What was "the Event" in your post-apocalyptic setting...

>What was "the Event" in your post-apocalyptic setting?

Modern humanity simply wasn't successful enough: food was plentiful, universal healthcare achieved, birth control readily available, most diseases exterminated or otherwise trivially curable, and civilization was on the cusp of post-scarcity with world peace seemingly finally achieved.
But then nothing happened. Society grew fat, lazy, and complacent: people grew disinterest in human companionship or reproducing, they pursued casual hobbies, art, and shallow entertainment, 'till eventually it became hollowed out and empty from the inside out with Androids making up over 80% of the world's population.

If you've seen or read 'Yokohama Shopping Trip', it's basically that only: PCs are usually Children or Teenagers going on adventures of self discovery & growth in a world that's become abandoned in the same way an unused public park or museum is: sterile, without character or spirit, depriving them of the adversity that would give them maturity. Getting into trouble, making friends with cute n' sexy Androids, and a little bit of Earthbound inspired combat here and there.

Setting is in a kids bedroom, and we’re all toys that inhabit it, kid is like a god figure that interacts with us all and the room is the size of earth (bad way of saying anti size compression) and we protect his domain by fighting the invaders with a god in out side. We always win and never even get wounded. Slowly as the kid grows up he starts playing/interacting with us less and less meaning we start to get injured in our fights, people have began to die and we’re losing areas to the invaders. We keep calling the kid but he ignores us or only helps us for a short time before he leaves.
Rebel factions have sprung up and our realm is collapsing in on itself.
Soon (we were hinted) the kid will leave for university and there will be no god to protect us. Just a world of level 20 adventures that are slowly becoming level 1

It was a nice cocktail of natural disasters, environmental factors, pandemics, limited nuclear exchanges, and economic instability.

There was less "an event" so much as there was a really dark period for a few decades.

Since i have read "Cat's cradle" the other day, i posit "ice-9" apocalypse, which was somehow partially reversed with some bullshit

God turned his face from the world sometime around 700BC. In 1975 someone laced the water at a massive inter-faith ecumenical meeting with LSD and in the resulting chaos someone managed to get His attention. He didn't like what he saw

Aliens stole a randomly chosen 75% of the human race. Then the moon blew up.

Alien invaders beamed the schematics for a Lotus Machine into the minds of tech developers. The machines where built and the majority of humanity migrated to the virtual world. The remainder took up residence in their ruins and formed new civilisations. Mostly city states.
>The landscape is dotted with mysterious, nearly impenetrable megaliths. These house the material forms of old humans. Some cities siphon power from these. However the minds of the old humans have a tendency to bleed out. Megalith cities are usually haunted.
>The earth occasionally rumbles from the drilling of the invaders deep beneath the surface. Large boreholes can be found in near the poles. These are good places to find treasure. Rarely things will climb up through the holes or burrow up through the dirty after an earthquake.
>The airwaves are clouded with alien interference and the dreams of old humans making stable wireless communication a luxury. Wars are fought over clear broadcasting stations. Most religious have some mysticism involving radios, and justly so.
>The world is vast and seems mostly empty. Still, few leave their city state unless they really have to. Truckers are an ancient and honoured union of workers who drive enormous armoured transports over cracked roads. The truckers share a secret language with hitchhikers.

Decades of an authoritarian dictatorship, followed by economical collapse, world-wide nuclear war and a century of barbarism

mine goes very similar to the first fantastic 4 movie.
Massive solar flare hit the Earth cause worldwide mutations, knocked out 90% of electrical equipment, and contaminated a good deal of water and farmland.
Worldwide food shortages, people killing each other over the smallest scape of food.
Plus a few nukes do get set off but not many.

The rich go some of the remaining highly fertile land with a haandful of slaves and leave the poor to the horrible barely functioning parts of the world.

More or less it mixes in the dystopia cyberpunk megacorp feel with post apocalyptic world.

>Lotus Machine

a what now

I think he meant to say Lotus-Eater Machine. You know, a self-contained virtual paradise meant to keep the occupant imprisoned without them realizing it?

>"Let's see what the banker has to offer!"
>"Ring ring...ring ring!"
>"...He's still not answering."

that's neat. How do the capitalists utulize cheap labor, has your setting skipped the robotic revolution?

The poor rising up against increasingly posthuman elites who retaliated with killer drones. They were eventually overwhelmed by sheer numbers of the rioters choking the hallway of the palaces with their flesh and then the dead man trigger released millions of tons of poison gas into the atmosphere wiping out all higher lifeforms on Earth’s surface.

The surviving posthuman elites (all four PC), now live in a empy palace on Mars and contemplate what went wrong.

