List of Disasters

Basic Information

Natural Disaster Types

• Drought
• Earthquake
• Famine
• Firestorm
• Fire whirl
• Flood
• Meteor impact
• Pandemic
• Storm
• Tropical cyclone
• Tsunami
• Volcanic Eruption

Man-Made Disaster Types

• Air Disaster
• Arson
• Depression (economics)
• Genocide
• Global Warming
• Hyperinflation
• Maritime Disaster
• Oil Spill
• Plastic Continent
• Power Outage
• Radioactive Contamination (See Also: Nuclear Meltdown)
• Riot
• Shortage
• Space Disaster
• Structural Collapse
• Terrorism
• War

Fictional / Hypothetical / Speculative Disaster Types

• Alien Invasion
• Atlantis
• Avalanche Season On Mars
• Big Crunch
• Big Rip
• Collapse of Causality
• Ice Age (specifically a sudden-onset ice age)
• Kardashev Cusp
• Nemesis (star) - passes near and brings possibly dozens of comet impacts
• Robot War
• Space Disaster
• Tower of Babel
• Verneshot
• Zombie Apocalypse

Historical Disasters

• 2010 Haiti Earthquake
• Blasts, Fire at Toronto Propane Depot
• Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event
• Deepwater Horizon oil spill
• Flannan Isles
• Great Chicago Fire
• Great Depression
• Galveston Hurricane of 1900
• Hurricane Katrina
• Peshtigo Fire
• Pompeii Eruption
• Spanish-American War
• SS Edmund Fitzgerald
• Tunguska event
• USS Iowa Turret Explosion

• News: Ancient tsunami 'hit New York'
• News: Is German Super-Volcano About To Erupt?
• News: Rescuing A Potential Nuke From The Chile Quake

Sources

Bibliography

1. List of disasters at the Wikipedia

2. Man Made Disasters at Wikipedia

Game and Story Use

• Having to deal with an impending or ongoing disaster or its aftermath during a historical campaign always adds a nice level of tension to an adventure.
  • And while the player characters won't know about the upcoming disaster, the players themselves might. This not only establishes the tension, but also gets them to worry what else might go wrong during the adventure…
• If the disaster is worldwide and bad enough, it could transform the campaign into an After The End scenario.
  • For the effects of the disruption of electricity and services, not to mention the collapse of civilization, see Post Apocalyptic Decay.