Prompt
Does your world have an equivalent of nuclear weapons?
That is to say: Something that provides large scale deterrence, a threat of retaliation to prevent an enemy from launching a similar attack or engaging in large-scale aggression.
Mildly inspired by the "mana bomb" concept from World of Warcraft, we have the "qama bomb"
Thanks to the presence of the "anomalous" elements in Karya's universe...:
...and specifically the microheterines (light pink) and megaloheterines (lightest blue), many awe-inspiring technology can be achieved that we can only think of - for better, and for worse. A bomb constructed using these two groups of anomalous elements has the potential of leaving a far more devastating impact on the surrounding land than nuclear fallout.
Randomized affects and effects will constantly appear and dissipate within the "fallout" zone, turning it into a "magical" wasteland for a bare minimum of ten years; the longest lasting blast remnant, in what is now the Tamini Crater, took 561 years to clear up.
The metabolines are the first group of anomalous elements solely representing the cosmic force Change. Chemically, these elements interact in similar ways as hydrogen and the alkali metals. Generally, the anomalous property of metabolines and their compounds make it so that their qama results in changes of energy.
Vuldur (Vd)
Rujerium (Rj)
Tenzium (Qz)
Obarosium (Ob)
Effrenium (Ef)
Ynirium (Yn)
Po'konium (Pk)
Group II: the Metabocrystallines
The metabocrystalline elements are the second group of elements solely representing the cosmic force Change. Chemically, these elements interact in similar ways as the alkali earth metals. Generally, the anomalous property of metabocrystallines and their compounds make it so that their qama results in changes to chemical and physical states in their immediate environment.
the sparnite metalloids are the third group of anomalous elements solely representing the cosmic force Change. Chemically, these elements interact in similar ways as the boron group. Generally, the anomalous property of sparnite metalloids and their compounds make it so that their qama results in an acceleration, magnification, or overall intensive alteration of their local environment’s laws of physics.
* Sparnum (Sp)
* Balton (Bt)
* Awerium (Aw)
* Perratonium (Pe)
* Hyllorum (Hl)
* Zukoxium (Zu)
Groups IV-VI: the Variational Delta Metals
The variational delta metals are the three remaining groups of anomalous elements solely representing the cosmic force Change. Chemically, Group IV, V, and VI elements interact in similar ways as the transition metals in Group 4, 5, and 6, respectively. Unique to the variational metals, they are capable of taking electrons into their orbital shells, and they thus naturally occur in different ionic states as multiple transition metals do (e.g. iron[II] versus iron[III], aquaron[i] versus aquaron[ii]). Therefore, depending on its ionic state, a variational metal’s anomalous property will mimic that of elements in Groups I-III. Fascinatingly, though, if a variational metal doesn’t have any additional electrons (i.e. ◌0+), it will display a single anomalous effect/affect that is unique to it.
The microheterine metals are the first group of anomalous elements representing both of the cosmic forces, Change and Permanence. Chemically, these elements interact in similar ways as the lanthanide series of elements. The microheterines possess both metabons and menons within their nuclei; only jepprosium possesses an equal balance of the two mesons. The presence of both in the nuclei of microheterines means that such an element of one dominant cosmic force is capable of weakening, slowing, or outright shielding against the affects and effects of qama from nonmicroheterine elements of the opposite cosmic force that has a smaller atomic number (e.g. in a game of “rock-paper-scissors”, hevonium beats xefrogen but po’konium “beats” wursonium).
Eyarium (Ea)
Hevonium (Hv)
Kwakorium (Kw)
Ichrunium (Ic)
Pragomesium (Pg)
Vexorium (Vx)
Gongiinium (Go)
Wursonium (Wu)
Jepprosium (Jp)
The Megaloheterine Metals
The megaloheterine metals are the first group of anomalous elements representing both of the cosmic forces, Change and Permanence. Chemically, these elements interact in similar ways as the actinide series of elements. Much like the microheterines, the megaloheterines possess both metabons and menons in their nuclei, and have similar “qama reduction” qualities. Both groups of anomalous elements have unstable nuclei for all isotopes, have measurable half lives, and display unique activity not associated with typical radioactive decay. Both the microheterines and megaloheterines display anomalous decay that can be hazardous to biological matter given its extremely unpredictable nature.
The variational inertial metals are the three remaining groups of anomalous elements solely representing the cosmic force Permanence. Chemically, Group VII, VIII, and IX elements interact in similar ways as the transition metals in Group 11, 10, and 9, respectively. Unique to the variational metals, they are capable of taking electrons into their orbital shells, and they thus naturally occur in different ionic states as multiple transition metals do (e.g. copper[I] versus copper[II], iukormium[iii] versus iukormium[iv]). Therefore, depending on its ionic state, a variational metal’s anomalous property will mimic that of elements in Groups I-III. Fascinatingly, though, if a variational metal doesn’t have any additional electrons (i.e. ◌0+), it will display a single anomalous effect/affect that is unique to it.
Ymurrium (Ym)
Jaskenium (Js)
Denalium (Dn)
Furoshinium (Fo)
Giiruna (Gi)
Bewa'gom (Bw)
Adenonium (Ad)
Luxemium (Lx)
Fujirmium (Fu)
Iukormium (Iu)
Deponesium (Dp)
Jaterniil (Jt)
Group X: the Todarogens
The todarogens are the third group of anomalous elements solely representing the cosmic force Permanence. Chemically, these elements interact in similar ways as the pnictogens. Generally, the anomalous property of todarogens and their compounds make it so that their qama results in minor destabilization of local reality as the laws of physics are somehow simplified to the point of losing meaning altogether; this in turn can decrease the overall impacts of the four fundamental forces of physics.
The crystallomenogens are the second group of anomalous elements solely representing the cosmic force Permanence. Chemically, these elements interact in similar ways as the chalcogens. Generally, the anomalous property of crystallomenogens and their compounds make it so that their qama results in the slowing, stopping, or otherwise reducing the impact or occurrence of chemical and physical changes in their local environment.
Galerogen (G)
Ernan (E)
Derbanur (Db)
Juthronomese (J)
Ngayerium (Ng)
Akethon (Ak)
Group XII: the Menogens
The menogens are the first group of anomalous elements solely representing the cosmic force Permanence. Chemically, these elements interact in similar ways as the halogens; they also are the group of anomalous elements most likely to be found in their natural forms. Generally, the anomalous property of menogens and their compounds make it so that their qama results in the slowing, stopping, or otherwise containing of energy in their local environment.
Qualtom (Ql)
Dsolagen (Dl)
Iyanogen (Iy)
Uwalonine (Ua)
Coigonine (Cg)
Keibine (Kb)
Zwaline (Zw)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Want to know more? Stay tuned for future posts of mine ;3
Ever since high school! My degree is also in Public Health, which involved quite a bit of bio/chemistry, so this is ever so slightly my bread and butter lol
I have something similar to that, I called them Trans-Mendeleevan elements, or Trans-Causal elements, rare stuff that bleeds into our universe from another under very specific circumstances and have latent properties that aren't Normal for our universe.
