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Ralanr
2018-01-29, 11:52 AM
So I’ve had an idea for a while and I wanted to apply it to a campaign I’m running. The downside is that I didn’t think far enough ahead.

So the basic angle is that the party is stuck in the aftermath of a big bad’s plans not being thwarted. The first session was normal life, ending with a massive earthquake.

The problem I have is that idk what kind of apocalypse I want. I don’t want to do demons and devils, and while zombies have been done to death I figured I could twist it to some plant based zombies, but that doesn’t feel apocalyptic enough.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

The Glyphstone
2018-01-29, 11:57 AM
So your BBEG's plan succeeded but you don't know what his plan actually was meant to accomplish?

Earthquakes make me think of something underground. What's a good, powerful underground-dwelling sort of monster that could be rising to the surface en masse to wreck everything (excluding 'civilized' societies like drow or mind flayers).

Lapak
2018-01-29, 12:04 PM
Your villain wanted to give himself raw elemental power on the scale of primordials. He succeeded in opening massive permanent gates to the Elemental Chaos that feed his powers, making him a near-invulnerable god-king.

He is not aware and/or does not care that as a side effect sections of the Material Plane are suffering crossover into the Elemental Chaos. Entire villages are suddenly replaced for a moment with a mass of Elemental fire, rivers surge several meters above their banks at random when an influx of Elemental water causes a storm surge from nowhere, and actual elementals of various strengths and sizes have begun to slip through these shifts and remain to plague the countryside.

The earthquake that kicked things off was due to such an elemental shift, and it’s only the first sign of disasters to come if someone doesn’t close the gates. Which is near-impossible (see: nigh-invulnerable god-king.)

Ralanr
2018-01-29, 12:11 PM
So your BBEG's plan succeeded but you don't know what his plan actually was meant to accomplish?

Earthquakes make me think of something underground. What's a good, powerful underground-dwelling sort of monster that could be rising to the surface en masse to wreck everything (excluding 'civilized' societies like drow or mind flayers).

The Tarrasque?

MintyNinja
2018-01-29, 01:16 PM
Your villain was in contact with Aboleths or Mindflayers or something deep and dark below the Underdark. What he did was open a rift in the Elemental Plane of Water that has been flooding the Underdark for the last ____________ (amount of time). Now there's massive earthquakes and floods, and the world is changing horrifically. Water becomes a sign of danger because it's possible for Underdark creatures and water monsters to have swam up from what is now the Undersea.

SO, as a GM, what you're doing is taking something essential to life and making it more dangerous. This is an Apocalypse. This is a Survival Game. Good freakin' Luck.

Joe the Rat
2018-01-29, 01:58 PM
Do you know what sort of Hazard World you want, or are you literally starting from "things will suck, go fix them" as the concept? Different sorts of breaks and incursions lead to different issues.

Some general ideas (mix and match as you like):
Like Gamma World With Elves - scenarios where things get really messy. Spellplague-sundery-wild-magic-iron-winds-Fallout messy. Magic might not work the same. Strange new creatures certainly are part of the problem. This requires something large to happen.

Birth/Death/Apotheosis/Failed Apotheosis of a deity. Results in substantial environmental damage, from random fragments of radiant power to a warping wind blasting outward from the site of godhood.
Rise of Tiamat's Prince of the Thundering Abyssal Apocalypse. Several of the 5e published games have some potentially rather nasty outcomes if "the problem" isn't resolved. ToD and OotA involve lower plane incursions (one deific, one demonic). Elemental chaos / Rise of the Temple extra elemental planar problems can be everything from mutation to invasion with environmental impact.
Kill the Moon. Throw big chunks of lunar rock all over the place. Lycanthropy abounds.
Antihelios - the arrival of a second sun, except this one radiates negative/necrotic energy.


World War X, where X is whatever is ravaging its way across the world and otherwise giving people a hard time of things.

Zombie/ghoul/wight/shadow apocalypse, with or without a Mastermind Necromancer.
Extraplanar invasion: Everything from Orcs (as in World of Warcraft) to Githyanki to Modrons-as-Borg to Elementals (imagine Efreeti and Dao teaming up to raid and reap a planet).
Sideways invasion: Faeries, Plane of Shadow dwellers, or an alternate Prime world has come into contact with yours, bringing whatever good/bad/ugly elements with them.
Cloud Giants with Lightning Guns.
If you won't go to the mountain... As a turn, the invasion is a result of the world being moved to the wrong place - an alternate Prime, or Astral Space, or descending into Acheron...and the locals take notice (if they didn't arrange the relocation in the first place). Alien sky is a big piece of this.


