>>52954490
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

>>52954490
Portals from Hell open, demons are everywhere

>>52954490
>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.

>>52954639
>Succubus prostitutes are everywhere
Already better than what's happening in Europe.

>>52954490

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.

>>52954639
Sounds like a real economic hell hole

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>>52954490
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.

>>52954639
I like it. It's goofy. But I like it.

>>52954639
>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

>>52954490
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.

>>52954639
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

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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.

>>52954639
>>52954639
>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

>>52954879
Read the fucking premise, moron. Souls are worthless. Hell's economy collapsed.

>>52954490
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.

>>52954490
>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, anon?

I love how /tg/ 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.

>>52954490

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.

>>52954490
mass bone hurting juice poisoning

>>52954490
Gamma ray burst. Dial the yield and duration which results in your desired level of apocalypse.

>>52954950

That kinda reminds me of The Gone Away World. Weird book, but pretty good.

>>52954945
Pro-tip: when you see someone complaining about unoriginality in RPGs, they probably don't actually play RPGs.

>>52954798
Surely there would be enough cumulative knowledge around to allow for at least some leeway?

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>>52954557
That is my favorite.

>>52954490
Sudden onset of mass apathy

>>52954950
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.

>>52954526
This, basically Wall-E if the humans remained on Earth.

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>>52955050
Sudden onset of mass depression is currently being discussed here >>52954658

>>52955096
Oh. Didn't notice that.

>>52954574
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.

>>52954490
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.

>>52954529
yoko taro pls

>>52954879
you're ruining this

>>52954872
>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.

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>>52955100
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.

>>52954742

Replace "Witch" with "Native Americans" and you actually have a plotline from Shadowrun.

>>52955243
>survival instinct work in reverse

Jesus christ really? That's the most retarded thing I've read all day, and I'm posting on 4chan.

>>52954639
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.

>>52954798
Ironically in this scenario Europe would probably be the least torched place.

>>52955299
>That's the most retarded thing I've read all day, and I'm posting on 4chan.
Have you dug through the trash recently? Shamalyn's worst ideas are gold compared to some of the shit there...

>>52954742

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.

>>52954490
A cyberpunk style society where they created and tamed vampires, But the vampires are actually in charge

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>>52954490
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?

>>52954490
Why don't you do a Gods Themselves style breakdown in physics? That'd be awesome for an apocalypse/post apoc scenario.

>>52954490
Rabbits become totally immortal, but still reproduce at the same rate.

>>52954490

My favourite one /tg/ 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.

>>52955557
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.

>>52955390

What the fuck? Are you a juggalo?

>>52955711
now that's a blast from the past

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>>52954490
The most horrifying futures are the ones we see before us but are powerless to stop.

>>52954490

Ecocalypse. Both the chtorr and the climate version.

Not that much original but worth considering.

>>52954490

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.

>>52954490
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.

>>52956139
>>52956255

Fascinating. Two magical realms, opposite yet similar. Two sides of the same coin.

>>52956139

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.

>>52954490
Memetic plague.

>>52954490

Global muslim jihad.

>>52956353

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?

>>52956353
>not sure if magical realm or literary exploration of human culture and sexuality

>>52956378
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.

>>52956353
>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

>>52956363
They tried in 1914 or 15, results were underwhelming.

>>52956412

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.

>>52954639
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.

>>52954490
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.

>>52954490
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.

>>52956441

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.

>>52954490
fracture the tectonic plates

>>52954490
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.

>>52956344
I don't think the magma one is possible in a human-scale time frame. The ant one is pretty terrifying though.

>>52956454

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.

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>>52956412
>my argument is unassailable because if you disagree you're not a true Scotsman so your opinion doesn't count

>>52956498
This would be a fun take on an Engine Heart game.

>>52956455
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

>>52956532
"Real" as opposed to "which exists in hentai comics", you negroid.

>>52954692
Pure, or alloys too?

>>52956412
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.

>>52956619

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.

>>52956573
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.

>>52954639
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

>>52956434
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 4chan 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.

>>52956703

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.

>>52956663
>Why are they v not invading in the first place
The ecological damage and resultant civil unrest and governmental chaos decimated Hell's armies

>>52956703
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.

>>52956721
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.

>>52954490
Metastable Vacuum Event

>>52956139
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.

>>52954490
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.

>>52955499
Are the rabbits invincible? Biological immortality might not change things much for rabbits (I'm not sure many of them survive long enough for that to matter in the first place). Invulnerability would result in a setting with lots of weapons and armor made out of live rabbits.

