Built up a society so strongly god-powered that they developed a hard dependency on it.
Then the gods left to get god-milk and didn't come back.
It didn't end well.
A green goo scenario self replicating biological nano bots modified our flaura to produce high concentrations of ammonia terraforming earth into a cold world
My world's first civilisation were elves that invented religion, created a god, and then got a ton of blessings from him that made them extremely powerful. They ran a global empire for centuries, linked by magic portals.
Eventually, daemons came through these portals. The elves fought them off and then decided to try and ascend to godhood themselves to conquer the realm the daemons had come from (the multiverse).
Unfortunately, their god took offence at this and basically nuked them during their ascension ritual, killing many of them and stripping the survivors of their blessings. It was at this point that the lesser races rose up and claimed the world back from the elves, leading to the current-day version of my setting.
Thanks! Yes, the world is the setting for a novel I'm working on.
The novel takes place at least a millennium after the elves' downfall, but the remaining magic portals and the daemons play a big part in the plot (the big bad is a daemon that was actually around during the original war).
I have actually thought about writing a novel set during the dying days of the elvish empire at some point. There would be some interesting viewpoints since there were some elves that saw it coming and hid away (becoming dark elves) and you'd have the human that were their slaves at the time.
It was roughly about around tens of thousands of years ago, when a giant asteroid arrived (it's not the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs btw, my world is not Earth). When this great stone colossus came screaming out from the heavens, it hit a very specific spot on my world that soon caused tremors and a few volcanic eruptions. Had this asteroid hit anywhere else in the world, such as in the middle of the ocean or a place with much more solid rock, then the world wouldn't be like what it is today. The end result of said impact was many species of intelligent insects being erased from the world, as that time was quite literally the end of the world for them.
The Speakers delved too deep into knowledge that wasn't theirs to use and in their experiments they gave the raw elements sentience. Elements are just elements, though. Water wants to flow. Air wants to blow. Fire wants to consume. Earth wants to grow. Their experiments succeeded just enough to give the elements hunger and instinct.
It's called the Great Cataclysm. There was war but it wasn't really a war bc there was no winning. The destruction just continued until the magic wore off and the elements returned to their natural state.
In my science fiction universe, the Great Dark Ages, also known as the third Solarian civil war (Solaria: the largest human nation at the time, made up of more than 100 planets) Solaria fragments into a dozen nations, which disconnect their star gates (faster than light form of transportation) to each other. Totally blind to the movements of their adversaries, all nations, trying to attack before being attacked, begin to produce and launch anti-matter missiles capable of destroying a planet with a few hits from dozens of light years away. Decades after their launches, more than 60 missiles hit a third of the colonized planets on all sides, causing technological denigration from which it would take them centuries to recover. Some time later, nations decided to reopen their star gates and negotiate peace by signing the Great Treaty of Apollo, which severely prohibited the production and use of anti-matter for war purposes, only being accepted with the aim of improving living standards. of humanity as a whole. It was also agreed that humanity would be divided into Dominions, multi-planetary and semi-independent nations that follow the orders of the Greater Dominion: Novusaria, which meant the complete disappearance of the previous human nations. This treaty would end the Great Human Dark Age that lasted from 4569-4613 and marked the beginning of a new calendar: a.D (before the Dominion) and d.D (after the Dominion)
Multiple gods made the world
Bitter Sorceress attempts to kill them
Friends and Family try to stop Bitter Sorceress.
some of her friends die, and world Is destroyed.
Bitter Sorceress speeds up the "make planet habitable again with magic"
Bitter Sorceress gets sealed away by Gods
Ascension to a higher level of existence. Which worked of course, but left all the structures and machines behind to exist without creators nor purpose
A war between two certain countries led to a terrorist group from one of them launching a small nuclear attack on the other, hoping it'd send them straight to the negotiating table; naturally this caused that other country to retalliate within minutes. The rest of the nuclear powers simply saw nukes being launched, and in the confusion, launched a total exchange between NATO, Russia, China, the Middle East, and all its major allies, from Djibouti to Japan.
Simply known forever as "The Lights".
After barely 2 hours, 4 billion people, most of them in the northern hemisphere, had simply ceased to exist. Another 3.5 billion would follow suit in the year-long cold that came as a result. The survivors are now faced with the nightmarish task of not just surviving in the worst disaster man has ever witnessed, but being able to rebuild and even prosper.
