World-Altering Ritual

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This trope is prone to inflation. Before adding an example, please reconsider whether it fits the criteria above.

What wouldn't be this trope: A spell that withers all the trees in the world (because its effects would be impermanent and could be replicated without magic). A spell that copies or destroys the sun (impermanent and doesn’t change the fabric of nature itself). A spell that saves the world through a method that doesn't rewrite it. A spell that ensures a single blueberry bush in a garden will forever produce poisonous fruit (too small-scale). Natural Meta Powers being used. A dimensional wall accidentally being torn open.

What would be this trope: A spell that turns all present and future fires green (which is vast in scope, if not importance). A spell that makes an ordinary sun sapient. A spell that saves the world by rewriting its DNA to exclude some Cosmic Flaw. The deliberate construction of a dimensional portal in a setting where such portals are very unusual and difficult to make.

• Fairy Tail: While the exact means that would have been used are unknown, the dark guild Grimoire Heart wanted to use the powers of the dark mage Zeref to transform the world into the "Ultimate Magic World" where only magic users can survive, leaving the 90% of the population, the ones that cannot use magic, to die. Thankfully, they fail.

• Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics): The fourth "Super Genesis Wave" (made by Sonic and tampered with by Eggman) had the effect of greatly altering the continuity of the comic series. The Wave retconned the backstories of characters who survived it, gave some a redesigned appearance, added new characters wholecloth, and erased others from history, leaving them Deader than Dead.
• X-Men:
  • House of M: The crazed Scarlet Witch utters the infamous three-word sentence, "No more mutants". This spell causes the House of M reality to turn back into the main Marvel Universe, and also depowers almost 98.5% of the world's mutant population. Very few new mutants would be born until the end of the 2012 crossover AvX.
  • X-Men: The Trial of Magneto ends with a ritual that creates a "waiting room" for mutants who died in the past and/or before their mutations activated. This ritual vastly increases the scope of Krakoa's pre-existing resurrection operation.

• The Answer Is Silence: Whatever happened to Harry Potter in the Bad Future is unknown, as this Peggy Sue story never shows things from Harry's perspective. What is known is that it made him obsessed, consumed with the idea of preventing anyone like Voldemort from ever coming to power again. This comes to a head in the final chapter, where he confronts Voldemort, who had possessed Bellatrix Lestrange's body, and enacts a dark ritual using the still-beating hearts of Rabastan Lestrange, Rodolphus Lestrange, and Nagini; all seven of his Horcruxes; and all three of the Deathly Hallows. The end result of this is not only killing Voldemort permanently, but rewriting the entire fabric of time and magic to annihilate the very concept of Horcruxes, not just making it impossible for anyone to ever make one again, but erasing all record and memory that they ever existed, and sealing the cracks so it's nigh-impossible for anyone to notice anything is missing, let alone recall what was once there.
• In Eternal Fantasy, a group of Mahoutokoro students create a closed space in which they can replicate a game's magic system, fueling said space with the convergence of three major leylines. Unfortunately, they make a mistake and invert the containment rune, creating a spell that blasts from their position across the world, slowly consuming the magic system that had existed before (Terran magic) to fuel the creation of a new, stronger system (Gaian magic), which also has the downside of crippling technology worldwide, leaving both muggles and magicals equally lost in the new world. Dumbledore finds the nexus of the spell, but he doesn't realize Harry is far happier in the new reality than in canon and no one in his team has any attachment to the Wizarding World that was until it's far too late, dooming him and the plan to restore Earth.
• Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality: Centuries ago, for reasons that aren't clear to Harry (but probably involved reducing the risk of someone blowing up the world by accident), Merlin invoked a great spell, the "Interdict of Merlin", which makes it harder for powerful spells to be remembered. Specifically, powerful magic cannot be learned from books or recordings, only from a living teacher who knows the spell. This means that those who have learned dangerous spells and survived doing so (which implies some degree of wisdom and restraint) have the freedom to judge whether it's wise to pass them on. Unfortunately, it also means that many spells have been lost simply because people died without teaching anyone else, giving the overall impression that magic is decaying or fading from the world — which was latched onto by blood supremacists as an argument that it's being "stolen" by intermarriage with non-wizards. Legend has it that Merlin sacrificed his own life and magic to create the Interdict.
• With This Ring (2013): In the aftermath of Vandal Savage going back in time to create an alternate history, the Paul from that history becomes the Time Trapper, outside of the usual flow of time. He wants his own timeline back, but defeating Vandal Savage means that it's not compatible with history anymore, and he recognises that the original timeline has just as much objective value, so all he can do is keep a few days of the altered timeline going on a slowly degrading loop. Then he makes a deal with Krona and gathers enough information about the structure of parallel universes that he can shift the Temporal Mutability of the multiverse, changing it from a single self-correcting timeline to an endlessly branching set of timelines. This allows "his" timeline to be restored and co-exist with others.

