What’s the best way to end a world, preferably with one’s own power?

[Malphegor]

Sometimes, you just want to see everything burn.

Hypothetical here: You are an Evil individual about to take your first level. The world is your dire oyster.
And you want to destroy it.
You’re not sure why, but something about all of existence repulses you. But you also want to do it yourself.
You don’t care for borrowing power from others, that’s the action of a weakling.
A villain, sure… But not a supervillain.

So. How would one destroy a entire world, in as few levels as possible, using your own might and talents?

defining destroying a world is probably necessary here: destruction of a world to me either means the physical destruction of the physical landmass of the world(s) themselves, or in some way ensuring that all life and unlife and etc entities with hp are impededed in a significant way from acting, such as death or brainwashing.


I am limiting this to just the prime material for simplicity for fitting most campaigns, if you know a way to go bigger, do it; Go big, be the Onslaught, the Galactus, the living apocalypse that dooms all things!

(the reason why I say not using other entities power is because it’s easy enough to summon a wightpocalypse or cause an elder evil to show up over time. Let’s assume those are off the cards or our hypothetical villain finds such methods abhorrent, just to see what creative stuff is out there without begging someone bigger to smoosh the world)

[Inevitability]

Casting Rockburst, defining arbitrarily large stone sections of the planet as 'a stone object'?

[Crake]

chopstick crusader could poke the earth and watch it crumble beneat them?

[Anthrowhale]

The clockwork wizard (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?496834-The-Clockwork-Wizard-Everything-in-no-time) could disintegrate all non-possessed objects in the world and inflict an arbitrary amount of damage to all the creatures of the world in an instant via abuse of Time Stop, Absorption, and free metamagic.

[Rebel7284]

Cancer Mage can get an arbitrarily high strength score at level 6 given enough time. Then take level in Hulking Hurler and just throw the earth into the sun once your strength is high enough. Alternatively, throwing even a small-ish asteroid can do it if you ask a T-rex.

[Vizzerdrix]

Commoner chickenpocolypse for me please. Right after using the commoner railgun to crack the mantle.

[Gruftzwerg]

There was once a Drunken Master by the name Atlas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_(mythology)).

He could "wield" the world on his shoulders as an "improvised weapon".

After a few attempts to kill an annoying fly with it, he eventually rolled a natural 1.

End of Story


Just make a handstand as drunken master and pretend to use the planet as improvised weapon .. XD

[ShurikVch]

Snuff the Light spell (Drow of the Underdark) - cast it on the sun

Have a Breath Weapon; take Clinging Breath, Lingering Breath, and Enlarge Breath; fill the universe with your breath...

Be Incorporeal; take Ghostly Grasp; pick the planet and carry it to the sun (or pick the sun and carry it to the black hole)

[Beni-Kujaku]

Snuff the Light spell (Drow of the Underdark) - cast it on the sun

Have a Breath Weapon; take Clinging Breath, Lingering Breath, and Enlarge Breath; fill the universe with your breath...

Be Incorporeal; take Ghostly Grasp; pick the planet and carry it to the sun (or pick the sun and carry it to the black hole)

I'm pretty sure the Sun is beyond close-range...

You'll have a hard time putting the whole planet in line of effect of your cone-shaped breath weapon at once, and since you'll have to wait approximately one year and a half between breathings (considering a White Wyrmling using a breath weapon the size of the earth, 12.5km), it would give plenty of time for surviving inhabitants to relocate, and find the source of the destruction (that is, you). This combo is good to destroy a country, or a continent, but wiping out creation is slightly out of its power level.

Ghostly Grasp only says you can carry items as if you were corporeal. Libris Mortis tells us that "The now-corporeal creature gains a Strength score equal to its Charisma score (not including any nonpermanent modifiers to Charisma, such as an eagle’s splendor spell).", so unless you have a Charisma of approximately 390, you wouldn't be able to move the Earth. Even if you could, the Sun is FAR away. With a movement speed of 90ft per round, it would take about a thousand years to reach it. Not that it would matter anyway, since only grabbing the Earth would make it incorporeal, and have every living thing on its surface dying in space.

(Oh, yeah, and bringing the Sun to the nearest black hole would take approximately a hundred billion years, and good luck finding enough informations to use greater teleport

[MaxiDuRaritry]

Rockburst would likely be one of the quickest and easiest, but that's already been suggested.

A 10th level ardent with the Dominant Ideal ACF, a dominant mantle with a blasting spell like energy wave that has a spread effect, Empower Power, Widen Power, and Metapower (Widen Power + energy wave) could do it. The only limits on applying metapsionics to a power are however many psionic foci you have (which is negated by Dominant Ideal), and how many power points you can spend on it (which is negated by a combination of Dominant Ideal and Metapower).

Basically, travel upwards until you're far enough away to fit the entire planet inside of a massively expanded energy wave, apply Empower Power enough times to deal enough damage to vaporize everything it touches, and Widen Power enough that it engulfs everything. Then deal billions of d6s to everything within a cone thousands of miles long and across.

Profit!

The only things that will survive are those that are immune to the energy type you use or completely immune to damage altogether, so use a few different energy types, including [sonic] to ignore hardness. [Cold] will kill any rogues with evasion.

Can't do much about stuff immune to damage entirely, such as wall of force spells, but that's all that will survive.

