I love a great location, and one of my favorite settings is an abandoned island. There are lots of reasons for this. Here’s just a few:

• They contain great visual elements, even when described in narrative.
• Decay and Ruin can be used symbolically to represent almost any situation in a game. And there’s always overgrowth and undergrowth and the like for symbolic representation of everything else.
• They are full of nooks and crannies that can hide anything.
• If you put something underneath that ruin and decay, you can get great contrasts.
• There’s always a story behind such places. Why is it abandoned?

Abandoned Islands in a Modern setting

Beneath the ruins of an ancient city, a super-agency has built a high-tech resource centre from which to mastermind their attempt to shape the course of future world events – whether the world agrees with them or not. Vine-encrusted stone walls lift and swing aside to reveal a hanger deck for stealth VTOL variants on modern transport and fighter aircraft. Infrared sensors and hidden cameras are mounted in collapsed and broken statues that give their eyes an eerie red glow at night. Pillboxes lie concealed behind centuries-old carved walls. Partially-collapsed staircases hidden beneath layers of dirt, leaves, and fallen branches lead to long-forgotten cellars whose walls have been rebuilt with secret entrances providing access for personnel, while caverns conceal a jetty for marine craft of all varieties to tie up – if you have the correct signalling equipment to trigger the lowering of a mechanised “reef” and a wall of razor-sharp stagalmites that block access to the jetty from the outside.

The more modern-day the campaign, the farther off-shore the island can be and still be “connected” to the campaign. This is due to two factors: faster transport, and modern communications.

Abandoned Islands in a Fantasy setting

In contrast, fantasy-campaign islands fall into two discrete types: those that are close enough to be reached by bridge, or – perhaps – by rowboat, and those which require a sailing vessel to access. The former are great for semi-isolated settings and contrast the life of the urban environment with the desolation / wilderness of the island, while the latter emphasize the isolation and disconnection from the known world; precedent for this type of usage stretches all the way back to the tale of Jason and the Argonauts.

The River Carstan runs through the centre of the port city of Jezwel, and in the centre of that river lies the island of Marshwell and the abandoned keep of Thimolise. Once, it dominated the region, but its strategic position attracted more settlers than could be accommodated within the safety of the Keep, and so the urban settlement of Jezwel sprang up. At first, the keep remained the position of power over the settlement, but its days of authority were already numbered. That authority was weakened when walls were erected around Jezwel, and much of the burgeoning bureacracy relocated, signalling a slow drifting of power into the heart of the urban community and away from the island.

The deathknell for Thimoline came when a stranger came to visit the Precept of Thimoline – a title that has since fallen into disuse. Although he claimed to be a friend, travelling with news of far places, his visit was for his own dark purposes. Late that night he stole into the mortuary and crafted a dark spell beyond the powers of most mortals and even many supernatural agencies, and the revered dead of the keep rose from their resting places to assault the living even as they slept. And each defender who fell rose again within minutes to join the army of undeath. Slowly, the alarm was raised, and the sixty-two fortunate survivors fled, burning the bridges that connected the island Keep to the town of Jezwel.

Deep within the crypts, according to legend, the Precept – the last of his line, for his sons and daughters had already fallen and joined the ranks of the enemy – confronted the Necromancer, and killed him, before succumbing to his own wounds. Others claim that the Necromancer had been summoned by the Precept himself to save the life of the Precept’s son, who was reportedly sickly and ill, but that the Precept was betrayed by the Necromancer, and that the killing was an act of revenge. None who survived know the truth.

Whatever the truth, every night the undead stir, under the command of the long-dead precept and the Undead Necromancer, and seek ways to reach the living to swell and bolster their number. For years, Jezwel was a town under seige, as the undead simply walked across the river bottom each night; but then came Stewen The White, who erected the white SoulGuard stones to confine the undead, giving his life to get the last in place before sunset and the rising anew of the dead. For a year and a day, it was thought that the threat was confined eternally, but then the Wards failed, and it was learned that they needed to be renewed each year.

In the handful of centuries since, this has become an annual tradition within what has grown into a trade centre and cosmopolitan city, but it has also grown ever more dangerous, for all manner of fell creatures have been attracted to the island, and even by dat, it is now a place of deadly danger for any who dare to set foot apon its rocky outcroppings.

