Sooner or later, every custodian of a fictional realm is faced with the prospect of its utter destruction. It may be a deliberate plot device, it may be a hideous accident. Either way, it's something that every author and GM will eventually have to face.

In July of this year, I was a panelist at Westercon in Seattle. I ended up, for no reason that was ever satisfactorily made clear to me, on a panel on utopian societies. Right alongside Larry Niven, no less! I'd decided before I got there that I would simply nod a lot, smile a lot, and let the other panelists do the talking. However, since there was only one other panelist besides Mr. Niven and myself, and he seemed to have the same idea, it was a rather painfully awkward panel.

My reticence was because I don't write utopian fiction, and I don't read utopian fiction. I have read Oath of Fealty, but only once. I prefer my fiction a lot more destructive. Compare my one reading of Oath with having read copies of Lucifer's Hammer and Footfall to page-shedding tatters. I can never read one without, upon finishing it, reaching for the other.

Also among my top lists of favorite reads are The Stand by Stephen King, and Swan Song by Robert McCammon. My guilty pleasures when it comes to movies are sweeping disaster flicks like Armageddon and Independence Day. I even like disaster on a smaller scale - the final blowout of Castle Rock in Needful Things, the improbable but still fun flick Volcano. Of course, this means I've also sat through a lot of stinkers, both in print and on the screen. But I try to forget those ones.

Usually, "destroying the world" fiction technically isn't. It's "destroying the world as we know it," or "the downfall of civilization." That good old humanocentric viewpoint. The struggle to survive the aftermath, and rebuild.

Global cataclysm can take any of a variety of forms, with any of a variety of causes. Each presents its own interesting challenges and possibilities.

However, when it comes to scenarios like this, the writer has it a lot easier than the GM. This is because in a game, there are going to be PCs. And where there are PCs, there are people who want to save the world. They hate to feel helpless; they hate to feel manipulated; they hate to sit on the sidelines while the big-picture action takes place all around them; they hate failure.

If they are unable to do anything about the event, they'll think the GM is an old meanie who's picking on them and punishing them. If they are able to try, but cannot find the answer or fail in their attempt (because the GM has fore-ordained that it's got to be this way), they'll be convinced that they blew it somehow, that they must have missed a clue. They'll beat themselves up over it, and they'll still think that the GM is an old meanie for putting them in a no-win situation.

Any GM wanting to, for instance, smack the planet with a comet and run a campaign about the survivors is hereby advised to start the game after the comet strike. Otherwise, the PCs will feel - logically or not - that they should have done something to prevent the event. Another option would be to tell the players up front. But that takes away some of the surprise, doesn't it?

The chances that the PCs will be able to affect the outcome depends on the setting and genre. In a superhero game, the world is always getting threatened with certain doom and the heroes are always able to intervene (personally, I'd think that this would get a little stale after the first few times). A high-tech or high-magic game will have the same edge. But some settings just won't, and that can be a bitter pill for PCs to swallow.

Okay … so what happens when the PCs are capable of acting, give it a try, and things just go wrong? Suppose that the dice are against them, or that their plan just isn't feasible. And suppose that this is a world the GM has put years of time, love, and creative effort into … about to be wiped out. What to do?

I'd say to grit your teeth and go for it. No cheating, no backsies, no deus ex machina. Never present a game situation unless you're prepared to back it up. That goes for lesser circumstances as well - if the villain's going to start killing hostages when the time limit runs out, kill them! Uphold the stakes, even when they're high. And if the GM fears he or she will wimp out, don't set up that situation in the first place.

The fictional equivalent would be when a writer writes the story into a corner, and comes up with a quick, easy, convenient way out. I only recently got around to War of the Worlds, for example, and thought it was brilliantly done (the book; I didn't care for the movie) right up until the wimp-out ending. Oops, they got a cold. Oh well. Even in The Stand, one of my all-time favorite novels, the Hand of God pretty much literally saves the day.

Face the consequences! Be strong! Sometimes, going through with the threat even when it seems like it's the end of everything will take the story or campaign in entirely new and interesting directions.

