Villain examples of world altering

[Gamezdude]

I'm looking for examples where a villain would attempt to alter the world's nature be it weather, geography, environment etc.

Context:
My villains objective is to prevent the sun from rising and I'm unsure as to how he would accomplish this.
Artifact?
Ancient magic that requires very specific ingredients?

[Breccia]

Context:
My villains objective is to prevent the sun from rising and I'm unsure as to how he would accomplish this.

Ascending to godhood.

That's really about it. Stopping the sun from rising, something often attributed to a god like Apollo, would at least require a stronger god pushing back.

Now, if the villain instead wanted to black out the sun's effect for, say, a fifty mile radius, epic- or artifact-level magic could do it. Control weather simply won't get the job done.

Those answers probably don't help you in any way.

So, you're going to have to cheat. Lucky for you, you're the DM!

What you might want to do, is make the process require several key steps that the PCs can thwart, such as:

A) Conducting a massively cool ritual that needs special unique ingredients the PCs could find first, such as "the blessed gemstone spire of the thousand-foot Eldimiir Lighthouse"

B) Destroying and defiling major temples of sun deities and killing their worshippers

C) Causing a massive forest or field fire a hundred miles wide

D) Placating multiple demons, devils, or gods of night, shadow or darkness, by going through their temples (cough dungeons cough) and contacting their high priests

E) As above, but rain and storms. Tougher to do, because they tend to be nature and/or good related, neither of whom want eternal night traditionally.

F) Cheesing the rules with 21st-century knowledge, such as chain-casting a high-level version of darkness on a massive block of ice, then making it evaporate.

G) And the whole thing needs to happen on a planet/star alignment under an eclipse and it snowed yesterday, putting the whole campaign on a massive looming timer.

The more parts and the more complicated/difficult the parts, the easier of a time the players will have accepting the premise is possible, and the greater hope they'll have they can stop it. Moving celestial bodies is not supposed to be easy. Make sure it doesn't seem to be. Sidenote: remember there's a simple question every action or fantasy movie faces. "Why didn't he do that before?" If the villain could just blot out the sun whenever he wanted, the PCs will feel their actions mean nothing -- and they'd be correct. Fortunately, magic has structures and rules. If the villain plays by the rules, the PCs will feel like you're not cheating, when you totally are.

Good luck!

P.S. At least once, one of your players will use the phrase "where the sun don't shine". If they fail to do so, the villain has to.

[the_david]

In the Illithid trilogy the sun was slowly fading due to the Illithids messing with it somehow.
In Evernight the not-Illithids pollute the skies with dark clouds.

Oerth is the center of a geo system rather than a planet in a solar system. The sun (Liga) orbits Oerth, instead of the other way around. If something would knock the sun from its orbit the years would start to get longer, the planet would cool down, sunlight would fade, etc.

[Lord of Shadows]

To bring in a sort of techno-magic element, there is also the Dyson Sphere, some major tech that would blot out the sun if the observer's planet were outside the sphere. This could involve an adventure including travel to the sphere and defeat/dismantle the obstruction. The sphere need not be completed yet, just the part facing the observer's planet, which since its also in orbit may not block out the sun all the time. An initial, temporary blocking of the sun could be a good foreshadowing event of what's to come should the sphere be completed.

Your villain could be allied with the alien culture building the sphere, or could just co-op the blocking event to use for their purposes, or could be involved in actually creating it for some reason.

Hope this helps.

[redwizard007]

In some of the Salvatore books a portion of the realms was blacked out via a goddess acting through a mortal proxy.

[brian 333]

Epic Spell: Malignant Darkness

When cast upon the stronghold of the magic-user, this spell creates a zone of darkness which expands at the rate of 1 mile per hour until it reaches the border of the lands controlled by the magic-user or the border of lands claimed by someone else. Should these borders expand or contract the edge of the zone will adjust at this same speed to conform to the new borders.

To comply with this spell any inhabitants of greater than animal intelligence must accept that the claimant actually controls the area, even if the legitimacy of the claim is contested.

Examples:
When the spell is cast a local lord holds a fort on lands claimed by the magic-user and patrols a five mile perimeter around it. The expansion of the darkness halts at this perimeter, though it may surround the fort if it can do so without crossing claimed territory.
In another location a hero establishes a stronghold on the perimeter and begins to root out the magic-user's minions. The darkness falls back.
In yet another direction the magic-user forces a duke and his vassals to swear fealty to him and the darkness falls on the duke's lands.

The zone is attractive to creatures which prefer darkness and they will be drawn to the region, but the darkness offers no means for the magic-user to control such immigrants.

The zone should be thematically linked to the magic-user, such that a fire elementalist creates a massive bonfire that makes enough smoke and ash to blot out the sky while a necromancer creates something more akin to a Darkness spell.

[noob]

Ascending to godhood.