>>52956826

I honestly have no idea if it was.
It's just everyone always thinks : no more babies, oh noes! So I am naturally inclined to think on what the opposite would be like "There are babies everywhere, oh noes!"

>>52954490
An alien sleeper ship, the last hope for its race, arrives on Earth. the aliens seek peaceful cohabitation and integration, seeing as it's their only means for survival. It goes well enough.

However, spores from some of the specimens brought to Earth are unintentionally released. When they find local flora, they attach themselves in a symbiotic relationship: the outcome being massively improved photosynthesis in the host. Within the first week of release, the plant mass of the host nation has nearly tripled, and spores have begun to spread through the air. Directly, they're harmless to humans, but the effects of such rapid and giant plant growth have been profound on infrastructure: cities and roads are unnavigable by vehicle, electricity, water, telecommunication and gas lines are disrupted. Attempts to clear the plants are made, but they grow back within days.

Large-scale governments find themselves unable to function properly, and all the while the newly arrived aliens are finding themselves under increasing attack and suspicion.

>>52954490
My idea is that the Earth has been through a massive extraterrestrial conflict with most of the attackers and defenders being destroyed in the process. The alien empire thinks all life friendly and hostile on the Earth is gone and leave the planet alone not knowing they left people behind. Basically story will be how the PCs and people of Earth interact with their new residents and how they eventually get along. Or kill each other.

>>52954490
Someone invents a time machine - specifically a time machine that allows people in the future to travel backwards to any point in time after the machine is switched on. Unfortunately, this splinters the timeline to hell, with billions of human (or otherwise, or debateably human) refugees flooding into the present for a potentially infinite number of reasons. Someone manages to blow the damn thing up, but it's too late - several millions of civilizations (some millions strong, others represented by a single individual) have entered the present, with conflicting agendas and a bewildering array of technologies, beliefs and cultures. The resulting chaos reshapes the world so radically (and with such a high death toll) in such a short amount of time that, from the perspective of cultures that existed before the stupid fucking machine was switched on, it was an apocalypse.

>>52956498
The economics of this scenario might need work. Anyone who owns any commodities or real property would preserve (or gain) a lot of nominal wealth due to rapid price increases, or real wealth in the case of property bought with now-meaningless debt. I'd recommend saying that the automated systems applied non-inflation-adjusted super-progressive taxation rules to wipe out those who suddenly got rich (more hyper-mixed-economics than hyper-captalism in that case, though).

>>52954490
Zombie apocalypses are old hat, you're right. How cool would a werewolf apocalypse be?

>>52957541
Fuck off. Rolling d10 is shit.

>>52957589
Oh, that. No, I mean standard lycanthropy spreading wildly out of control. You could maybe make the transformation under the full moon permanent, if you want wolfman-fighting action more than one day out of thirty.

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>>52954490
A meteor hit the earth, or increased volcanic activity caused several eruptions, including Yellowstone.

Either way, mos of the sky has now been covered by ash and smoke. The sun never shows anymore, and almost all vegetation is dead, along with the animals.

Most of humanity is dead, and what's left of them is either a few lone survivors distrustful of each other, or cannibalistic death cults that keep women pregnant to eat their babies upon birth and herd people like cattle, cutting off their limbs one at a time to eat while keeping them alive.

The seas are green and the life that flourished beneath the waves is almost all dead. Food is extremely scarce, and humanity might very likely be on its last legs. Almost all of what's left of humanity has fallen to depravity and hatred, but a select few are carrying the fire, as they always have.

>>52954490
Every apocalypse happens at once in one particular area. Every single one.

>>52957484

Hah, I'll make a note of that, thanks! As I said, I hadn't put too much thought into it, and it was never meant to be super realistic. I thought it'd be a fun premise for some very contemporary black comedy.

>>52956923
Invincible, invulnerable and immortal.
Totally impossible to kill in any way.

>>52958395

Suddenly rabbits become an extremely valuable construction material. Miles upon miles of self-regenerating roadway consisting of compacted layers of still living rabbits would be just the start.

>>52958328
Welcome to the Zone, Stalker

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>>52954490
Someone accidentally spills a bucket of blood on the occult book "A Chronicle of the Daevas", thus leading to the Daevas civilization stretching far into the future, with no end in sight. They now rule most of the world, and the few bastions of resistance are well on their way to falling. Ritualistic sacrifice and witchcraft have become common among the authorities, and a totalitarian government has been installed.

