Nukes are boring, zombies are meh, grey goo scenarios are old news and the superplague trend has come and gone. It seems like short of a spontaneous breakdown of the laws of physics all the cool apocalyptic scenarios have already been done.
What new ones could you think of?
Meteor showers.
pollution and chemical shit everywhere just slowly fucked yhings up over 20 years. The world's become basically a ghost town, with roaming parties living it up and scavenging tech to make it by in a very empty, but intact, world.
Magical Salt
Portals from Hell open, demons are everywhere
>grey goo scenarios are old news
since when
when has this ever been done
Portals to hell are always fun
Hell freezes over, forcing millions of demon refugees with no higher education and few job prospects to flood Earth, causing economic collapse. Many turn to drugs and become criminals. Succubus prostitutes are everywhere. Satan becomes a media figure trying to garner sympathy but mostly succeeds in becoming a meme. Some enterprising demons think they can trade the souls of the damned for money but it turns out humans have no use for those so their value drops to almost nothing, causing inflation which makes the production of Hellish goods (bads?) impossible. Pitchforks are in short supply. The best that's managed is selling portions of the Lake of Fire to the oil industry, but since most of it's frozen it's a slow and inefficient process.
>Succubus prostitutes are everywhere
Already better than what's happening in Europe.
A vague notion I've been working on has a pulse of unknown cosmic radiation instantly heating and melting all pure forms of metal on earth. Cities dissolve into molten slag, people with prosthetic organs or even things like pins in their bones die agonising deaths or are crippled once more. Planes fall from the sky, boats sink, and the satellites that dissolve form rains of molten metal and rings of gas around Earth.
Those who survive have to try and rebuild from the little that remains, reduced to using wood and stone tools to break apart the molten metal remnants, trying to pry free usable material and to develop the basic infrastructure to reshape it.
The idea of completely removing all advantages metal gives us, reducing us to a stone age level (admittedly with a lot easier time catching back up, at least to a basic degree) struck me as potentially interesting.
Sounds like a real economic hell hole
...
I was thinking Witch-apocolypse. Some Wiccan finds the key to actual magic, and rampant use of spells/hexes/plagues distroys society as we know it.
Huddled survivors fear the surviving witches and are constantly purging their ranks of suspected witches.
I like it. It's goofy. But I like it.
>tfw you drop a dollar for a demon hobo huddled on the sidewalk
>he scratches his horns, mumbles "Y'know back in Pandaemonium I was a Marquis?"
>tfw he starts swearing at you in the Black Tongue
>Tell him to go to Hell
>Everyone in the street looks at you, shocked
Fucking ungrateful shits
Solar megaflares blow out our electrical grids, majority of the developed world dies quickly because not enough people can stay warm in the cold areas and keep their food from rotting in the hot areas.
Basically just huge solar flares keep hammering Earth for a few years and everything goes to shit because our entire infrastructure is built around supply chains.
In fairness with all the atmospheric ash from running the soul furnaces for the last ten thousand years it was only a matter of time before climate change happened
Nothing. No one knows what caused it. A mix of things, really. All you know is that all manner of strange and alien beasts wander the landscape, there's barely enough food, and the only thing you can depend on is each other.
Fuck power armor and steampunk shit, just have weird-ass monsters and dudes with AK-47s and little towns made of sheet metal with farms. Make it like a D&D world but with guns, and don't answer the question of why it happened. I ran a post-apoc campaign for years without ever really nailing down the reason, even though they participate in a ritual to make contact with an elder god (not like Cthulu, more primal than that even) so that they could heal a crippled team mate.
>someone makes a secret deal with Satan to start a war somewhere in Africa, sending millions of damned souls down and rejuvenating Hell's economy
>In return, gets to appear on Satan's youtube channel, guaranteeing internet celebrity now that Satan's a meme
Read the fucking premise, moron. Souls are worthless. Hell's economy collapsed.
Increasing solar activity.
Either in the form of solar flares or in the form of luminosity increases.
One will cause electronics to mostly go byebye but not kill very many people, the other is good if you want to make the worst predictions of global warming look like a spring day in Maine within a human timescale.
Both of those things are also events that can and do occur within stellar bodies all the time, so you can also satisfy the "realism" aspect if needed.
>Nukes are boring, zombies are meh, grey goo scenarios are old news and the superplague trend has come and gone.
Why? Have you played a campaign in all of these settings, user?
I love how Veeky Forums is so obsessed with avoiding cliches when usually it hasn't even participated in a campaign that had any of them. "Aw man fighting a lich is so cliche.... but I've never done it myself, I'm just bored of it because I know it's popular and popular things suck because my campaign has to be interesting so that it can be published as a novel one day."
