Creative block! Help please!

As my title says I'm having a bit of an issue with a creative block in my world.

The material plane: Exists due to a cosmic collision between the Elemental planes. The 'impact' of mixed planes is the fodder that eventually fuels the material planes creation.

An old God (henceforth the Creator) saw that the planes collision was continual. Meaning that eventually the Elemental planes would be destroyed completely and there would be an uninhabitable maelstrom of energy left in their place. The Creator did not approve of this and created a powerful artifact in the Astral Plane that would stabilize the maelstrom and return it's components to their respective plane.

As the destruction stabilized it formed into a plane in it's own right, the Material, a mix of every element. And life was born. Over the thousands of years that the artifact slowly restored like flourished on the slowly diminishing plane. (Plane manipulation on this scale is slow even for the most powerful!) The life on the Material plane realized what was happening and fought to preserve their 'newborn' plane. They managed to create an artifact that fed off the energy of the Creators that stabilized the decline.

Now for the actual issue. Their are two sides of conflict. One that supports the return of the material to it's Elemental origins. And those that want to preserve it as its own Plane with as much right for it's inhabitants to have a home as any of the Elemental planes.

This conflict has created a 'cycle' wherein civilization on the Material rises and falls. The fall is triggered by one of the two sides (whichever is 'losing' that cycle). These 'sides' are my equivalent of celestials and fiends. Instead of being divided on good vs evil, they deviate on lawful vs chaotic with both sides having both good and evil subfactions (not relevant to my current issue I don't think so no more on that for now :P )

To major events identify the cycle. The first is 'The Awakening' in my mind this is the moment that all hell breaks loose on the material plane. The factions, that until this point are mostly playing puppet master to the mortals of the material plane that don't know the big picture, make appearances on the material. This is the moment that the inhabitants of the Material plane are (as a general whole) made aware of the risk to their Plane. It is POSSIBLE that others know before this point, but they are in the minority by a massive margin and are dismissed as conspiracy theorists by the masses.

The other is The Collapse. This is when civilization falls. Technology (magical in nature obviously due to fantasy setting) is lost and empires crumble. The world stops fighting the extra-planar threat and destroys each other, so thoroughly that records are lost and written history of this period (and before) rarely make it into the first states if the next cycle. This loss is likely influenced by the extra planar wars, but possibly not directly caused by them?

What I need help with:

How to trigger the Awakening?
-current thought is just a literal invasion from one faction as a preemptive strike, fearing they are feeling behind in the puppet war and need to act directly.

How to explain the collapse?
- I'm looking for a something that would explain the extent of lost knowledge as well as the complete lack of record of the entire time period.
- I need a plausible (I mean... Magic is a thing so it doesn't have to be THAT plausible lol) cause if the material planes infighting and why the extra planar entities back off.

I'm really just hoping someone can help spark something in my mind, I don't need a detailed explanation (though if you can follow my wonky world enough based in my probably pretty lacking descriptions enough to make one I'd gladly read and discuss it with you!)

Thank you to anyone who actually read all my ramblings, and double thanks in advance to anyone that responds!!

Edit: Changed title to better reflect what the final post ended up asking as I resolved my first issue while posting and changed to a new one :P

From my reading of that, I'm guessing that the forces of Chaos want to destroy the Material Plane, by allowing the elemental planes to slam into each other again. Do the forces of Law only want to preserve the Material Plane? Or do they too want to destroy it, but by instead separating the elemental planes properly once again?

As an idea regarding the Awakening: While those who recognise the threat to the world that these otherworldly forces represent are usually laughed off or derided as mad, what happens when someone who has the ear of royalty discovers hints of the truth in the ruins of the past? When a small contingent of powerful mages set to work to discover something, rarely does it remain hidden for long. And once the truth gets out, paranoia would spread, as ordinary folk begin to distrust one another, suspecting everyone around them as wanting to doom the world. On a larger scale, this distrust could be used to fuel the fires of old resentments and reopen old wounds, leading to wars as people lash out at a threat beyond their comprehension.

