Basic Trope: A supernatural or otherwise fictional weapon or spell which recreates the destructiveness of a nuke.
- Straight: Slay All is a forbidden spell that releases a shockwave of mana which is powerful enough to ruin an entire landscape. The residual mana becomes corrupted and poisons anything that visits the impact site.
- Exaggerated:
- Slay All has an array of enchantments that serve to prevent it from being cast outside the caster's control - for instance, by preventing random conjuration effects from casting it, or foiling spell-copying effects. This is justified - Slay All can wipe out an entire country and creates a fissure of the same size through which Eldritch Abominations may manifest.
- Slay All has a globally destructive version, called Obliterate All, which guarantees planetary annihilation. Not just the world, but the whole planet. It was intended to destroy unnecessary planets.
- Slay All summons a literal nuke. It transmutes local air into uranium-238, plutonium-239, and other elements necessary to achieve a fissile chain reaction. It forms a sphere at the desired location, which is then crushed by Elemental Barrier. What follows is twenty kilotonnes of raw, indiscriminate power in all directions.
- Downplayed: Slay All creates a large mana explosion which is powerful enough to raze a street to rubble, but leaves no residual effect. It is mostly because the destruction is indiscriminate that it is banned rather than because of immense power.
- Slay All is a ridiculously overcharged and overfocused fire spell that can massively heat up a small area of space the size of a marble. As such, it is a fantastic detonator for an otherwise pretty standard H-bomb.
- Justified:
- Sorcery is treated as a form of fantastic science, so it is reasonable to believe that such a powerful effect can be created with enough research.
- Inverted:
- Restore All resurrects everyone and everything in the radius and leaves behind a mystical energy which continues to heal anything near the casting site.
- Nuke All is simply an explosion, with a localized area of effect and no radioactive fallout or anything else characteristic of a nuclear weapon.
- In a setting full of dungeons, dragons and spells, the ultimate weapon is a regular nuclear bomb that uses uranium and applies the exact same concepts as the Trinity Gadget. For further Shown Their Work points, its designer is quite obviously an homage of Robert Oppenheimer… or is actually Robert Oppenheimer.
- Subverted: Slay All hits a group of enemies...and doesn't explode. The targets are left bewildered.
- Double Subverted:
- The spell left a small amount of extremely unstable mana inside each of the targets, which, after a few moments, all detonate in a monumental explosion.
- The spell produces the same kind of radiation as a nuke, not the same kind of explosion.
- Parodied: The episode in which the casting of Slay All is discussed is a reference to all kinds of Cold War fiction tropes, from the fact that the Godzilla Threshold may or may not have been crossed up to the use of a Two-Keyed Lock just to get the scroll with the spell's conjuration. There may even be a Fictional Geneva Conventions law with a Punny Name.
- Zig Zagged: ???
- Averted: Spells simply never become powerful enough to simulate a nuclear explosion.
- Enforced: ???
- Lampshaded: "You know, I've never understood why we even have Slay All. Couldn't we just nuke that monster and have the same effect?"
- Invoked: ???
- Implied: The sequence in which Slay All is used borrows quite a lot from the nuclear explosion sequence in Barefoot Gen.
- Exploited: Countries with magicians that know Slay All are sovereign over those who do not."
- Defied: Different circles of sorcerers come to an agreement to never cast Slay All, because of the threat of mutually-assured destruction.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
- Deconstructed: Disagreements between the circles of sorcerers come to a head. The agreement is broken, and the resulting battle wipes them all out, plus a huge number of animals and innocent people. The survivors begin to die slowly and horribly in the aftermath.
- Reconstructed: Restore All is reverse-engineered from Slay All by one of the survivors, curing most of the damage. Having learned their lesson, the newly-revived sorcerers make sure to learn Restore All, and once more agree never to use Slay Living on each other.
Back to Fantastic Nuke.
