Fantastic Fallout

You have to be clever to refrain from doing [magic] when you know how easy it is. There were places in the world commemorating those times when wizards hadn't been quite as clever as that, and on many of them the grass would never grow again.

— Going Postal

In real life, disasters tend to be temporary. Sure, a wildfire or a volcanic eruption will leave the surroundings a scorched wasteland for a while, but it won't take a long time before nature begins to creep back in and people will have begun rebuilding. Even the radiation from a nuclear bomb will eventually dissipate after several decades, enough that the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have more or less recovered.

Not so much in fantasy. If a powerful spell or a magical weapon blows up a large swath of ground, it is likely to never be the same again, or at least the effects will take far longer to go away than with any natural or technological disaster. At best, it's going to be a desert for a very long time. At worst, it will continue leaking strange (and often dangerous) magical effects onto anyone unfortunate enough to wander into the area. These effects will linger over the area hundreds or even thousands of years later — or worse, it may have even spread.

This is often (but not always) the result of a Fantastic Nuke. A Wizards' War is very likely to leave large areas of land polluted with this stuff. On a larger scale, it may overlap with World Sundering. May also overlap with Evil Tainted the Place, when the fallout is the legacy of a villain who used to lair in the area.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• One Piece: Following a fierce battle between Admirals Akainu and Aokiji, the Island of Punk Hazard has become perpetually covered by flames and lava eruptions on one side, and blizzards and snow on the other.
• Rave Master: In the backstory, the kingdom of Symphonia was destroyed by Overdrive, rendering it a barren wasteland surrounded by an endless storm.
• The Seven Deadly Sins: The kingdom of Danafor was supposedly destroyed when Meliodas lost control of his wrath. All that's left is a giant hole the size of the kingdom.
• Yuki Yuna is a Hero: In the distant past, a virus wiped out most of humanity and only the Shinju survived. Still, the world later stabilized and become affluent again, much like modern-day Japan. In actuality, the gods sent the Vertex to wipe out humanity, but the gods that remained to support humanity banded together to form the Shinju and protect what was left behind behind a barrier; the world outside of the Hero Club's island of Shikoku is a burning hellscape, and the island home to the Hero Club is all that remains of humanity.

Fan Works

• Fallout: Equestria has as a setting the After the End countryside of Equestria, which was stuck with a barrage of massive mega-spells, the effects of which went from "literal Fantastic Nuke" to "Body Horror factory" and beyond.
• Oogway's Little Owl: Mention is made of a time when Master Yao started cursing when he missed achieving enlightenment by getting distracted. This is Not Hyperbole; the mountain he was living on at the time will not be habitable for at least another hundred years or so.
• Purple Days: Asshai-by-the-shadow stands out as one of these among numerous examples. Some sort of ritual in the distant past caused a persistent shadow veil over the city, and on the anniversary of the event it causes people to be shown an illusionary echo of the event itself, complete with hostile city inhabitants.
• Thaumcraft: Being too messy with your thaumaturgy and producing too much flux can create Tainted Land, which covers everything with tree-meltingly toxic purple Meat Moss, spawns horrible Tainted mobs, and very slowly expands its borders. There are also occasional pre-existing Tainted Land patches, presumably caused by thaumaturges now dead.

Films

• The Dark Crystal shows the ugly and forbidding castle of the Skekses rising amid a wide area of desolation. About half of Thra is barren wasteland, while the other half is green and fertile. The latter is home to the gentle Mystics, and the small, harmless podlings, as well as the last two Gelflings: Jen and Kira. Thra has been this way ever since the Crystal of Truth was fractured, and a shard went missing.