Everything in a kitchen sink setting (but human only) decided it was time to go to war, either to take over the world, destroy it, protect it or take advantage of the chaos. War/Anti-Christ was marching about. Many types of super soldiers were all over the place. Nukes just weren't that good even though most of them hit something, mainly because of wizards. Everyone thought their super weapon or genius strategy was the best and they were going to win till they all inevitably failed for one reason or another. Hundreds of organizations were revealed that all individually thought they were the behind the scenes rulers of the world. Super humans made impacts all across the world. The alien invasion was blocked by God who didn't want them messing up his apocalypse till Cthulhu made a hole in the barrier.

Anyway, the apocalypse sure left a lot of neat stuff laying around.

Climate degeneration with a bit of resource war. Not dissimilar to Mad Max really, but with a forward thinking billionaire creating mobile, armoured bio-domes to house pockets of humanity while waiting for the climate to fix itself. Of course that isn't going to happen, and as each bio-dome fades out, the human race inches toward an inevitable extinction.

>tfw your setting had multiple apocalyptic events and/or extinction waves

Behemoth split Antarctica as it emerged and began to exhale the new atmosphere of the world to come until lots of nuclear bombs exploded on it.

Aliens blew up the Moon by accident. Also released mutagens into the atmosphere on purpose.

A mysterious wave of interstellar energy called "The Glow" struck the Earth, wiping out most governments and rapidly mutating all forms of life on the planet. A small minority of beings are aware that the Glow also allows portals from worlds "linked" by itself to open so a few beings on the planet are well and truly alien.

The few civilizations in the world that have the luxury of such things as an academia often theorize that the Glow is anything from an naturally occurring phenomenon, a living possibly sapient energy being, to a failed attempt at an FTL system of travel, to many others.

Giant Electron Storm roasted all electronic devices not running in Faraday cages or using Vacuum tubes

STAY INDOORS!

We let women vote.

youtube.com/watch?v=M75VLQuFPrY

Lords of Order got tired of the mortals' bullshit and let loose hosts of their servants on the world. While it was going on, Dukes of Chaos dicided to join in on the fun. In the end all of the sapient races were just about wiped out and replaced with new ones

Wait a second...

>a mom event
"OK, that's it, Earthlings! You can go to your room and think about what you've done! And no, you can't take your toys with you! Don't come out til you've learned some manners!"

Good ol’ fashioned super ice age. Oceans frozen, everything covered in snow. ‘Mines’ exist as excavation sites for old materials, plastics and metal being found and reshaped or melted into new stuff. Fuel for the forges is human feces, dried up and burned, and kelp, harvested from plantations under the ice. Transportation happens by ice ships, great vehicles with skates and sails.

Oife centers around hunting the great beasts of the ice tundra. One huge tubdra lion can provide food and materials (hide, bone and ivory) enough to make its hunter rich.

It doesn't matter. It happened so long ago nobody remembers, and the arcane details of how the world exploded only matter to wizards and mages who can't even agree on which details are important. The only thing that matters are the leftovers, sealed away inside boxes. This is the loot adventurers and other raiders make their money from, since wizards will always exchange healing potions and weapons for pre-war knowledge.

For example, some years ago a metal trashcan crashed near some village carrying nothing of obvious importance. But when the mages college heard about it, they immediately sent a scholar who exchanged a cartload of enchanted weapons for the device. That village is now an empire, and rules over the entire south coast region except the college itself.

Transdimensional Ayylmaos made all of the adults fall asleep forever.

Ecological catastrophe that resulted from a biological-weapon-gone-wrong scenario basically wiped out most of agricultural potential of the advanced society. A massive civil war that happened in that time also did not help, and destroyed a lot of the infrastructure: however it was just the lack of food that caused wide-spread famine and forced people to abandon their cities and seek sustenance as nomads or hunters and gatherers once more. The process was fairly gradual, taking a little over thousand years to go from mixture of modern and 18th century massive civilization to dispersed bands of stone-age level nomads and tribals.

You do realize that Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou clearly suggests ecological or military catastrophe that actually physically wiped out most of the inhabitants AND also caused massive sea level rise, right? While the story never directly acknowledges the events, it's clearly hinted that something directly wiped out most productive age population within a relatively short span of time, and those weird flying things scanning earth suggest some kind quarantine imposed on surface earth.
In Yokohama kaidashi, neither the androids nor societal decay were the cause of the end-days scenario.

That said, Yokohama + Shuna's Journey + Nausicaa + Laputa were easily my biggest own sources of inspiration for world-building.

"The Event" happened in early 2008 when everyone in the world woke up knowing how to cast magic. Every single person permanently had between 10-20 (based on int) random spells and unlimited use of those spells. Suddenly prisoners could teleport out of their jails, oppressed populations could burn down their oppressors with sheer overwhelming firepower. Nearly every city suffered a catastrophic fire within the first year, nearly every electrical line had been fried, yet there were actual few deaths as healing and resurrection magic was just as prevalent as damage magic.
Eventually someone developed anti-magic field technology and put several large area projectors in orbit, but lost control of them almost immediately, so there are 5 1200 mile diameter no magic zones that follow a predictable orbital path.