Or you could go with any SCP related apocalypse.

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>>52954490
Rogue planet that turns out to be a MASSIVE planet eating creature that lives in space. Society breaks down completely as it's revealed it's headed right for Earth and mass hysteria and chaos ensues.

Weird shit starts happening during its approach, and if you want to get REALLY weird with it make the scenario about the remnants of humanity surviving in/on the creature's physics defying body. Maybe even include the survivors of other planets it had eaten.

>>52954490
I really liked the setting of Lisa the Painful.
While there is no specific trigger, and the world is basically nuked, the idea I loved was that all the women have disappeared.

This creates an absurdly grim feeling that I haven't seen in many settings.

The men that manage to survive are basically having the last party of humanity.
They do whatever they feel like, which is often ridiculous, but you realize that they're doing this because they're completely doomed, being the last of their race.

>>52954490
>It seems like short of a spontaneous breakdown of the laws of physics all the cool apocalyptic scenarios have already been done.
That sounds pretty fucking cool actually.

>>52954574

The only Grey Goo scenario I'm aware of was Xenogears where the main badguy tried to use nanomachines to turn the entire planet into a space ship for Deus.

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>>52954557
That sounds like a pretty positive situation, anon.

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>>52956812
That just causes reality to stop existing as we know it, sort of hard to make a setting out of.

On-topic: large-scale crustal displacement event. It's a theory that's been proposed by some "alternative history" types that dovetails with the whole lost ancient civilization/Atlantis/Mu/etc idea. Basically, the gist of it is that the earth's crust can at times rotate freely over the mantle, moving continents and shifting the location of the poles relative to the surface. This of course leads to massive catastrophes, flooding and climate changes. One idea about Atlantis is that a crustal displacement around 9500BC buried it under ice in what's now Antarctica.

The sun is gone but the earth and all the planets remain in their respective orbits.

>>52959515
That's not a good idea. Everything dies. No plant life, and everything freezes to death.

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>>52954490

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>>52955050

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>>52959467
Wurl of STR

>>52958351
It's tough to maintain suspension of disbelief with fictional economics scenarios since weird economic events or conditions have complex implications, but remain subject rational anslysis based on (fairly) common knowledge. Basically, they rely on real-world rules so you can't easily handwave problems away with setting idiosyncrasies or conceal them with mystery when the audience starts poking holes in the setting's history. In a game, you also have to worry about players identifying a solution to the setting's fundamental problem that's much easier than you anticipated or eliminates the thing that made the setting interesting to begin with.

Researching real-world hyperinflation events may help. Weimar Germany is the classic example, but it probably isn't a perfect fit for what you have in mind.

>>52954490
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/SaB19auvjc8" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Don't even try to make sense of it, how would the PC's know unless they were privy to that info. From there perspective either shit has gone down and its more important to try to stay alive in a world gone mad OR if its later down the road then this is just how life is.

Have it happen fast, whatever the catastrophic situation is. Think like a earthquake, the real danger of a large earthquake in a city is the gas lines rupturing and casing a fire.

>>52954490
Spiritual transformation of big part of the population (or possession or people not being violent but just not human and unable or unwilling to live in our society) or other occult happening - cthulhu tentacle monster from beyond, big parts of population losing sanity or getting certain weird quirks/fixations that change their lifestyle severely
alien/demonic occupation in traditional sense or maybe something more subtle (aliens being living memes rewriting biosphere and minds of different creatures, humans included etc).

>>52958797
Read 'White Plague' by Herbert - a scientist who's wife is killed in the UK by an act of terrorism unleashes a plague that kills all the women in the UK and threatens to unleash it on the rest of the world if they try to Nuke the UK to sterilize the place.

>>52954490

See the [DATA EXPUNGED] Foundation.

>>52957541
I used that in a game once.

>>52958284
Hey fuck you buddy, I already ripped off the road
>>52956678

The "Babel" virus spreads across the world, causing irreparable damage to the language centers of the brain such that people who catch it can no longer understand speech or writing (or even codified systems of hand gestures like sign language). Very soon, entire countries are filled with people who each feel like the entire rest of the world has switched to indecipherable gibberish.

