What Causes Endless Night? Anyone know?

[meg_evonne]

Either a pissed off race of casters, or an irresponsible researcher, or if you're a Shyamalan fan, some angry <i>trees</i>, create a pathogen (magical, probably) that erodes a subject's ability to perceive light. The light is there, but the townfolk cannot perceive it, because they've each lost their optic nerve. This solves an obvious problem with the blotting out of the sun, wherein plant life cannot photosynthesize and the food chain dies from the grass up. It also gives you another layer, by which the protagonist and 5% of the population are immune to the pathogen, or if you like Reavers, have their visual acuity augmented tenfold. If you mean for magic to be a commodity in the world you're building, you can have someone selling an effective talisman for a king's ransom. Or perhaps the college of wizards is in for a powergrab; an environment with so much fear is just begging to be exploited.

Hey, I like that one!   It gets my vote!

[Franziska]

There was something similar in "the day of the Triffyds": a pandemy of blindness, caused by green meteors...

[LizW65]

A book of short fiction in my TBR pile, Banquet of the Lords of Night, posits a world plunged into eternal darkness by the aforementioned Lords, who have "conjured a great shell" above the world, blocking out all light and making it illegal.

[blgarver]

Tequila normally causes eternal night for me.

 

Sorry, couldn't resist.

[Syntopicon]

Large scale volcanic activity, could be natural or magically created.  Ash will make it like night for quite a while, and if the volcano were magically affected it could spew ash indefinitely.  Of course here you have the problem of falling ash...

[meg_evonne]

remember that the initial question refers to only a city being blacked out?  Some really neat ideas--love little lists of possibities

[Monkez]

Have the city teleported to the north pole during winter....

[meg_evonne]

So SlimMason.... did you find your solution to your delimna?  :-)

[bookivore]

To black out just the city - and be spooky -

One set of ideas, for actually preventing the light from getting there:

1) Light bending field effect that distributes the sunlight elsewhere.
2) Invisible Sunlight eating monsters floating above the city
3) The city has somehow become repulsive/super reflective to sunlight (very similar to 1 but the magic has been cast on 'the city' rather than 'above the city')

Spooky ways to have the populace see no sunlight

4) Illusion that sunlight does not exist has been cast upon people in the city.  Their plants, pets, etc have no such problem.  Then there's the question of whether their disbelief in sunlight leads to protection from sunburn, etc.
5) Experimental Protection spell has been misapplied and the people are now protected from sunlight, direct or reflected.

[Hell's Belle]

High fantasy, huh?

Some very, very clever and determined (and OLD) Vampires have collaborated and found a way to put this particular city into eternal night.  Nobody knows how they did it, the wizards are frantically trying to undo it, but the Vampires are very sneaky and have managed to hide, thus avoiding answers.

That makes the townsfolk remaining extremely wary. And paranoid.  Sales of vampire-Be-Gone are through the roof.

That way, you neatly sidestep having to explain anything, providing the reader with a good hook to suspend his/her disbelief, right off the bat.

No pun intended. (Bat, vampire, get it? Huh? Huh?)

[meg_evonne]

Some very, very clever and determined (and OLD) Vampires have collaborated and found a way to put this particular city into eternal night. 

Given our economy, there would probably be several cities that might be willing to offer tax breaks to be the community thus made endlessly dark--just to bring in the vampire market, given price of gas and air fare!  :-)

[Uilos]

Or you can go the Monty Burns way and use an attenae dish attached to a telescopic pole to directly blot out the sun

[OZ]

If this world is one with a pantheon of gods, maybe someone made a deal with the sun god that he/she will not shine on this particular city. As a god his/her power should be great enough to thwart even powerful wizards yet it leaves a possible diplomatic solution as someone tries to find out how or why the deal was made and reverse it.

A similar idea would be that something happened in the city that was so terrible that the sun averted his face and refused to shine on them.

The city is shrunken and hidden in a bottle in a dark place (superman anyone?). For anyone, wizard or not, to do anything about it they have to find the city.