>so there are 5 1200 mile diameter no magic zones that follow a predictable orbital path.

That's a pretty neat factoid for a setting.

I don't like that scenario user....and this is why I will never have children. That's too plausible of a future, and I'm not going to have my children and grandchildren suffer

Worm Ogres that rape people to death. It's over the top grimdark veering into magical realm. I'm not actually in that shit though and I'm really just doing it for the retardation.

Stop worrying and learn to love the bomb.

t. /pol/

Can't fool me Major Kong.

INFANTS AND PETS
THE SMALLEST PATRIOTS

What if your kids could help turn the tide?

I'm partial to pandemics combined with a total economic collapse.

Nobody knows, trying to think about it might make it happen again.

DO NOT THINK ABOUT THE EVENT!

What if they can't? I'm stuck in a rock and a hard place. I could have children, and maybe they'll and their children will have happy lives. Or am I going to watch my children perish before my eyes. I may be called a coward, but I could't deal with something like that. Other people can have children, but I'm not going to take the risk.

This is a good one.

Planar overlay, pretty simple.

it's a reference to OP's image
youtube.com/watch?v=l28o6fJda1c

Minor Biblical Flood coupled with a global scale The Mist that lasted for decades.

Some jackass killed the god of fire, and now fire has ceased to exist in the world, even magically or divine produced fire. The people have had to find alternate means of producing light, cooking food, smithing and keeping warm.
The sun also went out but after a year and things got real bad, but the gods finally managed to work together to create an alternative but it's not as bright nor as warm and the color is off. (It's literally a giant light bulb in space now).

Ocean temperatures raised a couple degrees over a few years. Killed most of the smaller surface life, then the ice caps rapidly dropped the temperature again which cold snapped everything else.

Sounds pretty interesting. Is everything played completely straight or is there some humor in the setting?

>can't view this in your country, because of copyrights

What happened to the Internet? More and more I come across "you can't watch this, you filthy foreigner, get lost" on videos. The fuck is the purpose of having a medium that can reach around the globe, but deny people access to it?

all the space junk starts losing orbital velocity until it slams into most major cities at once.

You too?

It's mostly played straight, but we (the players) throw in humor to keep it from turning into a despair simulator. All the PC's are members of the defunct Fire (Sun, Harvest, Smithing and Hearth) church and have carte-blanche to figure out what exactly happened and bring whoever was behind it to justice. It's the only thing all the races have ever agreed on.

science happened. it was discovered that all particles can be divided into infinitely small components and that those components could be manipulated with relatively simple mathematical equations. computer programs and a few truly gifted people could basically do magic, though in case of computers you needed terabytes of RAM. supercomputers became the new nukes (if nukes could destroy all of reality) and the gifted people disappeared somewhere. the resulting MAD was finally broken. Earth is destroyed. the known universe is literally filled with sand. there are few oases left where some computers are used to protect a small area from the multiplying sand and to create enough food and water to sustain a small population. the survivors are trying to develop (or find) a program able to transport them to another universe.

>everything i dont like is /pol/
grow up

That setting sounds kind of dry

Looks like they're figuring out how to keep media markets separate, just like in the good old days of three channel broadcast TV.

The End in my setting happened in a post-magical/supernatural races reintegrate into society kind of tech boom. So not only do you get nukes but also mass scale spell weaponry. Best example is a scavengers rooting around in skyscraper and eventually coming to find the trees that took root all over the place used to be people because a polymorph bomb went off on the building

HAHA YES, IT WOULD HAVE BEEN GOOD IF WE'D BEEN ABLE TO SAVE JUST SOME OF THE CHILDREN!

Man, I remember when we got our 4th TV channel. It was something...

Anyway, luckily it's only an annoyance affecting official channels. You can block the videos from the licensed distributor, but not from someone uploading it on a different channel or site. Once again government regulations does nothing but create criminals.

I really like that one. The one with the GPS, not so much

I like the ending, as the car's driving away fast and the GPS is telling them to turn around and giving the distance to the destination, which is diminishing.

That was the one part I really liked

Pretty sure he read Road Side Picnic and got it from there. Still, it does sound interesting.

Skipped the robotic revolution entirely, the economic warfare with China disrupted the flow of Rare Earths just enough that private innovation whithered in the cradle. In fact, some jobs have regressed back to being labor-based.

One word: Interdict.

A lot of shit happened trips Op
A masive biocomputer made a deal with not! Satan.
All spaceships in the empire were destroyed one after the other.
The Captin of the lab ship chose the crash it rather than let the bio computer take control.
The computer lets out all the experiments at the same time in retaliation.
Only the slave section of the survives the crash with a chunk of the biocomputer.