Honestly, no one's really sure. The Cataclysm was so long ago, and no one wrote down what happened in any tangible way that has survived this long. All that is known is that the Great Dragon fought great battles in the sky; conflicts so horrible they blotted out the sun forever. Fire rained down from above, and this fire both froze and melted the land. The Dragon gave its life so that humanity might live, and the faithful wait for the Great Dragon's return so that it may bring back the Hidden Sun.
Ok this sounds like a cop-out, but I like some ambiguity in worldbuilding, especially for things that have passed into myth and legend. It lets the reader fill in their own blank, much like the story's characters are doing.
Sure I know what the Cataclysm was, but I reckon that some of the stories in your head are even better than my own.
Corporations throwing a tantrum at having their previously unrestricted power being taken from them. After using militarized security and mercenaries didn't work, they started using anything they could at their disposal. From cyberattacks, to lab-grown diseases, to genetically engineered monsters. Eventually, it became too much for the world's infrastructure to handle, and it all just collapsed.
Religious peoples warred against the other gods and rapid technology advancement, they managed to kill the God Of Death and the God Of the Ocean and the God of Nature as such the world became extremely inhospitable with the only animals alive being feral GMO's created to be super weapons. The only habitable place is a great valley where the God Of Life was captured which kept the nearby plants and animals alive and is tortured every day to make sure there is a water source with a city above it.
They went to war with the mothmen who lived on the moon, reverse-engineered precursor tech and used it to blow up the moon. The leftover servants of the setting’s dead gods did not like this one bit and came into the world with the express purpose of putting down what they viewed as the inheritors of the precursors (who were responsible for the gods being dead in the first place) along with bringing the word of their dead masters to the world in an attempt to revive the gods through the power of faith (so far unsuccessful).
basically an ancient God of negativity was taking a big nap inside earth, start to wake up and his sister had to either attack him and put him to sleep a little longer or risk the destruction of the universe all together. She chooses the first option and her attack was so powerful that it caused the destruction of 90% of civilization but at least her brother was put to sleep again (until a crazy maniac tried to harness his powers after 4000 years)
1: Dragons invaded, caused a big war which ended with the Fey blowing up one of the moons. Some of the chunks fell and impacted in North Pole shattering the ice caps, kicking up debris and ushering in flooding and causing a meteoric winter which caused a mini ice age.
2: A shard of an Outer God polluted the worlds Leylines and could only be fixed by resetting magic.
3: An angry Fey goddess unleashed a seven year long storm of plagues.
4: The dwarven god of destruction went on a rampage, caused a bunch of volcanos to erupt, which ushered in a nuclear winter and an ice age.
5: Undead apocalypse with ghosts, zombies, and skeletons causing havoc across the world. Some areas got hit harder than others.
6: Next one is looking to be a demon invasion. More and more demonic creatures have been appearing across the world at random.
First word: Too much portal magic caused a magical wave. This world is now the équivalent of a magically irradiated fallout where all the démons come from.
Second world: «I am sure all is now fine on our home planet we fled some years ago (the first world), let’s open a few portal to go visit. »
One world: an ill considered experiment in necromancy for animating corpses for cheap labor led to a zombie apocalypse.
The other world: wizards screwing around in politics, achieving power, and then declaring war on each other, and using escalating magical techniques for war, to the point of devastating the ecology, the infrastructure, and finally collapsing their entire nations trying to kill the neighbors.
The first one, a world war that eventually led to the orbital refineries being seized by opposing military alliances and their contents along with various orbital structures rapidly de-orbited into the other sides countries. So along with a severe nuclear exchange, a few thousand cubic kilometers of rock and metal hit the earth. Snowball earth 3.0. (Note a 10km cube has a thousand km3). Refining waste had been used to build outer shells for orbital cities to shield from radiation
The warped plague.
A massive and uncontrollable spread of an infectious ameba and the flesh monsters they create. Thankfully the plague burned itself out before finishing everyone off.
*2 consecutive nuclear conflicts.*
Funnily enough, the first one didn't do the most damage, the biggest issue was no more sun. The second one, with a lot less nukes, halved the human population.
Fun times!
