If you had had a chance to blow up your campaign, could you?

This is a post about the long standing campaigns out there. Little pieces of the multi-verse that we have been  nibbling away  at intellectually  since high school or even before that.

For me, I started my campaign mostly ran it as a proper game in high school, but the basic map goes back to the very first game I ever ran and  a fighter named Buck looking for a ruby sword. That is a span of something like 26 years give or take. The last time I ran it was Friday, the game included a reference to something that happened in game back in 1994.I know there are folks out there who have been running games in the same world of their own creation for even longer. I know for a fact there are people out there who have kept better maps and  notes over the years than I have.

My question to you is what would it take to for you to blow it up?

Not start something new, but  rend the  old world to pieces.

How would it happen?

The introduction of new powerful magic can change a world for ever. Dropping a city  like Sigil form Planescape into a campaign would take that setting from being the center of everything to just one location in a vast multiverse.

The sun turns Red and ho, ala Athas.

The oceans away boil into vast steam clouds.

Never ending rain

A huge cosmic monolith  crashes into the world destroying a major city and everything around it.

A large object crashes down from the heavens causing  a cataclysmic impact.

Four great cracks open in the worlds crust spreading wider and wider, rending  cities apart and dividing the lands.

Aliens, time travelers, conquistadors, returning  gods, plague?

Any one of those ideas could be the start or at least the basis of a great campaign, but could you do it to you long existing setting?

When I first started writing  "Shards of Thimbral"  my  original concept was that the sharded world was the remains of my old campaign world. In the end I couldn't do it. Wanting to start fresh and slough off all those D& D soaked tropes was part of it.  Another strong part of it was I emotionally didn't want to blow up my game world.

So could you?

If you could how would you do it?

Thank you for reading.

Please leave any question , comments or  answers in the  smoldering  remains of civilization below.

-Mark.