Dark Age

You don't know who - or what - you might have once been, in some imagined before time. You band together with other bizarre and unfamiliar creatures to survive a surreal and unpredictable landscape and to explore the derelicts of a fallen cosmos.

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Welcome to the Shifting Wastes - a desert where mirages become real. Populated by oases and villages, some set up in the ruins of ancient structures, these communities need people willing to brave the hazards of the Shifting Wastes to connect them together.

Player Characters

The central gameplay revolves around "Wanderers" exploring, scavenging, and surviving the Shifting Wastes. Wanderers start weak and build up abilities and resilience, relying on their reputations to help them survive the harsh climate and creatures of the Shifting Wastes.

Wanderers may be of any species, from the insect-like Scarabs and Pli to the ape-like Orcish and Humanish or even the fungoids.

Wanderers may learn abilities which let them bend fate, manipulate the energy of life, manifest ice on a hot day, and peak beneath the veil that separates minds.

Setting & Genre

Dark Age is a low-fantasy low-scifi TTRPG with old west stylings that takes place in the Shifting Wastes, a large region of the Eastern Kel desert where reality is in flux. There are ancient structures to explore, and fantastical and horrific hazards to navigate.

Bandits and raiders threaten the communities within. Chimera are common, in both monsters and friendly creatures, blending aspects of two or more unrelated species into one. Storms criss-cross the Shifting Wastes which may bring sand, memories, or amnesia.

Starting Adventure

You wake up without any memories in a ritual circle deep inside the Infinite Pyramid, the only way out is death. But will even death be enough to escape?

Rogue-like Exploration

This quick-start adventure is build on top of a dice-driven rogue-like exploration system within the Infinite Pyramid that allows for endless rooms within, each with their own unique combination of theme, layout, and contents.

Lore

"Dark Age" refers to what future generations will call this period after the Cataclysm, "The Great Forgetting", where both bodies and memories have become distorted beyond recognition. This is felt most strongly in the Shifting Wastes where the past is forgotten and remembered in equal proportion. Scant few records of this period survive into future Ages, but the ideals and the impacts of the people who make a difference will have long echoes across the millennia.

Similarities

This particular Age and its stylings have some things in common with Firefly, The Postman, Mad Max, and Avatar. At the very end of development I started playing Horizon Zero Dawn finally (it kept crashing for me) and noticed some overlap, which is kind of fun and exciting to me.

Early Access

Dec 24th 2024 - ~Feb 2025

Dark Age is in early access while additional writing and abilities are added, but fully playable! It includes quickstart adventure built on top of a dice-driven roguelike exploration system with nearly infinite possibilities, 2 key locations, tables for generating oases and settlements and vendors, many hazards, special abilities, equipment, bestiary, a complete set of rules customized for the Dark Age setting, and much more.