The above is a slight revamping of the background to an adventure used in one of my D&D campaigns – I have the vague memory of it being the first Fumanor campaign, but I’m not 100% sure. There are three obvious ways to use this background for an adventure, and the changes made are intended to make them all viable choices. Option 1: The PCs are hired/selected to renew the Soulguard Stones for another year. Option 2: The PCs are hired to attempt to penetrate the catacombs beneath the keep, locate the crypts, and bring an end to the menace once and for all. Option 3: One of the Soulguard stones has been broken or stolen, presumably by one of the creatures on the island or perhaps by the Undead who have long sought to escape their confinement. The PCs have been hired to solve the crime and restore the Soulguard Wards, and to try and end the menace once-and-for-all if they can. The option chosen will require further development of the setting to support it.

Using Real Locations

Jump-starting your imagination with a real-life location can save you lots of effort, because all you have to do is recast whatever you can find out about the place into appropriate terminology for your campaign. If you are presented with a wall constructed of shattered fibro or something similar with vines growing through it, you can change it to stone, or wood, or concrete, or plastic, or whatever is appropriate. The key to doing so with plausibility is to note how long the island has been devoid of habitation, and why – then adjust both accordingly. Then employ the visual translation trick described earlier in this paragraph.

Finding Places

There are a number of web pages that list abandoned islands and communities. I’ve gathered a small collection below, but there are many more. Most, if not all these places, will have wikipedia pages dedicated to them, and a Google image search will turn up anywhere from a few to hundreds of images.

I expected it to be a problem selecting sites that didn’t have too many entries in common, but that turned out not to be a significant problem, much to my surprise!

Google Image Search Tips & Tricks:

• Google’s web search understands the use of “plus”[term] to mean “must include” and “minus”[term] to mean “exclude” – Google’s Image search doesn’t seem to do so. Response to using quotation marks around a term – which on the web search mean “exact match only” or “must include” – can also be sporadic.
• It’s also worth remembering that Google’s Image Search doesn’t search for images that match the search term you provide, it lists ANY image on a webpage that includes the search term – so you can end up with a lot of rejects that aren’t what you want.
• As a general rule of thumb, the farther down the list of results of an image search a particular result is, the less likely it is to match what you are looking for – but there are frequent exceptions to this rule.
• Once you have an image search underway, click on Search Tools, and you can restrict the size of image to whatever you want. I use two searches all the time: “Large” and “larger than 800×600”. This is great for weeding out images that are too small to be useful; the default is always “Any Size”, which gives you lots of thumbnails and small size images. The bigger the image, the more details you can usually extract from it.
• Don’t assume that Google Images on any setting will show you the largest version of an image. If the image offered is large enough, that’s fine. But if not, you have options:
  • Click on the size link to look for the identical image in other sizes (sometimes with very minor variations). This search normally happens in a new browser tab or window, preserving the original search.
  • Click on the Search By Image link to search for similar images – sometimes these will be very close to the original, sometimes identical, and sometimes wildly different. Again, this search normally takes place in a new browser tab or window.
    • This can give you pages that contain the image.
    • Clicking on all sizes gives you the search results IN SIZE ORDER, excluding the original.
• Sometimes, when you click on “view image”, you will get a “forbidden” message.
  • The “Visit Page” button can often get you the image when this happens. There are all sorts of ways to design a web page so that clicking on the “view image” button won’t work. These sites don’t distinguish between Googles’ search and any other website hotlinking to the image, and that’s a practice that all website operators tend to discourage because it means people can use the site’s bandwidth to download the image without seeing ads that support the website and keep it “on the air”.
  • There will sometimes be times when the page that comes up won’t have an obvious link to the image. There is one final trick that sometimes works: click the “Visit Page” button, and then, with that page still open in another tab, click the “View Image” button. Because the page is open, the site thinks that you have permission to view the image, and hey presto!
• Finally, if you get desperate, choose the medium or small image sized options. These can sometimes get you thumbnails that link to a larger image that the website has told Google not to list.

These tricks give you access to a lot more images – learn to use them all!

The List

• 8 Eerie, Abandoned Islands of the World from Weather dot com
• from touropia dot com
• from mentalfloss dot com
• from vypid dot com
• from untappedcities dot com
• from distractify dot com
• Abandoned eco-resort decays on World Heritage Island from ABC dot net dot au

The next time you need an idea or a location, consider an abandoned island!