This kind of thinking is why, when I first introduced virgin RPers to Pathfinder, they devoured the SRD and by the time they actually made their characters, only one of them was using a PHB race and only one was playing a PHB class. Everyone else was doing some obscure shit to be speschul because playing a normal human wizard or human fighter is just too goddamn boring, so they have to play a tengu oracle or a kitsune brawler to feel special. Like what the fuck. Make an interesting character, as a person. Then do that shit.
In other words, OP, your complaint is worthless. You've probably never played in a zombie apocalypse campaign yourself. They can be quite fun despite being overdone in media. Try just a generic regular post-apoc setting, who cares the cause? You'll get a story that everyone can relate to (that's how cliches work) and thus will be easier to engage with. Rather than some obscure "it's like fallout but with 1940s china aesthetics and themes of post-modernism and also fantasy races and technomancy AM I BEING CREATIVE YET" bullshit that will just confuse people.
Reality becomes 'flexible'
Distances aren't the same. buildings sag as physical properties shift. Power lines just can't transmit electricity, or multiply the amount of power put into them by a few dozen times. And critters and humans start mutating at random.
Civilization can only really exist in rare pockets of stability, or around those people who can impose their will on their surroundings.
mass bone hurting juice poisoning
Gamma ray burst. Dial the yield and duration which results in your desired level of apocalypse.
That kinda reminds me of The Gone Away World. Weird book, but pretty good.
Pro-tip: when you see someone complaining about unoriginality in RPGs, they probably don't actually play RPGs.
Surely there would be enough cumulative knowledge around to allow for at least some leeway?
That is my favorite.
Sudden onset of mass apathy
This gives me vibes of Monte Cook's WoD's setting. I resented the system but the fluff was fascinating with areas known as nightmare zones being analogous to slightly more horrific zones than those from the STALKER series of games.
This, basically Wall-E if the humans remained on Earth.
Sudden onset of mass depression is currently being discussed here
Oh. Didn't notice that.
I can only think of a few examples, but mostly from old SF. The only modern uses of this that I can think of is Grey Goo and maybe Alpha Centauri.
I don't think the mode of apocalypse matters as much as the world that exists around it. The nuclear holocaust was old hat by the time Fallout rolled around, but they still made it cool by building an awesome setting around it.
yoko taro pls
you're ruining this
>just have weird-ass monsters and dudes with AK-47s and little towns made of sheet metal with farms
So basically STALKER expanded to the entire world.
Eeyup. Happy to bring things to the attention of my fellow fa/tg/uys.
Despite how it ended-up I thought the concept for the apocalypse in the movie The Happening was interesting. Plants are releasing neurotoxins that cause people to have their survival instinct work in reverse. Not sure where I would take this scenario after the initial "it's happening" phase but I am fascinated by it.
Replace "Witch" with "Native Americans" and you actually have a plotline from Shadowrun.
>survival instinct work in reverse
Jesus christ really? That's the most retarded thing I've read all day, and I'm posting on Veeky Forums.
Ever read the webcomic Demon Kings? Demons from another dimension migrate to Earth to escape something worse. It not particularly wacky, but it's reasonably good.
Ironically in this scenario Europe would probably be the least torched place.
>That's the most retarded thing I've read all day, and I'm posting on Veeky Forums.
Have you dug through the trash recently? Shamalyn's worst ideas are gold compared to some of the shit there...
I've got a similar one. Basically, magnetic pole flips, causing a major EMP shorting out the majority of electronics. Also, it turns out the reason magic and gods went away is because they work via manipulation of the magnetic field, which has gotten weaker. So the gods are back. And they're dicks. But sufficiently strong magnets fuck with them.
A cyberpunk style society where they created and tamed vampires, But the vampires are actually in charge
A shift in Earth's magnetic fields cause all humans to suffer from religious delusions - magnetic fields can actually do this. A century later, it goes back to normal and the madness ceases.
The survivors in the ruins of civilization try to piece together exactly what the world was like before the coming of the gods, and to find why they have abandoned them?
Why don't you do a Gods Themselves style breakdown in physics? That'd be awesome for an apocalypse/post apoc scenario.
Rabbits become totally immortal, but still reproduce at the same rate.
My favourite one Veeky Forums ever tried to flesh out was a sort of weird combination of Blame! and Horizon Zero Dawn.
Basically the idea was a benevolent AI has managed to convince 90% of mankind to upload themselves to live in simulated utopia, the ones that are left are the typical people who reject technology. The AI isn't capable of uploading them by force or hurting them, so it just tries really hard to convince them. All the time.