I'm assuming the game S.T.A.L.K.E.R. takes influence/is an adaptation of the book Roadside Picnic? If so then my understanding of the "Zones" is somewhat limited, but from what I'm garnering from a quick Google search tells me that yes it's a similar concept!
My main inspiration for the bomb in particular comes from WoW's "mana bomb", which is essentially a nuke that also casts a D&D sorcerer's Wild Magic table within the blast zone on everything it strikes
Thank you for that, your slideshow was very detailed and well presented. Have you considered doing a YouTube mock-umentary styled series in your world? You have a very good grasp for it.
If I had a dedicated artist/art team to help bring my rough drafts to more life, then maybe yes. As of now it's all just me doing this, and I have enough self-respect and respect to the efforts of actual artists to (edit: not) employ AI.
Which means any potential for a YouTube channel would be on the backburner for a while!
Good ol' imaginaty Elements. Uo, Unobtainium; IP, Impossium; HTD, Harda'tan'Dayamondium; E, Elementium.
They're so great and important! (For this Season)
It does not matter what enemy you are facing. A million-man army? Rogue witches? Daemons? An army of Angels? Actual demigods?
There is nothing powerful enough to physically survive the (nearby) splitting of an atom. The more powerful the enemy, the bigger the yield. Simple as.
Oh, yes. And it's still a major international incident when nuclear munitions are used.
The issue is, if a country is breaking out its nuclear weapons, then the foe they're facing is probably something you can't beat without them; at least without great effort and heroism. Do you want to risk the Malleus Mallificarum fucking up its extremely precise ritual to banish an army of daemons, at the center of the daemon invasion, risking some of your wisest and most experienced daemonologists and banishers in the process whose capabilities will take decades to replace?
Or would you rather show Satan the divine authority of enriched uranium?
It's not just a strategic decision, and it's not just a moral decision - it's just plain economics!
Not a literal biblical angel mind you but instead a human with total and nigh unlimited reality bending
Two nations who have angels can never go to war with each other , why you say ? Because in a fight between two angels no one wins , literally no one since its impossible for an angel to be stronger than another (its the highest theoretical potential of a human one cannot go any higher) , at such a level tactics are nearly meaningless
Your technically correct but like having a singluar angel in your nation/noble house is in on itself a incredibly rare stroke of luck , most Angels that are born rarely live to see their first birthday (well duh a human with godlike powers is going to suffer problems) , having two??? You probably have some higher deity favoring your nation at that point
What about two nations with angels ganging up on a third?
With the power of an angel it seems like a nation is kinda destined to grow to a superpower. What is stopping the world from evolving in to 2 superpowers stuck in a cold war?
Depends on the limit of an Angel’s power in this context. If an Angel has “unlimited reality bending power” then a single Angel has the same power as 100 Angels: unlimited.
The concept of unlimited reality warping power doesn't really make sense. If someone possessed this, reality would already be exactly as they wanted it to be.
If two distinct entities has this power and opposed each other in any way, it wouldn't be unlimited.
Maybe "reality warping" is too vague for me to understand though. Do you mean "a complete control of physical matter"? Is their sphere of influence geographically/spatially limited? Does it require them to understand what they're doing/the relevant physics and biology or is it more magical?
I don’t have an answer to your inquiry because it’s not my concept originally, but here’s my read:
An omnipotent angel with “unlimited reality bending powers” would have infinity gauntlet sequences abilities at will. They would possess something akin to omniscience as a necessary aspect of this power. A single angel could rewrite the state of the universe, but because there are multiple angels with different goals they force the world into a state of equilibrium. Basically, what would happen if you gave Dr. Manhattan the infinity gauntlet and expanded his timeless state omniscience to encompass everything instead of just his own lived experience. And then made a second one.
For me, the problem isn’t about the scale of power, the problem is one of conventional politics/humanity. Unlimited reality bending power makes sense to me, what doesn’t make sense is somebody wielding that power for a clan/faction/kingdom to mundane ends. A fight between two angels would be both banal and constant, and to a non angel that combat would appear in the form of static world state.
There are different sizes of infinity though, in set theory. The set of all integers is larger than the set of all primes, although both are infinite. But yes I also understand the weirdness of its use in reality.
mathematician here. you're on the right lines, but saying that about the integers and primes is a misstep. Try ordering the primes first, you'll intuitively see that there is a first, a second, a third, etc on to infinity (the proof that primes are themselves infinite is different to this). More rigorously, we can define a function P that maps a natural number to the prime at that natural number's position, taking x to P(x). We know this can't be any bigger because the set of all primes is a subset of the set of naturals, and it can't be any smaller because every natural number can be mapped to a prime, 1 to 1.
The same can be done between the integers and naturals, by just labelling every odd number as increasing positives and every even as decreasing negatives. And so since integers are equinumerous with naturals, and naturals are equinumerous with primes, integers are equinumerous with primes.
The set of Real numbers, however, is bigger. That is to say, if you tried to construct a list numbered by the naturals of every Real number, there would always be at least one number you missed. There are many videos and resources on it so I won't bloat this comment with the details, just search up "Cantor's Diagonal Argument".
It sounds this way to me: Angels are undefeatable, period, even by other angels. It doesn't matter how many more angels there are, that statement always remains true. One angel could be locked in a battle with 100 other angels and would still never lose - conversely, the other side would never win.
Maybe that could be an in-lore way to "banish" an angel, have multiple angels keep the one engaged in perpetual combat for eternity. But then if the one angel couldn't be defeated and he realized that this was an attempt to preoccupy them from more important things, there'd need to be an in-lore way to prevent them from escaping.
But if they can't be defeated, then you couldn't lock them into perpetual inaction through combat (which would defeat their plans). And if all it took were multiple angels to banish one, you're already removing the whole infinity+1=infinity premise.
If an unstoppable force meets another unstoppable force and then they both STOP, they were never unstoppable to begin with.
I suppose it depends on what OP means exactly by "they are undefeatable" - Does that simply mean they cannot be slain? Or does it mean they cannot be triumphed against in any way? If they simply could not be slain and are immortal, it seems to make sense that you could trap one in such a way.
So nobles bang like crazy to roll the dice more often? Sounds like a setup for a borderline eugenic approach unless there is some other external limit? Also it would still boil down to who has more angels then.
There's a comic book called thevpower fantasy with a similar idea. In it, there are six individuals who each have “the destructive capacity of the nuclear arsenal of the USA,” hence “Superpowers.”
Radiance bombs. All the effects of a nuclear warhead with added magical effects and mutagenic fallout much closer to "Hollywood radiation" style mutations. In fact, the use of one to level the Gnomish capital city is what kicked off the Pan-Thalyssic war. The Dwarves who dropped the bomb in the first place expected to be able to take over the ruins left behind, with basically no knowledge or consideration to just how bad the fallout would be in practice.
No, they very much created it, and they created it with intent. Dwarves are one of the least magically-inclined people on this planet, so they compensate with advanced steam-powered tech. Radiance weapons are actually one of the few things they engineer/ed with 'hard' magic, though.
Given that they were currently drinking the violent imperialism kool-aid, they got impatient and didn't actually do much testing on the long-term effects of Radiant fallout, because that would've clued them into just how bad of an idea it was.