World Breaker That earthquake was just the beginning. The world is changing in strange ways.

Down the drain - flooding of the underdark and draining of the oceans
Collapsing continent - rising waters as the spaces below collapse, causing the lands to sink into the ground
Cracking apart - major segments of the land are separating... the whole world is breaking apart.
Elemental shift - the influence of a plane has gotten stronger, turning the world into more of a borderland (fire gets hotter, earth is more tectonic, water is storms and flooding, air is winds and arbitrary gravitation.
Draining the Lifestream - killing the world. Always a classic. Go find the Engine.

Max_Killjoy
2018-01-29, 02:12 PM
"I never thought I'd actually win... I'm not supposed to win, I'm the villain!"

LibraryOgre
2018-01-29, 02:46 PM
Well, if it starts with an earthquake, then you should see about birds and snakes and aeroplanes...

If you're wanting zombies, what about Yellow Musk Creepers? Throw in a bit of GI Joe: The Movie, and you might have something like this

Golobulus (your big bad evil dude is OBVIOUSLY the ruler of Cobra-La (http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Cobra-La)) has a spell/power that would allow him to control fungi, and thus Yellow Musk Creeper zombies. He had a plan to spread the YMC spores world-wide, thus making him the god-king of the planet.

He miscalculated.

Maybe a plucky band of international heroes who are still mostly white partially stopped him, but not before their blonde-haired-blue-eyed-sergeant-who-was-still-somehow-in-command got killed by a Staff of the Serpent. Maybe he overestimated the spell's abilities, or underestimated the plucky band of rejects, or any of a number of other mistakes off the villain's list. The earthquake was just his mountain lair crumbling into the earth, and sending shock waves through the surrounding tectonic plates. It is accompanied by a plume of YMC spores, which spread through the surrounding country (i.e. places close to the PCs). Not everyone gets infected, of course... perhaps being in a cave during the initial plume protects the PCs... but enough are, and enough get secondary infections, that you have a zombie apocalypse on your hands.

Clistenes
2018-01-29, 03:09 PM
The Big Bad has been duped by Y'chak The Violet Flame into awakening Holashner, the Hunger Below; the Big Bad thought he could control Holashner to do his bidding, but he was mistaken both about Holashner ability to shrug off his magical control and about its scale (Holashner is so big it is eating the world from inside like a worm eats an apple!). The Big Bad is trying to find a way to make others deal with Holashner while at the same time still trying to reap some benefits from it...

Lvl 2 Expert
2018-01-29, 03:59 PM
If the big bad was a druid, maybe the first event was a birdquake. Then there's a sharknado, of course, a tarantulanche, an eelstrom, a molecano, a manta raygun and finally the platypocalypse.

Hugh Mann
2018-01-29, 04:24 PM
The BBEG could be trying to restructure the planet's crust. Kill off everyone except his chosen few and build a new utopia from the ashes.
The earthquakes are the tectonic plates moving, this will cause increasingly large earthquakes, volcanoes everywhere, massive tsunamis, rampant storms/tornados, and global flooding. New continents rise out of the ocean and collide with old ones causing new mountains, while others sink into the waves. Entire continents burn in magma, causing dust clouds to cover the sky causing an indefinite winter. Basically every disaster movie combined.

Meanwhile the BBEG has built a secret vaults somewhere to weather out the storm, as he and his chosen people live in the lap of luxury. When everything calms down they will rise up and reclaim the world.

Squiddish
2018-01-29, 08:56 PM
If the big bad was a druid, maybe the first event was a birdquake. Then there's a sharknado, of course, a tarantulanche, an eelstrom, a molecano, a manta raygun and finally the platypocalypse.

You won the forum.
You did it.
Great job!

Grim Portent
2018-01-30, 02:07 AM
Seeing as the sign of success was an earthquake, how about we go with an earth theme?

The BBEG was a servant of or lord among the Dao, the genies from the elemental plane of earth, and he has summoned forth a mighty fortress from their plane to anchor the two realms together. The material plane is now assailed by the various natives of the plane of earth and the Dao are establishing an empire around the fortress to secure the material wealth of the mortal world to secure a postion of prestige among the trading circles of the various genies by selling copious amounts of things not readily available on the elemental planes, engaging in mass logging and hunting, strip mining for organic compounds and siezing mortal works of art and literature.