Literature

• Age Of Discovery by Michael Stackpole is set in a fantasy world that has been devastated by a cataclysmic event known as the "Time of Black Ice." Warring armies years before the events of the books unleashed wild magic on one another, permanently altering the landscape. The most heavily damaged areas are unmapped and extremely dangerous.
• Bas-Lag Cycle: The city of Suroch was destroyed by a particularly nasty Fantastic Nuke. The effects were so horrific that a second fantastic nuke of a different type was dropped on the area just to destroy the abominations created by the first one. To this day, mothers threaten to send unruly children to Suroch, "where the monsters are."
• The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant: High Lord Kevin foolishly joins with Lord Foul to invoke the Ritual of Desecration, which he thinks will destroy Lord Foul. Instead, the land is reduced to dust and requires a thousand years to recover.
• Discworld:
  • The books feature this in spades, in keeping with its "magic = nuclear power" theme. There are areas of high magic build-up where laws of reality are malleable, leading to various mutations and strange creatures, as well as uninhabitable zones that are the result of magic wars. For example, the area around the Unseen University has become stained with magic "radiation" that leaked out of the university over the centuries, leading to animals in the area developing sapience and the ability to speak.
  • Part of the first novel, The Colour of Magic, is set in a region that was once laid waste by a mage war. Centuries later, it's still prone to random magical effects: there's an upside-down mountain resting on its point, flipped coins tend to come down on their edges (if they come down at all, or haven't changed into something else entirely), and it's the only place on the Disc where the background magical field is strong enough, or reality is weak enough, for dragons to survive long-term.
  • The Science of Discworld mentions a place called Loko, where the local wizards attempted to split the thaum, the elementary particle of magic. Today, Loko is a very deep valley surrounded by mountains, home to creatures like centaurs and fauns, and anyone who visits tends to die of some magical disease a few months later.
• Dragaera:
  • The Empire's old capital city was destroyed when a Chaos Magic spell misfired, reducing the region to a permanently impassible lake of raw chaos that dissolves anything it touches.
  • Millennia of large-scale sorcery in the Dragaeran Empire have left a permanent orange pall in the sky, though by all accounts it's only a cosmetic effect.
• The Forges of Dawn: Tsatsi's spell to obliterate Mobor's army and his own turns the whole Arabian peninsula into a wasteland where anyone who dies there becomes The Undead. It turns out that the effect goes on because Tsatsi himself is The Undead, stopping No Ontological Inertia from taking effect, and the wasteland fades once he is permanently killed.
• Guardians of the Flame: The party must travel through the Wastes of Elrood, a desolate wasteland created by a massive magical duel between two extremely powerful wizards. Only a small section of the original verdant forest remains, preserved by the magic of the Matriarch of the Healing Hand.
• Heralds of Valdemar: The Mage Wars ended with the Great Mages Urtho and Ma'ar causing the Cataclysm, an event that shook the world so hard that it left two giant craters in the landscape over a hundred miles wide, and strange magic mutations even farther out. It was so great in fact that, three thousand years later, the event rebounds like a rubber band, causing the whole mess to happen again in reverse.
• Iron Druid Chronicles: Aenghus Og's demon-summoning spell consumed all plant and animal life within a fifty-mile radius, even down to soil microbes, creating a death-spot that will take centuries to recover normally (fortunately, this occurred in an uninhabited semi-desert). Atticus and his apprentice later spend a great deal of time planting shrubs and inoculating the soil to speed up the recovery process.
• Iron Widow: The border territory in Huaxia's Forever War has been reduced to a lifeless wasteland, drained of its qi, by centuries of battles between Huaxia's Humongous Mechas and attacking hunduns.
• The Lord of the Rings:
  • Dagorlad, the great plain before the gate of Mordor where the previous "last battle" against Sauron was fought, is an immense swath of beaten, stained, and broken land where nothing green is able to grow.
  • At the end of the book, Aragorn declares that Morgul Vale (which is full of magically mutated vegetation) won't be habitable for the foreseeable future.
  • On a smaller scale, the grass where the Lord of the Nazgul's steed was burned never recovered, leaving a blackened patch on the ground forever.
• The Sharing Knife: Malices are Enemies to All Living Things, rendering land sterile. The damage they do to the surrounding environment can take hundreds of years to recover.
• Slayers: Lina Inverse has a spell of her own invention called the Giga Slave, which involves combining elements of the Dragon Slave (a One-Hit Kill Spell that kills Dragons) and text from an incomplete version of the Claire Bible. Her first effort to cast the spell transforms a body of water into a "sea of death" where, according to Lina, nothing grows to this day.