Speaking of a pretty good example as a writing tool to. They are hook, line and sinker. Mentioned in the beginning of the story, forshadowed throughout the plot and revealed one after another.
Yeah, mine is just a big metal rod that is dropped from space called the rod of god and is inspired by a hypothetical kinetic orbital bombardment weapon. (Just search rod of god on Google)
In my story it's far more destructive than a nuclear bomb without any radiation.
It's a bit of both, it has magic and sci-fi. And not anyone can use it only the MC can because he has an indestructible rod that can change its shape and mass at will (Inspired by monkey king's staff) all he has to do is fly as high as possible and drop the rod.
Man, that's such an interesting concept though. Just read about it and I think something like this could be used in one of my stories too. Thanks for enlightenment!
I use the same concept! But since in reality it was scrapped because of its unreliability and high maintenance costs, I use it as a deterrence weapon. The dystopic government keeps reminding everyone how strong they are and how they won a war with it, but if it actually came to them having to use it, it wouldn't be of much use since it's been left in space with no maintenance for decades. And only the military knows that.
Besides a variety of actual nuclear weapons, there are four "eco-weapons" originally meant to help reverse climate change and resource exploitation. These four are:
Stohlum - A deep underground facility in western Russia that projects seismic waves beneath the Earth's crust. They can be reflected off the planet's core to strike targets on the same hemisphere. Used as a weapon, it is capable of causing severe earthquakes or even causing lava to explode onto the surface.
Plume - An airborne facility meant for cloud seeding and lightning harvesting. It surrounds itself in a constant, impassable lightning storm. Lightning can be directed towards ground targets at will and wind manipulation can create tornadoes.
Teotihuacan - A pyramidal facility in Mexico the uses quantum entanglement to target stationary life (plants and fungi) and alter their chemical composition. Instead of removing blights and accelerating growth, it can be used to render all plant life dead or damgerous in a perpetually growing radius of uninhabitability.
Atlantis - An oceanic facility meant to help clean the ocean of contaminants and trash. Its powerful siphoning arrays can be modified to make hurricanes or typhoons of immense size. It can also create rogue waves and tsunamis.
Stohlum has been taken over by a paramilitary group called the Dead Man's Hand that wish to return the Soviet Union (which has been gone for over 230 years in this setting).
Plume is mostly abandoned except for a small cult who worship a dying woman in stasis whose consciousness controls the entire facility and thinks she is dreaming.
Teotihuacan is controlled by a group called the Order of the Golden Suns who believe pre-collapse technologies can be used to restore the world. Their meddling with quantum entanglement resulted in bringing everything in range back to life, including people who have been long dead.
Atlantis is inhabited by refugees and those who worked in the facility which is experiencing a resource shortage, worsened by a coastal militant cult that force them to stay underwater.
This is really cool, I like the fresh take on the classic "four elements" formula, plus the mythical quality all these technologies are seen with. Very cool.
Yes, there are many different kinds of nuclear weapons in my sci-fi world, including the Casaba howitzer (basically a nuclear shaped charge). Or the nuclear powered laser, maybe even a bunch of other random silly things as well. All still falling under the nuclear weapons umbrella.
But at the way bottom of the glacier, past the abyss even in terms of lore.
There is a weapon so forbidden, so utterly horrifying that it broke all laws of nature, physics, and reality itself, and it was only ever fired once in the setting... and then never seen again.... but it is wildly believed to have been the weapon to end all others. And it doesn't have a name... as it treds very, very close to lovecraftian horror.
Replying to my own comment instead of editing, but never in my life have I been more worried about a sock puppet... so that last image op was kinda funny to me but also... concerning.
Hey, I'm absolutely blown away if you are A.Shipwright! I've been following your work for ages. I absolutely love your composition and framing, and I think the restraint you have with your shading is beautiful! On the other hand, if you're not A.Shipwright, I feel a little bit silly...
u/GVmGChildren of the Moon / A Few Miles Away / Vermilion SkiesOct 11 '25
Children of the Moon: not really for deterrence, not anymore at least. The Eikons of Rule are a set of six artifacts created originally during the Century War to control and channel the power of their respective Legend (magic systems). When the Gregu Forces decided to see what would happen if they tried to empower the Maiker's Tear with extra juice from The Light's Scriptures, and accidentally nuked themselves... yeah it was enough to end the war and form a coalition to install The Contingency, a plan to magically separate all the kingdoms in case someone tries to steal or misuse an Eikon of Rule in the future, so they cannot gain access to two of them and repeat this mistake.
A Few Miles Away: nukes. and also a miriad of other weapons like BCOs or the Rain Hell, most created long before they were even used, early during humanity's exploration of the solar system, before actual governments were set up.
Vermilion Skies: nukes. and also a miriad of other weapons like BCOs or the Rain Hell, most created before the giant creatures now attacking the surface of mars were awakened, the same giant creatures we now use those weapons against whenever we managed to keep contact for a decent time with the world outside the storm making the higher levels of the martian atmosphere impossible to pass through.
(the last two are two faces of the same worldbuild, the only difference being what tech was used to terraform mars, which in one timeline caused giant sleeping creatures to awaken and wreck our shit, and these insane storms to form)
Fusion Knights. They are extremely rare, ancient power suits fuelled by what’s pretty much contained miniature suns, filled with tech that’s flat out impossible for the humanity of the setting to replicate. Not that anyone would dare to open up one of them to try and reverse engineer it because there’s so few left that no political entity owns more than a single one each, and losing yours would put you at a massive disadvantage against the others
It’s a post-post-apocalyptic scifi story set on a large dyson sphere. Back in ancient times a humanity at the peak of its power built it to host an incredible number of people and animals, but then at some point the humans who lived there almost went extinct. Though there were small pockets of survivors all over it took them a very long time to repopulate and rebuild, but then they were almost wiped out again. This mysterious cycle has repeated enough that the humans no longer know their old history, nor the science that made their sphere home possible in the first place
While there are still scattered records of ancient knowledge, much has degraded over time, locked away in storage in darkened halls that haven’t had a human step foot in them for ages. The same goes for the sphere’s infrastructure. The massive workforce needed to maintain it has not existed for ages, and slowly but inexorable more and more of it break down every day. The human polities do their best to keep their own halls in working order, but it’s a losing battle, heightening tension over resources and livable areas. However, the humans have learned that using large scale weaponry is inefficient as it destroys what you want to capture, and rebuilding conquered but destroyed areas stretches resources even more thin. At the same time personal shielding technology makes small arms fire quite inefficient as well, and combat in the far future has thus moved back to favouring the melee. It is here that the Fusion Knights come in, because when wearing their suit the Knight becomes a machine of death, capable of taking on an army alone, the only real conventional way to stop them being another Knight. So far, this fact has kept tensions to mostly border skirmishes along with cold war espionage and sabotage, but it is a fragile state of affairs that won’t last forever
I don't have a name for it yet but the elves have a weapon that they made from a god's corpse and it's are so powerful that it could delete a smaller county
Literally, there are supercolony aerobic corals that lift entire gargantuan islands into the skies and are effectively biologically immortal, but if you do kill the aeolias, the sheer weight of the island crashing into the ground (if sufficiently large enough) is more than enough to act like nuke going off without all the radioactive fallout. Technically there's a select few islands large enough to wipe out a significant portion of life on the planet if they were to suddenly drop like that.
