“There is a road… no simple highway… between the dawn, and the dark of night…”
The road is paved with red clay and cracked, but very usable by horse or cart. Every once in a while a square red sign remains, with the numbers “49”, faded, with a cross in a circle beneath the numbers. Those who travel this road call it the High Road—49. The cross and the numbers are a rainbow of colors despite the obvious age of the sign. The numbers shine back like a cat’s eye in lantern light or the beacon of the train.
What’s beyond the mountains? Roads. “Hill folk, kings of the road, side winders. You just came off a side road, didn’t you?” Most travelers speak the language (a variation of Latin). A few speak something called English around where you came on. Once in a while someone comes on speaking the old tongue of the city (Elvish). “The circus folk patter city speak, but I don’t know how much they really understand.”
“The circus comes round once in a lifetime.”
The people and towns
The people here speak Latin. This side of the road is fading. It’s got a heavy old-west flavor, but without the gunfights. Think of it as a Roman Mexico after Rome left.
The only towns still inhabited are on the main road (High Road 49) and in Caulfield (to mine the coal for the train). There are many abandoned towns down sand-covered side streets. The people stay in the towns they were born in. Partially this is just because. But it’s also because they have farmland scratched out near these towns, and it’s very difficult to start new farmland in this hard soil.
Each town is also the location of a well; towns without a well are abandoned.
High Road: Money
| Coin | Weight | Front | Back | Metal | Worth |
| Aureus | .02 | medusa head and snakes | winged victory holding wreath and palm leaf | gold | 25 monetary units |
| Denarius | .01 | Quirinus and flame | anvil, tongs, and hammer | silver | 1 monetary unit |
| Dupondius | .03 | Marsu and scythe | sceptre, garlanded | brass | 1/8th monetary unit |
The coins of the road are the brass dupondii (dupondius), the silver denarii (denarius), and the gold aurei (aureus) of the last emperors. The dupondii and denarius is by far the most common. The aureus is worth about 25 denarii, and a denarius is eight dupondii. These coins are tiny, and old. They were originally the size of a dime, but have been worn with time. If the characters are from a place, such as Highland, where the silver shilling is the size of a quarter and six times the weight of the denarius, they may try to talk down prices—“our coins are worth much more than your coins!” Most people here will have none of that. A coin is a coin. There’s no value in the coin itself, it’s just a symbol used for trade. In the larger cities of Aquestern, Silverwood, Tupose, or Glendale, they might, on a Charisma roll, be able to convince an interested merchant to trade them Denarii on a 2, 3, or 4 to one basis for Highland shillings (from a weight standpoint, it should be six to one or more).
The people will generally not accept copper or bronze coins. If it isn’t gold, silver, or brass, it isn’t a coin. That brass is just a copper alloy doesn’t matter. It’s the symbol that matters, and brass is the symbol.
High Road: Technology
The Road has a proto-“steampunk” level of technology, though most of the people in the world are no longer able to use this technology. There are no radios or transistors or vacuum tubes, but there are gears and steam and coal.
Firearms do not work along the road. Magic does. The train itself is part magic, part machine.
Clothes are made from a flax- or hemp-like plant. They’re rarely colored.
All of the cities are equipped with underground Roman aqueducts (often overground across chasms), several public baths, and several elaborate fountains. All are empty of water. With the decline of the city, water has become a precious resource. Most buildings have indoor plumbing, which doesn’t work anywhere except Glendale. Buildings will usually have several washrooms and possibly one or two toilets, depending on the size of the building and its proximity to the old sewer lines. None of these are used anymore, and if the building is occupied the rooms will usually be converted to other use.
Astronomy, Climate, and Geography
The sun is a gift from Central Station before the end of the world, though few remember that. Peco and Jon do remember. There are no stars at night, nor is there a moon, but the skies are a faint purple that gives the equivalent of starlight for seeing by. Rain rarely comes; when it does, it’s got a faint brown tinge to it.
The mountains to either side of the valley are barren and hot—no sign of the high, cold mountain that they came through (if they came over the mountains). The change is gradual, taking perhaps an hour or two, but eventually the mountain pass and snow fade. They’re stuck here unless they can find the flowering sage that marks the entrance to the pass.
It gets cold at night here, and coal is important.
High Road: Time
The people of the road use a calendar of ten months, though the months have begun to get out of whack. Martius (for Mars), Aprilis (for the forgotten god), Maius (for Maia), Iunius (for Juno), and then the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth months: Quintilis, Sextilis, September, October, November, and December. Ten months of thirty or thirty-one days each, and a winter of sixty-one days in between December and Martius.