As to the Collapse: Perhaps magic in the Material Plane is tied to the forces of Law and Chaos. Chaos gives magic its strength and potency, while Law gives it form and direction. Without Law, magic becomes extremely powerful, but wild and unpredictable, potentially with catastrophic consequences. Without Chaos, magic drains from the world, perhaps causing creatures that feed on magic to become more desperate, and they take to the surface world and rend it asunder in a desperate need to feed on the magic inherent to living creatures. As to why these factors could cause the extra-planar forces to temporarily abandon the Material Plane, if Chaos is winning perhaps an immense magical feedback loop rips through living creatures, targeting those with the most magic inherent to them (namely, extra-planar beings and powerful mages). If Law is winning, perhaps the forces awakened by the weakening of magic fixate on the extra-planar visitors, hungry for their power more than anyone's.

As I read it, one side (Law, I think) wants to pull the elemental planes apart, restorint the previous order. That would destroy the Material, which is incidental, as it should never have existed in the first place. The other side wants to maintain the present stalemate wherein the elemental planes are neither continuing to crash nor pulling apart, so the Material can survive.

I imagine the Awakening starting the same way Nidhiki foes, with knowledge of the situation starting to become known, but e diverge after that. I imagine one side {of the outsiders} seing mortal knowledge as being in the other's advantage, and invadint the Material to stampbit out. The other side counters, and they fight for a while.

Once one side gains the upper hand and drives the other out, the victor inevitably wants to avoid repeating the events so the their advantage can be maintained, and so destroys all the evidence before withdrawing.

Why does neither side ever try something different? Like actually finishing the other side off instead of withdrawing with "an advantage"? Because the universe likes cycles liles seasons, birth and death, Awakening and Collapse, so the players have no more choice than leaves on the trees.

Perhaps treating these Outsiders like D&D treats Gods would work?

the reason that the Outsiders backed off (in addition to the Magic Balance suggested above) is that the Creator either foresaw this war, or realized it was a problem, and did something to make it very difficult for the Outsiders to enter the World.

Perhaps another Artifact that no one has access to?
But is still affected by the Elemental Planes so that both the 'The Awakening' and the 'Collapse' can happen?

I think you were trying to avoid this, but I'll put it in anyway.

Or perhaps the Creator allows Mortals - Of each Major Alignment - to Acend to Godhood? With only one Domain per God.
And only the God of Death is Neutral.

These Gods would be opposed to the Outsiders, and thier power would depend on the belief and dedication of the Mortals.

This could also create a Good vs Evil conflict, split even more because the Gods could oppose each other - both LG vs All Evil, but also vs CG. Same for the Evil Gods - LE vs CE and both vs All Good Gods.

Also, each time the World is Reset/Destroyed the existing God's of that Time are "Dead", and new Gods arise?

This makes all the Sides rely on Mortal Envoys.

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Originally Posted by Galithar

How to explain the collapse?

- I need a plausible (I mean... Magic is a thing so it doesn't have to be THAT plausible lol) cause if (of) the material planes infighting

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Okay, so I think it's correct to say that the sides are:

Destroy the Material Plane and allow its base matter to merge back into the Inner Planes

versus

Preserve the Material Plane because it has created a unique and novel kind of life

and the there's a central strategic asset;

A MacGuffin that slows the degradation of the Material Plane

and a backdrop in which there's a different artifact stopping the collapse of the entire Inner Plane.

The sides are Destructionand Preservation, but the underlying arguments for either could be seen as "Chaotic" or "Orderly" depending on framing.

Destroy could argue there's a higher natural order that's being violated, that there's something inherently wrong with the Material Plane creating short-lived unpredictable mortal beings, or that it's just weird to have a plane of mixed matter. They could argue that mortal existence is inherently cruel, and thus absurd. They could also believe that repairing the collapse of the Inner Planes means eliminating the Material Plane, or that working counter to the efforts of the Creator who created the first artifact is risking the entire cosmos.