• A Song of Ice and Fire: The land of Valyria was destroyed by a mysterious volcanic cataclysm that is heavily implied to be magical in nature. What's left of Valyria is described as something that resembles heavily irradiated areas: supposedly, the curse of Valyria that kills anyone who approaches works on a line-of-sight principle like gamma rays, and the only surviving city of Central Valyria (Mantarys) is full of mutants and freaks.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • The Hand of Thrawn establishes that the Dark Side nexus on Dagobah (i.e. the cave where Luke has his vision of battling Vader in The Empire Strikes Back) was the result of Yoda killing a powerful fallen Jedi there during the Clone Wars.
  • In The Thrawn Trilogy, Leia uses the forest moon of Endor as a neutral meeting point between herself and the Noghri. While there, the Millennium Falcon's orbit inadvertently takes it through the last position of the Second Death Star, and Leia passes through a scar in the Force left by Emperor Palpatine's death and is knocked unconscious for a few minutes. She has Chewbacca adjust their orbit so that this doesn't happen again.
• Sunshine: The Voodoo Wars between humanity and the supernatural left "bad spots" that no one can safely enter. While they don't cause physical harm, they can Mind Rape people with visions of otherworldly horror. Targeted Protective Charms might block the effect.
• The Tough Guide to Fantasyland: Long ago, there was a Wizard War that left large tracts of Fantasyland as Waste Areas, devastated by magical pollution that persists into the present. Plants there are twisted, thorny, poisonous and unnaturally colored; many are likely to be carnivorous. Slimes and mosses abound that try to absorb living flesh, rocks may be ambulatory and homicidal, and all animals still living here are horribly mutated, intelligent, and predatory.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Dark Sun: Thousands of years in the past, there was a great war between wizards using defiling magic that caused the world of Athas to become a desert planet. Athas remains such even today.
  • Eberron: During the last part of the century-long Last War, the nation of Cyre was covered in a strange mist out to its borders (at the time) which killed everything in it. Years later, the mist no longer kills instantly, but it prevents natural healing. Now known as the Mournland, its only inhabitants are either undead, constructs, or bizarre "living spells" produced by the magic of the place.
  • Forgotten Realms:
    • The murder of Mystra, Goddess of Magic, was used as Gameplay and Story Integration of the change to 4th Edition. The result was a magical cataclysm that caused magic to burst its bonds all over Toril, creating nation-sized areas of intense Wild Magic called the Spellplague.
    • The Mere of Dead Men south of Neverwinter has a heavy undead infestation because fragments of the essence of the death god Myrkul landed there after Mystra killed him during the Time of Troubles.
  • Greyhawk: Thousands of years ago, the Suel Imperium and the Baklunish Empire fought a magical war. The Baklunish Imperium destroyed the Suloise with the Rain of Colorless Fire, which turned the lands of the Suloise into ashes and dust. The result was the Sea of Dust.
  • Mystara: The Kingdom of Blackmoor from module DA1, Adventures in Blackmoor, was destroyed when its powerful magical devices exploded, causing it to sink beneath the sea. Thousands of years later, it emerged again, becoming the devastated desert area known as the Broken Lands. There is almost no trace of the original Blackmoor.
  • Ravenloft: The domain of Hazlan suffers a bad case of this. Its darklord is an Archmage with little mind to the consequences of his or his students' experiments. He is actually aware of how much damage he's doing to Hazlan, but knows that it's not entirely real, and thinks that he can escape if he destroys it entirely. He cannot.
• Pathfinder:
  • The Mana Wastes are a narrow strip of barren land between the two sorcerer kingdoms Nex and Geb that resulted from a devastating war between the two. Apart from it being turned into a desert, it is also impossible to reliably cast any kind of magic there: in some places, it simply doesn't work, in others, it automatically becomes Wild Magic. A steampunk city of Alkenstar was erected in the middle of the Wastes by those who chose to eschew magic completely.
  • The area around the Worldwound, a giant planar breach to the Chaotic Evil plane of the Abyss that opened in the year of Aroden's death, is a cold, blasted desert that sickens all living things that enter it unless protected by a powerful consecrate effect.
• Savage Worlds: In the Hellfrost setting, the titular Hellfrost came with the invading armies of cold and darkness, and, even after the war, never left. In the north, there are many places that are permanently under ice and snow. This may also have something to do with the gods of fire and sun apparently being dead or at least disappeared.
• Warhammer: The city of Praag was once invaded by Chaos, and suffered heavy corruption and mutation. The people of Kislev burned the city down upon reconquering it, then rebuilt it, but even after two hundred years, Praag remains haunted.