• Halloweentown:
  • Halloweentown II: Kalabar's Revenge: Normally, the portal to the Halloweentown dimension only opens for one day every Earth year, on Halloween, and closes at midnight when Halloween is over. (Halloweentown itself works on Narnia Time.) However, the Piper-Cromwell witches cast a spell that rips it open permanently. While The Masquerade is still in place for the mortal world, the change significantly affects the Piper-Cromwells and Halloweentown, as the latter's people can now go to the mortal world whenever they wish.
  • Halloweentown High shows the fallout of this spell; since the Halloweentown Council fears the Middle Ages prejudice that necessitated Halloweentown's creation is not gone, Marnie brings Halloweentown students to a mortal high school to prove them wrong.
  • Return to Halloweentown further discusses the consequences of the ritual; with the portal open year-round, many Halloweentown witches and warlocks chose to go to college in the mortal world instead of their local Witch University (because they wanted to get as far away from their parents as possible). This meant Witch University had to open its doors to other magical creatures, and allows Marnie and Dylan to go to Witch University themselves.

• The Ascendant Kingdoms Saga: It is discovered that an arcane ritual was used to bind Wild Magic (or visithara) to twelve noble bloodlines of the Kingdom Donderath, taming magic to human control (at which point it is called hasithara). In Ice Forged, a Fantastic Nuke renders all but one of the remaining bloodlines extinct and magic bursts its bonds worldwide; this causes The End of the World as We Know It and forces protagonist Blaine McFadden, the last Lord of the Blood, to go on a quest to recreate the ritual.
• Ash: A Secret History: The Hidden Villain seeks to retcon the evolution of humanity, using the power they've been building up for centuries by stealing solar radiation and a human Reality Warper in their thrall. They do this because they've calculated that all possible futures where humanity exists will lead to their latent Reality Warper potential being fully realized and then weaponized, leading inevitably to the destruction of reality itself. In the end, they're convinced not to erase humanity, instead simply to alter history to make us not latent reality warpers, which they did by shunting the original timeline into a Place Beyond Time and, from there, monitoring the timestream to edit out all the "miracles" that we cause — creating our present history.
• Chaotic Craftsman Worships The Cube: After refugee gods and their followers came to a new world, some of the crafting gods worked together to create the System, a worldwide effect that granted the sapients there the ability to measure their strength and skills in a numerical fashion and made it easier to gain new skills (including magic) based on their natural affinities and their efforts. It also gave everyone the "world speak" skill, allowing them to understand each other past language barriers and even the ability to interbreed with each other. It's later revealed that in order to power the System, the desperate refugee gods essentially sacrificed the native gods (comparable to animals or infants in their awareness) of the new world, an act so shameful they've kept it a secret from the rest of the world.
• Dead Djinn Universe: 40-odd years before the time of the series, Al-Jahiz brought magic back to the world by somehow connecting it to a supernatural otherworld. Now, creatures out of myth live openly alongside mortals, governments are politicking with Faerie Courts, and Magitek is driving technological innovation.
• The Death Gate Cycle: In the distant past, at the height of their war against the Patryn, the Sartan performed an immense magical ritual. That ritual unmade the Earth and reshaped it into five worlds (the four elemental realms and the prison-world of the Labyrinth), a form they considered more pleasing and easily controlled. The ritual also created entirely new species to serve the worlds' ecology and made one of Earth's pieces — the Labyrinth — sapient, which it had not been before.
• The Immortals: Stormwings, an artificial but true-breeding species, were created by a human mage. She died centuries ago, but they're still around, desecrating soldiers' corpses and serving as a living argument against the idea that War Is Glorious.
• Inheritance Cycle: In the distant past, magic was very hard to control and easy to accidentally misuse. After a particularly terrible catastrophe, the Grey Folk cast a great enchantment to safeguard the world — an enchantment that bound all magic to their language and turned it into the setting's Language of Magic. For safety reasons, it also precluded anyone from lying in that language and gave it the power to perfectly describe the essence of things. The cost of this enchantment was so great that they never recovered as a people, fading away into myth.
