>Worldbuilding thread this
>Worldbuilding thread that.
>Never a World DESTROYING thread.

How does your setting end? Does your god get pissed off and smack the shit out of your universe? Does an evil planet killing entity eat/drink all of reality for lunch? Does your political heads go full retard and unleash the Big red button? Does your population get some horrible disease that wipes out all life?
>Inb4 My setting is foreva tho!
Bullshit Nothing lasts forever. Soon we will all be dust and forgotten memories. If your setting doesn't have that it is unrealistic and therefore immersion breaking and therefore shit.

>>95903276 (OP)
Theoretically just like ours. It's a sci-fi setting with mostly the same rules, besides a bit carved out for FTL.
But the human race is going to be in for a hard time when the openly not!Qu show up. They are on a galactic migratory circuit of the Milky Way and they will bring things back to how they they left it the last time around by force.

>D&D3.5
>PCs had recently become gods (it was a really long campaign) and established their portfolios
>so of course time for a war of all the gods plus ones from other settings like FR and Greyhawk that I hadn't been using
>setting is destroyed in the process, PCs and the few other remaining gods create a new setting
>next time I ran a long campaign, did it in that world, one of the players made a cleric of one of the previous game's gods, etc
My only regret is that the war itself wasn't that interesting, other than me describing the world getting fucked up occasionally as some of the more 'important' gods were killed and shit started getting unstable
Them choosing their targets was the most fun part
>and yes, I know I'm the idiot for responding earnestly to these low-effort prompt threads

>>95903317
at the risk of sounding like john bumpington, tell me more

>>95903276 (OP)
Afterlife collapses into reality from too many dead souls weighing the whole thing down, not helped by necromancers damaging it by doing their dirty business. All that remains after this is mad specters wandering the ruins of a world they used to belong to.

>>95903276 (OP)
Reality is literally destroyed through propaganda and ideology and I do mean literally, as in a mechanical-spiritual plague designed to destroy any kind of energy not aligned with said ideology, which also fucked over and destroyed its creators and users in the process because what could go wrong amirite

>>95903276 (OP)
The gods die out and the magic goes away, leaving behind a world much like our own.

>>95903276 (OP)
>How does your setting end?
Well there's this big scroll kept in the right hand of God, with seven different seals on it, see. And each seal that gets opened by the Lamb draws the earth closer to its inevitable destruction: the upturning of the world, the loosing of the winds, the dominion of War, Conquest, Famine and Death, and the many cataclysms of the blowing of the seven trumpets. Fire and brimstone falling from the heavens, water turned to wormwood, mountains rent and seas upheaved, skies darkened, horrific locust-men plaguing the flesh of the unbelievers, et cetera et cetera. Somehow, despite all these calamities, men will still make rebellion against their God and worship the Beast and the Dragon, so that even after the sufferings of the seven plagues the false prophet will have a mighty army, and he and those who follow him will war against the angels and saints of God in the plain of Armageddon. And only once the last of these wicked men are slain and the beasts cast down into the lake of fire, then shall all the holy ones receive new life, and the old earth be utterly cast away and destroyed, to make room for the new earth.

>>95903276 (OP)
an alien sentient virus has been contaminating earth for years and suddenly wakes up, turining everyone into thin strips of dessicated tissue. game over

i don't know why they do it, and if they are the aliens or just a weapon used by the actual aliens

i dont know how the PC are supposed to stop them and they only have 20 years and aweird time machine to do it

>>95903276 (OP)
>Run campaign where one of the players is basically the anti-Christ, a harbinger of doom, and destined to become an evil abomination that destroys the world.
>Imagine this to be a campaign about the party fighting fate and creating their own future.
>Instead once the truth comes out, the players instantly become paranoid and all try to kill eachother on suspicion of being the harbinger and completely ruin the campaign.
>As DM I already knew which player was supposed to be cursed, but out of spite I declared the last one left standing was it, and the acts of bloodshed and betrayal had awoken and fed the evil inside. Cue a prologue where he becomes a dark lord who plunges the world into centuries of darkness that end with the death of everything.