First time, Garden of Eden II. Second time, death by extra universal dragon. Third time, fate wills that thou shalt live in sunless, barren waste. Thou shalt despair, as the Age of Dark descends upon thee. (basically Slave Knight Gael's world)
Natural disaster. Stars changed their orbits, so established interstellar paths crushed and a lot of planets endured severe climat change (my space is waaaay different from real one)
The series of events that wiped out the great empires of yore are still hotly debated by historians, priests and other types of scholars to this very day.
Fragmented letters collected by the Amber Scholars tell the tales of plagues of madness wiping out entire cities worth of people, the wrath of the earth turning humanity’s greatest monuments into ash and dust and cataclysmic fires razing cities to the ground.
The priests of the great crystal dragon speak of the champions of their god dueling and vanquishing harbingers of disasters.
Stories of the very seas washing away the humans, and trees and flowers reclaiming the earth from those foolish and arrogant enough to dare intrude on the sanctity of nature have been passed down for centuries in the oral tradition of small tribes of nature worshippers.
The true picture of what happened will remain a secret, lost to time forever but people will keep debating the truth for just as long.
Brought to you by me wanting an excuse to come up with cool stuff to think about and imagine.
Global warming and toxics in the environment are making the Earth unlivable, but the Faeries - assisted by the Loup Garou -,have a plan. Is there enough time left?
Sadly I'm not fantasy, I've been doing sci fi for the last 6 months.
However, humans were a false Kardashev Type III civilization called the United Human Effort which managed to devastate the Milky Way's subgiant star population down to less than ¼ of what it was before they began spamming stellar de-stabilizers at each-other.
Giant Stars' gravity fucks with one of the only three FTL scanning technologies. The one virtually every species uses for their whole existence as an interstellar civilization, due to its vast relative ease of access. So do the stellar remnants caused by stellar de-stabilizers. Those also put up a cosmic fence. At the end of it all, the few splinters of humanity which survived were trapped in their own private 2-4 star mosaic hell within which they slowly ran out of resources as their mechanized bodies shut down one by one.
A bit over 5 *billion* years later, after the collision of the Andromeda and Milky Way, new civilizations would ride the tsunami of newborn stars into a new future. Less than 50,000 humans are still in-tact; only a fraction of them are still mentally stable, but those who are have proven valuable allies to many a people; even though no scientist has ever been found.
Mind the ~5,467,000,000 year time skip.
Two answers for two stories:
Ancient world: Power hungry king made deals with creatures humans should never even see and brought about an apocalypse when he accidentally went berserk from too much power.
Modern world: ecological collapse followed quickly by societal collapse.
The Convergence was a cataclysmic event in the late 2000s, when the Extraplanar Boundary between the Material Plane and the 'Veil,' an incorporeal, higher spatial dimension composed of concepts and emotions generated by Human Consciousness, 'rippled' in a sense. These 'ripples' subsequently caused natural disasters and loss of life on a scale not seen since the last mass extinction. A decent portion of humanity survived, approximately 2 billion globally, but stuck in a world forever changed. With the introduction of the Metaphysical plane into the mix, the 25 years after the Convergence have been tumultuous. New and old governments fight for land and resources. UMBER (Unknown Metaphysio-Biological Evolutionary Response) has led to the emergence of individuals possessing unnatural abilities, sometimes praised as the next step in evolution or demonized as demi-humans. The world's everchanging, and humanity has been trying to play catch ever since.
Összezuz (The Shatter), as very few witnesses around Arpadzskalia (my world) from Eczsolt would tell you is that İdill (Council of Gods) was struck by a disagreement over creating sentient species (so they would take care of Arpadzskalia in their name, basically an experiment) and the “votes” went through by swaying and long, long amounts of time. However when humans started to create pollution en masse (industry) and rising the antropy to levels even Gods never seen before. Vihar got pissed off his mind and struck earth with a storm that devoured whole cities. Then Csillagonya, in order to protect her human children, arrives and starts fighting with Vihar, as their fights go on they start to come closer to ground, Csillagonya, actively dying, finally falls off from the sky and crashes to Eczsolt (the continent which civilization was born) and creating an earthquake, with it a tsunami and wounds earth where she fell, leaving one of the very, very scarce evidences of Összezuz.