• The Last Binding: In the finale, the villains reassemble the Last Contract, the physical embodiment of the faerie pact that sustains all mainstream magic, and it reabsorbs all its power from Magical Society. To foil them, the main characters return the Contract to the fae, forfeiting their magic forever but leaving the human world free to rediscover its own Old Magic.
• Log Horizon: Elder Tale, an In-Universe MMO, uses this trope to justify the presence of many of its RPG elements. A spell named "World Fraction" is capable of altering the game world, and is known to have been used three times; the first led to the creation of the game's infinitely-respawning, Always Chaotic Evil monsters, the second (which correlated with the game's real-world launch) led to adventurers being summoned to fight them, and the third correlates with (and is implied to somehow be the cause of) the Apocalypse that led to the game's players getting trapped inside it.
• Nona the Ninth reveals that the Emperor of the Nine Houses, John Gaius, ascended to godhood by killing everyone on Earth by instigating a nuclear war, and then killing all of the planets in the Solar System, before half-eating the Soul of the Earth (now known as Alecto); the other half of her was trapped in a human body. The Emperor eventually resurrected enough people to rule over and repopulate the Solar System, but left the vast majority of them dead.
• Otherverse: The Seal of Solomon, created by practitioner Suleiman bin Daoud, is a magically binding deal that created the modern version of Innocence, the Awakening ritual that all practitioners undergo to gain the ability to use magic, and the rules all practitioners and Others bound to it must follow. Though the Seal was intended to give humans (who were once at the mercy of hostile Others) greater protection, it was eventually corrupted into a method of enslaving weaker Others. In Pale in particular, the tensions of the Seal in the modern world are a significant plot point.
• Saintess Summons Skeletons: Over three thousand years ago, three powerful and unaging individuals — a human, a dragon, and a god — came together and created the System. Their goal was to replace current methods of ascension, which were difficult and sometimes dangerous (e.g., soul-grafting dark arts), with relatively simple "level-ups" gained by killing monsters and completing trials. Eventually the System spread over the whole planet and became so pervasive that everyone took it for granted.
• Shakugan no Shana: For most of the series, Crimson Denizens need to consume someone's Power of Existence to manifest physically in the human world, which is why most of them prey on humans. However, the series ends with the creation of Xanadu, a completely new world. On top of being filled with infinite Power of Existence, Xanadu physically blocks the route from the Crimson Realm to the Old/Human World, making conflicts between those worlds' inhabitants unnecessary and very hard to prosecute.
• Sword of Truth:
  • Three thousand years ago, a spell that prevents the birth of people with the talent for Subtractive Magic (and reduces the birth rate of people with magic in general) was cast. At the end of the main series, it is undone.
  • A lingering curse on the Midlands makes all its red fruits deadly poisonous. The curse, cast during the first Great War, was a cruel ploy to weaken one side by affecting the foods most appealing to children.
• The Tower and the Fox: Some "Great Feats" (as described in-universe) are this trope. Examples include the creation of the Calatians and the undoing of such in book 4, which turns all Calatians but Kip's family back into dumb animals. It's eventually revealed that performing or undoing a Great Feat kills the caster.
• The Wandering Inn: The Kingdom of Rhir used their mages to link-cast their Great Ritual, summoning earth people from 14-30 into their world. Significant because it is revealed later that this Ritual knocked the earth out of its tilt.
• The Wheel of Time:
  • In Winter's Heart, The Corruption poisoning half the world's magic — previously a death sentence for anyone born with that magic — is cleansed. The act required two Amplifier Artifacts capable of destroying the world, blasted a three-mile hole in the ground, and was visible to everyone with Supernatural Sensitivity no matter where they were.
  • In the "Save the World" Climax, Rand al'Thor uses a powerful Amplifier Artifact, a vast amount of the One Power, and the Dark One's own power to reforge the Dark One's prison outside Creation, ushering in a new Age free of his corruption.
• The Year of Rogue Dragons: The ancient elven kingdoms used a mythal, a working of epic magic, to win a war with the dragons. The mythal's effect drives all dragons Ax-Crazy any time a comet called the King-Killer Star passes near the planet. At some point the Big Bad tampered with the Dracorage mythal, making its effect unending, so that he could coerce the dragons into becoming dracoliches.