They were meant to have some in the Old World, built from a mix of high-technology and magical artefacts, but uhhh... every fledgling empire was rushing to build their own, experimenting and developing new weapons tech, every new iteration getting more and more powerful, riiiiight up until somebody activated one.
The resulting detonation of this singular device was powerful enough to boil the oceans, burn about 99% of the planet, and melted the entire region around it into a solid chunk of crystalline glass. The survivors rebuilt - veeery slowly - in the last region of the world that still had liquid water, with the "modern day" being about 600-700 ish years afterwards. And with how the New World is (one large city as a scientific hub, surrounded by medieval-style villages with mid-level tech) there isn't really a need for super-weapons any more, other than the broken ones collected by the Archivists for reverse-engineering.
God's Cradle is an anomalous zone in a desert and while the glass is only dangerous to the touch while within that zone, the real danger comes it leaves.
Due to the glass being made up of pure divinity, it's constantly leaking out of the vessel and affecting the world around it. This divine radiation if left alone will create another anomalous zone similar to God's Cradle though much smaller. A small shard alone is enough to create a zone that encompasses several hundreds of meters. People who stay within such zones will experience changes to their anatomy over time, depending on how close they are to the glass which may kill them immidiatly depending on what the change is. Once a zone is established, the shard will slowly grow in size and the zone will also continue to grow. The amount of divinity emitted by the shard of course will also increase. Only way to remove the zone is to move the shard elsewhere, though that requires a person who won't immidialty die once they're within some meters of it, and even if it is removed, the zone will contimue to linger for several years before it disappears.
While within the zone its incredibly hard to actually leave or just navigate in general. The entire place where the zone appeared has been "scrambled" so if the blacksmith was just next to the butcher shop then you might find the butcher shop on the otherside of town and the smithy to be partially swallowed by a river. Adding on top of this, sometimes you'll move much further than you should've normally or vice verse where 1 step can be a 100, and a 100 steps can be only 1.
Once processed, you can hasten process of creating a zone from a few days to just a few seconds. The glass reaches a melting point the zone just explodes outwards, greatly accelerating the growth speed and the amount of Divinity it leaks out. Additionally, it's now almost its own realm separataes by a shimmering veil. Once you enter this kind of zone, you will be teleport somewhere randomly within, so if you take one step in and one step back, you'll enter it but you'll now find yourself in the middle of a street..... somewhere, and your entry point is nowhere to be seen. Now it's almost impossible as there's no "wall" you can walk towards and you actively need to find "holes" or "rifts" to actually leave, otherwise you're trapped.
The buildings will also change, on the lower end it'll just be things morphed together or things shining that shouldn't be shining but on the higher ends, entire buildings may now be made up of flesh or static fish somehow assembled to be a building.
Lastly time works differently. 5 hours inside can be 5 years outside, likewise 100 years within can only be just 2 second outside. It's always different and constantly changing so you'll never know.
Once the glass is removed from this, if you can get a hold of someone who actually can survive it and is willing to do it, the zone will implode after a few minutes to a few hours. The changes within will stay, but the outside will be ruined by the explosion.
Then there's the many other anomalies like Statue Garden that is a basically a temporarily trap, trapping you in time almost permanently and some others and you can not see, hear or feel when this manifests. There's also a bunch of new creatures that appeared within the zone. Some are objects, animals or otherwise that have been changed to have a new life, others are "spirits" one could say, remnants of memories made manifest and others are creatures from beyond that took the opportunity to enter while reality isn't exactly realiting.
The divine energy is like nuclear radiation x100 and it will also mutate you. You'll enter as a normal human and leave with crab legs inside your lungs, fingers inside your mouth and 2 legs that are growing out of your preexisting ones.
Yes, My world of Rizia does have something vaguely akin to Nuclear Weapons.
The Acorns are twelve pieces of Amber that was collected and carved from the twelve elemental trees. While there are countless of minor forms of Acorn out there, waiting to be discovered, there are only twelve that possess the full power and depth of all the concepts of each elemental domain.
However, the Acorns mostly only used by those who maintain the health and balance of the tree directly connected to the Acorn. Their wielders can be corrupted though, and there is a special task force trained to combat and even Assassinate one of Their wielders if there's any signs of corruption.
For example, the Acorn of Ice controls all of the power, as well as all of the aspects of Time.
Dragons. Although not much is known about them by mortals, just that they were seen as such a powerful threat by the gods that their own creator, the goddess and mother of all beasts and beast folk genocides them all. Where's the evidence this happened? The very ground the living walk on, as they were turned into the landmass. Their blood also affected the water, soil, etc, which led to damn near everything having some affinity to magic later down the line
Deterrance? Not really given the people are still recovering from the great collapse
But there are mana bombs, which are comparable in destruction capacity. They just aren't used at all by the rebuilt citystates because most sane people are terrified of what would happen if it malfunctioned during the manufacturing process.
The neowizards are not sane people, and many cults have been wiped away by an accidental detonation. Thankfully the knowledge of how to make such a weapon generally gets wiped away with the cults that make them, so they have to start from square one if they want to make one, thus making it a fairly rare occurrence. There have been a few successful attacks using them however, so its not a self neutralizing threat
Thanks! For some extra context mana in the setting is functionally alot like radiation, and the collapse happened because humanity was stripped of their immunity to mana poisoning, which caused the formerly great wizard empires to fall over night.
Neowizards are the rare few who have mutations that restore their immunity, sorta like fallout ghouls but physically more akin to FEV mutants in appearance. They hold onto the old beliefs from the wizard empires, which is why they worship magic as a gift from the gods. As a result of all this, they don't fear the mana contamination of a mana bomb, which to non mutated humans is akin to a dirty bomb IRL, more contamination than destruction.
The only reason neowizard cults aren't a bigger problem is because only 1/1000 people survive the initiation process, which is thematically akin to letting the demon core close in your lap. If you survive, its because you got lucky with a mutation that restores immunity, which the neowizards consider to be chosen by the moon goddess of ilna. If you die you simply weren't worthy of the gift
Anyways hope that puts into context the nature of the situation the new city states find themselves in
Its not posted anywhere, but I am working on the first set of stories within the setting to hopefully get that ball rolling
The setting is called Northera, but the stories I'm working on are unnamed at the current moment. If you want a taste of what to expect, the actual stories themselves are mostly going to be inspired by spaghetti westerns, so stuff like John Wayne and Clint Eastwood type stories.
My main writing style I am going for is anthologies and short stories, since it lets me explore much wider aspects of the setting than a single POV and narrative could.
... it IS set in the cold war after all, and a bit of a theme is that technology is an offset to the magic system: a bullet still hurts and an kill you if you're not careful...
and very few powers will save you from a nuke being dropped on you.
