Sometimes out in the world you'll come across an abandoned city, town, neighborhood, or homestead. No matter what scale, you can tell that people lived there once and now they don't.
Moving is hard. Happy, comfortable, thriving people usually don't uproot their entire lives and leave for the uncertainty of elsewhere on a whim. There was a reason they left and a reason they haven't come back. Why?
(d66, roll 2 d6's and treat each value as a digit instead of adding them together)
11 The well went dry.
12 Too many years of drought to keep going.
13 Famine from the blight.
14 Fled the rat flood.
15 Earthquakes used to be rare, but now the tremors are frequent and getting worse.
16 The underground fires burning through the mines keep spewing fumes and causing unpredictable sinkholes.
21 Everything burned and they never rebuilt.
22 Weather's changed to unending lightning storms, tornadoes, and floods.
23 The plague took too many to keep the place together.
24 The dire skuas' migration routes shifted to pass directly overhead.
25 A roc established its aerie nearby and claimed the area as its territory.
26 The mine's played out.
31 The factory closed down.
32 The water's overfished to extinction.
33 The company dug too deep and woke the sleeper.
34 Whole county's been polluted by industrial waste. Air, water, and soil's toxic as can be.
35 Reactor melted down, everything's contaminated and will be for the foreseeable forever.
36 The arcane and alchemic contamination from the war is irreversible.
41 A wizard moved in just across the river.
42 The bandits in the hills are getting bolder and the governor's not doing anything about it.
43 There's rumors of an army on the way.
44 The new baron's exorbitant taxes are untenable.
45 The new governor is a tyrannical monster.
46 They were all conscripted and driven on a forced march elsewhere.
51 They were forced to relocate in preparation for a new dam and reservoir. Construction's been delayed for years but not canceled so they're not allowed to return.
52 They were forced out to make way for a new "urban revitalization" development, then the project stalled.
53 Vampire preying on the locals ate the place down to zero.
54 Alien abductions and cattle mutilations are happening almost every week now.
55 Whole place is haunted, ghosts everywhere you look. Wasn't always like that, but what can you do?
56 Area's cursed so the sun doesn't rise.
61 Area's cursed so that nothing can be born, grow, or die.
62 Increasing incidents of spontaneous resurrection.
63 Increasing incidents of spontaneous combustion.
64 The land just hasn't been right since the meteor fell.
65 They're all infected with the fungus. It sent them out and has no reason to recall them.
66 They're still there, they just exist on a different plane of reality now and are imperceptible.