Also they're enslaving people, and that's impolite at best.

From a castle of jet black stone surrounded by jagged chasms of sheer rock they have rapidly forged an empire that puts Rome to shame, mortal nations either falling to the sword or bending at the knee. Their armies are vast, their magics strong and the damage they would do to the world for callous greed immeasurable. The only way to banish them is to steal into the heart of their fortress and taint the anchor point holding them here with the other elements.

Lawleepawpz
2018-01-31, 01:21 PM
With all the suggestions of earth themes, here's a new one:

The earthquake was a large portion of the ground separating from the planet. He split a section of it off to demonstrate his power to people he wanted to subjugate. The ritual lets him feed off of magical energies in people that remain after death, and he performed it after months of political maneuvering complete with illusion magic start a war between two kingdoms, now he wants to have a steady supply of people to leech magic out of and his next goal is to figure out how to store it.

And he's also out and about blowing things up because too much power held in his body is toxic? This causes issues with planar bindings while the people he leeches magic from are slowly transformed into psychotic aberrations that spread out and start murdering everybody.

Draconi Redfir
2018-01-31, 01:39 PM
since the quake, a viscous black fluid has been pouring out of the planet's core, brought in from another world. It quickly fills the lowlands, and it continues to rize through the campaign until the point where only mountain tops are safe from it's reach.

Honest Tiefling
2018-01-31, 01:46 PM
It started with an earthquake, as the natural forces of the world began to change. The world became infused with elemental magic as the druids often wield, and at first it was subtle. Then islands began to rise into the sky, oceans became filled with sand and fire, and the sky lit up with a massive, never-ending storm. Mountains in strange shapes began to appear in places they were not before, while ancient volcanoes collapsed into themselves to create seas of lava. Seasons became either meaningless or extreme, with very little inbetween that is hospitable and peaceful.

Animals and plants were not immune to these changes, and the animals often became larger, more aggressive, versions of themselves consumed with an never-ending hunger. Wolves descend on a village and eat every last person, animal and bit of food, and yet are not sated. Ancient beasts long thought dead reappear, and beasts of legend begin to ravage cities and empires with a mindless hunger. They too are touched with the primordial power of the elements, giving them magic few animals had before.

The plants begin to grow, with one city destroyed by a massive oak that grew large enough to put the ruins into perpetual shade. Like the animals, they gained magic such as storm-wielding ents. And like the animals, they are consumed with hunger and human flesh and blood is just as satisfying to them. To this end, a humble vine has gained the ability to animate corpses to bring it more bodies to feed the swamp in which it dwells.

SirGraystone
2018-02-01, 10:04 AM
I would start with a massive volcano creating a large island of black rock, that would cause earthquake, which would cause a tsunami destroying ships and ports, and storm of ashes covering the land, killing crops and trees.

All that cause by a powerful spellcaster trying to summon an elemental prince with an artifact. The caster lost control and got killed by the summoning but the artifact is still working creating portal of random size and location, linking to different elemental plane. Leaking elemental creature or element out.

Black Knight 2k
2018-02-01, 03:59 PM
Grains start to rot everywhere. Soon they are followed by other plants.
As food is getting scarce, the society collapses, and only few try to find the source of this curse.

Knaight
2018-02-01, 04:19 PM
If you want the plant zombies but it doesn't feel apocalyptic enough you could make some small changes. The earthquake broke open a deep and sealed chamber, and its contained ecosystem. Within that ecosystem is a small hivemind of parasitic spores and the mushrooms that grow them, and unlike the other creatures in that ecosystem the surface world has little to no resistance to these spores.

Feddlefew
2018-02-02, 01:49 AM
The Tarrasque?

Maybe the Tarrasque is the larval (or nymph) form of something much bigger, which the BBEG has just released from the world's core?

DarkFather
2018-02-04, 09:07 PM
The earthquake altered the planet's orbit so that the moon is ALWAYS full, and lycanthropes run rampant throughout the land.

Delwugor
2018-02-06, 12:01 AM
The villian's plan went beyond what he expected and the earthquake opened up a rift to a place with horrible aliens. Your planet is rich with unobtainium that the aliens want or need, so of course they invade to get it. Those pesky natives are just in the way and must go.
Or the rift opens to a place with aliens who are absolutely devoted to peace, and will enforce it at all costs to the people of the planet.

The villian did not understand that his plans would lead to a black hole being forming underneath the earth, the earthquake was just the start of it. Now it starts slowly gobbling up more of the planet and eventually all of the planet will go into the black hole.

