Somewhere - no, everywhere - the earth trembles. This is not an earthquake, the planet itself is shaking very slightly. If the party is near an active volcano, they see this, otherwise the perspective shifts to a poor sucker near a volcano somewhere. Animals flee away from it. They are followed by a series of increasingly fearsome monsters. A hand grips the rim of the volcano. The primordial spirit of earth and fire, worshiped and sacrificed to for millennia, crawls from its home. Standing upon the naked earth, it points to the sky. In the noon, a star becomes visible, shining more brightly than the sun. The volcano spirit pupates, splitting in half. With a scream like the crashing of continents and a blast that levels the ground for miles, it explodes upwards, achieving escape velocity. The being of magma streaks towards that bright star. It grows dim, and disappears.
Other stars become visible around the world, regardless of time of day. Each star is the heavenly representation of a spirit; this has always been known. Everywhere, beings worshiped as deities in their own right look towards their stars and prepare to depart the planet. Sylvan creatures look from the nighted glades. Supernatural beasts of the wide desert shake the dunes off their backs. The cult-gods in caverns beneath the greatest city in the world tear their way to the surface. One by one, spirits of every size and level of power, variously called demons and angels, all ascend to the skies. Some stop briefly to speak to their most devoted. Goodbye they say, and thanks for all the prayers. Within two hours of the first tremors, there are no more stars in the sky.
That is when Cthon awakes.
The sentient power source in the earth’s core has been waking up for the last ten thousand years. The spirits have been trying, and failing to keep it slumbering. With its awakening inevitable, the spirits leave to save their own hides.
In that moment, Cthon’s supersentience tears through the planetary psyche. A third of the sentient population (humans, animals, most plants, some of the larger fungal colonies) have their astral selves forcibly ripped from their bodies. Most don’t make it back in. Another third of the planet goes immediately and irreversibly insane. The remaining third maintains their sanity, at the cost of immense torment and pain. Five hours from the tremors the world is one part comatose, one part mad and one part suffering horrendously.
In the heavens beyond, in the void between planetary rings, among asteroids and comets, the Five True Gods of Man battle outsiders, as they have for ten thousand years. Their ancient enemies abruptly disappear. In an instant, they have realized there is nothing left to fight over. For the first time since their ascension, the True Gods turn their full attention to the planet.
From each of the planetary poles, Cthon bursts out. For hundreds of miles about each, the matter of the Earth is ejected in a cone. Geometric smoke sparking in colors beyond human senses floods out. Tayv, Goddess of Human Life, Tubul, God of Just Death, Karn, God of the Deep Ocean, Saris, Goddess of Knowledge and the Skies, and Jalla, God of Dreams and Magic, prepare to battle the being. Eight hours from the first tremor, the True Gods are utterly destroyed by its passing.
The Moon, caretaker of the Earth, shifts within herself to trap Cthon. It grasps the Moon and shears her in two. From her carcass, Osis appears. Osis, the Cosmic Child, who seeded first life on the planet when Cthon slumbered a hundred million years ago, who elevated the Five with a fragment of His power. He takes a colossal human form hewn from star-silver and void-black. He bathes in the power of the Moon, His most steadfast ally and oldest friend. With a blade shaped from a still-spinning neutron star, he attacks.
Cthon rips out His heart.
Unopposed, Cthon eats the sun. The power gained allows it to undergo rapid growth. It was a spore, around which a planet formed, billions of years ago. Now, millions such spores blow into the wide cosmos to begin the cycle anew.
Twelve hours since the first tremor, humanity is decimated, the powerful spirits we appealed to and appeased are gone, our defenders against the Outside are shattered and the Outside is no longer interested in us. The being responsible for creating life as we know it was curb-stomped by the galactic equivalent of a dandelion. The sun is gone, and within a day of the tremors, the Earth has frozen over.
Night fails to care.
What the fuck just happened?
***
Other stars become visible around the world, regardless of time of day. Each star is the heavenly representation of a spirit; this has always been known. Everywhere, beings worshiped as deities in their own right look towards their stars and prepare to depart the planet. Sylvan creatures look from the nighted glades. Supernatural beasts of the wide desert shake the dunes off their backs. The cult-gods in caverns beneath the greatest city in the world tear their way to the surface. One by one, spirits of every size and level of power, variously called demons and angels, all ascend to the skies. Some stop briefly to speak to their most devoted. Goodbye they say, and thanks for all the prayers. Within two hours of the first tremors, there are no more stars in the sky.
That is when Cthon awakes.
The sentient power source in the earth’s core has been waking up for the last ten thousand years. The spirits have been trying, and failing to keep it slumbering. With its awakening inevitable, the spirits leave to save their own hides.