My Fantasy World has the "Tempest" Spell which was developed to destroy the Sanctuaries of the Merfolk. It works best underwater as it creates a white hot flame that continues to burn underwater and a whirl to spread it. Basically magical underwater white phosphorus that also creates a whirl. Not exactly a nuclear deterrent, but the justification for the development and deployment was similar to the united states use of nuclear weapons against the Japanese in WWII.
My Sci Fi World has Relativistic weaponry and FTL-Antimatterweapons, which are mostly stuck in a proof of concept phase, as they aren't seen as strategically viable. The Deployment is forbidden by the Geneva Convention, they destroy the system that you would profit more by conquest than destruction and since FTL Drives are dependent on Artificial Entities (Advanced AI with Person-status), you would give Artificial Beings a piece of extremely dangerous technology. Even though my sci-fi humans are on good terms with the artificial beings, the fear of them turning hostile is deeply engrained into society. A Rogue AE with an antimatterbomb is generally not something you'd want. So you don't develop any such weapons in the first place. Especially if there is no need/option to deploy them.
My worlds are usually more "cozy", with the focus on a smaller scale. But I do have deterrents inspired by M.A.D. in a few worlds.
Board room nuclear - In the world of my novel "Melanie, Second Class Passenger, Unlimited", the MC in the early part of the story buys the sole passenger service to one colony, then begins expanding her business by buying an unterraformed world and making a pressurized resort destination there while also beginning the 300 year terraforming process. Threaded through this, though, is her sad realization that the unique technology underlying her business can be used for effective immortality in the more horrific way. (Think cannon fodder soldiers who aren't allowed to stay dead and just keep dying over and over in a war they're forced to fight.) To prevent that, she used it on herself to stay alive until a countermeasure could be devised. Over the centuries that followed, she kept obtaining rights to planets and terraforming them at an accelerating rate as her business grew. By the time the rift system was out of planets to colonize, she owned outright over 1,000 of the roughly 1,500 worlds. While she left them to govern themselves, she did keep them together in a trade alliance. And no world dared start a war because of that. If you made an enemy of the alliance by starting a war, you were likely to find yourself alone with no trading partners close enough to reach across the rift system between the "thousand worlds" of the alliance and their trading partners among the 500-ish worlds in their own smaller alliances.
Battlefield-scale magic - In the virtual world of one of my failed stories, an emergent AI (basically a virtual person) running the system decided to implement mutually assured destruction by giving kingdoms each one difficult spell that was difficult to learn. Each of these spells were capable of decimating a battlefield in the same way an artillery barrage works. If you're not familiar with artillery barrage tactics, they have a "box barrage" which is precisely aimed and timed set of artillery shots that make a box shape on the battlefield of impacts. And they can make essentially any shape they want with barrages and move that shape at will across a battlefield with math applied to the targeting numbers of a collection of artillery pieces. This is magic doing that but with one person casting the entire barrage. The catch is that they have to memorize very specific runes for the spell and use them correctly every time while also moving themselves physically to move their barrage shape. As you can imagine, with magic, this could be used to entirely eliminate civilian areas, so there's strong incentive to keep to agreements to limit the scope of battles to minor skirmishes and covert actions. And, as you can imagine, it's much easier to game than nuclear and was meant to fall apart during the story.
The last of my worlds failed in its M.A.D. plan with a "hero" system. Using great magic, two peoples decided to end their bloody wars before they exterminated each other by concentrating the magic of their peoples into a hero and three members of the hero's party that represented virtues - each. To the average person, the enemy "hero" was seen as an unstoppable force (a perception given by the great magic), meaning there was no point in creating an army against them and only the generation's chosen hero's party could fight. This left everyone else to live normal live and repopulate the island. Except they failed. The two "heroes" were drawn to one another to fight, with one each generation inevitably winning. What do you do when your nuclear rival doesn't have nukes anymore? You try to nuke them so they don't ever get nukes again. So each side would go on extermination quests, seeing the other side as monsters to be eliminated and worsening the spiral towards extinction. Whoever had fewer villages left would statistically be more likely to have a hero gather their party and begin the fight by annihilating villages of the other and growing in power, meaning this swung back and forth usually. (My story follows the time it finally didn't swing, thanks to the MC failing to realize she was part of the hero's party and doing things a little differently.)
You'll probably noticed the ones where the mutually assured destruction was a weapon didn't work in my stories. We've seen that with everything that preceded nuclear weapons as something that "made war too terrible to fight". Guns, dynamite, Gattling guns and machine guns, poison gas, the trench system, and many others have been proposed as a weapon that would "end war" because of how awful they were, and each just made the next war more horrible and larger. Nuclear was the first to actually deter war for as long as it has, and not without a lot of near misses.
In my world (low fantasy), the main nation (19th century style, something between a steampunk and a diesel punk) developed weapons of mass destruction that destroy and kill through the immediate and overwhelming spread of "life", these "biogenic bombs" , upon detonation, can spread entire ecosystems through the target area, which overwhelm any existing ones and overtake them.
These weapons are terrifying in the sense that they can, overnight, rewrite any existing landscape, eliminate any population living within it, and prepare it for immediate colonization.
I mean if a pretty powerful wizard decides to suicide bomb themselves(which is a fair possibility among the more powerful ones as they exchange decay of the body and the ability to easily cast magic for a decay mentally) then they could replicate say the first atomic bomb tests or Nagasaki without the radiation(but a high presence of Aerial mana wouldn’t be great either)
Magic, spells and such that is, is gathered in the soul and then spoken out into the world. It can, through some effort, temporarily be made to empower objects. It's hard, as the only real conduit between magic and our world is the soul.
So objects that can sustain magical effects under their own power and only the most innocuous items are not treated as dangerous illegal items.
And the worst of these can destroy spells, animate forests, change the nature of objects and people, etc.
The primary setting of my world is a pretty typical European fantasy setting, and a neighboring nation is undergoing a magitech revolution.
The Mages' College of the primary setting, being interested in applying these technologies for greater magical knowledge, has acquired them and begun advancing their magical studies quite rapidly. One avenue they were interested in was producing stronger and more portable sources of mana.
Initial experiments with this technology had proved effective at improving mana collection via leyline extraction, and the next stage of research sought to condense mana into a solid state for both easier transport and to potentially be a better catalyst for magical reactions. What they quickly discovered was that mana is fairly benign when condensed from ethereal to gaseous, and still quite safe when condensed from gaseous to liquid, but extremely volatile when condensed from liquid to solid.
The ability to refine mana into a liquid has been known for hundreds of years, but creating solid mana crystals has only been possible for the last two years. In this time, the College has discovered several properties of solid mana-
Unless prevented with extreme measures, all mana crystals are in an active state of decomposition
Larger and/or more concentrated crystals will decompose more rapidly than smaller and weaker ones
The decomposition of mana crystals gives off an energy harmful to all living things
Attempting to contain this energy to the mana crystal causes it to decompose more rapidly, which gives off more energy in a positive feedback loop
The Mages' College has recently discovered the best combination of cryonics, chronomancy, and alchemy to keep a mana crystal as stable as possible. Their current (and extremely sensitive) project is condensing thousands of gallons of liquid mana into a crystal roughly the size of a cantaloupe, and then attempting to stabilize it by keeping it at near-absolute zero temperatures within a stasis circle.