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: In "Chosen", the Series Finale, Willow casts a spell with the Slayer Scythe to permanently activate every Potential Slayer into a full-fledged Slayer, forever changing The Chosen One into The Chosen Many.
• Once Upon a Time (2011): Blatant magic does not naturally occur in the "real world", but plot events at the end of season 1 alter the fabric of Storybrooke (a town in the real world), making it a magical place. This alteration also restores the powers of townsfolk who had magic but lost it.

• The Magnus Archives:
  • It's explained in the third season that avatars of one of the Fears will sometimes attempt a ritual that is meant to summon their entity into this reality from whatever plane of existence in which the Fears are located. If this is successful, the Fear is supposed to essentially take over the world and warp it into one big factory farm to harvest fear of it from sentient creatures. While they invariably involve sacrificing a lot of people, the details and invoked symbolism vary depending on the nature of the Fear.
  • In the fourth season, the season finale ends with the successful completion of Jonah Magnus's ritual, causing all of the Fears to be summoned, with the Eye in primacy. The fifth season deals with the aftermath of the ritual and shows the nightmare realms that make up the world while Jon and Martin travel through it.

• Embers in the Dusk:
  • The first thread ends with the Chaos Gods performing the so-called Grand Ritual to weaken the barrier between the Materium and Immaterium. Due to backstabbing by each other and the meddling of the Sane, the success isn't nearly as definite as they would have liked.
  • The second ends with Be'lakor attempting to bind the Chaos Gods to his will. He manages to bind one, which basically means Chaos is now too busy with internal strife to be the top enemy.
  • During the War in Heaven, some desperate Slann tried to tap into a dimension beyond the Warp to create the ultimate weapon. Due to a mediocre roll, what they got instead was the creation of Chaos in its current form.

