Most players don’t truly consider the ramifications of just how dangerous some of the spells are that they have at their disposal. When you can have a Meteor Storm or Insect Plague at your fingertips or you can summon a literal god, it’s quite scary how things can quickly get out of hand when playingDungeons & Dragons.
When you think about it, there are some spells that can truly destroy the world if your DM allows you to use them a certain way. While you may not be able to destroy the world on your own, with some creativity and a bit of help from other spellcasters, several spells can truly end the entire world.
Type
Level 6 Enchantment
While this spell seems simple enough on the surface, if you consider the ramifications if a cult or large group decided to use it for evil, you might start to realize just how devastating it can be. It would require a bit of work on the part of the cult or influencer, as you cannot order anyone to directly harm themselves or each other. However, an innocuous command you’ve insisted will help a massive group of people can be convincing them to destroy all the crops or drain the ocean or some other ridiculous notion.
En masse, a well-worded command across a cult spanning he world will bring the world to a complete halt. The fact thatat higher levels the spellcan last for 366 days means you can force large swaths of people to do your evil bidding under the guise of good for over a year. The destruction they can cause will ruin the world. It’d be long and arduous, but it can be done.
Level 6 Abjuration
While this spell does admittedly need a second spell to truly end the world, it’s a start that will be helpful for plans to destroy it. Forbiddance protects up to 40,000 square feet of the caster’s choosing. No one can teleport magically in or out of the targeted space. Travel to the world’s core, block all attempts at intervention, and watch as your actions cause the world to disintegrate. If you work together with other spellcasters, you can potentially create an area wide enough to block out entire cities, eventually the world if you’re ambitious enough.
The icing on the cake, though, is that Forbidance damages your choice of creature if they manage to get themselves inside the designated area. You can protect yourself and whatever else you summon to destroy the world while also dealing damage to a creature that comes inside to try and stop you. Combined with other world-ending spells, Forbiddance feels like you need to have it prepared when you get ready to mess things up.
Level 5 Conjuration
If you want to get biblical with your world destruction, take the Insect Plague spell and tweak it just a bit, and you’ve got a pandemic. Instead of having the Insect Plague focus solely on creatures, you can have it focus on the world’s supplies instead. A plague of locusts (which you need as a component for the spell) can do more than just deal damage and make the terrain difficult to get through.
They will tear through and completely wipe out all the crops and vegetation in an area, making it completely uninhabitable and creating food shortages. An easy enough spell to cast, it can be devastating on a large scale.
Level 8 Transmutation
This one is easy. While the original spell is on a smaller scale, the devastation it can cause is major. With options for dealing damage to crumbling buildings and structures, while also allowing you to cause fissures on the earth.
An Earthquake spell done by a large number of spellcasters around the world, synced at the exact same time, will ruin everything. If you want to get really destructive, you’re able to even add a Tsunami spell in there as well. Unfortunately, there’s almost nothing anyone can do to stop destruction on this scale.
Level 8 Conjuration
Similar to Earthquake, Tsunami is a spell that, if planned correctly, can destroy the world. Several druids coming together to cast a Tsunami in very specific oceans around your world will have devastating effects. A 300-foot-long and 300-foot-high wall of water coming at you all at once, dealing damage and destruction in its wake, is already bad.
Have several druids working together to double the amount of area covered, traveling the world and creating devastating Tsunami in their wake, and you’ve got a world-ending situation on your hands. As with the Earthquake, you can pair this Tsunami with other options such as monsters or Earthquakes to destroy the world.
Level 5 Necromancy
Contagion on a mass scale can be the beginning and the end of a campaign. A pandemic caused by a contagion spread by a cult is the perfect start to a world-ending campaign, and if your players don’t stop it, it’ll also be the end. While it’s not the most practical way of ending the world, it can be done with the DM stretching the spell’s abilities a bit.
Contagion allows you to spread poison throughout an area as your touch contains a magical contagion. The spell’s contagion (poison) lasts for 7 days. If you have a cult spreading the contagion across the world, you have a world-ending spell that’s pretty easy to implement with drastic consequences. It’s not just creatures, as you can use the spell to plague the earth itself with some creative decision-making to make it truly worth its world-ending potential.
Level 9 Evocation
What’s better than a Fire Storm spell? A Meteor Storm spell. There’s not much you can do when blazing orbs of fire rain down above you, burning everything in their path at the same time. The devastation and destruction can be on the dinosaur extinction level when you have sorcerers working together to completely annihilate an area.
Burning everything in its wake, while the spell description focuses on the 20d6 of Bludgeoning damage and 20d6 Fire damage it does, you’ll want to consider the devastation that much damage can cause to the area around it. Having a bunch of high-level spellcasters raining fireballs down on the world en masse can easily destroy the entire planet, doing tons of damage to the plane.
Level 6 Conjuration
If you may’t destroy the world yourself, just call on someone who can. Planar Ally allows you tosummon an otherworldly entities aid for help. The options include “…a god, a demon prince, or some other being of cosmic power. You can even name the creature you’d like to aid you. Whetherit’s a dragonor a celestia being, the problem with this spell however, is that the entity you summon is not under your control.
You can summon them and make a request, but you’d better summon someone who is willing to help you completely destroy the world. While they won’t accept a task that seems suicidal, they don’t have to die to destroy the planet. The price they charge however, might be pretty steep as it could take days depending on how you ask for their help.
Level 9 Conjuration
If none of the above options work for destroying your world, the best course of action is to just rewrite reality itself. While the Wish spell itself is the mightiest spell that can be cast, most of the options suggested to you are not world-ending. The final option, however, literally allows you to rewrite reality depending on how you word it.
This spell is probably the trickiest, as anything you do to disrupt the multiverse will fail, but destroying a particular world in the multiverse isn’t technically against the rules here. At this point, you’ve reached superhero levels of alteration, and little can stop you from destroying the world.
