The Absorbed Worlds RPG Setting

I played a lot of great RPGs in the 80's and 90's and one of my first and all time favorites was TSR's Gamma World.  The rules might not have been so hot, but the setting was what really made the game.  Post-apocalyptic is cool in itself, but with the fantastic mutations and lost super-science it almost qualified as a multi-genre setting without the lameness of Rifts or TORG.  Oh yeah, and it was a refreshingly zombie-less apocalypse I might add.  Anyways, playing Gamma World always made me think of my favorite post-apocalyptic setting, the subterranean worlds of the cartoon Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea.

I would force myself to wake up at 0430 when I was in grade-school, just to catch Spartakus on Nickelodeon.  The cartoon was like nothing I'd ever seen before, with its surreal imagery and sophisticated story.  The show featured an artificial woman with telekinetic and matter manipulation powers traveling in an intelligent spaceship through the crust of the earth, searching for a way to prevent her people's artificial underground sun from exploding.  Her travel companions were the titular gladiator Spartakus, as well as two surface children and two weird animal-creatures who may have been artificial themselves.  The best part of the show was the fact that the group traveled through different "strata" in the crust of the earth, and in each encountered people and creatures from different times. The laws of physics also sometimes seemed to be altered in this underground nexus of realities.  The show therefore had no limits; one week the heroes were in an ancient China analog, and the next they were in space.  The show was set after a Great Cataclysm, and for decades now I've thought that it would make the ultimate RPG setting.  Player characters would have but to step through a cavern and they could face anything, yet there was still an underlying if tenuous back-story, so an RPG set in Spartakus' world wouldn't feel like a generic multi-genre campaign.

The cartoon was originally released in France, under the title Les Mondes Engloutis.  I've found translations of this title listed as "The Absorbed Worlds" and "The Engulfed Worlds".  I don't speak french but my research leads me to believe the most literal translation of the original title is: "The Swallowed Worlds".  I prefer the first translation, even if it might be technically incorrect, so I'm using that to describe the setting.  I'm currently using this setting for a solo RPG campaign using the Mythic GM Emulator.  So far I've completed one adventure, which I plan to share in a future post.  I really hope I can sit down and summarize the adventure so I can highlight the Mythic GM Emulator; I love this tool!  After literally decades I can again enjoy the fun of seeing a story unfold like only a RPG can provide.