But what does the magical doomsday weapon actually DO?

Something something vacuum energy

It reboots the campaign into an alternate universe. Everybody hands their character sheet to the left and rewrites a new character based on the stats and history of that character. The "doomsday machine" is now a font of elemental power which can save the universe.

>magical doomsday weapon
It's the gavel the judge is supposed to use when he comes down for doomsday.

It doesn't actually do anything special -he could use any old gavel if he needed to. He'll just smack it on a wooden surface every so often to call people to order while he does humanity's moral audit. It's really a quite bureaucratic and unimpressive process.

Something elven?
Suit, what kind of doomsday can they even come up with? Making everyone trees?

It dooms the day.

It turns all the air in the world into wood.

>it turns all the air into wood

i would've sworn that i saw that post but it vanished or i'm crazy

>dear god.. a thermonuclear catsplosion

Do that quantum wave vacuum thing, what's it called eh. something something vaccuum decay.

So the people who built the doomsday weapon figured out we are living in a vacuum, and made a device that generates a single point in space that breaks the energy barrier and topples over to a lower or indeed true vacuum state, which then spreads with the speed of light and absolutely destroys the universe (and maybe rebuilds it with different physical laws and constants)

>the switch is thrown
>the air crackles with energy
>suddenly, humans have a sexual dimorphism as vague as elves!
>dickgurlz! Everywhere

Nothing. That's the beauty of it.

It completely dissolves and abolishes any sexual lust and even reasoning for procreation, thus allowing most sentient living beings to just die off.

more simple to just permanently sterilize everything I guess.

>Tumblrette "art"

Mana killer?
Just turn it on and BAM dead magic zone.
Siphons it all into the void.

Part 1: the Island of Many Hills Projects

All good alchemists know there are five types of fundamental particles: Acid, Cold, Fire, Lightning, and Thunder (also known as Sonic). The sound of my voice is carried to you by particles of Thunder. The earth below your feet is particles of Acid combined with particles of Cold, or with particles of Fire in the case of Sulphur and Coal.

Necrotic and healing form their own separate pair, as they involve the Body specifically, while Good, Evil, Chaos, and Law are all generated by, and conjoined with, the Soul. We alchemists traditionally lump these under the Elements Divine, and deal only with the Elements Spiritual.

Acid corrodes, dissolving metal, stone, and flesh. Its colour is green. Acid combined with Lightning is called Water, for Water flows like Lightning through channels, and corrodes (but slowly!) like acid.

Next to Acid, we find Fire, its kin. Fire corrodes, but leaves behind Smoke (the combination of Fire and Thunder). Fire's colour is red.

Fire is also kin to Thunder, for Fire crackles. Thunder's colour is black, for it has no colour. Thunder combined with Cold forms Air.

Cold is next. Its colour is Blue. Cold is abundant in the world, for every stone also contains some Cold. Ice is simply Water (as described above) combined with Cold.

Finally, there is Lightning. Lightning's colour is white. Like acid, lightning can burn, but unlike Fire the burns are without Smoke or Embers.

Now, we must describe the ways matter changes, before we can discuss the Bomb Atomic.

Dude. That image is literally the MtG color pie. It's in the correct order and everything.

what

I reject your elements.

Each particle is most closely associated with its adjacent particles. Acid is kin to Fire and Lightning, but far from Cold or Thunder. We call this distance Loathing. For instance, we can say that Lightning Loathes Thunder (for Thunder flees before it) and also Fire (for Fire is slow compared to it). The exact reasons for this Loathing are unknown, as are the reasons for the Kinship between particles.

The creation of matter from particles that Loathe each other is difficult, but possible - indeed, possible in nature. For instance, alchemists have created deadly, mind-rotting sounds by mixing Acid and Thunder.

But the Wars Yet To Come demand more powerful weapons. It is not enough to combine Fire, Lightning, and Acid to create Alchemists Fire, as our ancestors did. We require weapons capable of destroying cities, fortified air-bastions, or deep-burrowed mountain strongholds.

It kills everyone except for you, Batlin, and Lord British.

When Ice melts, the Cold particles leave Acid and Lightning behind and mix with the air. Molten stone or lava draws Cold from the air, replacing its Fire with Cold and becoming solid. These and thousands of other transformations take place all around us, every day.

More exotic forms of unstable matter may be created by saturating matter with an element. Fire is most amenable to this - add fire to molten stone and you get a very odd type of stone indeed, one that behaves almost like air!

But try as you might to combine, separate, or purify these particles, you can never change one to another. Fire remains Fire, Cold remains Cold.