Fast forward a few generations, and Earth has started to go feral again. Thing is, the AI has other goals, and has started to cyberfy most of the plants and animals in order to expand its computational power, without overly disturbing the humans that are left. This has the added benefit to the AI that it can now try and convince the humans all the time. Wind whispering in the wind is probably telling you to go to the nearest upload facility. The trees shaking suggest that life would be much better in perfect utopia.
The humans obviously have taken this to be supernatural, and have built up superstitions surrounding the AI's attempts at cajoling humans into its paradise. Even so they lose young people at an alarming rate to the AI.
PCs are trying to figure out what is actually going on.
>It seems like short of a spontaneous breakdown of the laws of physics all the cool apocalyptic scenarios have already been done.
As a computer programmer I sort of wonder what would happen if all the kludgy hacks and glitches in computer programs just glitched up. If all the race conditions and one in a million bugs just started happening.
you know, you just gave me an idea.
>Our universe turns out to actually be a simulation
>The super advanced alien laptop that runs it is running short on memory
Sub in any computer issue really. Hell maybe the child playing sim universe finally got bored and started hitting the godzilla button.
What the fuck? Are you a juggalo?
now that's a blast from the past
The most horrifying futures are the ones we see before us but are powerless to stop.
Ecocalypse. Both the chtorr and the climate version.
Not that much original but worth considering.
OP's bitching and moaning aside...
Hyperfertility : for whatever reason the human race becomes hyper fertile. Any unprotected intercourse results in pregnancy. Twins and triplets are the norm. Quads and Quints are analagous to the old twins and triplets. Pregnancies come to term in a mere three months. Because nobody is willing to stop fucking and "every life is precious"; the human population explodes. A lack of resources to keep up with it means it then quickly implodes. Food riots, massive famine, etc. China is the only country that had the systems in place to start with to make sure its people didn't go fucking around too goddamn much. But even the Eastern Giant feels the pain of the rest of the globe falling in on itself. In the aftermath, sexual intercourse between members of the opposite sex is criminalized without a licence. Two child limit is strictly enforced. Any more children than that, and the children are disposed of. Can't stop making babies? You're disposed of. Life is cheap. Drowning is more cost effective than sterilization.
Rogue neutron star passes through/near the Sol system : Earth's orbit is changed just enough to start a new, possibly perminent ice age. The ice sheets are advancing, even faster than man made global warming can stop them. Eventually the ice is a mile thick over the upper mid-west of the USA. Humanity huddles in the former tropics, which are now temperate zones. A loss of mineral wealth and farmland has reduced our ability to progress technologically, and the need to survive has superceeded the sciences. This might not be very apocolyptic, thinking about it.
Hyper Volcanism : I'm not talking about something small like Toba. No, I mean something like what lead to the Siberian Traps. Continuous eruptions over a million years that spewed out half a million cubic miles of lava, and god only knows how much in the way of unfriendly gasses.
The declining birthrate finally catches up with us, and nearly every country on Earth collapses due to the burdens of a miniscule working population caring for the elderly.
Bad decisions snowball into terrible ones as politicians either refuse to admit that there's a problem or attempt to solve it by cutting the payments that the elderly receive in an attempt to kill them off quicker, making the problem worse as the grandchildren can't afford to make up the difference with their own incomes. Child labor laws are ignored in favor of trying to keep food on the table. Without a consumer base, companies and even entire industries collapse.
After two decades of global depression caused by the Barren Times, a small lab in France manages to synthesize a solution before the sole scientist working there died under mysterious circumstances
The D-Virus, as its known, causes gene structures in meiotic cells to reform from the nucleic bases, essentially randomizing the genetic code and allowing for nearly infinite genetic variance even with a limited breeding pool. In addition, it accelerates the growth of fetuses in mothers, reducing the gestation period to just over a week, and increases the libido of everyone infected with it. The virus is designed to last ten generations naturally, dying out when humanity's population can be expected to have fully recovered. Unknown to its creator, if left to incubate without the carrier breeding, in a it mutates the human form in sexy ways.
The players are all the original test subjects, waking up from cryostasis, each discovering that while under, they have all developed one mutation. This can be anything from abnormally large sex characteristics to distinctly inhuman features, or even additional sexual organs. Their task? Repopulate the human race while trying to retain their own humanity.
An idea I quite like is an information density apocalypse.
Humanity accidentally surpasses the physical limits of information density with the advent of quantum information storage, accidentally overwriting huge chunks of our reality with junk data, real life screen-snow and static. The survivors have to deal with the fragmented nature of reality and other individuals, while also searching for the ability to control, or perhaps even salvage things lost in information space.