Video Games

• ANNO: Mutationem: A multitudinous of areas such as Freeway 42 that became inundated by the Mechanika Virus became an Abandoned Area to be overrun with remnants and carnivorous creatures. Various Story Breadcrumbs at The Consortium's facility also delineate supernatural factor incidents that occurred over the world brought about by the Limen crater, one of which is a floating chasm that can be seen on the world map.
• BlazBlue: The rampages of the Black Beast in the game's backstory left the world with seithr, a kind of magical substance that is harmful in high concentrations, which rendered large areas of the world uninhabitable. After advancements in Magitek, however, seithr becomes part of the world's everyday life.
• Fall from Heaven: If the Armageddon Counter (AC) is high enough, then the Hell Terrain will spread — first in empires following the Ashen Veil and then in neighboring neutral ones too. Terrain infected by the Hell Terrain will lose all features, is less productive, and can only be restored by Sanctification.
• Fate/stay night: Right in the middle of a bustling city, an area the size of a park remains abandoned for years: trees burnt, ground scorched, apparently never recultivated or developed. Details on this site are gradually revealed as the story unfolds: the area was razed by the interrupted activation of the Holy Grail during the previous Holy Grail War.
• Final Fantasy XIV uses one as a transition to A Realm Reborn. The moon Dalamud falls and reveals itself to be a prison for Bahamut, who promptly breaks free and starts wreaking havoc. Eorzea was barely saved by a Heroic Sacrifice and the resulting scars led to a great deal of land being unrecognizable. The most notable are the Corrupted crystals in Mor Dhona and Thanalan, and Corthas's sudden climate change from a lush meadow to a frozen wasteland.
• Fire Emblem:
  • Fire Emblem Gaiden: After Mila and Duma cast off their physical bodies, their decaying remains would go on to permanently alter the environment around them, creating the location Mila Tree seen in Awakening.
  • Fire Emblem: Three Houses: Ailell is a hellish volcanic area also known as the Valley of Torment, created when Javelins of Light, the resident fantasy equivalent to intercontinental ballistic missiles, went down there. This was not intended, though, as the Javelins were originally aimed at Garreg Mach monastery, but its protective aura redirected them.
• Flight Rising: Energy from the Arcane flight is specifically compared to radiation, being capable of making dragons sick, mutating the local wildlife, and distorting the land around the Starfall Isles.
• Jet Force Gemini: One of the planets you visit was turned into a wasteland of undead monsters when the local Tribal mystic tried to use a spell to drive away the bugs.
• Neverwinter Nights 2: There's a patch of bare earth in West Harbor where no plant will grow. It's a scar left by the shattering of the Silver Sword of Gith when Ammon Jerro fought the King of Shadows.
• Overlord II: The area surrounding the Tower from the first game has become a twisted and desolate wasteland, with massive lakes of raw magic corrupting (or killing) everything it touches and turning your minions into uncontrollable mutants after a few seconds. The cause? The Big Bad of the game tried to tamper with the Tower Heart in order to steal some of its magic and blew it up instead.
• Terraria: Destroying the Wall of Flesh results in raw magic being unleashed upon your world, creating new Hallowed or Corrupted regions. Additionally, after this happens, smashing the various altars found in Corrupted regions results in new metal veins spontaneously generating throughout the world and mechanical bosses spawning more naturally.
• World of Warcraft:
  • The Blasted Lands is a rocky, orange crater that was created by the fel energies of the Dark Portal. It used to be part of a teeming swampland called the Black Morass, but there's no vegetation left in the region.
  • The orc homeworld Draenor became the Outland after it was ripped apart when Ner'zhul recklessly opened portals all over the planet. The entire world was reduced to nothing but a large landmass in the Twisting Nether. Netherstorm is the most destroyed, being reduced to nothing but clusters of floating purple rock. Even relatively untouched areas like Nagrand are filled with random floating islands.
  • Azuremyst Isle and the neighbouring Bloodmyst Isle are suffering from the Magitek fallout of the crashed Exodar. Both areas are under attack by mutated wildlife.
  • When the Scourge destroyed Quel'Thalas in Warcraft III, they left a warpath of defiled ground called the Dead Scar, which splits the entire country in half. Even after the capital city Silvermoon was rebuilt, the Dead Scar couldn't be removed and still runs down the city's center.

Web Comics

• Unsounded: The Forever War between Cresce and Alderode has permanently wrecked the Background Magic Field along their contested border, which mutates the local fauna into Dire Beasts and can compromise reality itself — unlucky people might clip through the ground or have their bones walk off without them.

Web Videos

• Critical Role: Campaign Two prominently features a country called Xhorhas reduced to haunted wastes by an ancient war between the gods of good and evil. As would be the case after a nuclear war, the country was inhospitable for years and what life survived the war was horribly mutated, although in Critical Role these mutations involve more monstrous transformations than cancer. The cast even calls out the similarities between the wilds of Xhorhas and the ruins of Chernobyl, just to make the comparison explicit.

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