One needs the aid of Magic to create a Bomb Atomic.

Stops time, forever

better yet, It starts reversing time in a 1:1 ratio, and everyone mind is conscious and aware of it happening. Re-experiencing their lives in reverse, unable to act, only watch on in horror.

So that's why Pluto was taken off the planet list.

We're sure it works, right?

>muh dwarf fortress

Underrated.

>5 element system
What's wrong with Wu-Xing?

Not flowery enough.
It stops time for an instant.
But that instant never has a chance to end.

1:1 leaves you at the moment it was used.
It would need to be slightly faster; not necessarily 2:1, but faster.
Maybe something like 10001:10000 for extra slow-motion awfulness?

If I put one of those in my setting, I'd make them do some cataclysmic, but ultimately survivable, changes to the world.
Essentially something that you would consider the point where one era ends and another begins - society collapses, knowledge is forgotten, ruins are added to the map for new waves of adventurers to dungeoncrawl. And of course it's already been activated a few times, doing such things as
>activating magic
>killing all the gods
>deactivating magic
>inverting the geography
>raining meteorites
>creating a god
>reactivating magic
>wiping every being's memory
>disabling the sun
>and so on

Hey, I built that in mine craft once, only mine was better because it didn't have those oddly shaped middle bit. Just a 253x243 cube made out of 81x81 cubes, made out of 27x27 cubes, made out of 9x9 cubes, made out of 3x3 cubes. Would have been more, but I hit the height ceiling.

And if Lord British was already dead, does he respawn like the cowardly shit he is?

Destroys the world, idiot.

>tfw the device was invented to stop the universe from being destroyed in a Big Crunch scenario.
>tfw it had to happen at some point and there was nothing you could ever do to stop it.
>tfw it's done reversing time, it all starts over again, except in this time line every conscious mind is born with the knowledge of the previous timeline but in reverse.

>We're sure it works, right?
Not even a little bit. But no one wants to call that bluff. Because if you call it and get fucked, everything is fucked. Maybe.

A sufficiently skilled Wizard can, with a single spell, change one type of particle to another. A dragon's fiery breath could become a blast of purest Cold. More esoterically, a Wizard can change Stone to Mud, or Air to Ice - all alchemical in nature, though few Wizards will admit it.

All one needs then do is create somewhat stable chunks of matter, and then have a Wizard transform one type of particle into another type, creating a very /unstable/ type of matter. This unstable matter decays, like ice tossed into a furnace. This alone creates a powerful explosion, but the real genius comes from the Expanding Alternating Layer Theory.

The core of the bomb is metastable matter. A Wizard changes one element to another (let us say, Cold to Fire). The core is now unstable, and decays... but the next layer out became /more/ stable as Cold was changed to Fire, and contains the particles. A second Wizard then casts an opposite transformation. The second layer, energized from the first, decays and spreads into the third, etc, etc.

This was the theory behind project BARON, which was deployed above the city of Waterdeep during the Unification Wars. This weapon was relatively crude - it took up most of the airship used to transport it, and required three trained Wizards to sacrifice their lives in its firey activation.

It's a magical device that produces more magic than it absorbs, that's production scales with the amount of magic that it has access to. It has a maximum level that it can function at before breaking down, but that level is far above the densest known concentration of magic. It's not certain how that much magic will affect the world, but it is known that no known form of life can currently withstand it without being irrevocably altered, usually in destructive ways.

No part of OP's picture is a Menger Sponge.

>253x243
I'd say back to but you deserve It indirectly causes the most awesome event in the universe to happen. It also directly causes everyone else to be aware of the event, and to miss out on seeing it.
The sheer awesomeness of the event will be so great that everyone everywhere will spiral into deep nihilism (for lack of witnessing it).

Project HALFLING was more refined. Instead of three layers, it had six, but pre-prepared spells cast on each layer and tied to a single word of command meant no Wizards needed to die for the bomb to activate. It's amazing what a little motivation can do for a project.

Additionally, all five elements were incorporated into the weapon, although the Fire/Cold alternating sequence was still at the heart of the design.

The bomb was deployed by airship once again, but this time, over the city of Undermountain. Due to the depth of the catacombs, the bomb was deployed just above the surface. Unexpectedly, Acid-infused Stone dust created in the explosion drifted downwind, contaminating fertile farmland and rivers. This unintentional side-effect, known as Thaumaturgic Fallout, was later made an intentional part of Bomb Atomic designs.

It makes everyone give up.