Preserve could argue that the Material Plane matters because it is novel, because its mix of matter creates unique and more and more complex structures in nature and supernature, because mortals and mortality create beautiful fleeting things, that there is an inherent dignity to life and thus a right to exist. They could also believe that a racemic, variegated plane of mixed elements is a solution to the problem of Inner Planes collapse, not a byproduct.

...what does happen to dead people? Because somewhere in here there's potential argument about the Material Plane creating new souls that then pass on the eternal Plane, and how that's unconditionally bad or good, or conditionally bad or good if there's pragmatists or cynics about....

I don't really know how to mesh this conflict with D&D's two axes. The sides don't really fit with "Order" and "Chaos" but can be made to by picking and choosing arguments. Good and Evil, too, although there's a separate problem where I struggle to see any "Good" argument that adheres to the Destroy position, because the former simply denies the existential value of people.

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...and why the extra planar entities back off.

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As to why they back off, I have several thoughts: Go look at stuff on cold wars and proxy wars.

What you're describing between Destruction and Preservation fits this mold, and the best explanation for a collapse is that what's happening on the material plane is a proxy conflict where mortals (and maybe lesser outsiders) are used to advance objectives and sound out what the other side's trying to achieve. The proxy conflict stays cold, or cool, while societies develop and new proxy factions acquire power, but there comes a point where the war heats up, leading to the "Collapse" phase where the sides go all in and completely devastate the field of contest.

• Stemming from the specific US-Soviet Cold War: Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). If Destruction and Preservation truly war across the whole metaphysical realm, the result is a devastation to the cosmic order that unravels the cosmology--the result of neither the restoration of elemental purity or the stabilization of the Material Plane--or (cynically) at very least means that the very powerful beings atop each side will lose their nigh-infinite power. In each phase there comes a moment in the Material Plane conflict where MAD beckons and the sides recede, and the "reset" of the world is what occurs while the depleted forces of Destruction and Preservation rebuild the strengths and develop new ideas of how to proceed in the next cycle.
  
  
• The next is that the cosmic sides have rules of engagement (ROE), so after a Collapse phase something triggers in their mutual understanding and pull back. This may tie into the aforementioned fear of MAD, or may have to do with a distinction between important immortal outsiders being sacrificed for the cause and limited mortals (and/or less important outsiders) being chucked into the grinder. Hence resetting the world after a Collapse: the agreed-upon format of the conflict requires a board and pieces to move, and for those pieces to function correctly (not resist or question being proxies).
  
  
  -A grotesque subset of this idea of ROE and proxies is that there are multiple levels of proxy, and thus "Destruction" and "Preservation" have within them agents operating in full faith believing this is an existential conflict, and agents operating in a more calculated way that implicitly acknowledges "rules" about keeping the fight in the mortal realm, and--especially dark--higher-order operators for whom the conflict means deceiving lesser outsiders on the same side to keep them fully invested in the fight. The very pinnacle beings could view the entire conflict as a kind of gentleman's bet or grand experiment, with mortals being viewed as less dead and thus acceptable losses.
  
  
• There are elements to the conflict that are unknown even to the very powerful beings of Destruction and Preservation. One version of this is not being sure how the artifacts actually do what they do, and how to undo the effect. So the philosophical conflict over the material plane repeats while the uncertainty about the underlying metaphysics means that certain endgame strategies...making mortals extinct, literally destroying the planet...are avoiding because the result isn't certain (which ties into MAD again). As such, "resets" after Collapse are an attempt to avoid scraping up against an unknown that destroys everything rather than give one side a win. Better to restart, and try new opening moves than lose the ability to win.
  
  The elaboration of this is unknown unknowns: Destruction and Preservation are fighting to their utmost, in earnest, but their conflict cannot achieve a success for either because there are elements of the cosmic system that are beyond their reckoning. For example, in each Collapse phase there are attempts to simply destroy the Material Plane fail, or kill all the mortals fails and instead there's a palingenesis phase where the world "resets," people survive but do not remember. As such, the destructive side cannot achieve their goal, but the preservation side cannot stop the destructive side from trying again. As such, each cycle is not just a war, but also an experiment with trying to create a true ending...preservation or destruction with no reset...with each side testing out theories and strategies on not just how to beat one another, but to overturn a super-ordinate force.
  