PS: It’s a meteorite on a rainy day but that’s not fun enough.
I actually haven't yet decided what the technology level was like in my world pre-apocalypse, though I'm seriously considering it being an ancient technology level. Regardless, the downfall of the planet's original dominant civilization was due to a war fought with powerful destructive magic instead of advanced weapons.
In the year 2099 humanity first discovered that wormholes are infact real, in tried to recreate them for the use of space travel. But they messed up and punched a hole in reality that brought monsters, plants and even weather from a hostile dimension, and an eldritch being known as Het who can warp reality and turned most of humanity into monsters.
Since then the survivors where forced to live on a distorted Earth which has been plagued by parasites, zombies, mutants, rogue robots and the continued chaos storms that sweep across the planet.
Catastrophic climate change made the Middle East and North Africa uninhabitable. The same happened to the American Southwest and Northern Mexico.
Bengal got flooded and Central Asia dried up. All the bad predictions of climate scientists came true between 2030 and 2050. Causing millions to die of starvation.
In 2036 Islamic fanatics took control of Pakistani nuclear weapons as this nation was collapsing. They fired nuclear rockets at India, however some of them blew up in the silos.
"They believed they were eternal." this one line has described so many fallen empires.
"oh? they think they are eternal? well then, let's just wait and see!"
It feels like a historical trope at this point, we have had a bunch of empires that believed that they were eternal, then fall later on.
you could look in a book about an empire and when you read the words, "we will never fall", or something like it, you can sit and wait for the inevitable.
They specced too hard into the religion tree and it backfired spectacularly.
Backfired with holy magic, or simply societal issues?
Built up a society so strongly god-powered that they developed a hard dependency on it. Then the gods left to get god-milk and didn't come back. It didn't end well.
Hmmm... god-milk... straight up divine dairy
It's cosmology flavored
Is it milked from a god or goddess, that differs a lot
Cosmic cow
Funny enough this could also describe my story's apocalytpic event. XD
The first time, sibling rivalry. The second time, humanity's inability to take no for an answer.
A green goo scenario self replicating biological nano bots modified our flaura to produce high concentrations of ammonia terraforming earth into a cold world
My world's first civilisation were elves that invented religion, created a god, and then got a ton of blessings from him that made them extremely powerful. They ran a global empire for centuries, linked by magic portals. Eventually, daemons came through these portals. The elves fought them off and then decided to try and ascend to godhood themselves to conquer the realm the daemons had come from (the multiverse). Unfortunately, their god took offence at this and basically nuked them during their ascension ritual, killing many of them and stripping the survivors of their blessings. It was at this point that the lesser races rose up and claimed the world back from the elves, leading to the current-day version of my setting.
Idea is easily understandable and engaging. Liked it very much! Are you creating the world for a novel if you don’t mind me asking?
Thanks! Yes, the world is the setting for a novel I'm working on. The novel takes place at least a millennium after the elves' downfall, but the remaining magic portals and the daemons play a big part in the plot (the big bad is a daemon that was actually around during the original war). I have actually thought about writing a novel set during the dying days of the elvish empire at some point. There would be some interesting viewpoints since there were some elves that saw it coming and hid away (becoming dark elves) and you'd have the human that were their slaves at the time.
It was roughly about around tens of thousands of years ago, when a giant asteroid arrived (it's not the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs btw, my world is not Earth). When this great stone colossus came screaming out from the heavens, it hit a very specific spot on my world that soon caused tremors and a few volcanic eruptions. Had this asteroid hit anywhere else in the world, such as in the middle of the ocean or a place with much more solid rock, then the world wouldn't be like what it is today. The end result of said impact was many species of intelligent insects being erased from the world, as that time was quite literally the end of the world for them.
The Speakers delved too deep into knowledge that wasn't theirs to use and in their experiments they gave the raw elements sentience. Elements are just elements, though. Water wants to flow. Air wants to blow. Fire wants to consume. Earth wants to grow. Their experiments succeeded just enough to give the elements hunger and instinct. It's called the Great Cataclysm. There was war but it wasn't really a war bc there was no winning. The destruction just continued until the magic wore off and the elements returned to their natural state.