• The backstory of Banestorm is kicked off when a circle of Dark Elves, seeking to eradicate Orcs from the world, has their magical ritual go very wrong. The backlash kills off all the participating spellcasters, transforms a large part of the continent into mana-dead desert (and weakens magic in the neighboring regions), and summons dozens of intelligent species from across the dimensions... including humans, who transform the world beyond all recognition. Ironically, it's been argued that the Dark Elves got what they wanted, since humans DID kill off most of the Orcs and drive the survivors into a distant corner of the continent... it's just that their kingdoms and cultivation practices have also done away with most of the wild lands that the Elves depend on.
• Deadlands:
  • In the Renaissance era, a group of Native American shamans entered the "The Hunting Grounds" and performed a spell to make all magic, whether good or evil, harder to cast. This effectively made magic go away — which was what the shamans wanted, because evil magic outnumbered the good. However, the spell had two unintended effects; it incentivized Europeans to turn to technology, allowing them to become deadly conquerors when Columbus "discovered" America, and it left Native Americans comparatively weak and vulnerable to said conquest.
  • 1863 saw a second alteration in this vein; Raven, a vengeful Susquehanna shaman, re-entered the Hunting Grounds and undid the original spell, removing the seal that had been placed between the Grounds and the ordinary world. However, this made the ordinary world vulnerable to Reckoners, monsters that feed on negative emotions. Reckoners want to "terrorform" Earth so they can escape onto it.
• Exalted:
  • The Salinan Working made it so the world itself tutors people who wish to learn sorcery. You could be dirt-poor or miles away from another human being, but causality will twist to ensure you learn what you need to learn. It also ensures that no spell can be permanently lost — information on how to cast it will always be somewhere in Creation, however hidden or encoded.
  • The Sidereals performed a mass ritual to conceal their role in usurping the Solars, and accidentally broke a constellation in the process. The ritual backfired, working so well that nowadays normal humans can't remember Sidereals exist at all.
  • In Third Edition, the highest form of sorcerous or necromantic working — the kind of extended ritual spell that does not have pre-defined game mechanics, as other ritual spells would have, and have a chance of failure — is Ambition 3 Solar / Void Circle workings, which can either create a single extraordinarily potent but localized effect, or introduce a more subtle but far-reaching alteration to the entire cosmos. The Salinan Working in Second Edition, while not directly named as one in the Third Edition, would be such a sorcerous working. No sorcerous working, once successfully enacted, can be undone — although someone else might finish another sorcerous working with an opposite effect, they cannot simply negate the original effect. Therefore, while mechanically the result might be the same as having no sorcerous workings in place, the narrative is significantly more complex and interesting as a result of conflicting magics.
• Forgotten Realms: The Realms were scarred by Karsus's Folly, an immensely powerful spell (12th level) that was intended to make Karsus into a god so he could win a desperate war. Instead, the uncontrollable surge of magic destroyed his own empire and rendered all magic unstable until the then-goddess of magic Mystryl sacrificed herself to fix it. The reborn goddess, Mystra, set new limitations on magic, one of them being that no spell above the 9th level can exist.