  The artifacts are perfectly positioning to act as MacGuffins that preserve the world in spite of the world-ending conflict(s), making the cycle recur.

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How to trigger the Awakening?
-current thought is just a literal invasion from one faction as a preemptive strike, fearing they are feeling behind in the puppet war and need to act directly.

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The Awakening is the part of the endgame of each cycle. Following the cold war/proxy war model...it's the point where two things start happening:

(1) Each side has reached a point where they see either advantage or emergency, and escalate the conflict. The cold war gets hotter and the proxy conflict inflates as matériel, then combatants, flood the conflict region. (2) This escalation reveals the larger planar conflict because at some point the mortals are either actively told, or they attain sufficient magic and technology that they can discern (or divine) the information.

Escalation can cause cause disintegration of the proxy system, or disintegration of the proxy system can cause escalation. If Destruction and Preservation really are playing a kind of Lovecraftian board hame, which is cause and which is effect matters less than that both are signals of endgame strategies and--likely--another stalemate and resetting of the state of play.

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- I'm looking for a something that would explain the extent of lost knowledge as well as the complete lack of record of the entire time period.

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Consider reading up on mythic ending-beginning cycles for inspiration. Snorri's version of Ragnarök ends with only one man and one woman surviving. The Hopi version, one world dies and a tiny number of people escape to another, again and again. In Mesoamerican versions, the world is always under threat and the gods must be "fed" sacrifice to defend it...but eventually it will die of age anyway, at which point the gods will sacrifice themselves to make a new world and new people.

I'm suggesting this because What's missing from you cycle is a sense of scale both in time and space.

Is the Material Plane--and thus the zone of conflict--a planet, or otherwise a singular livable manifold (like a scifi ringworld or Dyson Sphere, or fantasy discworld) or more like solar system or galaxy? This determines the scale of the conflict and thus the scale of each cycle reset.

A related issue to "space" is what remains after each Collapse phase...not just people, but all the physical changes to the world. There's both presences--buildings, durable technology, magic--and absences--all the raw material subtracted from the ground, chunks of ecosystems missing because of civilization development and the devastation of a life-ending war--that either affect the next phase, have to be unmade for forgetting to happen, or have to be "fixed" so that sapient mortals have resources to thrive and build to the point they can get their war on again.

Another aspect of the spatial is whether Destruction and Preservation can operate through agencies other than beings. Can disasters be created, diseases fostered, the earth blighted with curses, planet-killing events be engineered? Is this another aspect of ROE? In effect, why are mortals useful as agents and proxies, when one cheap "win" is just...extinction...?

The time element is more complicated and thus more defining to the scenario, because the contrast is outsiders operating with an infinity of time (unless you say otherwise) versus a Material Plane proxy conflict in which a cycle bounded by temporal things (population growth, tech development) defines the conflict scale. Consider a series of questions to which there is no correct answer, just answers that refine how your basic premise could operate:

• With each side manipulating and influence the mortal world and culture, how fast does the conflict escalate before Awakening, and how long until the Collapse phase? In different cycles, has Collapse happened faster or slower, and why? Is triggering Awakening at a specific level of development and population density something that either side has tried as a strategy?
  
• Is there a fixed time component to the Collapse cycle? For example...each phase last exactly seven thousand years, the there's a Collapse, so each side is trying to "win" while watching the clock.
  
• Is Awakening truly inevitable in each phase, or can things escalate to the point of Collapse before it occurs?
  
• How long does it take for the Material Plane take to recover to the point that the proxy war re-initiates? Since the agents of Destruction and Preservation conducting this fight operate outside of conventional time...they're immortal or basically immortal...and are effectively gods in their ability to make/unmake...this can be anything from in an instant to geological time.

There's no right answer, and I'm asking rather than telling because it might spark something.