Pick one for your start point really.

Warring alien factions stumbled hid away on what they thought was a tiny uninhabited rock from where they could engage in guerilla warfare. Instead, they were discovered by their enemies, who preceded to haphazardly wreck every major settlement on the planet in an attempt to drive the guerillas out. Humanity actually manages to get them to back off, intent to instead wait their enemies out, but by that point all that's left of humanity is a scorched husk.

Every disaster imaginable happened at once because a disgruntled scientist made a probability engine so he could win the lottery but he accidentally turned it on in reverse.

The only coward move you're taking is deciding your potential children's future on your own. Their future is not for you to consider and decide for them, the only thing you can do is give them the opportunity to do as they please with their lives.

*fails art school*

Viral outbreak engineered after nukes were no longer certain enough destruction. It was pretty rapidly spread, a bunch of major cities became hosts for it, and from there it spread airborne wiping out generally everyone on earth. The only known survivors were those placed in cryogenic storage, of which about 20% were ultimately irradiated because they were infected, and another 30-70% didn't survive the freezing process, based on the technology of the facility they were at. After the lack of human hosts, the virus eventually died out after a couple hundred years, meaning it was safe to emerge and start again.

Most infrastructure was left completely intact, nukes were launched, but only few in number and at military targets, so major cities were simply incredibly deserted. The biggest problem though were that the cryo chambers were developed by four competing AIs that think of themselves as deities, and spent the entire cryogenic cycle programming loyalty into the people who went in and are hell bent on destruction of the other AIs, sort of like four Friend Computers who all regard the others and their followers as commie mutant traitors. The players awoke from cryo brainwashed to serve one of them and are trying to shake off the conditioning to prevent another extinction event (or willingly serving their AI because one of them never gave a shit about free will).

>deciding your potential children's future on your own
>coward move
The hell you are smoking, user? If anything, this hubris is the exact opposite of cowardice, vicious in its' own contaminating manner.

so, every hive world in 40k ever?

1e Dnd + Gamma World/10

RIFTS/10

Goddamn now that is cool - like a Toy Story that's gritty. I Love the idea of reverse levels.

It was Ragnarok.
The Sun got eaten and the earth is dying. The prophesy says that the world will be reborn when there are only 2 humans left alive but no one is sure if that is true or not.

Nah it was mass urbanization and over population growing so out of control that the ever-growing anarchist faction eventually became the actual majority and toppled the crippled world governments before falling in on itself entirely, leading to the creation of a society so entangled with street fighting that it began to birth abnormal humans.

Yes that's the one. I need sleep when I typed that.

A zombie virus caused the powerful governments of the world to nuke the infected away. But, all of those nukes and wanton slaughter of the innocent invoked an ancient prophesy that caused portals to hell to open.

All life energy was divided into two opposing elements by a freak lab accident.

Someone hacked the Pentagon because why the hell not and activated the drag erryone down with us protocols that had been installed in everything that goes boom since the cold war.

Guy just thought it was a joke, no way that sort of thing would be left so unsecure right?

Damn budget cuts.

Mine was two lesbian goddesses having a real rollercoaster of a relationship.

People just stopped fucking caring. That lead to a bunch of other assorted disasters, that made things worse. But the general response to those was either blind panic or almost aggressive apathy.

Relativistic kill vehicle clips Mars, showering Earth with debris. The damage from the event, followed by a ton of civil unrest, causes modern civilization to largely fail. There are pockets of relative modernity, but the vast majority of the world is somewhere between the late medieval period and early Renaissance. Efforts to rebuild have been stymied by all of the easily extractable petrochemicals already having been extracted.

Fucking saved, not your idea, your pic. Shit's cash.

We failed to stop Tiamat.

Someone ripped the tag off a mattress.

Someone put a cup on the table without a coaster.
There is a ring now.
It could never be forgotten.
It could never be forgiven.

The setting's equivalent to Dr. Manhattan killed himself rather than let humanity reach the stars, as he had seen what a race with psychic potential was capable of and wanted to control humanity before we turned into the Kree. Failing that (because in this timeline the equivalent of the world wars never happened and basically everyone important was psychic Captain America now), he believed we needed to be reverse-decimated and detonated his massive well of psychic power into an extinction-level event, setting humanity back to Mad Max-style living.

First event destroyed the “unified communion” was destroyed
The second was the destruction of the “unified empire”. The unified communion was a time when the “dragonic lords” were at peace with each other and their servant races, but then [incomprehensible] aka Chaos destroys the Union by spreading his work with deceit and politics, turning the dragons and their servant races against each other. He did the same thing with the unified empire (the races attempt to bring back the communion)