After the World Drowned

When the world Drowned, humans scrambled to make ends meet. Most of the land is underwater. Only the tallest buildings rise above the surface, the highest hills forming atolls. Communities live in the upper floors of once-luxurious hotels.

In the century since the Drowning, plant life has flourished, the built environment a prop for a living skin. Reptilian and amphibious species inhabit the same spaces as humans, sometimes in an uneasy truce, often in conflict.

Humans have scavenged the resources they can, deep diving into the underwater remnants of their built civilisation and by hunting animals and fish for food, while clearing overgrowth and using it for materials.

But it's been like this for generations now and you sense it can't keep going the same way. Communities form and dissolve as you all keep moving, from one abandoned highrise to the next. Now you've devoured the local animal and fish populations, you've built with all the plants, and burned them for fuel. This community is coming close to an end and tensions are fraying. The time of dissolution is near.

There must be a better way, and you will find it.

In this storytelling game, inspired by the J.G. Ballard's "The Drowned World", you will explore that new existence. The story is fundamentally one of hope. You will conceive of speculative ways to "make kin" with the more-than-human world. You'll build relationships not just between characters but between species: plant, animal, or algal. You'll imagine what this world could become and invent creative approaches to forge it.

Play to find out how your speculative solarpunk future forms, in kinship with the non-human species you might have previously neglected.

Play After the Drowned World on Story Synth

This work is based on For the Queen, a product of Alex Roberts and Evil Hat Productions, and licensed for our use under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.