It sounds like you don't want a Mad Max scenario where it's people living in the remainder of a civilization, retaining a folkloric understanding of the past and certain rehearsed skillsets. You really want a full clean slate.

One option is the equivalent of the geological time scale: everyone dies on a planet, human development completely dissolves, eons pass, and life reappears via special creation or evolution. A similar option is that the Material Plane is galactic in scale, but individual planets that develop life become conflict zones. Eventually life appears on another planet and the process begins again.

Another option is like the Hopi story: the conflict burns a world to a cinder, but people escape to a new, untouched world, where society is reset and practical and historical knowledge rapidly disappears because it is contextless and unimportant compared to the needs of survival. This can happen space, by being whisked away via space ship, by supernatural intervention, or just mysteriously there's always a path to a new world and some people always slip away.

There's also the "the process is unexplained" possibility, where the remaking of the world and the cultural forgetting doesn't have to be implemented, but happens to people automatically at some point. The survivors of the Collapse go to sleep and the world (or solar system, or galaxy) sort of...heals itself of changes made by mortals...and the survivors wake to a clean world and few memories of the their past. Another version of this would be a time loop...Collapse happens, everything dies, and then there's a hard reset back to some ancient moment when mortals first prayed, or made fire, or something.

The Gods are Elementals, with the Good Gods being those who wish to preserve the material plane, by whatever means they decide are appropriate, and the Evil ones wishing to restore the original pre-crash planes or to see it all fly apart.

Thus you have your two major axes of Law and Chaos who are either restorationists or destructionists, and you have your Good and Evil axis defined by your Materialists versus Elementalists.

Your alignment chart looks like this:

CG (destroy the old Elemental Planes in favor of maintaining the new Material Plane.)
NG (strengthen the new Material Plane.)
LG (maintain the new Material Plane while strengthening the old Elemental Planes.)
CN (Destroy it all.)
N (Find and maintain a balance between the old and the new.)
LN (Preserve it all as it is now.)
CE (Destroy everything except those elemental parts I or WE control)
CN (Destroy everything except what we can restore to the former condition)
LN (Restore the old Elemental Planes to their former pristine condition.)

Then it gets fun, because you have six stacks of that chart, one for each element!

@brian
That last one should be:
LE (Restore the old Elemental Planes to their former pristine condition.)

And the eighth one should be NE.

As for why The Awakening and The Collapse happen... Perhaps caused by the birth/ascension of a god, and ended by a death? The solution is to rig the game so the triggers stack the deck in the players sides favor.

all the three sides are lawful:
The first side which wants to keep things as they are now and not have the material plane destroyed either by excessive energy concentration or by disjoining are lawful because they want to stop change.
the second side which wants the natural order of things to resume and to have the material plane destroyed by the elemental planes keeping to merge are lawful for they want the normal order of things to go on.
the third side which wants the material plane to vanish as its components go back to the elemental planes is lawful for it wants to return the universe back to its first stade.

There is only lawful forces and no chaotic forces in your setting.
I think it is normal you can not develop a chaos vs law divide if the sides you are thinking about are all lawful.

However you could create a new alignment axis that includes "do not care", "conflux"(wants to resume the natural process of plane fusion), "material" (wants the material plane to stay as it is) and "divergence" (wants the elemental planes to split to make the world come back to its previous state)

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Originally Posted by Great Dragon

@brian
That last one should be:
LE (Restore the old Elemental Planes to their former pristine condition.)

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Originally Posted by jqavins

And the eighth one should be NE.

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D'oh! Correct on both counts. Remember folks, edit before you post.

Okay, so my life got in the way for awhile, but I wanted to give HUGE thanks to Yanagi for a lot it good insight and things to think about. I've had some major changes to the world and how things work due to me having to make things up in the fly because I wasn't propped ahead of time and the campaign is advancing at a little bit faster pace then was comfortable for a bit. That said I'll post an update on where I'm at, taking into consideration things said here and let anyone that's keeping track have an update! Hopefully sometime this week.