Inspiration
Many of the quotes at the head of each section come from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Much of the inspiration comes from Stephen King’s Dark Tower and just about any blues song that involves the crossroads. You’ll also find inspiration from episodic television science fiction such as Star Trek and Firefly. You might also find inspiration in the role-playing game Dogs in the Vineyard. Read and listen to and watch some of the works listed as inspiration. This is a loose collection of adventures. The general theme is that there are alien worlds beyond every cultural and physical horizon. This is what it shares with On the Road, for example.
1. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.
2. Stephen King’s Dark Tower series.
3. The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem: Rambles of Spring (The Makem and Clancy Concert)
4. “The Elves” from “Tales Before Tolkien”
Additional adventures
The Road is a great place to put adventures that don’t fit in your “real world”. If you’ve got any old-school adventures you’ve been aching to use, the road passes by small towns, emptying cities, and failing kingdoms. Reality isn’t always working right. Sometimes it jumps a bit. You can pull some of the old-school classics from Dragon Magazine, Judges Guild, or Fight On! For example, I expect to use Graeme Davis’s Tower of Babel from Pegasus 12 during this series of adventures, or Calithena’s House of the Axe (Fight On! #4). It has the right combination of decay, revenge, and deceit for a Road adventure. I used Karl Merris’s Fell Pass for the Station of the Sun railway tunnel. Jeff Rients’s Welcome to Slimy Lake (Fight On! #6) belongs on the Road, too, and if you have the Paul Jaquays’s Caverns of Thracia, it could go in the Yellow Forest or Prata Phoenix. It could even be used as the temple ruins in the City at the Crossroads, if you want to expand that part of the adventure.
My own Song of Tranquility (Fight On! #7) is a great adventure for the initial cold mountain pass and Fabrica Solis: Forge of the Sun can be used underneath whatever you put in the Route 49 tunnel and the Station of the Sun.
About the Road: Technology
As in Highland, firearms don’t work on the road. What does work is a combination of magic, steampunk, and cowboy goth, such as the train that carries water, coal, and grain from town to town.