Part 2: The Thunderhead Bomb

Thunder is traditionally one of the most difficult elements in alchemy. It is elusive, unseen, and fleeting. Puffs of Thunder are created in some processes, but almost immediately flit away. Thunder generally requires "carrier matter", that is Air, or Water, or even Stone, and can only be purified with great difficulty. Similarly, Lightning requires a carrier element, although it loves metals and Water best.

The idea of a Lighting/Thunder based Bomb Atomic, rather than a Cold/Fire based weapon, was proposed at the start of the Unification Wars but was not refined for several decades. Practical difficulties - generating and condensing so much Thunder, for example - had to be overcome.

Thunder and Lightning both travel much, much faster than Fire or sluggish Cold, and the effects of the bomb were expected be correspondingly more devastating. Project BRAVE was a two-stage bomb. The first stage was a compact traditional Bomb Atomic, which would push a great deal of Fire into the Lightning layer of the device, before the Lightning layer expanded into the final Thunder layer (and from there, outwards).

The device was tested on the neutral plane of Akatoll, far from any significant population centres. The explosive power of the device was far greater than expected - rather than ten Project Halfling bombs, its devastating impact reached more than a hundred-fold larger area. Several floating island chains utterly destroyed in the explosion.

At this time, the Evil Empire had tested its first Bombs Atomic, and we were encouraged to maintain our advantage in armaments, though war was considered unlikely.

The first innovation was the long-forseen three-stage weapon. A Thunder/Lightning bilayer would be compressed from within by one exploding Bomb Atomic and from without by another, their explosive yields carefully designed to force the two materials together as closely as possible before the final detonation. One of these new Fused Atomic Bombs the size of a wooden chest could level a city.

But we also developed at this time Inter-Planar Thaumaturgic Missiles. These swift airships, powered by the combination of Fire and Cold in controlled amounts, had their own planar gates and teleportation rings installed and extraordinary cost. Once targeted, these weapons could devastate any location in the Multiverse. The most powerful carried weapons capable of scouring a plane bare, melting its surface into slag with one blast and contaminating the air with Thaumaturgic Fallout. We had hundreds of these weapons pointed at the strongholds of the Evil Empire, and, of course, they had their own weapons pointed back at us.

I'm not sure who fired first, or if anyone fired at all. Both empires had sages and diviners working day and night. Perhaps one of them got it wrong, foresaw an attack, and called out for a pre-emptive strike. Perhaps a Wizard working on some new bomb had stuttered and set off a catastrophic chain reaction. Who knows? But the results... well, you still can't walk through Faerun without full elemental protection gear.

I was long retired by this point, mind you. Any rumours of a Bomb Axiomatic, or that the Evil Empire had succeed in making a Necrotic Warhead, will forever remain rumours.

Thoughts?

It's actually a magical equivalent of a satellite that channels energy from the sun into a high-density beam, like an orbital weapon.

That's pretty good, user. Albeit a little unexpected.

What, you think MtG is the first system to come up with 5 opposed elements?

Nothing's wrong with Wu-Xing. It's just that dragons don't breathe Wood in D&D (as far as I remember). I'm trying to build plausible doomsday weapons built on the underlying alchemistry of that setting.

I don't know, some sort of interplanar Cold War seems appealing to me for some reason. Imagine "Smiley's People" with access to spellbooks.

Or the aftermath of that devastating war. Not a magical war, per se - that's been done - but an explosion-based slugfest.

Actually, time going backwards is much more problematic. We'd know our entire future but wouldn't be able to remember what happened in our past. As we have no memory of the future but I remember the past, they would have no memory of the past and remember the future. But since time is moving backwards, you are constantly forgetting everything. So you are born aware of your entire life's events and die not knowing anything about anuthing. When time goes backwards, it's unmaking. Causality and entropy reverse.

Releases all the Pain.

It causes people to be assholes to each other on the internet.

Turns everything inside out.

>Electric
>and Thunder
Nigga this is some redundant shit.

You're telling me, but it's canonical. I think WotC thought "Sonic" was too sci-fi. It threw me too at first, but it makes much more sense if you think of it as Sound - a banshee's wail, a thunderclap, a song...

Release doomguy

I want this as a clock face

The catalyst for an artifical big crunch.

it detangles DNA

Why the fuck is that an image of Menger Sponges?

Uh, no, it isn't.

Electricity=/=sound. Thunder=sound.

Signals the Creator that the world has reached the height of its glory, since mortals have found and figured out how to activate the device.

The world is then harvested.