Fascinating. Two magical realms, opposite yet similar. Two sides of the same coin.
The world's ants go aggro on humanity for a time. There is no explination why. They just did. The survivors have to figure out how to make life happen again in a world that is terrifyingly empty (perhaps 90% or more of humanity is just straight up killed and eaten); all while living with the fear it could happen again.
A magma plume just under the crust of the ocean rapidly warms things up. Methane hydrates are released, slowly, then rapidly, then explosively. Ocean life is devastated, wrecking a major source of food for much of humanity. Tsunamis destroy coastal cities the world over. Millions are displaced. Millions starve. Economic collapse. Government collapse follows. How far does it go? City-states? A return to Feudalism? What about massive armies and their WMDs?
CERN gets a powerup to investigate dark matter. Their experiments produce a heretofore unknown particle that has a strong interaction with highly energetic neutrons, causing them to be even more energetic. Every nuclear warhead on the planet suddenly explodes because criticle mass is now lower than it used to be. All the nuclear reactors melt down. All the shit, all the fans.
BTW, I don't claim that any of these ideas are any good. I'm just bored, and throwing this stuff out there. Maybe it'll inspire something better from someone else.
I had a concept for an Apocalypse that was caused by madness from an otherworldly creature. The sight of these creatures was enough to make you go mad and begin to mutate, slowly becoming one yourself.
There was a hentai (well, probably more than one) about a virus which started turning all the men and women into futas. Now, if you ignore the fetish bits for a moment, that's actually an intriguing setting for a story. Probably not an RPG, but like, a book.
(a good idea might be to replace "futas" with less inherently sexualized "hermaphrodites" - i.e. everyone now has both sets of genitals and grows both facial and leg hair).
Just think about how much of our culture and society as we know it is defined by sexual differences real, perceived, believed in or imagined. From a purely sociological viewpoint, everyone suddenly becoming the same sex is going to wreak absolute havoc.
Then you got all the people who will go various degrees of insane, lose hope, all that general "collapse of social order" side effects. Riots, looting, diseases, yada yada. Guys who previously defined themselves through their masculinity, chicks who defined themselves through their femininity. All those Muslims and Jews. All the feminists.
If you want to go further, you can skip the apocalyptic bits a few centuries into the future. See how society rebuilt itself as the hermaphroditic humanity learns to adapt its cultural mores and norms.
It's the kind of idea literature majors would love.
Memetic plague.
Global muslim jihad.
Arguably that would be a way (albeit not an ideal one) to achieve the feminist ideal of gender equality. Not sure how trans people would deal with it... I guess getting halfway is better than feeling like you're 100% wrong?
>not sure if magical realm or literary exploration of human culture and sexuality
Think of how much harder it'd become to be either an SJW *or* a Stormfronter now everyone's the same sex. /pol/ would never be the same.
>nothing changes as real people are not fucking hentai characters and no real man would actually be willing to use their newfound vagina and no real woman would be willing to use their penises, leaving everyone with the exact same social roles
They tried in 1914 or 15, results were underwhelming.
Man who'd totally make use of his pussy here, you're talking out of your ass. And there's a reason my GF owns a strapon, she'd fucking love to have a cock.
How badly did Hell freeze over?
Chances are, some people who are used to frozen climate will try to willingly move there after demons left.
The one I've been thinking of lately is aliens. Not a full on invasion, but more along the lines of an oil spill.
An alien ship carrying a bunch of futuristic fuel crash-lands, which spreads all over the place mutating and altering everything in weird ways. There's handfuls of alien tech, but the world is growing entirely different and strange.
Total economic collapse.
A couple banks go under...a small nation goes into chaos... bigger nations jump in..large scale war leads to more banks falling...the US tries to bail out... suddenly; people can't cash their checks. All banks close...the military is activated to keep riots down... anarchy.
The US divides into pockets of colonies... roaming bands of looters...death count climbs into the millions. Soon...the dead outnumber the living..all power, water, trash, medical is gone. Diseases like the flu, and infections kill millions more.
Animals roam streets...tough survivors survive...the weak die.
Kinda reminds me of the C&C Tiberium setting, with an alien mineral acting as both ecological disaster and potent new source of resources and research.
fracture the tectonic plates
Due to dwindling resources and a massive population, most of humanity decides to upload their minds onto a global network, meant to simulate an idealised reality. Meanwhile, back in the real world, the few people who, tasked with maintenance of these scattered servers, stayed behind, have to deal with a sudden mass power vacuum, with the population of entire first world countries up and disappearing.