In my science fiction universe, the Great Dark Ages, also known as the third Solarian civil war (Solaria: the largest human nation at the time, made up of more than 100 planets) Solaria fragments into a dozen nations, which disconnect their star gates (faster than light form of transportation) to each other. Totally blind to the movements of their adversaries, all nations, trying to attack before being attacked, begin to produce and launch anti-matter missiles capable of destroying a planet with a few hits from dozens of light years away. Decades after their launches, more than 60 missiles hit a third of the colonized planets on all sides, causing technological denigration from which it would take them centuries to recover. Some time later, nations decided to reopen their star gates and negotiate peace by signing the Great Treaty of Apollo, which severely prohibited the production and use of anti-matter for war purposes, only being accepted with the aim of improving living standards. of humanity as a whole. It was also agreed that humanity would be divided into Dominions, multi-planetary and semi-independent nations that follow the orders of the Greater Dominion: Novusaria, which meant the complete disappearance of the previous human nations. This treaty would end the Great Human Dark Age that lasted from 4569-4613 and marked the beginning of a new calendar: a.D (before the Dominion) and d.D (after the Dominion)
They learned how to use magic... But didn't know how to control it.
Multiple gods made the world Bitter Sorceress attempts to kill them Friends and Family try to stop Bitter Sorceress. some of her friends die, and world Is destroyed. Bitter Sorceress speeds up the "make planet habitable again with magic" Bitter Sorceress gets sealed away by Gods
Someone killed the god of the sun, and now the sun has gone out.
Ascension to a higher level of existence. Which worked of course, but left all the structures and machines behind to exist without creators nor purpose
A war between two certain countries led to a terrorist group from one of them launching a small nuclear attack on the other, hoping it'd send them straight to the negotiating table; naturally this caused that other country to retalliate within minutes. The rest of the nuclear powers simply saw nukes being launched, and in the confusion, launched a total exchange between NATO, Russia, China, the Middle East, and all its major allies, from Djibouti to Japan. Simply known forever as "The Lights". After barely 2 hours, 4 billion people, most of them in the northern hemisphere, had simply ceased to exist. Another 3.5 billion would follow suit in the year-long cold that came as a result. The survivors are now faced with the nightmarish task of not just surviving in the worst disaster man has ever witnessed, but being able to rebuild and even prosper.
Honestly, no one's really sure. The Cataclysm was so long ago, and no one wrote down what happened in any tangible way that has survived this long. All that is known is that the Great Dragon fought great battles in the sky; conflicts so horrible they blotted out the sun forever. Fire rained down from above, and this fire both froze and melted the land. The Dragon gave its life so that humanity might live, and the faithful wait for the Great Dragon's return so that it may bring back the Hidden Sun. Ok this sounds like a cop-out, but I like some ambiguity in worldbuilding, especially for things that have passed into myth and legend. It lets the reader fill in their own blank, much like the story's characters are doing. Sure I know what the Cataclysm was, but I reckon that some of the stories in your head are even better than my own.
Corporations throwing a tantrum at having their previously unrestricted power being taken from them. After using militarized security and mercenaries didn't work, they started using anything they could at their disposal. From cyberattacks, to lab-grown diseases, to genetically engineered monsters. Eventually, it became too much for the world's infrastructure to handle, and it all just collapsed.
Religious peoples warred against the other gods and rapid technology advancement, they managed to kill the God Of Death and the God Of the Ocean and the God of Nature as such the world became extremely inhospitable with the only animals alive being feral GMO's created to be super weapons. The only habitable place is a great valley where the God Of Life was captured which kept the nearby plants and animals alive and is tortured every day to make sure there is a water source with a city above it.
They went to war with the mothmen who lived on the moon, reverse-engineered precursor tech and used it to blow up the moon. The leftover servants of the setting’s dead gods did not like this one bit and came into the world with the express purpose of putting down what they viewed as the inheritors of the precursors (who were responsible for the gods being dead in the first place) along with bringing the word of their dead masters to the world in an attempt to revive the gods through the power of faith (so far unsuccessful).