Yes, it was petty and spiteful of me. I don't care. Players who turn on eachother deserve what they fucking get.

>>95903276 (OP)
>Bullshit Nothing lasts forever
That's where you're wrong, bucko.

In fact, Nothing is the only thing that doesn't last forever. At the end of times, there will lbe a culling of undesirous aspects of reality (they're alright with that, because they want to not exist). The resulting pattern will be completely harmonious, no suffering or real change (although there may be the sensation of change). A perfect high note that doesn't need to be held forever, because forever is now.

I have no idea when this will happen though.

>>95903276 (OP)
a world destroying thread is even more useless than the regular worldbuilding threads. Good job on reaching a new low?

>>95904687
this less usseless than you fuckface

>>95904804
why so angry lil fella? Why respond to me over all the people posting in relatively good faith?

>>95903276 (OP)
Man ascends to godhood by merging with the spirit of the machine.

>>95903276 (OP)
Man invents the god-machine, which optimizes magic so hard that it uses up all the fabric of reality. Without reality, there is nothing to sustain unreality, magic disappears, the god-machine's spell stops existing and the universe now has zero dimensions.

With all of existence compressed into literally zero space, the pressure mounts, building towards something...

>>95903276 (OP)
I had an idea where a bunch of cataclysmic world defining plots happen all at once, albeit independent of each other, like a ritual that would create a wrathful new god, a great and terrible sorcery that would flood the world with Necromancy, goblins ruining everything, and hell opening up all over the world allowing the forces of hell free access to the material plane. While some of these might be stopped in time, others would prevail and the world would enter a time of Armageddon one way or another.
I call the campaign "Sinister Synchronicity"

>>95910038
I had a similar one, except the gimmick was that a bunch of organizations similar to the SCP had independently tried to basically seal off and contain every single potential threat or cause of Armageddon in their facilities, although the organization heads eventually lost sight of that and decided trying to study all these world-ending threats for their own political means or to empower themselves.

Only trouble is that when you have all those world-ending threats in one single place, there's only so much you can do before one of those threats escapes and/or sets off the rest. Only now instead of separately, they're all going off at once. And now openly rampaging and fighting against each other for the privilege of ending existence, while humanity is stuck in the middle paying for their hubris.

>>95903276 (OP)
One of my PCs will become God, potentially destroying the world in a fit of despair or remaking it in their own image. Or one of their NPC counterparts will do it, ushering in a terrible new age. Possibly the PCs kill the NPC, but refuse to take on the divine mantle themselves, in which case the world will persist for a time, but will slowly succumb to entropy.

God, I really want to get back to that campaign, but we had to take a long hiatus due to real-life stuff.

>>95903276 (OP)
Covetous nations went and killed the Soul of the Earth, a manifestation responsible for recycling the souls of living creatures through a cycle of birth, death, reconstitution of the soul, and rebirth. The end result now is the pool of souls which new life springs from has become stagnant and is decaying.

Normally, souls are released from the living on death, flow back to the earth, and then they're mixed in with all the others before being reconstituted and imbued back into living creatures on birth. It's sort of like pouring a lot of liquid together, then taking out a cupful again--it's mixed together and creates something unique each time as things are added and subtracted. Instead, souls don't mix now, they just return to bodies as they are, except because they're not reconstituted, they're all fraying and coming apart leading to life that's deficient.

Life is born sickly or stillborn now, and sometimes people die and find themselves getting back up, the soul has nowhere to go so it just returns to the body in a sort of undeath. Some people are able to keep themselves together through sheer force of will, but eventually even they will fall apart. This has led to a surge of necromancy and "alternative" forms of life as people try to keep their souls intact, along with spirit vampires that repair themselves with other souls.

The world's going to go out with a whimper most likely. One of the players had the idea to travel back to the corpse of the Soul of the Earth and attempt to fix souls with the stagnant pool, I'm thinking of making it successful except it produces anti-souls, something completely twisted but still capable of filling the same function as the previous, sans that it must be imbued to creatures unnaturally.