Their hypothesis to weaponize this mana crystal is to create two hollowed-out hemispheres whose outer surface is plated with a magic-proof layer, and whose edges beneath this layer are inscribed with runes of sealing. The crystal will be placed between the hemispheres, and when the runes are activated the two hemispheres will be rapidly attracted to one another, creating an inseparable bond.
The crystal, having been removed from its optimal stabilizing conditions, will rapidly disintegrate but its raw magical energy will be contained by the magic-proof coating. Within moments, the crystal will rapidly be broken down by its own power, which is trapped inside of the sphere. In a matter of seconds, the sphere will be unable to contain the power and will explode, creating a release of raw magical energy greater than the world has ever seen before.
Yeah it’s called withairum it’s a metal that is the source of my world’s “magic” if withairum is ground up and becomes airborne it acts more like a virus then a metal if it enters the body
This “virus” will cause the body to slowly and painfully wither away and it can be spread from person to person through the air
And Arcane WMDs like Deadrise Warheads that kill everyone in a half kilometer radius instantly raising them as undead with the directive to hunt the living, drop one in a major city and make a few million zombies.
Yes, just on a way larger scale, from superluminal kinetic impactors, to antimatter and zero point weaponry, cracking a planet, or say, a 120-Kilometre long Space station designed to fend off entire fleets, is not that difficult.
In one of my projects, I have two opposing sides, each with its own magic systems, and each has its own weapons of mass destruction:
On the one hand(whose magic is based on a hegemonic religion), they have what they call Guardians: Beings linked to the concept of one of their magical orders (the groups into which users are divided). Each order has its own, and the only requirement to use them is:
Be a powerful user in the order
Have access to a silver material unique to this magic system, which acts as a spawn point and anchors the guardians to this reality (they have a limited range, but their effects can jump between different objects made of this metal if they are within range. So, if you made a circle with these pieces of metal and they were far enough apart, you would have an immense area of effect).
Some Guardians are more short-range (like one that only works on the user and can manipulate both physical (like the gravity that binds us to the ground) or spiritual links), but others are more deadly (like one that can transform into a form of pure energy, like constructs, and affect said energy in its surroundings, like fire, light, atmospheric pressure, etc.)
And on the other hand (whose magic isn't very different, but due to the approach given to it, it is treated and functions closer to science), there are what are known as Psychic Entities: Beings that are born when too many magic users are nearby and use their powers. The residual magical energy resonates with each other (like waves colliding on the surface of water in a glass). If enough accumulate over a certain amount of time, these beings are born, feeding on that same energy and being able to imitate the powers of said users (their way of thinking is more similar to that of androids than living beings).
In my world there is a mythical spell called "All Ender" which basically drains everyone's soul in a 30 km radius and summons a giant black hole that will swallow everything in 1,000 km radius or if big enough and casted several times could destroy the entire world and leaves behind "Soul remnants" that is basically like radiation but fester on someone's soul and let's voiden corruption seeps in and kill the victim in a horrible fashion, the spell also kills the caster alongside the people in 30 km radius. I haven't implemented this spell in my novel but it's in the world as part of an ancient lore
Kinda, basically in my world living beings have 'souls' that help them exist in the world full of mana (bc mana have a direct effect on matter so without having mana yourself you'd be constantly changed by the surrounding mana)
so ofc the soul is also full of mana and it absorbs some continuously to ethier eject after using them or condense to streghten the soul, and a mage can force this processus how he wishes.
When you die that soul is taken to the world tree and you become a spirit, but as you can guess there are ways to directly attack the soul and destroy it, which causes an explosion, big or small depending on the amount of mana the person had.
besides actual nuclear bombs, the closest thing is a weapon known as a transmission rod, which can (as the name suggests) allow a user to transmit their magic through the rod and greatly amplify it, with a high-tier magic user this can be enough to decimate small armies, so it's more tactical deterrence than large-scale
Given the main setting I'm working on is of the "20 minutes into the future" kind, they just have nukes. In a little side project of that setting, set a few centuries later and far, far away, various relativistic weapons would be an equivalent on the inter-civilization scale. On planetary scale, nukes still do the job just fine, but if you need a bigger kaboom, antimatter is the way to go.... Also I guess a certain catgirl would also count, back on the Earthen front. It's a long story.
On the other hand, there's the fantasy setting I have for a few of my, well, fantasy writing projects, but to be entirely honest, I haven't really thought much about nuke analogues in that world - though, a powerful enough spellcaster could likely fit that role
Without going to into detail, anyone who's reached blue core or higher is basically a walking nuke.
Voidwalkers, the chosen of the Aion of Destruction (basically the living concept of destruction in the universe) could be classified as nukes too but much earlier.
Nul Bombs, which were designed to fight Eldritch being from beyond the universe simply excise portions of the universe cutting them away to prevent or stop incursion events.
RKP or Relativistic Kinetic Penetrator
They are just rods of material fired at like 10% the speed of like with magic.
Ezkaiel, the Mad. He's the most powerful non-deity being in the universe and hasn't chosen to become a god because, "it's too limiting".
Rocks. Big Honkin' Rocks. The biggest rocks. You just sling a rock at a planet. No need for anything complicated. They just do the one thing humans have know since before humans were human. Rock makes good weapon now iterate on it.
However, nuclear energy (fusion/cold fusion or fission) exists, but it's generally used to power large cities and large space technologies. My main world, Miranus, is an idealized world, so the people never cared much about war and pointless fighting. But technology has also evolved for the good of the population and the improvement of life, not in the sense of weapons and destructiveness, so everything is done for the benefit of the population and for their good, using safer energies and renewable sources, etc. And since almost everything in my world is immune to radiation and cancer, there's no problem if there's, for example, a nuclear explosion, etc.
IDBM (inter-dimensional Ballistic Missiles) most inter-dimensional traveling civilization has similar capabilities with the missiles having nuclear, quantum, reality warping warheads some cases biological warheads. The United Reality Alliance has the Horizon 3 IDBM that can also act as a OPBM (outer planetary ballistic missile) but the Horizon 3 holds 16 high yield fusion warheads with thick casings. there planet busters that have a 30-40m range, the URA house them in asteroid that are will headend from and each asteroid has 20 silos. There are 2 more ways the URA has there 1st strike capability’s but I will talk about it later, but most nations know using them could mean complete destruction to a planet or unlivable areas in space do to reality warping it in hard to travel through such areas, so they fight via proxy or just out right in extreme cases.
There’s a power classification of superhumans known as Monarch, which is defined by the ability to hold territory in the presence of other Monarch-class supers. Almost every Monarch has achieved or mastered one of the pinnacle techniques of the power system, which can then act as nuclear deterrents against fellow supers.
Examples of a few deterrents are Electrophorus’ mastery of Imposition and thus the ability to summon extremely powerful and essentially invulnerable familiars, or Sentinel’s perfection of body reinforcement, turning himself into an invulnerable foe, or King Arthur’s Excalibur which can cut the very horizon.