Steel Mirror
2018-02-06, 01:06 AM
The BBEG released the Primal Gods, the primal forces of creation which once hewed this entire plane of existence from raw quintessence. Unfortunately, those gods were imprisoned by the modern gods for a reason: they are endless uncontrollable fonts of raw creation, destruction, and recreation without end or purpose, on a scale which would simply annihilate mortal society and the fragile natural world. And that's exactly what happened.

Now the current era's gods are dead, dying, or cast down to earth into mortal form in order to try and evade the Primal Gods' wrath. In one corner of the world, the Primal of Life is endlessly creating species of gigafauna (godzilla-like monsters of impossible dimensions) that rampage freely across the ruined cities of man.

In another corner, the Primal of Energy spins massive hurricanes, super-tornados, earthquakes, and all other manner of unnatural disasters and sets them loose to sweep across the world, and twisted magics take root in their wake.

In yet another corner the Primal of Form subverts the very laws of reality itself, and from its lair is expanding a zone of impossible geometries, shattered time bubbles, shards of 2 or 4 or 11 dimensional realities, and twisted intelligences that whisper to any unlucky or foolish enough to wander nearby- and mutates them into something unrecognizable.

And so on. That world sounds too messed up to be put back into any reasonable shape, but that's why they pay PCs the big bucks!

EDIT:
If the big bad was a druid, maybe the first event was a birdquake. Then there's a sharknado, of course, a tarantulanche, an eelstrom, a molecano, a manta raygun and finally the platypocalypse.
Gods above help me, I'd totally play that game.

Armok
2018-02-11, 08:48 AM
Things seemed peaceful enough. Life went on, day by day, and the average person would think that life was the same as always.

But, for those who knew where to look, there were signs. The first of which was the earthquake. The day the world shuddered, like snow had been thrown down its shirt. It came from nowhere, and abated as fast as it started, but there's no doubt it marked the start of something.

Other omens soon came to follow. Crows, hundreds of them in the skies, swooping down on living creatures and ripping them to pieces. An explosion in the population of vermin. Mages began reporting of strange things in their divinations, creeping shadows just on the edge of their vision.

The evil races of the world, the orcs and goblins and other fell creatures, have begun raiding settlements with increased frequency and savagery. More disturbing are reports of seemingly impossible alliances, gnolls and goblins and ogres marching together to overwhelm towns on the edge of civlization. Something terrible had come to upturn the balance of the world...

In a distant and sacred land, a wicked sorcerer achieved his terrible goal. In that place where one could touch the soul of the world, he worked his malice and magics upon the heart of nature itself. Now the world itself is becoming a twisted reflection of the dread lord's heart, and it may indeed be too late to stop him...

Bohandas
2018-02-17, 10:44 AM
*vampires
*fimbulwinter
*global flood
*planet breaks up
*alien invasion
*unending night
*unending day
*vacuum metastability event
*black hole
*breakdown of causality
*water disappears or water cycle stops
*asteroid impact
*world overrun by people with the initials L.B. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0GFRcFm-aY#t=02m25s)
*birds and snakes and aeroplanes
*supervolcano
*evil clowns take over
*hell impinging on earth
*alien world impinging on earth (http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/short-stories/134/the-metamorphosis-of-earth)
*nuclear war
*global plague
*global famine
*people just dying for no explicable reason
*world overrun with ravenous flesh eating beasts
*oxygen cycle stops
*no more room in hell, dead walk the earth
*venusian zombie radiation, dead walk the earth
*gates of the netherworld smashed, dead eat the living
*invaded by crearures from the hollow earth
*reality rewritten
*the world burns/firestorm
*everyone inexplicably and compulsively violent
*moon falls to earth
*seas drained
*seas turn to wormwood
*atmosphere drifts off into space
*seas turn to blood
*overpopulation
*technology stops working

Segev
2018-02-18, 01:47 AM
The BBEG is a vampire lord who wished to rule over a world of unending night. The Earthquake was his magic ritual halting the rotation of the planet. (Handwavium: he stopped enough of the destructive shaking to prevent the cities and such from falling utterly apart, but couldn't prevent it completely.) The PCs live on the opposite side of the world from him, so find the sun is now fixed in the sky.

RFLS
2018-02-18, 03:15 AM
It could be the start to this setting. (https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/40mizi/help_me_build_miyazaki_above_and_lovecraft_below/)