[ShurikVch]

I'm pretty sure the Sun is beyond close-range...
Oh, come on! There are so many ways to circumvent this limitation - from simply teleporting there to casting through a portal, or even Distant Shot with Spell Storing arrow...


You'll have a hard time putting the whole planet in line of effect of your cone-shaped breath weapon at once, and since you'll have to wait approximately one year and a half between breathings (considering a White Wyrmling using a breath weapon the size of the earth, 12.5km), it would give plenty of time for surviving inhabitants to relocate, and find the source of the destruction (that is, you). This combo is good to destroy a country, or a continent, but wiping out creation is slightly out of its power level.
Sacrifice billion years of not using BW - make your breath bigger than the planet!


Ghostly Grasp only says you can carry items as if you were corporeal. Libris Mortis tells us that "The now-corporeal creature gains a Strength score equal to its Charisma score (not including any nonpermanent modifiers to Charisma, such as an eagle’s splendor spell).", so unless you have a Charisma of approximately 390, you wouldn't be able to move the Earth. Even if you could, the Sun is FAR away. With a movement speed of 90ft per round, it would take about a thousand years to reach it. Not that it would matter anyway, since only grabbing the Earth would make it incorporeal, and have every living thing on its surface dying in space.

(Oh, yeah, and bringing the Sun to the nearest black hole would take approximately a hundred billion years, and good luck finding enough informations to use greater teleport
Items which carried by Incorporeal creatures are Incorporeal too - thus, have no weight, and any carrying capacity limits are irrelevant
And, since many of Incorporeal creatures are immortal in some way (Undead, Outsiders, Fey) - they can spend any amount of time to bring the system to the black hole
(Also, for the less impressive variety of "ending the world": grasped world would become Incorporeal - but what's about the world's inhabitants, atmosphere, or water?..)

[Curbludgeon]

I hold with those who favor fire.

[icefractal]

The "treat the whole planet as a single object" approaches are worth mentioning, but really it's too easy that way. And not (IMO) plausible - if even a normal house is treated as multiple sections and not a single object, how would the planet be?

For the "super huge AoE" approaches, it's critical for it to be a spread, otherwise the side of the earth opposite you survives. Although with the psionic version there's no centuries-long cooldown, so you may be able to hit both sides in one round with a contingent teleport.

[loky1109]

For the "super huge AoE" approaches, it's critical for it to be a spread, otherwise the side of the earth opposite you survives. Although with the psionic version there's no centuries-long cooldown, so you may be able to hit both sides in one round with a contingent teleport.
If AoE isn't spread just cover all orbit of planet and make effect continuous. Plus, if we talk about Breath Weapon there is feat Spreading Breath.

[Gruftzwerg]

The "treat the whole planet as a single object" approaches are worth mentioning, but really it's too easy that way. And not (IMO) plausible - if even a normal house is treated as multiple sections and not a single object, how would the planet be?


I have to admit that the trick needs the Drunken Master to become colossal size. Because that is the size required to wield colossal size weapons/objects. Since everything after a certain size is "colossal" this would be technically possible (if the Drunken Master becomes colossal somehow: Giant Size, Shapechange...).

(Lets not talk about the weight issue here ^^)

[Inevitability]

An omnificer-like trick to get +infinity to a skill of your choice, followed by a Profession(Miner) check to dig away the entire crust of the earth?

[Vaern]

If you can get the old locate city bomb cheese past your DM, you can hit extremely large areas for decent amounts of damage. A single casting will deal significant damage to an entire nation even at a fairly low level, and with widen spell at 20th level it will devastate continents.

[Endless Rain]

Get fire immunity. Cast Gate. Put one end anywhere on your planet. Then put the other end in the middle of another plane's sun.

(If your cosmology doesn't have suns or stars on any of the planes but yours, stick the other end on your least favorite plane, put a second Gate adjacent to it, and put that Gate's other end in the middle of the Prime Material Plane's sun.)

[Gemini476]

Get fire immunity. Cast Gate. Put one end anywhere on your planet. Then put the other end in the middle of another plane's sun.

(If your cosmology doesn't have suns or stars on any of the planes but yours, stick the other end on your least favorite plane, put a second Gate adjacent to it, and put that Gate's other end in the middle of the Prime Material Plane's sun.)

Fire immunity isn't enough. You'll need to be incorporeal, or something similar, to withstand the flood of matter passing through - and remember, Gate's a concentration spell.
And, well, if fire immunity is enough to keep you alive then it's certainly not going to kill all other life on the planet. Not to mention the unlife.


In any case, though...

Obtain a Sphere of Annihilation (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/magicItems/artifacts.htm#sphereofAnnihilation) (a Talisman of the Sphere (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/magicItems/artifacts.htm#talismanoftheSphere) is helpful) and a Well of Many Worlds (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/magicItems/wondrousItems.htm#wellofManyWorlds). I'd recommend finding some adventures where they feature (e.g. the Tomb of Horrors for the Sphere) and then rolling up some hyper-sneaky thief with arcane spellcasting to go nab them.
Put the Sphere inside the Well.
Per Elder Evils p.142, "The sphere becomes a 'black hole', annihilating everything in existence. If abandoned, it picks up speed and power, drawing the island, the waters, the air and everything else on the Material Plane into its dimensional fissure, erasing all existence in 1d12+6 minutes."
Hope against hope that the gods didn't see this coming three weeks in advance and snuff you out before you even started.

Basically, just become Edwin Tolstoff minus the bit where you shatter the obelisk and summon Kyuss.