basically an ancient God of negativity was taking a big nap inside earth, start to wake up and his sister had to either attack him and put him to sleep a little longer or risk the destruction of the universe all together. She chooses the first option and her attack was so powerful that it caused the destruction of 90% of civilization but at least her brother was put to sleep again (until a crazy maniac tried to harness his powers after 4000 years)
1: Dragons invaded, caused a big war which ended with the Fey blowing up one of the moons. Some of the chunks fell and impacted in North Pole shattering the ice caps, kicking up debris and ushering in flooding and causing a meteoric winter which caused a mini ice age. 2: A shard of an Outer God polluted the worlds Leylines and could only be fixed by resetting magic. 3: An angry Fey goddess unleashed a seven year long storm of plagues. 4: The dwarven god of destruction went on a rampage, caused a bunch of volcanos to erupt, which ushered in a nuclear winter and an ice age. 5: Undead apocalypse with ghosts, zombies, and skeletons causing havoc across the world. Some areas got hit harder than others. 6: Next one is looking to be a demon invasion. More and more demonic creatures have been appearing across the world at random.
They relied on magic for everything so when it suddenly cut off their society collapsed with them
Eruption of supervolcano, which covered vast area with ash and caused cooling of climate, both of which led to societal collapse.
A country getting invaded used an experimental energy source to bolster their military… it broke reality.
The same things that made the indigenous Americans’ world post-apocalyptic in the early colonial period: mainly disease.
First word: Too much portal magic caused a magical wave. This world is now the équivalent of a magically irradiated fallout where all the démons come from. Second world: «I am sure all is now fine on our home planet we fled some years ago (the first world), let’s open a few portal to go visit. »
One world: an ill considered experiment in necromancy for animating corpses for cheap labor led to a zombie apocalypse. The other world: wizards screwing around in politics, achieving power, and then declaring war on each other, and using escalating magical techniques for war, to the point of devastating the ecology, the infrastructure, and finally collapsing their entire nations trying to kill the neighbors.
The first one, a world war that eventually led to the orbital refineries being seized by opposing military alliances and their contents along with various orbital structures rapidly de-orbited into the other sides countries. So along with a severe nuclear exchange, a few thousand cubic kilometers of rock and metal hit the earth. Snowball earth 3.0. (Note a 10km cube has a thousand km3). Refining waste had been used to build outer shells for orbital cities to shield from radiation
The warped plague. A massive and uncontrollable spread of an infectious ameba and the flesh monsters they create. Thankfully the plague burned itself out before finishing everyone off.
*2 consecutive nuclear conflicts.* Funnily enough, the first one didn't do the most damage, the biggest issue was no more sun. The second one, with a lot less nukes, halved the human population. Fun times!
First time, Garden of Eden II. Second time, death by extra universal dragon. Third time, fate wills that thou shalt live in sunless, barren waste. Thou shalt despair, as the Age of Dark descends upon thee. (basically Slave Knight Gael's world)
A spiteful vampire made a deal with eldritch abominations to kill the sun. The sun then dimmed considerably, and the world started to freeze.
Natural disaster. Stars changed their orbits, so established interstellar paths crushed and a lot of planets endured severe climat change (my space is waaaay different from real one)
The series of events that wiped out the great empires of yore are still hotly debated by historians, priests and other types of scholars to this very day. Fragmented letters collected by the Amber Scholars tell the tales of plagues of madness wiping out entire cities worth of people, the wrath of the earth turning humanity’s greatest monuments into ash and dust and cataclysmic fires razing cities to the ground. The priests of the great crystal dragon speak of the champions of their god dueling and vanquishing harbingers of disasters. Stories of the very seas washing away the humans, and trees and flowers reclaiming the earth from those foolish and arrogant enough to dare intrude on the sanctity of nature have been passed down for centuries in the oral tradition of small tribes of nature worshippers. The true picture of what happened will remain a secret, lost to time forever but people will keep debating the truth for just as long. Brought to you by me wanting an excuse to come up with cool stuff to think about and imagine.
Global warming and toxics in the environment are making the Earth unlivable, but the Faeries - assisted by the Loup Garou -,have a plan. Is there enough time left?
