RPG supplement: Junkyard

This is the prolog to a little RPG supplement: Junkyard. A demiplane of junk. It'll be coming out in both systemless and PF1/5E versions. More info soon!

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Long ago, there was a civilization that encompassed an entire world, one where sorcery and mundane technology granted the people dominion over the world. Electrical and magical lights blazed in their cities, banishing the night, while factories churned out endless products, both magical and mundane.

But soon the new era found itself with a problem.

Trash.

Wrecked engines, worn out furniture, spoiled alchemical potions, all of them started to accumulate, poured into the sewers and rivers of the great cities. Even worse, miscast spells and damaged golems could actually become dangerous threats, lurking in the sewers and alleys of the smog-ridden urban landscape.

Recycling the material would be difficult and expensive. Storing it in a safe area would also be expensive and dangerous, as the gathered magic concentrated and pooled.

But the College of Wizardry had a solution. Send it somewhere else. Powerful sorceries opened up gates to a demiplane, one that held nothing of import to the wizards. And into this demiplane was poured the ruined potions, the wrecked machines, the trash of a thousand cities.

It answered two of mankind’s great urges—showing off their strength, and avoiding the consequences of their actions.

But magic… Magic is a mysterious thing, and the greater the sorcery the more the intent matters. The intent here was to get rid of trash, of things that were inconvenient. Things to be lost.

And so, some things and people, vanished because they were inconvenient. An heir nobody wanted, orphans, a criminal, a group of orphans that were too expensive for the city to pay for. Street rats. Some of them willingly (even if they didn’t know where they would end up), some of them accidentally. And some, it was said, by the use of forbidden sorceries to open up a small portal to the realm. They mostly came from those groups that were unwanted in any case, so few worried.

In other cases, treasures also vanished, the victims of malfunctioning spells or just a desire to put them somewhere nobody would think to find them.

For a hundred years this process has continued, and entire generations have grown up in the junk realm. People still arrive, some of them by choice, some of them involuntarily. Beyond them, adventurers seek out treasure among the junk, some by trade, some by the sword. Others come seeking out missing persons, hoping that they were brought to the junk realm.

Some of the inhabitants seek to escape, while others have come to accept their exile, and for those who were born here—they know no other land, save from the tales of their parents. Many of those tales play up the fact that they were unwanted, and so it is better to remain here. Others of the inhabitants work to trade with those adventurers who risk the junk realm, be it for passage to another world, or things that the realm does not have in abundance.

But the trash still falls from the sky, and people still come to the junk realm, be it voluntarily or involuntarily. Adventurers who are tried of dank caves and ominous towers also come, for as it said by the Wondermere Mages Guild—”there is gold in that shit.”