When it comes to the actual specifics of destroying the world, the methods fall into a few different categories. First up is Cosmic Forces! Here's where the physical structure of the planet is going to be at risk.

Cosmic Forces include solar flares, suns going nova, asteroid or cometary impact, meteor showers, black holes, planetary collisions, and the shifting of the magnetic poles.

The scope of some of these might range from limited and local to worldwide. The effect can be far-reaching. An asteroid strike brings several layers of damage: the initial crushing blow to whatever's underneath, the seismic events triggered by the jolt to the planet's crust, possible conflagration from the heat, dust-clouds blocking the sunlight and interfering with the climate, etc.

Then, there are Natural Causes. Here's where lesser disasters fall - earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, super storms, tidal waves, floods. Many of these could very well be side effects of something bigger. Or something smaller … I cannot remember the title, but I read a horror novel that postulated the effects on all life if a single very basic organism was to inexplicably die out. Naturally-occurring viruses could cause mass extinctions and rearrange the entire ecosystem.

And not all of the Natural Causes are 'natural' per se. They could be man-made. Ken Follet's The Hammer of Eden is a great example of eco-terrorists with the power to cause earthquakes. Clive Cussler's Atlantis Found and Fire Ice are another two examples of people with the technology to cause chaos on a global scale.

Sadly, we live in a world where the threat of deliberate biochemical contamination is a grim reality. I imagine that when Stephen King originally wrote The Stand, he never really expected it to be so close to coming true - the first half, anyway … it'd remain to be seen if the survivors do find themselves in a biblical struggle between good and evil.

In his "Christopher Snow" books (Fear Nothing and Seize the Night), Dean Koontz has crafted a more or less slo-mo end of the world. Well, change, really … but to a lot of people, change and the unknown are fates worse than death.

I got into Tarot card reading in high school and college. Had a knack for it, if I do say so myself, though I later figured it was more due to being a psych major than any inherent power in the cards themselves. I always found it interesting that the real meaning of the "Death" card wasn't death, but drastic change.

It doesn't seem like very long ago when what really worried us and kept us awake nights was the threat of nuclear annihilation. Not one or two backpack nuke terrorist actions, but all-out holocaust as the superpowers slugged it out. That is the premise of Swan Song, as well as countless post-apocalyptic films.

I've seen previews for the next Tomb Raider movie, and there's one line that bugs me. The one about a weapon more powerful than anything we can imagine. Yeah? What? Writers and GMs can think up darn near anything. I remember a reference somewhere to a device that linked the cores of every star in the galaxy and could trigger a simultaneous supernova. Not too shabby. Or how about the Omega 13 in Galaxy Quest? Some people thought it was a 'matter collapser' capable of obliterating everything in the universe. I'd call that pretty powerful. Never devalue someone's imagination with a line like that.

I wonder sometimes what it might have been like if Y2K really did turn out to be the way the panic-mongers claimed. The end of the world? Not likely. The end of civilization? Again, not likely, but it sure would have been a drastic change. How would we cope if plunged suddenly into a non-electronic society?

Of course, the zombies might always take over … one of the nastier end-the-world scenarios is that made famous by George Romero. Something happens - nobody's sure what - that causes the dead to rise with a hunger to gorge on the living. The idea of a zombie cataclysm is never going to be romantic - unlike vampires and even werewolves, it's damned hard to think of zombies as being in any way romantic, dark, alluring, or sexy. But the concept is one that strikes a real chord. Death's supposed to be the end. The idea of then coming back as a monster, a gross brain-chomping one, is especially gruesome. Gruesome, but popular - Eden Studios is having a lot of fun with their "All Flesh Must Be Eaten" game and its three companion anthologies (in which, all modesty aside, I have two stories).