• GURPS Technomancer depicts an Alternate Universe in which Robert Oppenheimer actually said the Bhagavad Gita quote he was thinking when he saw the Trinity explosion; "I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds". In doing so, he unknowingly finalized a summoning ritual that would turn the nuclear explosion into a never-ending mammoth geyser of Mana, bringing magic roaring back into the world.
• Mage: The Awakening:
  • The fall of Atlantis came when Man Grew Proud and tried to take over the Supernal Realms, bridging the realms with an unmatched feat of magic called the Celestial Ladder. The resulting Wizards' War destroyed the Ladder, erasing Atlantis from history and opening the Abyss, a multiversal Cosmic Flaw that has threatened reality ever since.
  • The Role-Playing Endgame that enables an Archmaster to ascend to the Supernal Realms has them bring a grand, world-changing vision to fruition, then rewrite reality from the Supernal so that it was always true. One of the sample quests is to create a new god, so they need to aim high.
• Monster of the Week (Evil Hat Productions) has rules for Big Magic rituals, which can theoretically do anything that isn't normally possible within the rules. Unlike the normal Use Magic action, which is just a roll for success, Big Magic requires many elements to be assembled (preparation time, casting time, assistance from others, special ingredients, etc.) and exposes its casters to greater dangers than usual.
• Warhammer:
  • During the Coming of Chaos some 8,000 years before the present, when Daemons poured into the world and nearly overwhelmed the mortal races entirely, the Lizardmen's priest-kings cast a tremendous spell that turned their homeland of Lustria into a savage Death World. All of its plant and animal life became so hostile and tenacious that even the hordes of Chaos struggled to penetrate its jungles. This working has remained up to the present day, making Lustria one of the most hostile and feared lands in the world.
  • This same near-apocalypse was brought to an end by another ritual, this one by the Elven race. Realising that, thanks to Chaos Daemons being able to manifest so freely, they were in a battle of attrition they couldn't hope to win, they decided on one last desperate gamble: Caledor Dragontamer, mightiest Elf mage of his era, gathered a handful of his strongest fellow Archmages on the Isle of the Dead and chanted the spells that created the Great Vortex. The Vortex drew in and drained vast amounts of excess magic from the world, banishing the swarms of Daemons and saving the mortal races, while also causing all the Gods of the Elves and Dwarfs to vanish as well. Since the Vortex's creation, Daemons now rely on Human Sacrifice rituals to be able to enter the Old World, and even then can never bring in as many of the as they could when the world was awash with magic.
• Warhammer: Age of Sigmar: The realm of Shyish, like the other seven realms, was originally a Flat World where reality became more malleable and magic more powerful along the edges. Nagash, then just a minor god of the dead, developed a ritual that involved having a legion of skeletons transport bits of petrified magic in the form of grains of sand from the edges of Shyish and carry them all the way to the center where Nagash used them to build a monument to himself. The result was that he slowly but surely changed the nature of Shyish so that its magic would be most powerful at the center rather than the outskirts, all because Nagash is incapable of accepting a world where he's not the center of the universe.