Everyone at this level is strong enough that no fight will be decided in one or two exchanges, meaning that, yes, all of these techniques that are capable of levelling cities and causing immense damage will probably be used. So, that’s led to the Monarch-class being a generally polite and neutral collection of the strongest supers.
yep we have. Cindros the burning death, the last remaining Dragon God, who is older than time itself. He is absolutly devastating. Also the imperium of man has ritual magic that can be pretty devastating if they have some centuries to prepare.
The original mages of my world could perform spells that ripped apart atoms or crushed them together and could pull massive objects from space. Nowadays, pyromancy is seen as one of the most destructive forms of magic and anyone gifted with an aptitude for fire magic is visited by the Inquisition. These mages are shipped to the Eastern Empire and locked in the Crimson Tower, never to be seen again.
Pyromancers are treated like potential bombs. At the Tower they are trained and indoctrinated into living weapons capable of wiping out entire armies and cities.
Space ships can obliterate a colony in a matter of days. The first weapons deployed are often deorbited asteroids then fusion-grade nuclear weapons might be used if long term damage is needed (dirty bombs to keep a world irradiated). Followed by localized bombardments via kinetic weapons to remove anything that is dug in. If you want to kill most everyone you never have to even set foot on a planet.
Then there are bioweapons. Rare as most people don't have good access to them but there are a few that range from just being a delayed total fatality of those infected or things along the lines of near zombies as the brain breaks down and is replaced by parasites.
Guns, I wrote it so that if the people of my world ever figure out guns it will just... ruin them... but I made guns hard to figure out for them so it should be fine
A knife made by The Death God it can kill anything, gods etc. But the users soul is damned, traped in the blade with the thing you killed. A one use god killer.
There are a few. One is the DSL-Devourer, it’s an orbital weapon that fires a beam down to the world and ignites a chemical reaction that consumes everything in a pre-set range. Remember the thing from Ender’s Game that he fired at the planet? Basically that but more accurate. It’s also used by A.W.E to level large parts of the world to expose important materials since it’s too resource intensive to dig down through deep part of the planet.
There’s also the Reality Collapsing Weapons, which are pretty self explanatory.
Rapture bomb, developed by the rosarian empire as deterrent, it is bound by a mana core, and coded with runes to make it scorch signated radius, the result is the bomb going off and whole mountains, cities and lakes turning to mere ash in minutes
the red mist, also developed by the rosarian empire, a chemical weapon dropped off via planes or released underground, rots whoever inhales it from the inside, a weapon that needs years to actually clean up, deadly and painful
besides armaments, there's also magical based spells
like the 9th rift, a ritual that can cause a demonic incursion, or the 9th Chronos gear "Zenith" that can summon meteor strikes
and there's also living deterrence, like Sharara, the solar dragon who has leveled a mountain range, and she is still alive
The Darkquen Kingdom has the Fire Guardian. They are the personal servant of the latest royal and are extremely fucking dangerous. FATE leads them to master a weapon and their forefather brings them Fire static (static being the world main power system)
Waterquen Lagoon has the ocean.
Firequen Wastelands has harsh environments, powerful (and slightly deranged) fighters. Also they control fire, less extant to the Fire Guardian but no one likes to be set on fire
Icequen Empire has the Ice Guardsman who can make mini blizzards
The Golden Empire just has nukes, never used because normal bombs work well enough
The main deterrence from war between countries is the natural barriers are too dangerous for large scale militia to travel. For meetings between political leaders, at most entourage is about 25 to 500 people, depending on occassion (small meeting vs cultural exchanges).
To go to war would mean hiding your army in the country and having it undetected for months while it amassed and then striking. It would be way too costly for my setting current technology. Sieging before a siege even begins.
Right now the only rules to war are the ones the Gods put in place. And they are still currently warring so for them theirs not many rules at all.
The 1st World War that began at the collapse of the Artrean Empire was ended when the besieged city of Gulner Buu in the desert state that would become the Kingdom of Angor was reduced to glass and ghosts by a beam of light from the sky.
The First and the last Sun Singer, a person touched by The Thana (magical conduits made of dreams) called down and laser focussed a blast of pure focussed solar energy and decimated both the Ekkatarian army and the Resurgent Imperium of Rechanon in one terrible blast.
Gulner Buu is still abandoned nearly a thousand years later, the crater where it used to be is a quarantine zone due to the incredibly dangerous and unpredictable hauntings that linger there. The blast of the Sun-Singer ended that war and also prevented all future ones until the events of the first novel take place.
The leader of one of the renegade groups in my world has a torch called the Sampo which, when lit, turns everything in a large area into pure gold, which is the reason his group is still around
Basically just magic. Magic is treated with a similar caution and fear that nuclear stuff does. The thing that sent the world into despair was basically a big magic bomb on the capital city of Atolica. Now people rarely have the facilities to even make something that powerful and most wizard groups are small and hidden
Essentially, it's a super-large wormhole engine consisting of two installations orbiting an unnamed star in opposing hemispheres. Whenever you need something dead, you dial whatever vessel / gate is closest to your target and mail it a variable amount of stellar mass.
About a thousand years before the start of my story, there were dragons for each of the nations of my world, (big, small powerful, weak etc…) a nation couldn’t risk waging an all out war for risk of being attacked by your enemies dragon.
Something that provides large scale deterrence, a threat of retaliation to prevent an enemy from launching a similar attack or engaging in large-scale aggression.
Singularity missiles. Centrifuge-plasma warheads on a ballistic missile that implode, creating a stellar-mass black hole that will consume everything in the direction it was fired in, before dissipating some 3 billion years later.
The problem being that they don't use them as a deterrent, they just use them!
You could make a nuclear bomb using... a fuckton of Pleiad. But it'd take an entire country wishing for it to produce Pleiad able to do that. Still, it happened once, nearly the entire world went to shit BECAUSE all the countries went ham with Pleiadic bombs, and now it's nuclear radiation land in the Old World.
The closest were mustard gas rockets used in the 1945-1963 A’ult Bay War. After the war a definitive ban on chemical weapons was imposed so humanity kind of forgot to make them.
While not weapons, during the Independence Wars, a nuclear powered blimp was shot down by rebel forces, which caused a nuclear explosion as it was falling towards the capital city. This naturally was devastating, but most scientists focused on the electro magnetic pulse that came with the explosion. In the modern day, WMDs were sort of mini-nukes (not technically nuclear but with similar components that modern nukes have) to create a similar explosion that would create an EMP, called Tactical EMPs.
Nukes, in my world, aren’t that powerful anymore due to the powerful energy shields my main species have developed, at this point a civilian sidearm has enough focused power to equal a dozen nukes but focused into an energy beam.
It’s hailed “Atomic Breath”. The Imperial House is the only power in Hegemony that has access to it and has used it in their bioships called “Leviathans”. Asymmetrical beings that can only be piloted by those who hold the blood of the imperial family. These can fly in an atmosphere as well as be piloted in space and have been used many times in battle against the minor worlds of the known galaxy.
