The Abandoned World was created from a game a Trophy: Dark that I had ran for some friends several years ago. When they were creating their characters, one of the players asked what time period it was set in. It was a one-shot in Trophy: Dark style, so I didn’t have anything planed in mind, and the incursion I was running was The Flocculent Cathedral, which could easily be set in many time periods. So, the character created a modern-day treasure hunter who was a suburban mom very into MLM schemes. That character was the star of the module, and it got me thinking about Trophy incursions that were specifically written for the modern day. In my development, modern day quickly gave way to “unspecified far future” with a post-apocalyptic twist that led easily to the Trophy style demise.
I got a lot of inspiration from post-apocalyptic fantastical settings like Adventure Time, Vaults of Vaarn, and Caves of Qud, though I tried to make the default Abandoned World a little more grounded. Mysterious and fantastical things certainly exist in this world, but the environment and other humans are the greatest threat, usually. I wanted to create a setting where there was plenty of room for the fantastic, but also plenty of room to bring in as much of the modern world as you want.
The first zine for the Abandoned World, The Shadows of a Tesseract, is a Trophy Dark incursion about a ruined town in the middle of a desert, rumored to be rife with an ancient treasure. Check it out now on my itch page.
And coming soon, the next incursion for the Abandoned World delves into a crumbling relic from the 20th century – the American Mall. Follow me on itch.io for updates!
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