I don't think the magma one is possible in a human-scale time frame. The ant one is pretty terrifying though.
I had an idea for a slightly more comical take on this.
A future where automated shopping districts have robot security ensure nobody without enough money can loiter there, keeping the people in their place, with the wealthy not having to deal with the homeless and so on. An automated supercapitalist future... Where an AI glitch suddenly crashes the global economy, inflation skyrocketing. Suddenly even the wealthiest people in the world finds their savings worthless, their own service robots forcing them out of their homes as unwanted intruders. The entire human race shepherded, whether peacefully or violently, out of the cities they'd built by the machines designed to keep them apart from others.
A world of entirely intact, fully functional cities and an automated economy that seems to be working just fine... Where no human being has enough money to be tolerated entry. There's some hope that over time, the inflation will fade and values will normalise, but humanity has to survive for decades before that might even be possible.
...
>my argument is unassailable because if you disagree you're not a true Scotsman so your opinion doesn't count
This would be a fun take on an Engine Heart game.
Yeah, similar to that. But for an apocalypse, it takes much longer for anyone to actually take advantage of it, and by then the world is already post-apocalyptic and twisted
"Real" as opposed to "which exists in hentai comics", you negroid.
Pure, or alloys too?
It's actually an interesting scenario, if you consider a potential second generation which will be presumably infected at such a young age they won't even know if they're meant to be sexually male or female. Feminine penis and manly vaginas could potentially become a thing in such a society. Probably not world-ending, though.
Sorry, didn't phrase it well. I was more trying to figure out how to avoid stuff like 'well it should affect the iron in their blood too'.
Any metal in its common lattice structure, basically, whether monoelemental or alloyed.
Right, but in the time since you posted it, at least one person has stated that they would do the thing you claim no one would do. That means you're wrong.
Why would they immigrate in the first place?
Why are they v not invading in the first place. Your dumb and your thinly vield political comentary is halfassed at best.
How about a setting where a strange, grey ash coats everything? It's always cold, the sky is always grey, even the ocean has a grey film on it. The players might have guns, sure, but the ammo? Nowhere to be found. They'll find themselves making fake bullets to chamber for the intimidation factor. Food is nowhere to be found, everyone resembles a grey skeleton, starved of food and humanity. What happened doesn't matter, what matters is how the PCs keep going when they don't know what they're going for
I know we like to meme it here that everyone's a gay faggot deviant who wants to be dominated by a hung futa, but the truth is that even on Veeky Forums the amount of people who fit that profile only account for a minuscule percentage. Among the general population, it'd be immeasurably smaller. The vast, vast, VAAAAAAAST majority of men, if they suddenly grew a vagina, aren't going to go "HUH! I CAN FINALLY REENACT DULCE REPORT LIKE I ALWAYS WANTED!", they're going to be some combination of disgusted, disturbed, terrified, furious, self-loathing and confused. Most of them aren't going to embrace their femininity just like that any time soon. They still have a dick, they're still going to use it.
Given that the same's true for most women, things won't change nearly as much as your weaboo ass thinks.
Human sexuality running rampant, society breaks down in a wave of semen.
Jokes aside, I've always been fond of GM crops overrunning the major cities, maximum Green apocalypse style.
And that's entirely irrelevant? The initial statement was 'None'. It doesn't matter how small a proportion might go against that, if it's any it makes the prior post factually incorrect.
>Why are they v not invading in the first place
The ecological damage and resultant civil unrest and governmental chaos decimated Hell's armies
I think society would still quickly shift within the span of a generation or two, as the old concept of "male" or "female", at least from the point of view of your sexual organs, becomes more increasingly disconnected from reality.
While I agree with your position, you're grasping at straws there, buddy.
I want an Eternal Darkness style apocolpyse. Like magical zombies, horrors, magic and shit. Guns are useless, except when you charge them with magic or pray while shooting.
Metastable Vacuum Event
Wasn't the hyper pregnancy one in some sci fi book? Humanity has a giant bunch of mirrors and use them as a super laser against the invading aliens and to carve out giant mobile fortress factories from asteroids.
The effects of the Big Bang are fading. The galaxy has stopped expanding and the laws of physics are breaking down. Gravity fluctuates, a child can throw a stone with the force of a railgun, and electronagnetism is unreliable. Conservation of energy is already gone, making interplanetary trade incredibly random and treacherous. There are people known as Despoilers who can manipulate the laws of physics using ancient machines left behind and gene-encoded to a special chromosome, who are the PC's. Only they can ensure interplanetary trade and connect planets together. The goal is to find out what the hell is going on while conducting trade between the different and exotic humanoid descendants.