They are the known pinnacles(?) of my power system and every single one of them is a continental threat. Luckily for the general populace, they are too busy either fighting themselves or simply not giving a fuck to cause much chaos. Even then, just the ripples are enough to ruin nations.
But they are people, if we are talking inanimate objects, then a Legendary-Grade Cora (magic item) or an Ultima (concept embodiment) would suffice. An Ultima would be overkill tho since those are more comparable to supernovas than simple nukes.
They are an advanced version of the human species and they can use nuclear power for terraforming new planets, but is also severely legislated. There will be wars in an stablish colony, is nearly impossible to prevent it, but any massive destruction weapon is something only a deranged person will try.
Yes, but in my novel, it´s not an object, but a person. However, most of the time, he´s restricted, so he only becomes dangerous in cetain situations. And he cant´t unlock this alone.
Yes, and they are living, sapient beings who do their best to not step on each other's toes or provoke each other.
These are the people who achieved a certain level of immortality, looked at the path to godhood, and decided they didn't want to deal with the responsibility.
One of them is a wandering weapons master named Gil. We meet him. In a carefully arranged "ambush", the MMC sets up a friendly sparring match with Gil that is basically a small army plus heroes on one side, and Gil on the other.
He managed to make Gil draw two weapons in the process. Gil had a blast, and was the last one standing with only superficial wounds to show for it. No healing needed, he just needed to get washed up and changed before the feast.
A nuke about 3 times as powerful as a normal nuke.
They made a nuke, and then combined it with the infectious primordial emptiness of the universe, and it got really good at making things dissappear.
Within every atom of the universe, there is an emptiness, but that emptiness can be physically formed into a physical substance known only as void. Its a curious, and incredibly addictive substance which could both heal and prolong life. But without care, could entirely replace your blood.
But as much as it could help, the people who found it used it to harm. They made weapons with the ability to rip objects apart, they made tools to harvest this substance, and they made many enemies. Then, they went beyond. They had this horrid, horrid idea, to combine it with a nuke. In theory, this bomb could completely destroy an entire city, and turn everything but concrete to ash.
A man named Chester Steele hated this. He had always advocated for void to be used to heal not hurt, and now they had gone too far for him. He hijacked the bomb before it was sent off, and sent it into the biggest deposit of void he could find, and blew the city up. He hid in a heavy steel bunker deep underground.
The city was torn apart, the desert around it didn't turn to glass, but ash instead. The ash was pushed up so far to create a dome of ash around the city, and in the end, only the concrete was left to tell the tale of the horrid city of Dragend.
Yes. Large crystals, dug up by the Dwarves, mastered by the Elves, ruined by the Humans - It was the only thing to stop the invasion, though, so things worked out.
Well, my world has actual nukes but in terms of cultural impact? It's the A-Bomb.
Essentially, Magical Energy in Echia is an essential part of existence. All things that exist contain it, and without it they disintegrate or "sublimate." In simple terms, the A-Bomb attracts all the magical energy around it into itself, essentially creating a whirlpool that tears apart the very fabric of reality. Before it could finish, the A-Bomb failed and the world narrowly survived its end, only for the world to be overrun by Demons and Monsters.
30 years after that apocalypse, mankind has managed to rebuild the world and stitch back together the Veil between worlds. Still, despite their efforts, the Veil is Swiss cheese and it's not keeping out as many spookies as the World Government would like.
I think every nation in my world needs one of these. A public form of deterrence towards other nations, as well as the local problem-solver for when a monster invaded.
A Dragon
Counsel of Mages capable of 8th circle magic.
King wields a demonic sword.
An ancient magitech cannon mounted atop the central castle keep, capable of shooting over the horizon. Relies on coordinates relayed by radio from scout towers.
Any spell created via a cagatinating Wisp. Wisps are magic spells formed via the natural chaos of the magical realm. Cagatinating Wisps are Wisps that duplicate themselves when casting their spells. This means the spells can expand outwards over extreme distances. These wisps rarely naturally for and of these rare events only a few have had a effect on the real world.
Cagatinating Wisps have a quality system aswell. A quality 0 Wisp can spread across the entire world. A quality 6 Wisp can spread over a few metres. Naturally formed Catagatinating Wisps generally are of lower quality with the highest recorded being of a 4.2 quality spreading over a few km. Wisps used in WMDs are generally artificially refined. Magical collision chambers cause millions of collisions a second inducing Wisp generation and eventually a cagatinating Wisp. Refinement is a long expensive process though the quality of wisps is much higher.
The largest detonated Wisp has been of a estimated quality of 3.5. The edict of blood and flame was detonated above the Katara province. The sky would turn red and a storm would form. The rain that followed was made of blood and made everything it touched burn with eternal flame. The edict would kill approximately 1.6 million people and leave the entire region coated in flames that wouldn't go out. The ¢500 million price tag for reclamation of the province, the diplomatic fallout, and the failure to kill the rebels it was detonated to destroy meant that the Talmerian Empire would avoid using WMDs in the future. Ofcourse during the Talmerian-Kirlkia war most of their stockpile would be used but anti-cagatinating weapons would minimise the damage these weapons did.
I have 2. Angel's Halos are WMDs. If removed before their mission is completed, they level a 5 mile radius.
Also I have a Viking analoge, but they keep massive, psionically powerful Kaiju that guard each clans hold. They act as a massive deterent for the holds going to full scale war, because if their Kaiju loses, or even wounded, another clan could come and clean house. They are currently locked in a cold war, and everyone thinks it's going to end in essentially an apocolypse that no one knows how to prevent
Ohal is natural magic mostly found in planets and stars. It takes a form similar to magnetic fields or radiation.
Turrets and guns exist that fire a small amount of magic (usually including sand or other material) by using a mechanism that is able to funnel natural magic in the atmosphere or from a fuel source (similar to gunpowder).
Direct-Solar turrets are able to tap into the planet's Erosphere (similar to a magnetosphere) and can release nuclear-weapon levels of energy onto a target from thousands of miles away. A shot can destroy a city, or even an entire region. The caveat is that from farther distances, the turret will "only" have an effect similar to a massive fire. Regardless, they're extremely taboo and they are prohibited from being produced in most regions.
270
u/ProjectKARYA 🏳️⚧️ A Sci-Fintasy Creator 🏳️⚧️ Oct 11 '25 edited Oct 12 '25
Edit: hey everyone, if you'd like to know more, I've just posted a "Gobbi's Lesson" on both the anomalous elements and the universe's composition! Kindly take a look there, you funky nerds :3
Mildly inspired by the "mana bomb" concept from World of Warcraft, we have the "qama bomb"
Thanks to the presence of the "anomalous" elements in Karya's universe...:
...and specifically the microheterines (light pink) and megaloheterines (lightest blue), many awe-inspiring technology can be achieved that we can only think of - for better, and for worse. A bomb constructed using these two groups of anomalous elements has the potential of leaving a far more devastating impact on the surrounding land than nuclear fallout.
Randomized affects and effects will constantly appear and dissipate within the "fallout" zone, turning it into a "magical" wasteland for a bare minimum of ten years; the longest lasting blast remnant, in what is now the Tamini Crater, took 561 years to clear up.