gets control of the plane afterwards never works. So the solution is simple containment, rather then overt force.
The offending plane is given a solid divine “whack”, sort of like using a putter on a golf ball. This has two effects. One, it starts the plane moving through the astral plane and “out of the way”. This helps to clear up any issues with the flow of magical energy to any of it’s neighbors. Two, it causes the universe in question to start “vibrating” at a different pitch. This has the immediate effect of severing every gate and/or extra-dimensional connection. It also makes plane shift impossible, because every known “vibration” is now scrambled. Anyone trying to gate from inside is going to fail, for a while at any rate. A while being anywhere from decade to a millennia, but a few centuries is usually par for the course.
It is believed that usually when a plane has become a “tippyverse”, it’s doomed. So all the other gods need to do is move it out of the way of the normal flow of magic and let it implode. While this process does not harm anyone inside the target plane directly, those who rely on extra-dimensional movement for resources and power notice right away. And while the “whack” doesn’t accelerate the continuing loss of magic, it certainly causes the inhabitants to panic.
How do they normally solve a problem? You guessed it, with MAGIC. Using magic to try and fix the problem usually just accelerates the process and dead magic zones become more and more common. Within a matter of years, the dead magic zones cover 99% of the planet.
Option 2: Kill all magic
If there are no gods left alive in the offending plane, the pantheon alliance usually uses a more direct approach. Dimensional compression. This usually involves getting something with a bit of weight to it, a personal demi-plane will do. The alliance usually keeps a few planes drifting about the astral plane just for this purpose. Said plane is given a divine “whack”. Then another. Then another. Then another. The goal is to give is a good amount of momentum. Then a few more whacks to make sure it safely makes it through the astral plane without hitting anything else by accident, and then you line it up to ram the offending plane.
The impact has no direct effect on the inhabitants of the plane itself. Lined up correctly, it will hit at a perfect ninety degrees to the axis of magic and both planes will compress, losing a dimension in the process. There is no massive explosion or release of energy. The universe just loses a dimension for a while. Imagine that you could take a cube and turn it into a flat piece of paper. That’s what happens to both universes, except the goal is to compress the target universe's dimension of magic.
The result is the entire target plane becomes a dead magic zone. Extraordinary abilities still function, but spells, spell-like, and supernatural abilities all fail. Artifacts continue to function, since they contain their own “internal” dimension of magic, but any mundane magic created by mortals fails. Even epic magic fails, unless it is powered by an artifact.
The result is a “cooling off” period of a few centuries. The thought is that the plane in question will “settle down” and when the plane returns to it’s natural shape, it won’t have as big of a snarl and magic will flow naturally again. Oh, not every part of the world will be a dead magic zone, but 99% of it will be, and that’s good enough.
Option 3: Ignore the problem
There is a third option of course. Ignore the problem. The multiverse is huge and the gods can’t watch everything. Sometimes a plane is fragile and it doesn’t take nearly as much magic to break it as other planes. Some planes can take a whole lot of abuse, but when it snaps, it goes down hill FAST. For whatever reason, the pantheon alliance either can't come to an agreement, or they just plain miss the problem. When this happens, the problem goes unchecked. Usually this results in the inhabitants becoming much more aggressive about finding magic. Once they begin to notice the huge rents in the fabric of reality and the resulting dead magic zones, they might decide to do something about it.
Run Away
This is a common response. Simply get up and go. Take whatever it is you really like about your home plane and leave. You got a flying city? Fly it to another universe where there isn’t as much hassle. The problem is that you aren’t fixing the problem. Furthermore, you are likely to just repeat the process all over again, especially if you didn’t learn why the dead magic problem was occurring in the first place.
Also, Gods of other planes don’t like interlopers. Flying your city into some other plane, especially when you are arrogant enough to tool around the cosmos in a flying city, usually offends the locals. This can end violently if you are too prideful. Humbling yourself before the local gods might work, but typically they’ll want you to dismantle your city. This doesn’t often go over very well.
No, the best way to run away from the problem is to just slip away as a lone spell caster. Set up a small magical base somewhere in the multiverse and just get back to whatever it is that you do to keep yourself amused. This is by far the most common outcome.
Fight It
Pride come before the fall, and sometimes people just don’t know when to quit. This is usually the point where the REALLY BIG magical devices come out. For example, that giant glowing thing in the sky. I think people call it “the Sun”. Now that thing seems to be just chock full of energy. I bet THAT could keep my unseen servant running for a while.
Such methods of “cannibalizing” the energy sources of your home plane rarely work. All they do is accelerate the process. The setting of Dark Sun is a perfect example of what happens when the process of cannibalizing magic goes too far. Worse is what happens when someone figures out the real problem. If they decide they aren’t going anywhere, and they are GOING to fix this plane, then it comes down to getting magic from SOMEWHERE. That usually involves raiding other dimensions.
Imagine your world is a typical D&D setting. Then a giant flying city appears overhead. Next thing you know, every living thing for a thousand miles is dead and converted into magical energy, stored in the flying cities’ batteries. Flying constructs go out to collect all the bones. The bones make excellent raw materials, don’t you know. That is the sort of thing that could happen when a high magic plane starts to get desperate. Hence why the pantheons tend to work together on this sort of problem. Nobody wants flying energy collecting cities draining other planes of magic. This sort of thing needs to get nipped in the bud.
Conclusion
Under this framework, while the Tippyverse might be considered a forgone conclusion, by adding a cosmological level of scarcity to magic, we bring the cosmological imbalance back in line with the standard D&D model.