The year is 10,986. It has been 589 years since the end of the world. Add 9,994 to the Highland year for the City year.
High Road: Numerology
Ten is the number of civilization. When we learned to reason, we reckoned on our hands. There are ten months, commissions are ten men, and the crossroads meet at ten squared plus ten. Before reason, our number was two, an animal number, instinct. Day and night. Act or don’t act. Run or fight. There are two roads on the crossroads; their number combines to ten.
High Road: Water
Water is a precious commodity here. They generally have barely enough of it from thin muddy streams or saved up from when the river flows or brought in by the train. Baths are unknown; they’re not even decadent, they’re unimaginable.
High Road: Food
The people grow wheat as best they can, lentils, chickpeas, American corn, and root vegetables resembling parsnips and turnips. They eat the greens from both of those vegetables. They also eat an agave-like cactus when its fruit are available.
They will also eat small animals when available, and can spice their food using salt, a garlic-like bulb grown in basements, and a fennel-like weed that’s becoming more and more rare.
Some grow small chickens. In the past the area also had pigs, but no longer.
Their alcohol is mostly a beer from wheat (in the southeast) or parsnips (in the northwest), or fermented cactus nectar (in the west).
High Road: Animals
There are lots of small animals: rabbit-like creatures, rat-like creatures, scrawny birds, and scrawny coyotes. The largest animal still around is the donkey.
High Road: Buildings
The towns have far more buildings than people. Most of the buildings on the edges of the towns are deserted. The buildings are either stone, often two or three stories, possibly with adobe walls, or are completely adobe. Most adobe buildings are one or at most two stories. The roofs are vaulted or domed, because this doesn’t require wooden beams.
High Road: Weapons
Just about everything that needs to be made is left over from better times. That includes the swords of this world: they’re short swords left over from the times of the City. They’ve been resharpened so often that they’re thinner than they should be. Most people don’t need them unless they live off of the road near the abyss, so swords are most easily found in Glendale.
High Road: Pax Urbana
One of the reasons that people still live in the towns on the road is that the road feels safer. It is safer: the City’s Peace is a magical charm lain on the roads of the city forbidding violence. It originally extended throughout the entire cities; today it extends for most of the towns, a good hundred yards around the road. But the Pax Urbana is failing; it’s gone from all of the side roads, and recently disappeared from the Caulfield spur of the road—thus enabling the train robbery and the wyvern attack.
Even on the main road, the Pax is fading. Anyone wanting to begin a fight must make a Willpower roll, at a penalty of 2, to do so. The Pax Urbana does not affect defensive actions, only offensive actions. Continuing a fight does not require a Willpower roll, only starting one.
The Pax Urbana applies only to intelligent creatures. Animals can and do still attempt to feed or protect their territory along the road. This puts people in a bit of a fix: they have to wait until a predator attacks before defending themselves, but the predator is not under any similar restriction.
“The world has not become more violent since the Pax Urbana. The city became less violent—and no longer able to keep the peace.”
Where Pax Urbana Roads cross, there is a place of power, +1, Order.
High Road: The Circus
All the inhabitants have to look forward to is the circus (see the Coriandrome Circus). The circus comes around once every generation or two. Prizes from the midway are handed down as heirlooms; they should be oddly creepy, yet understandably nostalgic.
Some of the things people will keep from the circus: colorful sunglasses with large round lenses, forever flowers in perpetually bright colors, super-bouncing moldable clay, a hemispherical jar of eye-agates in liquid, colorful wooden birds that fly when thrown.
They also keep the fliers that advertise the circus, though most of them are heavily faded.
The encroaching abyss
People here don’t talk about the encroaching abyss; to do so is rude and boorish. If a sidewinder tries to talk about it, “let’s talk about something else” is the most polite response they can expect.
This is boring
Yes, one of the points of this part of the world is that nothing is happening here. Except for the conflicts brought in by the player characters (such as Joe Lakono) this is a dead world. But even though this is going to be boring for the characters, don’t let it be boring for the players. Unless something comes up that interests them, you can probably travel the entire 3,000 miles within two or three nights of gaming: one for the train robbery, one for the dragon attack, and one for the rest of the trip where they find traces of Joe and possibly get spat upon.
Play up the scenery, the desolation of each town. The Arizona-like desert, the dry riverbeds, the trickly muddy water where water exists, and the rusting, cannibalized structures. Then send them on their way to the next town.
Sample Names
You can mark what you’ve used each name for in the empty column as you use them. They rarely use “family” names; when they need to identify a particular person, it will be by town and/or by occupation. Anthony of Greenfield, or Lucius Digger.