Sort of along the lines of the zombie thing is the Nature Run Amok scenario. In this one, mankind is threatened by some previously-innocuous force that has now turned deadly. Back when I was first cutting my horror-reader teeth, I was heavily into books in which ordinary animals become savage killing machines. I read a lot of books with titles like The Dogs, The Rats, even Slugs. They didn't even have to be bugs grown to monstrous size like in all those 1950's movies. Just everyday animals … GONE BAD!

Or the animals could be newly discovered species … or species thought long gone … or brought back. I love Steve Alten's books Meg and The Trench, in which he envisions prehistoric giant sharks and other behemoths dwelling deep in the oceanic dark. Having a fondness for dinosaurs as well, I am a big fan of the Jurassic Park movies (and waiting impatiently for one in which the raptors - coolest dinos ever, in my opinion - get off those islands and become a real problem).

Moving a step further than dinosaurs brings us to giant monsters. I'm talking Godzilla and his pals - Ghidra was always cool, though I never did quite understand the turtle with the saber-toothed underbite. I'm talking half the episodes of The Powerpuff Girls, in which one icky critter after another escapes Monster Island and comes to lay waste on the city of Townsville. Or Deep Rising, a particularly enjoyable bit of film (all the more so for Brian Setzer's "Lady Luck" and Famke Janssen slinking around in a red dress).

Sometimes, the threat is really external. Extraterrestrial, even. I'm talking aliens. Footfall, War of the Worlds, Independence Day … Mars Attacks (why not?). Forget your nice cuddly uplifting E.T. … forget Star Trek … I'm of the school that believes (even if I don't necessarily like it) that most technological advancements do not grow out of a desire to explore and do good. I believe that they come from adapting military applications, and therefore the idea of aliens coming in peace seems a lot less likely.

I take back that bit about forgetting Star Trek. I amend it, anyway. Forget the Federation. Look at the Romulans, the Klingons, and of course the Borg. I mean, another of my favorite books is about first contact with an alien species (I won't say which, not wanting to spoil it for anybody), and those aliens are benign, seeking out inhabited worlds, spreading good will, sharing knowledge … how the heck did they get funding?

And if sometimes the threat is external, it can also be extra-dimensional. In the world according to Lovecraft, there's an entire dark and squishy universe of dark and squishy entities overlapping our own. Or the threat to a world may come via time travel, from the future or the past.

I recently picked up Footprints of Thunder by James F. David, which turned out to be a surprisingly good read (especially as I plucked it from a bargain bin) and has time displacement plunking down sections of prehistoric territory in the modern era. The old lady who suddenly finds that her New York apartment has a view of a meadow, and who makes a pet of an iguanadon, is just too much fun. That's dinos and time travel, a twofer!

Last, but certainly not least, there's always the Act of God. Pick a god, any god … Apollo let his son Phaeton drive the chariot of the sun, which then went wild. When it plunged close to the earth, it seared the surface into charcoal. When it soared too high, the earth froze. The tale of the Great Flood is found in everything from the Old Testament to the fall of Atlantis.

Just as every culture had its legend about the creation of the world, they had their forecast for its destruction. The Bible lays it out play-by-play in the book of Revelation. The Norse myths bring us the doom of Ragnarok. The Mayan calendar says our collective time is up on December 21, 2012 -no need to stress the holiday shopping that year, huh? Prophecies abound, and not a month goes by when The Weekly World News doesn't run some Nostradamus revival … in between updates on Bat Boy.

Personally, I haven't written or GM'd many situations with that catastrophic a scale. I have a hard time letting go of just my characters, let alone wiping out an entire civilization. I get attached. PC death is also a very rare phenomenon. All that work, all that emotional investment … plus, I hate eliminating someone or something and then coming up with a really nifty idea.

Lately, though, I'm finding that I feel a little more comfortable with the prospect. Lest my players start shrieking in terror, let me hasten to add that it's in my writing more than my gaming. I've already completed one horror novel that skirts the end of the world by means of wars. Skirts, because the action all takes place on a remote island and what's happening in the rest of the world is only heard about on the news. But I've been brewing a new plot about a global effect that leaves only a few survivors. I've admired those kinds of books for so long that I really am itching to try my own hand at it.

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