forum What was the most deadly event in your world's history? How did it happen and who/what caused it?

Started January 07, 2018 by @Chronicle Beta Tester

tune

Just curious

The most deadly event to happen in my world was the complete destruction of a kingdom. It happens centuries ago and by my protagonist, who lost control of his magic.

I'd say the murder of the Elementals. One turned dark and killed all except two others (and that was in a thriving community), essentially destroying an entire civilization. None of the other wars or battles in my universe's history can compare.

The First War. More people died than "the counting of numbers can comprehend" and there was wholesale destruction. The face of the world was completely changed, and had such a strong impact on all the species involved that everyone in the world remembers some detail or another of it from birth.

i think it will happen in the third book. still working out the kinks. but there's a human who wants to take control of faery, so that's bound to go all kinds of bad.

@"Cami"

This sounds interesting. What happens when a person tries to take control of a faery?

@Chronicle ah i meant the realm of faery (which is where the fairies live)! the human is invading the realm, so things are gonna go south quickly when the fairies rebel ;)

Mine is the Ascension. Basically two witches harnessed the power of a celestial convergence and ascended to basically being gods. One's power manifested as serenity and the other as entropy. Entropy succumbed to the nature of her power and tried to tear the world apart before Serenity stopped her.

America finally succumbs to its crippling debt and China, Taiwan, and all other essential providers decide to stop making products for America until the debt is paid off. The Americans, proud as we are, begin a nuclear war that devastates the globe.

I'd say the complete segregation of the races due to an all out war between a very powerful Elven brother and sister.
the brother was hell bent on becoming the overlord of the world with the help of an omnipotent force but the sister sacrificed her life to put an end to the war and thus creating a rift between the human and elven worlds.
The races are still aware of each other but can have no contact. In simple terms, there is now a massive wall separating them so there will be no war and lasting peace.

but like in any story it doesnt stay that way :P

In Telurs it was probably the dragon wars that happened between the strongest of the high dragons, and they nearly destroyed the world so they had to create a truce to stop fighting. A close second would be when the goddess that governed the universal layer died and left most of the population without magic, or when one of the high dragons later conspired to destroy the Stag, whose body was bringing magic in from another dimension, leaving a lot of magic-reliant kingdoms(hint: almost all of them) in a really bad place.

Everyone else is sharing, so I thought I might do it. (Note: this is a w.i.p. I thought it was a cool idea and quickly wrote it down.)

One of the most devastating events in my world's history was caused by a cook.

No, really. A cook, whose name is undecided, figured out a way to neutralize the poisonous leaves of an Otrach tree and put them in a drink. The drink that he created was a success, and other cooks wanted to know how to make it. As he told many cooks how to create the drink, he casually left out how to neutralize the Otrach leaves.

Around 300,000 died because of a cook.

For a Pathfinder campaign I'm running, the origin point for recorded history in the world is called The Sundering. A smaller, highly populated planet was dragged into a much larger planet through gravitational pull and ripped in half. 99% of all life (including plants) was destroyed. The 1% survived entirely through the intervention a god-like being. Death toll estimated at 84-88 million people.

An incompetent demon handler was employed to assassinate someone. Said assassination went south real quick when the demon summoned was improperly bound/contracted. Demon jumps ship and basically possesses the assassinee, basically using him as a really strong bonus magical battery, causing a hurricane and then going on a kill and pillage spree around the world. At least 17 major cities get burned to the ground and human-magical relations are obviously badly affected for the next couple centuries.

While dancing around the inevitable nuclear war, the world's superpowers designed and built biotechnological weapons with AI brains to fight their battles for them. These genetically engineered weapons, called dragons for their resemblance to the reptilian monster, soon developed a will of their own and decimated much of the earth's population. This forced the remaining humans underground. I've estimated around two-thirds of the population was destroyed in the war.

The Ice Elementalist three generations before the main timeline, Alecsaynjra Teblar, had a profitable reputation among the main courts of Iftle. She stopped using a device, a necklace in this case, that controlled the magic inside her. She went kind of crazy, and through some inside jobs, managed to cause a large amount of mistrust between the high courts. Eventually one king snapped, and five months later the entirety of Iftle was in a full blown war. Alecs killed her fellow Elementalists, but not before they gave her a fatal blow to the chest. Fifty years later, when the story begins, in the west the war is still going on, and the death toll is two billion and counting.

There are five. The mass extinctions of Earth (actual prehistoric events), which were caused by the main villain in the Doomsday Arc in one of my series, whose name is Apocalypse/Armageddon/Apocalypse/Extinction, yada yada yada you get the idea. This villain is a terrifyingly deadly malevolent god, who has wiped out most of the life on Earth five times.

Of course the sixth attempt at mass-extinction on Earth failed, due to the intervention of the main protagonist.

The invasion of fire
It's exactly what it sounds like, the fire god decided he didn't want to serve the god of chaos no more so he and his other lower god buddies teamed up to fight the two higher gods order and chaos.This was basically a revolution from the minor gods to the two top ones. unfortunately the gods had physical bodies and not atheral ones so all the fights were held on Itoria this was the first of two mass extinction's of Itoria and since the fire god led it all so it was dubbed the "invasion of fire"

also the third higher god balance practically sat in the corner and ate popcorn because it was him who wanted the lower gods to hold a revolt.

Well… Maybe not devastating to the world, but one time an entire civilization just disappeared. Then it reappeared a few centuries later and was crushed by everyone else.

Hmm.. The slaughter of the only remaining human kingdom on Gal'Huria. Their savior failed to defeat the leader of the Obscuracles (the creature behind the slaughter) and because of that, everyone was killed in very brutal and bloody ways.

My world is a fairly idealistic fantasy. Most of the most devastating events occurred before it actually existed. Part of the idea is that mankind ended up destroying itself but a few survivors got the attention of some cosmic beings that decided it was worth their while to preserve them. Thus civilization began anew on the back of a giant space turtle.

Rio Giraud raised about army of walking corpses on Omara to overthrow Queen Shannon, he lost control of them and they slaughtered millions of people before getting neutralized

The deadliest moment in my universe's history was Alleâmoth, or The First Awakening (which is the title of my first book in my series), which was caused by the prime antagonist, Agogon, and his sixteen servants, known as Darkwalkers. With their prodigious Wielding (magic-using) talents, they almost decimated the entire population, and their servants that they left behind before killing themselves, known as Creatures of the Night, are still killing citizens of my kingdom, Arwaëa. Alleâmoth caused such an upheaval that the wars that went on within it were called the Black Wars, and the sun and sky actually began to turn red.

The deadliest moment in my universe's history was the fall of the star goddess Zaria, after her sisters, the moon and sun goddesses Erin and Cassia, broke into war. They began the myth of where an eclipse comes from; the sun and the moon merge together and block out the stars, 'killing' Zaria. As she was the goddess of the stars and oracles read the stars for their predictions, the kingdom deemed them useless and slaughtered every single one, demolishing Zaria's temple as well.