>>95903276 (OP)
If things go well, entropy.

If things go poorly, a self-replicating swarm of nano machines housing the quantum/digitized consciousness of the Last Emperor of Humanity will escape from its containment zone around Mars via an advanced FTL drive to consume the universe as it views literally all other life as stealing energy and resources that belong to it.

>>95911056
Is there any actual way to quantify if a state's entropy has increased, or is it purely down to human perception

>>95911606

I mean, you can quantify it, though it's generally not useful outside of some thermodynamics maths. The theoretical end state is that everything sort of descends into an equally distributed slurry of energy such that the universe is in its most "disordered" state as stars eventually burn out and gravity slowly breaks down stellar objects, but that's at timeframe that makes the current theoretical age of the universe look like seconds.

>>95912389
Ok, go on then - explain why the right has less entropy than the left. The idea is that it's less likely for the right to occur, but is that /actually/ true? Or are we just assuming that the left is more common because it looks random to us?

>>95903276 (OP)
My players stop showing up

>>95914166

As much as I want to rehash a semester's worth of thermodynamics, I will do my best to explain.

So the idea is that, in a given system (which for the purposes of this explanation is perfectly sealed and essentially is the only thing in existence), there is a set amount of energy. This is the 1st law of thermodynamics.

Now, inside that system, the energy is not necessarily equally distributed, which we as humans perceive as differences in temperature, electric charge, the effect of gravity (potential energy), and so on. As time goes on, the average state of that system tends towards such a state that the energy gradient approaches 0, or that there's no difference in energy throughout the various states of the system.

In the image you provided, let's just say that those are all particles with a positive electric charge with equal magnitude (since generally electromagnetic forces are stronger than the other inter-particle forces, but that's a different conversation). The option on the right is pretty much one of the highest-energy states because the particles are packed closely together, and there are not many other arrangements of particles that have a similar energy state.

However, when the particles are all spread out like on the left, there are significantly more arrangements that can be made that have the same energy state. Since there's less of an energy gradient across all those possible states of the system on the left, it has higher entropy. Of course, this is only considering a small system where we are only considering electromagnetic forces, and of course there's no perfectly sealed system that is smaller than the universe.

I hope that's relatively understandable, but thermo is not really my specialty.

>>95914624
Ah, so the metric is distance (I guess adjacency can be considered a crude representation of interaction/energy transfer). That makes sense. Especially given that to be more accurate to rely life, you'd have to be increasing the system's area (or at least the travel time between spaces)

Thanks for the explanation, I appreciate it

>>95914836

In terms of things like energy from same polarity electric charges interacting (as in the example), yes. In terms of thermal energy/temperature, a higher entropy system is just a uniform temperature throughout instead of having hot & cold spots. In terms of potential energy/gravitational pull, it's where everything is at the lowest possible potential energy (i.e. why objects always fall down as far as possible and never fall "up" or just hang in mid-air unless being acted upon by an outside force.)

The temperature thing is why it's also called the "heat death" of the universe, since in theory the maximum entropy state of the universe is fairly warm instead of being absolute zero, since it is about being as equally disordered everywhere instead of having some zones of high order and other zones of low order.

There's a reason why the second law of thermodynamics (entropy either remains the same or increases) is generally the one that gets skipped over the most in high school physics and more focus is given to laws 1 and 3, since those ones tend to make more intuitive sense than entropy does, especially since so many different things contribute to what we observe as entropy and it's hard to make an intuitive example that includes as many forces as possible, since for example the force of gravity counteracts the tendency for particles with the same charge to repel each other, so there is a point (theoretically) where the particles being too far apart is more "ordered" than the bunched up cube of particles since gravity is overcoming the electromagnetic repulsion (since electromagnetic forces, while stronger up close, fall off much faster. The only explanation we have for that right now is that is what has been observed experimentally / is a simply a fundamental property of those forces)

Entropy is weird.

>setting setting setting
Thread still sucks.