• Age of Wonders 4: Casting one of these is a victory condition. Exactly what the spell does differs based on affinities and culture, but they all require a powerful ruler to control several ancient sites to use as foci and then defend them for a lengthy period as they channel a spell to reshape the world in their chosen image, ending all competition one way or another. While the effects are localized in the sense that the world affected is just one of many in the Astral Sea, succeeding is still such a rare and impressive achievement it qualifies the wizard responsible for ascension to a pantheon.
• Cult of the Lamb: In the Woolhaven DLC, the lambs, hunted down by the old gods after their own god was killed, create an unstoppable ritual that would rot the world, destroying it as vengeance for their deaths. It required the corpse of their god as a catalyst, and the extinction of lambkind to activate.
• Dishonored:
  • Dishonored 2: Attempted by Delilah Copperspoon. She has perfected a ritual that allows her to swap the content of her paintings with reality. However, it has an unusual requirement in that she needs to have regular worldly power over the target in order to do so. At the start of the game she pulls a coup not just to get the throne she believes is hers by birthright, but also to spread the effect of the ritual onto the entire Empire (which seems to represent the entirety of the civilized world), replacing it with one where she is adored instead of feared.
  • Dishonored: Death of the Outsider: The plot ends with the godlike Outsider being deposed (either because Billie kills him or frees him from his prison in the Void, making him mortal again) and the Void he personified going wild. Now the Void can touch anyone and anything.
• Dominions: Global Enhancements are powerful but expensive spells, some of which qualify as this trope. One Enhancement covers the world in an eternal storm; another gives the caster a degree of omniscience. You can end an Enhancement by Dispelling it, replacing it with another one, or killing its caster.
• Dragon Age:
  • The breaching of the Golden City by the Tevinter Magisters Sidereal was this. Spurred by their gods to claim the mystical Golden City, the magisters spent most of the world's lyrium reserves and sacrificed thousands of slaves in a ritual to enter the Fade in the flesh — only to find the Golden City blackened and to be themselves corrupted into the first Darkspawn. While it is later revealed that the Taint was present in Thedas even before that, the magisters' folly directly caused the first of the devastating Blights that would shape the continent for the next thousand years.
  • Dragon Age: Inquisition reveals in its Trespasser DLC that Fen'harel, aka the Dread Wolf, was responsible for the creation of the Veil that separates the mundane world and that of the Fade, making most spirits and mortals unable to interact with foreign planes of existence. Dragon Age: The Veilguard reveals that the Veil was only supposed to contain the palace that the Evanuris were imprisoned in, but when the Evanuris resisted it disrupted the ritual and Solas's efforts to complete it anyway resulted in the Veil covering the entire world instead.
• The Elder Scrolls: Thousands of years before the events of the first game, an anti-elf cult known as the Marukhati Selective attempted a ritual to purge Akatosh (the draconic God of Time and chief deity of the Imperial pantheon) of his elven basis (the Aldmeri eagle god Auri-El). It was both ineffective and highly destructive.
• Final Fantasy XIV: The Primal Hydaelyn's sundering of the Primal Zodiark split the world into fourteen copies of itself and reincarnated the Ancients into different, completely new races.
• Grim Quest: Ancient legends speak of a metal called "iron" that no longer exists. Sages of old unleashed an incredibly powerful spell that transmuted all iron ore across the world into steel, much to the delight of blacksmiths and warriors everywhere.
• Honkai: Star Rail:
  • Zandar's creation of the Aeon-supercomputer Nous, and therefore the Path of Erudition, was this trope.^note A Path is a cosmic well of energy defined by an ideal like knowledge or destruction. Paths come into existence every time a new Aeon is born, and people who embody a Path's ideal (or "walk the Path") are physically empowered by it.
  • Lygus, who believes that Zandar's act was a mistake that calcified the universe, tries to kill Nous with a lengthy Evil Plan that is also the trope. The heroes' goal in the Amphoreus arc is to stop the plan from going off.
• The Last Spell: The Last Spell is so named because it's the last spell that can ever be cast, since it directly invokes The Magic Goes Away.
• Might and Magic: This is what the Ancients meant by "fulfilling the destiny of Xeen." After defeating both of the final bosses, the Dragon Pharaoh tasks the party with making the arrangements for a ritual to change the flat planet of Xeen into a sphere.
• RuneScape: The quest "Twilight of the Gods" revolves around the player restoring the Edicts of Guthix, an immensely powerful spell that would expel the gods from Gielinor, and prevent them from directly interfering. Unlike the original Edicts, which were channeled through Guthix himself and expired when he died, the new Edicts are self-sustaining and will presumably last forever, though casting them does burn out the player's Guthix-imbued World Guardian powers.
• In Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne, Hikawa, formerly a member of the Ring of Gaea, stole one of their forbidden tomes and divined the exact steps to enact the Conception, a grand ritual designed to destroy the existing world and recreate it under a new set of rules enforced by the Universe itself. Normally said ritual is only supposed to be used when the planet's energy is about to be exhausted as a means to renewing it, but all of the entities that ultimately join the race to remake the world are doing so as a means to serve their own agendas and biases. It is possible to use the rite's mechanisms to recreate the old world or even break the system... but as seen in the Freedom and True Demon endings and Shin Megami Tensei V, that carries its own risks.