It hurts. Really, really badly.

As you know, everything in existence has a latent magic signature that tells it what it should be. It defines a default state and keeps the object corporeal and with form.
The device removes this. Everything in existence no longer knows whether it should be a rock or a tree or a person or a fish.

Let's just say the Sun wasn't always the same way it is right now.

Turns out there is an intricate series of microscopic speakers planted throughout every metropolitan area, by the millions, by alien visitors, all set to be amplified to the decibel of a cargo plane taking off. This button sets turns on the orbital stereo they are all wireless connected to. And these aliens REALLY like dubstep.

No..Noo.. NOOO

Not too big a fan, at least in the way that it's described in . All relationships and relative properties, but at the end of it I don't have a clear grasp of what each element IS, or at least how it stands out from the others.

and it's hard to make matter that loathes each other, but we have a ton of Earth(acid+cold)?

...

It unbans Virt.

flip the switch

>tree in left of picture

Is there an ecosystem in Doom Hell?

Could Hell be colonized?

And Jim Profit.

And Flare Fag

The triumvirate of worthlessness.

Please stop, some places are best left uncolonized.
Australia is one example, i dont think hell would be much better.

It's obviously a machine which assimilates adjacent matter into more versions of itself. Whenever there are twenty same-sized versions, they conjoin in order to assimilate larger regions of matter more efficiently. BEHOLD, DESTROYER OF WORLDS, MENGER SPONGE.

surely it would reach a critical mass and collapse into a black hole, unless that is part of the plan

Basically, it sets the atmosphere on fire.

Note that this is a simplification, as that's pretty much all anybody will be around for.

More specifically, what it does is cause all molecules in its area of effect to start vibrating with a lack of harmony, creating friction between them and eventually causing everything to melt into slag. To put it another way, it turns literally everything into a bomb that is constantly exploding.

Fuck off, Hayden, you fucked up enough times already.

Are there more gifs like that? that's cool as shit.

It turns everyone inside out.

Black holes are very efficient at assimilating matter, seems like a good end goal.

uncontrollable though and im pretty sure black holes dont move like regular objects, not sure though

youtube.com/watch?v=9HI8FerKr6Q&feature=youtu.be

Maybe the designer of the Borg Sponge understands the internal mechanics of black holes better than humans do. Maybe they LIVE in black holes, and this is basically a machine that terraforms for them.

A black hole is a solid physical object and they're not actually very large, you can't live inside one.

Hey, if it's impossible for you to imagine a super tiny extra-dimensional alien race that thinks black holes are comfy, that's fine. I'm just saying I can imagine it.

It conduct census for taxation purposes. Get it?

This is the worlds we are living in now. Here we are, safe within the rune-stabilized walls of New Waterdeep, enjoying the safety against the raw elemental magic of the countryside. The high towers of the houses, academies and temples that rule the Mageocracy soar high over the squalid commoner districts. Waterdeep is mostly built upon Waterdeep, and miles upon miles of lost buildings, sewers and catacombs filled to the brim with magical fallout and freaks make up its roots.

Here, like many of the other major settlements of the multiverse, the power is held tightly by the arcane scholars maintaining the defences against the hostile world, but also magically feeding the populace after the loss of the fields. The rest of the people eats the scraps of their masters, but some prefer to go out, or deep, to bring back fame and riches.

The former countryside is now dotted by ruins, occupied by elementals, mutated freaks that were human once, and gigantic creatures. It is dangerous, you need protection against the elements - and that's not a byword for weather, trough you'd need protection against that as well, it's all messed up. But it is also rich in artefacts from before the war and objects imbued by natural high-intensity magical fields. Of all the adventurers going outside the walls, few come back, and even fewer come back with valuable loot. But that loot is usually so valuable, great houses and temples are willing to spare no expense to launch more expeditions.

It destroys Order, plunging everything in chaos. It also destroys Mind, killing all psionics and degradating brain of sapient peoples.
Mortal plane starts to resemble /b/.
Hell becomes /trash/, but even more mindburning.
Heaven now is /s4s/.

Death dies.

It stops the timeflow. Everywhere. Freezes the universe.

It generates post-1990's pop music.

>What, you think MtG is the first system to come up with 5 opposed elements?

Hardly, just saying it almost certainly came up with it before you did. Just cite your sources, man.

there's equally likely to be a race of tiny extradimensional people living inside a random rock. And you know what, inside the rock they won't be subject to incredible gravitational forces or warped spacetime.

Shoots a big blue laser in the sky and makes a BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMP sound.