>>52954490
What if nothing happened?
What if during recent political tensions, North Korea unveiled their secret superweapon, nothing, and launched it at America.
Within hours, nothing had landed somewhere offshore of Los Angeles, but the area effect of nothing was far larger than that. Soon, Los Angeles and San Francisco was engulfed by nothing, forcing its citizens to either flee east or risk succumbing to nothing. Then nothing would spread further east, fueled by its victims, and nothing soon spread east of the Rockies. By the time Defcon 1 was ordered, though, nothing had already infiltrated the entire US nuclear missile arsenal, rendering them inert.
What's worse, turns out that some of the refugees from the East Coast were vectors for nothing, and they unintentionally spread nothing overseas - after a week, even North Korea fell under nothing. Nothing had achieved global saturation after a month had gone by.
Some still survived nothing, though. But now, as they scavenge from the supermerkets, they have to be on the lookout for nothing. Sometimes they fell to nothing, after opening a room that turns out to be filled with nothing. Others have banded together and hunted nothing to survive. Some say that some Chinese survivors have managed to harvest nothing for power, in the Three Gorges Dam, but these are mere rumors.
But always on the lookout for nothing. Nothing terrorizes them. Nothing preys on them. Worse yet, nothing thrives on their corpses.

>>52956663

>Tumblr shitposting as usual

oy vey

>>52954490
>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.
This right here is a block buster

The world is running out of clean drinking water. Screw oil, natural water resources is what the next major series of wars are fought over. The rivers and lakes in india and china get so polluted that they already import massive amounts of water, if the trend continues worldwide we're going to run out sooner or later.

Take that scenario and look 50 years into the future, add in some socio-economic failures and you have a setting.

>>52954574
Deus Ex: Invisible War

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>>52954490
The Chtorr scenario:
Ayys start terraforming (well, xenoforming, I guess) Earth. They don't make contact, or invade, or anything. They just seed the planet with an ecosystem more to their liking. Super-dangerous and virulent plants and animals rapidly spread, destroying agriculture and the ecosystems we rely on. By the time mankind even understands what's going on, the invasive species are pretty much everywhere, and even feeding the existing human population is just about impossible. In the books, the critters were preceded by alien plagues that killed the majority of the population, but I don't think that's necessary for the scenario. Super-plagues are a dime a dozen, and sufficiently nasty alien invasive species are perfectly adequate for TEOTWAKI.

I've always been partial to Planetarian's "endless acidic rain" scenario.

>>52954490
Portals pop up unpredictably all over Earth, for random periods of time.
Sometimes they lead to other locations on Earth, like a backyard, or the Oval Office, or the Marianas Trench, or halfway to the core of the Earth.
Sometimes they lead to the surfaces of other astronomical objects, or even in the vacuum of space.
Sometimes they lead to parallel Earths.
And sometimes things on the other side can make them stay open indefinitely.

You could do all sorts of fun stuff with that.

>>52954490
global worming. All ice melts, global tempture sharply rises, most of africa and parts of europe are not a gig-desert. Microflora is changede drasticly infested by toxin producing cyanobacteria, most species cant survive the change and die out. Clean drinking water is in short suply and a lot of egsotic shit pops up

>>52963264
>global worming
All worms everywhere become hostile and aggressive towards human life?

>>52963306
sorry forgot to run this through spellcheck, *global warming, but now that i think about it, global worming would be interesting

>>52955711

Nah. I'm actually cribbing from Pratchett.

The basic (horrible) idea is that magic requires three things:
A: a sufficiently powerful magnetic field (not quite up to electromagnet levels)
B: certain specific diamagnetic and paramagnetic states that come from that, as well as the true complexity found in the earth's magnetic field and how it interacts with matter
C: Certain specific mental states that interact with and influence those states with that magnetic field.

Several parts to the reasoning: the mind does in fact produce magnetic fields, and can be influenced by them. Almost all modern 'ghost' investigations with any credibility tend to find weird EM anomalies (the rest infrasound). And the faeries (who are, themselves, just weakened forms of gods great and small) are weak to iron, aka ferromagnetic materials, much in the same way we're weak to black holes.

The whole thing was something I set up to work with the Aftermath system.

>>52954966
My fucking nigga, that book was fantastic. And yet so few people seem to have read it. Wu Shenyang a best crazy uncle

Bacteria evolve to eat plastic, and consume all of it over the course of just a few years.

Augmented reality systems get so widespread and customizable that no one ever has to interact with anything they disagree with ever. Until the system goes down.

Algae developed that consumes oxygen and spreads so rapidly that it significantly lowers the atmospheric oxygen content.

Alternatively, same but CO2 or N or something, drastically increasing oxygen so any kind of combustion is much more aggressive. Fires more like explosions, rust way faster.