In that moment, Cthon’s supersentience tears through the planetary psyche. A third of the sentient population (humans, animals, most plants, some of the larger fungal colonies) have their astral selves forcibly ripped from their bodies. Most don’t make it back in. Another third of the planet goes immediately and irreversibly insane. The remaining third maintains their sanity, at the cost of immense torment and pain. Five hours from the tremors the world is one part comatose, one part mad and one part suffering horrendously.
In the heavens beyond, in the void between planetary rings, among asteroids and comets, the Five True Gods of Man battle outsiders, as they have for ten thousand years. Their ancient enemies abruptly disappear. In an instant, they have realized there is nothing left to fight over. For the first time since their ascension, the True Gods turn their full attention to the planet.
From each of the planetary poles, Cthon bursts out. For hundreds of miles about each, the matter of the Earth is ejected in a cone. Geometric smoke sparking in colors beyond human senses floods out. Tayv, Goddess of Human Life, Tubul, God of Just Death, Karn, God of the Deep Ocean, Saris, Goddess of Knowledge and the Skies, and Jalla, God of Dreams and Magic, prepare to battle the being. Eight hours from the first tremor, the True Gods are utterly destroyed by its passing.
The Moon, caretaker of the Earth, shifts within herself to trap Cthon. It grasps the Moon and shears her in two. From her carcass, Osis appears. Osis, the Cosmic Child, who seeded first life on the planet when Cthon slumbered a hundred million years ago, who elevated the Five with a fragment of His power. He takes a colossal human form hewn from star-silver and void-black. He bathes in the power of the Moon, His most steadfast ally and oldest friend. With a blade shaped from a still-spinning neutron star, he attacks.
Cthon rips out His heart.
Unopposed, Cthon eats the sun. The power gained allows it to undergo rapid growth. It was a spore, around which a planet formed, billions of years ago. Now, millions such spores blow into the wide cosmos to begin the cycle anew.
Twelve hours since the first tremor, humanity is decimated, the powerful spirits we appealed to and appeased are gone, our defenders against the Outside are shattered and the Outside is no longer interested in us. The being responsible for creating life as we know it was curb-stomped by the galactic equivalent of a dandelion. The sun is gone, and within a day of the tremors, the Earth has frozen over.
Night fails to care.
What the fuck just happened?
***
Based on Arnold K.’s take on a post-Cthulhu apocalypse, this is my campaign world after the end. Frankly, it’s pretty mild as apocalypses go. Probably a Class 5 according to TVTropes. Of course, there are some more interesting wrinkles.
Like in Arnold’s world, volcanoes become the new centers of life. Humans and other sapient beings move into underground caverns nearby them, and bring as many useful life forms as the can with them. The ejection of Cthon was a messy affair, and a few globules of its power are still around, hence the volcanoes. Wizards may be able to use these as the cores of new cities, generating heat and light. Shards of moonstone have been falling to the ground ever since, and are valuable for both their metallic and magical properties.
The few sentiences that made it back into their bodies after being blasted out are now able to walk between the astral and material planes at will, and have new abilities on the side. These people, assuming they don’t get eaten before waking up, survive the next few months of cannibalism, and don’t get hunted down in mobs, become the prophets of new religions, now that the Gods are dead. Most of the ones you will interact with will be humans or demihumans, but by sheer mass there are more of these astralites in the animal and plant worlds. Somewhere, a psychic ant queen has united all the world’s ants into a supernation, currently at war with the psychic fungal colony that covers most of the remaining planet.
Also, the astral plane is much more important than it once was. Remember all those ejected consciousnesses? Where once the astral plane was a hazy world of half-dreams and unconscious projections, it now has hundreds of billions of permanent residents, a whole ecosystem equivalent to a third of the original planetary biomass.
Maybe some of the spirits stayed, unwilling to leave. Maybe some came back, after Cthon left. What effects they would have suffered it completely up in the air, but perhaps some adventurous youths climbs from their cave to see the frozen surface, and spy a lone star in the night sky. They travel by kite-pulled ice sled in the direction of that star like winter-punk biblical magi, seeking a creature that could well become the god of the new world. Hell, that’s a solid adventure hook right there.
There’s also the matter of spirits that couldn’t leave. Hell got pretty well emptied out that day, but there must have been some beings of power from the old days, likely malevolent, that were sealed in a can millennia ago by great heroes. Maybe Set the serpent-demon, maybe a lich or other such nasty. If cults would be trying to release them back into the world back when it was whole, then there’s going to be a rush to find and unseal them now that the world has gone to shit and there’s a power vacuum.
Some will be trying to harness and control the power of such beings, others just looking for something greater than themselves, that they can worship in exchange for protection. Those creatures will find the world on a silver platter, assuming more than one of them wasn’t released at once (hello adventure hook). What would life be like under the lich-king after the apocalypse? It might well be preferable to stumbling about on one’s own, dodging grisly demise at every turn. Then again, is service really preferable to death?
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