That's really about it. Stopping the sun from rising, something often attributed to a god like Apollo, would at least require a stronger god pushing back.

Now, if the villain instead wanted to black out the sun's effect for, say, a fifty mile radius, epic- or artifact-level magic could do it. Control weather simply won't get the job done.

Those answers probably don't help you in any way.

So, you're going to have to cheat. Lucky for you, you're the DM!

What you might want to do, is make the process require several key steps that the PCs can thwart, such as:

A) Conducting a massively cool ritual that needs special unique ingredients the PCs could find first, such as "the blessed gemstone spire of the thousand-foot Eldimiir Lighthouse"

B) Destroying and defiling major temples of sun deities and killing their worshippers

C) Causing a massive forest or field fire a hundred miles wide

D) Placating multiple demons, devils, or gods of night, shadow or darkness, by going through their temples (cough dungeons cough) and contacting their high priests

E) As above, but rain and storms. Tougher to do, because they tend to be nature and/or good related, neither of whom want eternal night traditionally.

F) Cheesing the rules with 21st-century knowledge, such as chain-casting a high-level version of darkness on a massive block of ice, then making it evaporate.

G) And the whole thing needs to happen on a planet/star alignment under an eclipse and it snowed yesterday, putting the whole campaign on a massive looming timer.

The more parts and the more complicated/difficult the parts, the easier of a time the players will have accepting the premise is possible, and the greater hope they'll have they can stop it. Moving celestial bodies is not supposed to be easy. Make sure it doesn't seem to be. Sidenote: remember there's a simple question every action or fantasy movie faces. "Why didn't he do that before?" If the villain could just blot out the sun whenever he wanted, the PCs will feel their actions mean nothing -- and they'd be correct. Fortunately, magic has structures and rules. If the villain plays by the rules, the PCs will feel like you're not cheating, when you totally are.

Good luck!

P.S. At least once, one of your players will use the phrase "where the sun don't shine". If they fail to do so, the villain has to.

In dnd 3.5 it can be done with an ice assassin swarm of like 10^60 just to be safe(it is big enough and it will take a surprisingly short time due to exponential growth) that is immune to fire and which proceeds to cast an epic spell animate seed with an high enough area to animate the entire sun then one of the ice assassins use magic jar to posses the sun then casts teleport.
The reason the villain did not do that earlier is that earlier it was only level 16.

[Quizatzhaderac]

My villains objective is to prevent the sun from rising and I'm unsure as to how he would accomplish this.?

What will that accomplish and why does the villain want to do that? If you have specific answers we can go from there.

Also, (assuming this is for a D&D campaign) do you want your players to generally succeed at the intermediary steps or fail to stop the BBEG?

If the BBEG casts spells on the leypoints, the heroes will go from leypoint to leypoint generally succeeding in disputing the spell; bringing light to region by region.

If the BBEG plans to kill the sun god, it will need to obtain the godslaying spear, obtain the tomb of theomanifestation, kidnap the highpriest, and do this whole ritual thing on this specific place on a particular day. This plan will probably be more interesting if the BBEG succeeds in some (or almost all parts) of the plan.

[noob]

What will that accomplish and why does the villain want to do that? If you have specific answers we can go from there.

Also, (assuming this is for a D&D campaign) do you want your players to generally succeed at the intermediary steps or fail to stop the BBEG?

If the BBEG casts spells on the leypoints, the heroes will go from leypoint to leypoint generally succeeding in disputing the spell; bringing light to region by region.

If the BBEG plans to kill the sun god, it will need to obtain the godslaying spear, obtain the tomb of theomanifestation, kidnap the highpriest, and do this whole ritual thing on this specific place on a particular day. This plan will probably be more interesting if the BBEG succeeds in some (or almost all parts) of the plan.

Then the adventurers discovers it was all a pointless plot(because the villain would not have succeeded that way due to how physics works) to distract them from the fact they were creating a swarm of ice assassin big enough to do the epic spellcasting animation of the sun then teleport it as if it was a creature.
Take 500 disjunctions, 500 meteor swarms and 500 orb spells from 0.000000000000000001% of the ice assasin swarm while 1% of the swarm is busy animating the sun and the rest is idling and ready to act just like in movies where you see people pretending to fight in the background.

[Mechalich]

My villains objective is to prevent the sun from rising and I'm unsure as to how he would accomplish this.

This seems like an odd goal. the consequences of the sun not rising are pretty much universally fatal in a matter of really only a few days assuming you're blotting out solar radiation from the entire planet. Even if you're talking about an undead being who doesn't care much about the cold, turning the planet into a giant ball of ice seems like it would be decidedly inconvenient. There are almost certainly significantly easier ways to eliminate all organic life on a planet, and some of them - like stripping all the oxygen from the atmosphere (okay certain microbes would survive this, but I mean, come on) - that wouldn't involve burying everything under miles of ice.