• Koishi Komeiji's Heart-Throbbing Adventure features the Moonlight Descent Ceremony, a plan conceived by Lord Tsukoyomi and carried out by the Watatsuki Sisters in an attempt to reunite The Moon and The Earth, Star-Crossed Lovers who were separated. This required humanity to be in a state of utopia and no conflict, as well as complete faith in the moon, achieved by transforming the residents of Gensokyo into Kaiju via a Hate Plague and shattering the Hakurei Barrier. They would then release the kaiju on the world, only to slay them to appear as heroes to humanity and gather their faith for the ceremony. By the end of Finale 7/9, the ceremony is completed, and all sapient life on earth was transformed into satori, creatures with Third Eyes, although people became incredibly emotionally hollow as a result.

• Agents of H.E.A.R.T.: When the Mad God Discord ran rampant across the world, the unicorn sorcerers Celestia and Luna defeated him by inventing magic that created the sun and moon, returning the world to relative normality and establishing the day and night cycle.
• DeadEndia: There are thirteen Planes of Existence, the top six being for angels and the bottom six being for demons with humans and animals living on the middle one, because the world was split during an event known as the Great Division. In the third and final graphic novel, it's revealed that the series Big Bad Pael did a ritual to divide the Planes because he hated living amongst demons so much. In the end, our heroes successfully cast a spell to join the thirteen Planes back together as one, with humans and supernatural beings living together (for the most part) in harmony.
• Housepets!: The final story arc of the comic has this as the end result of the cast deciding to Take a Third Option. A group of pets, gods and humans-turned-animals have successfully defeated the demon Eudonant and thus are given a reward for their deeds, but when the vote is split between undoing the spell (Todd and Steward) and keeping the humans transformed permanently (Keene and Lois)^note Tarot chooses to abstain, being mostly satisfied with finally fulfilling her purpose of being a hero and gloating a bit to Kitsune about it., Marion voices his doubts in regards to what he wants as while he certainly wants to be human again, he's also grown accustomed to being a squirrel and wishes to explore that life some more. So, Cerberus offers a solution: Turn half of the world's humans into animals in order to speed up the process of making them equal, but also turn the transformation magic into a public scientific phenomenon that can be studied and, once it's been figured out how it works, let each individual decide for themselves whether they want to be a human or an animal. The cast agrees to this, finding it a suitable compromise.
• Leaving the Cradle: Faster-Than-Light Travel is possible because the Ancients somehow modified the very laws of physics to allow it.
• Surviving the Game as a Barbarian: After a witch's curse rendered most of Rafdonia inhospitable, the land's remaining mages pooled their knowledge and power together to summon the Labyrinth, an otherworldly space with floors upon floors of monsters. The Labyrinth serves as a source of much-needed resources.
• Unsounded: In the climax of Book 1, the Time Abyss Lady Ilganyag claims that "the Man" worked an unprecedented feat of magic within the Background Magic Field itself, guided by her knowledge of the gods, to retroactively give souls to humanity. It went wrong, so she's been scheming for untold centuries to correct their mistake.

• Critical Role:
  • In response to a hugely destructive divine war, the Prime Deities created the Divine Gate, a magical barrier that prevented both themselves and the Betrayer Gods from physically interacting with the world of Exandria or the Elemental Planes. This creation, made to protect mortals, began the Era of Reclamation. ^note This is shown in more detail in the Downfall arc of Campaign 3 and in Exandria Unlimited: Divergence.
  • Critical Role: Campaign Three: When Bells' Hells are forced to choose between unleashing the god-eater Predathos or keeping it trapped (effectively kicking the can down the road where someone worse could unleash Predathos later), they decide to Take a Third Option — getting the Raven Queen to cast the Catatheosis ritual. Catatheosis gives gods the opportunity to reincarnate as mortals in an endless cycle. They will keep a smaller portion of their powers and be able to interact directly in the affairs of mortals again, as before the Divergence, but without the massive power imbalances caused by their full godly forms. Miraculously, all of the gods accept the terms, which shatters the Divine Gate completely and ends the Era of Reclamation.

• Adventure Time: Prior to the "Elements" miniseries, Patience St. Pim captured Princess Bubblegum, Flame Princess and Slime Princess, using their combined elemental powers in a ritual to bring out their full potential, transforming Ooo into a world divided into four zones of pure fire, ice, candy, and slime. In the miniseries's finale, "Skyhooks II", Finn, Ice King and Lumpy Space Princess perform a ritual using the Enchiridion, the princesses' and the Ice King's crown jewels, and LSP's own elemental powers to create a World-Healing Wave that reverts Ooo back to its default state, though things aren't quite the same as before.
• The Legend of Korra: At the end of Book Two, Korra battles Unalaq and Vaatu during the Harmonic Convergence. In the aftermath of the battle, Korra leaves open the spirit portals, allowing spirits to more easily travel to the human world, and the energy of the convergence causes many nonbenders to become airbenders.
• Monkie Kid: In the season 5 finale, MK and his friends use the Color Stones to spread the burden of being the World Pillar between everyone. This has the side effect of giving everyone magic.
• The Owl House: Emperor Belos' grand plan for the Boiling Isles is the Day of Unity, a huge feat of Ritual Magic he claims will align the powers of all the Isles' witches and join the Demon and Human realms in a utopia. Its true purpose is to drain the life out of everyone in the Isles but him; fortunately he's stopped in the nick of time.
• Star vs. the Forces of Evil: In "Cleaved", Star, Moon, Eclipsa, and Meteora perform a ritual to destroy magic in order to stop Mina. This collapses the portals between realms and begins to seal dimensions, including those of Mewni and Earth, off from each other. However, the portal between Mewni and Earth explodes instead, bringing the two worlds together as one.