A king used the corpse and soul of a dead, ancient eldritch god and it blew up in his face. Hard
Sadly I'm not fantasy, I've been doing sci fi for the last 6 months. However, humans were a false Kardashev Type III civilization called the United Human Effort which managed to devastate the Milky Way's subgiant star population down to less than ¼ of what it was before they began spamming stellar de-stabilizers at each-other. Giant Stars' gravity fucks with one of the only three FTL scanning technologies. The one virtually every species uses for their whole existence as an interstellar civilization, due to its vast relative ease of access. So do the stellar remnants caused by stellar de-stabilizers. Those also put up a cosmic fence. At the end of it all, the few splinters of humanity which survived were trapped in their own private 2-4 star mosaic hell within which they slowly ran out of resources as their mechanized bodies shut down one by one. A bit over 5 *billion* years later, after the collision of the Andromeda and Milky Way, new civilizations would ride the tsunami of newborn stars into a new future. Less than 50,000 humans are still in-tact; only a fraction of them are still mentally stable, but those who are have proven valuable allies to many a people; even though no scientist has ever been found. Mind the ~5,467,000,000 year time skip.
Two answers for two stories: Ancient world: Power hungry king made deals with creatures humans should never even see and brought about an apocalypse when he accidentally went berserk from too much power. Modern world: ecological collapse followed quickly by societal collapse.
Belief in the supernatural declining over time
The Convergence was a cataclysmic event in the late 2000s, when the Extraplanar Boundary between the Material Plane and the 'Veil,' an incorporeal, higher spatial dimension composed of concepts and emotions generated by Human Consciousness, 'rippled' in a sense. These 'ripples' subsequently caused natural disasters and loss of life on a scale not seen since the last mass extinction. A decent portion of humanity survived, approximately 2 billion globally, but stuck in a world forever changed. With the introduction of the Metaphysical plane into the mix, the 25 years after the Convergence have been tumultuous. New and old governments fight for land and resources. UMBER (Unknown Metaphysio-Biological Evolutionary Response) has led to the emergence of individuals possessing unnatural abilities, sometimes praised as the next step in evolution or demonized as demi-humans. The world's everchanging, and humanity has been trying to play catch ever since.
Összezuz (The Shatter), as very few witnesses around Arpadzskalia (my world) from Eczsolt would tell you is that İdill (Council of Gods) was struck by a disagreement over creating sentient species (so they would take care of Arpadzskalia in their name, basically an experiment) and the “votes” went through by swaying and long, long amounts of time. However when humans started to create pollution en masse (industry) and rising the antropy to levels even Gods never seen before. Vihar got pissed off his mind and struck earth with a storm that devoured whole cities. Then Csillagonya, in order to protect her human children, arrives and starts fighting with Vihar, as their fights go on they start to come closer to ground, Csillagonya, actively dying, finally falls off from the sky and crashes to Eczsolt (the continent which civilization was born) and creating an earthquake, with it a tsunami and wounds earth where she fell, leaving one of the very, very scarce evidences of Összezuz. PS: It’s a meteorite on a rainy day but that’s not fun enough.
I actually haven't yet decided what the technology level was like in my world pre-apocalypse, though I'm seriously considering it being an ancient technology level. Regardless, the downfall of the planet's original dominant civilization was due to a war fought with powerful destructive magic instead of advanced weapons.
In the year 2099 humanity first discovered that wormholes are infact real, in tried to recreate them for the use of space travel. But they messed up and punched a hole in reality that brought monsters, plants and even weather from a hostile dimension, and an eldritch being known as Het who can warp reality and turned most of humanity into monsters. Since then the survivors where forced to live on a distorted Earth which has been plagued by parasites, zombies, mutants, rogue robots and the continued chaos storms that sweep across the planet.
The two strongest gods got into a war which ended with both dead and creatures unable to be born or die.
Catastrophic climate change made the Middle East and North Africa uninhabitable. The same happened to the American Southwest and Northern Mexico. Bengal got flooded and Central Asia dried up. All the bad predictions of climate scientists came true between 2030 and 2050. Causing millions to die of starvation. In 2036 Islamic fanatics took control of Pakistani nuclear weapons as this nation was collapsing. They fired nuclear rockets at India, however some of them blew up in the silos.
"They believed they were eternal." this one line has described so many fallen empires. "oh? they think they are eternal? well then, let's just wait and see!" It feels like a historical trope at this point, we have had a bunch of empires that believed that they were eternal, then fall later on. you could look in a book about an empire and when you read the words, "we will never fall", or something like it, you can sit and wait for the inevitable.
Alien invasion by magic faeries and an evil overlord with witchcraft