A disease that makes people so horny they cannot do anything other than sucking dicks all day.

>>52958797
Science overcomes : labaratories IRL have already created eggs and sperm from seemingly completely unrelated cells in the human body, so creating a fertilized embryo in the lab with only males wouldn't be that tough. The real trick is in getting those embryos to mature. I can imagine implanting them in animals that have had their immune systems suppressed so as not to reject the foreign body. Human babies would be delivered by c-section from herds of sheep or pigs. Or that artificial womb that's been making the headlines recently is made advanced enough to raise a human embryo from day one. Depending on the reason why women disappeared they may remain gone, with humanity become a single gender race that can only reproduce through SCIENCE!. Or the first generation of new babies might all be female, used as nothing more than breeding stock to repopulate.
How's that for a fuckin' dystopia?

>>52958582

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092106/

>>52955050

Joss Whedon tackled that. Sort of.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379786/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

>>52954692
Calcium aka bones are metal

>>52954490
The plot of Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead.

>>52964613
What is it?

>>52962807
That would actually make for a very interesting setting. Society would collapse for sure, and people would have no access to the accumulated knowledge of the past without the ability to read.

Might be hard to implement though if nobody can communicate with anyone else at all- there'd be no real possibility for a society to exist at all.

>>52966439
Could make for a cool solo RPG, maybe. It'd even be thematically appropriate.

>>52963341
>but now that i think about it, global worming would be interesting
You might enjoy Alpha Centauri.

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>>52954490
Magpies.

Just fucking Magpies.

When looking at real desasters you often notice that most of them happened due to a combination of reasons.
Imagine a strong solar storm hitting earth, causing lots of the electronics to fail and the electeonic network to become defunct due to lack of tranformators, while at the same time an epidemic breaks out. Producing a cure en masse is impossible without electric power, and getting the power net back up is extremely difficult when a lot of your workers are sick/risl getting infected outside.

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>>52954490
Bring back Alium invasions. Semi-covert, mind control and abduction kind, not the hollywood blockbuster city destroying kind.

>>52956826
Oh John Ringo No

>>52954639
>Some enterprising demons think they can trade the souls of the damned for money
Wouldn't that work for history museums? Or religious figures like monks or some shit using their stories of hell to try and teach people something or show that "enlightenment can reach anyone"?

>>52954490
>a spontaneous breakdown of the laws of physics
Why not this? STALKER apocalypse.

I'd take the Mad Max approach. Global fuel shortages leading to the economy free falling, law and order being destabilised and the infrastructure of society falling apart, until one day the power goes out and the rules are thrown out of the window, forcing everyone into a situation where they have to scavenge and plunder what's left or defend what they already have.

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>>52954792
>Tell him to go to Hell

>>52967266
>Tfw, you literally can't use that insult anymore.
>Can't even call someone a devil, demon, or describe them as demonic because those words are the new N-word.
>Tfw, this was the Devil's plan all along.

>>52967307
Isn't that just how they're called, though? How else are you going to refer to them as? The divinely challenged?

>>52954490
>Asteroids
>Volcanos, earthquakes & tsunamis
>Climate change, global freezing, icestorms
>Climate change, global warming, duststorms
>Alien starships
>Alien fauna
>Infernal portals
>...

The list goes on and on

>>52956255
>The declining birthrate finally catches up with us

But that's due to economics and conscious decisions!

>>52963013
No, no, that was one of the 'good' endings.

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>>52959911
>captcha: select books
Black Samurai plz

I had a mini apocalypse where, for about one week, a capital city of the biggest nation on the planet was sealed off from the world, and inside of that city, there was a large white disk floating above the entire thing, randomly shooting down beams of madness and horror on the populace. It was a plot device to explain why the city was busted and why there were some people/things out in the world now with crazy ass powers that aren't covered in any spell for my players to beat up, but I realized it would be pretty cool to see that kind of thing. Just having a group of people fighting undead, when a beam of light passes through you all and half of the undead are fused into one mesh of flesh, some fighters melt on the spot, some people go gibbering mad or catatonic, or anything, really.

>>52967430
Providentially Challenged

>>52954526
Sprinkle in general war/conflict for resources that dial things back to roughly American Western levels of lawlessness.

The rapture happends, only about 4% of the population go to heaven, but the confirmation that that the remaining 94 percent of the population are now in hell creates a breakdown in morals that leads to a mad max esque future.