Hey /tg/, I am working on a setting and I need some ideas. Imagine that there are many "parallel Earths" inhabited by early 21 century humans. A group of beings with basically unlimited power create cycles during which a world suffers a major technogenic catastrophe (usually nuclear winter) that wipes out local human population after which they get cloned back up while autonomous terraformers fix the damage and make their best effort to hide evidence of what happened. When the local humanity refuses or is incapable to wipe itself out these creatures cause random calamity that kills most if not all locals and if some survive makes it impossible to rebuild. They do that to harvest souls or something, it is not important. What is important is the final apocalypse caused directly by these beings. It is supposed to be as if they have a competition in who can wipe out humanity in the most creative fashion. After making up a bunch of worlds jam packed with predators that can rip open a tank, deadly diseases that kill within hours and remain active for centuries, worlds flooded with toxic gasses, corrosive liquids miles deep, glassed, frozen, robbed from atmosphere, retuced to fine dust, absorbed by ever growing piles of flesh, turned into Venus- like greenhouses and a bunch of others I ran out of ideas. So i need ideas, ideas for apocalylses.
Rules are simple:
1) Starting condition: 'modern' humanity on Earth
2) Few or no humans must survive. If they do they must not be able to recreate technological civilization usually due to environment hostility and/or lack of usable resources. Survival of the rest of biosphere is irrelevant.
3) No limits on technology or literal magic. Go wild
4) These beings consider humans no more than cattle and their refusal to die in a cycle as worst offense they could possibly do. The more horrifying it is to be on the receiving end the better.
5) Bonus points if it would be interesting to explore several hundred years down the road
I guess I'll start. A device that slowly disrupts chemical bonds in organic carbon based molecules is introduced into the world. Living creatures start feeling sick, eventually dropping dead after which their bodies rapidly deteriorate into dust in matter of hours. Result is a sterile world filled with dry bone carcasses of beings that once inhabited it and choking dust storms almost constantly roll across the wastelands.
>>55364426
Crust of earth removed intact, internal mantle used to create a new earth while the broken and inhabited shell collapses into a solar-radiation scoured vacuum fragments. Some poor fools in sealed bunkers might survive a little while until resources run out.
As the shell falls apart, you get massive plates of rock and ice drifting about inside the hollow shell and outside it. Some frozen/burnt ruins of human civilization yet remain, and of course there's corpses floating in the void everywhere.
>>55364426
Humans become infertile.
>>55364426
>>55365694
Counterpoint: Humans become hyperfertile, fully maturing three years after birth, their lifespan is reduced to twelve years, they gain an insatiable urge to have intercourse, with an almost total likelihood of insemination regardless of precautions, having a three month pregnancy with a 50% chance to produce twins, 25% chance to produce triplets, 10% chance to produce quadruplets, 10% chance to produce quintuplets, and only a 5% chance to produce single births.
Bam, human life is worth less than nothing and the entities get to watch humanity's population exponentially explode while they literally rip each other apart over scraps in a global, cannibalistic orgy.
>>55366683
If you like that mixed with horror/where those things are the villains, check out Crossed. Hyperviolent bloody orgies are the norm there.
>>55364426
The combine invades and there's no Gordon Freeman in this parallel earth
>>55364426
Warhammer 40k Chaos discovers earth, and the world is slowly torn apart by eldritch fanatical cults and is eventually consumed by numberless daemonic hordes. For the sake of balance, the Chaos Gods are exponentially weaker than their 40k counterparts, and require years of time and widespread corruption to build up their strength.
>>55368602
The leaked HL3 plot notes show that even with Freeman, Earth can't beat the Combine.
>>55364426
Assuming the big bads have an essentially limitless amount of power:
>An entropy generator creates a universal speed limit. Nothing, but nothing, can travel faster than 100 miles per hour.
>Days are extremely long, same with nights.
>Boolets, light, the planet, the speed of air molecules, electrons in an atom; all of these reach the top speed of 100 but no more.
I'm not sure of the ramifications, but I like the sound of it. I assume stuff like combustion and evaporation might be fucked as well.
>>55367962
>check out Crossed
Or don't, you'll thank me later.
>>55364426
Evil empire plants a gravity inducing machine in the core of the earth. Gravity slowly, but steadily, increases until everything starts to slowly crack apart and exhaust itself. For a short time everyone actually gets stronger, then it all falls apart bit by inexorable bit.
World is later found with the machine at a very high, but stalled setting that has started to crush and condense the mantle while few or no humans have survived.
>>55364426
I literally ran this for about 4 years spanning 3 concecular campaings, invilving a jungle, desert and a swamp zones.
Without the strange soul harvesting creaturs, and autorepairing teraformation.
Pic realated, one of the monsters(mutated humans, but they never knew) from the alterantive universe where there was a bilogogical virus disaster.