[Squire Doodad]

I can't think of any reason to stop the sun from rising that isn't petty as hell or that the villain has a wider-scope plan and blotting out this star is the first in a wide range of galactic spanning conquerings.

Generally I'd say having there be a holy artifact from a sun/night god would work fine for blotting out the sun over a small area (like, say, a kingdom). If the plan is actually "kill the sun, completely", you'd want something bigger. Either a doomsday weapon or a plan to shatter a series of lost artifacts to cause a feedback loop and cause the star to fail.

Of course, a much more reasonable plan would be just to make the world plunged into darkness. This is easier, as you can simply have it be things ranging from a spell of everlasting night, destroying the mechanisms of time (PMD Explorers of Time), summoning a dark god (Nyx works well), or tipping the scales of light and darkness on a global level (FF3). Plus way too many more.

Overall, while it seems...interesting? You should think about what the villain actually wants. If they want to plunge the world into darkness (whether it's "you have low light visibility everywhere" or "everything is pitch black unless lit, but there's still heat from the sun") then that's interesting, and lets you have a possibility of the villain winning and the party trying to fix it. If they want to kill off the sun, then you should think about why they want to do so. Also, is the villain undead because otherwise doing so will probably kill them too. And even undead feed off of something, so even that won't last long enough.

[noob]

I can't think of any reason to stop the sun from rising that isn't petty as hell or that the villain has a wider-scope plan and blotting out this star is the first in a wide range of galactic spanning conquerings.

Generally I'd say having there be a holy artifact from a sun/night god would work fine for blotting out the sun over a small area (like, say, a kingdom). If the plan is actually "kill the sun, completely", you'd want something bigger. Either a doomsday weapon or a plan to shatter a series of lost artifacts to cause a feedback loop and cause the star to fail.

Of course, a much more reasonable plan would be just to make the world plunged into darkness. This is easier, as you can simply have it be things ranging from a spell of everlasting night, destroying the mechanisms of time (PMD Explorers of Time), summoning a dark god (Nyx works well), or tipping the scales of light and darkness on a global level (FF3). Plus way too many more.

Overall, while it seems...interesting? You should think about what the villain actually wants. If they want to plunge the world into darkness (whether it's "you have low light visibility everywhere" or "everything is pitch black unless lit, but there's still heat from the sun") then that's interesting, and lets you have a possibility of the villain winning and the party trying to fix it. If they want to kill off the sun, then you should think about why they want to do so. Also, is the villain undead because otherwise doing so will probably kill them too. And even undead feed off of something, so even that won't last long enough.

In dnd 3.5 there is tons of ways to cause eternal darkness with ease.
In fact you could just arguably cast energy ward: fire then fly to the sun then grab it and throw it away from the planet repeatedly.
Or you could cast an improved version of the eclipse creating epic spell.
Or you can fly toward the sun then when close enough create an epic spell with a very negative dc and thus create a black hole that eats the sun(then the planet shortly afterwards)
Or you can polymorph(with PAO) a black hole into a chicken and throw it at the sun.
Or you can put a sphere of annihilation you got from your SPC in a well of many worlds.
Or you can go around the planet and systematically cast persisted shadow spells until the whole world is covered.

[NichG]

I would start with the idea that the villain questions something everyone else accepts as given or knows something everyone else doesn't, then follow a chain of reasoning 3 or 4 steps down, then have the villain's first visible actions center around that.

E.g. villain suspects that logic and truth are themselves subject to belief in a Planescape setting and wants to prove it. So, they join a group that wants to actively manipulate belief for their own reasons (say, a group of would-be godslayers who want to manipulate the dogma of a religion to destabilize its deities), with the intent of piggybacking on their work to test their theories and undermine belief structures supporting the local equivalent of 'I think therefore I am' (accidental omnicide if successful). So how do you undermine a religion? What if you could use an effect that changes the contents of religious texts without people noticing? So, first the villain group is trying to steal one of the quills that a god of history uses to correct the timeline. How do you do that? Well, the god of history can't personally record everything, so it all starts with the mysterious disappearance of one of the apprentice scribes...

In the case of preventing the sunrise, perhaps the villain understands that it is caused by the turning of the world. Therefore, to prevent the sunrise, they should get rid of the world's rotation. But where to put it? Well, it is known that there are other planes of existence, and the ethereal is one that touches on the world physically in some cases. So the villain needs a device with two parts - one material, one ethereal, which would 'catch' the world on some kind of static ethereal feature like an Ether Gap and would start to transfer angular momentum to it. They also need a sphere of annihilation to handle the necessary momentum flux density, and a way to locally fuse the material and ethereal planes. And each of those requirements spawns plots and backup plans and such.

Or, perhaps the ploy is to interfere with the more mythic aspects - sabotaging Ra's barque, finding a cosmic scale dungball to distract Khepri with, etc.