“I got the key to the highway.”—Muddy Waters
On the other side of the mountain pass, High Road 49 continues. Travelers call it the Phoenix Highway.
The blues have traveled this road since the road was built, riding thumb and wheel from the backwoods to Chicago and Memphis. The junction of Highway 61 and Highway 49 (7 and 13) in Clarkdale, Mississippi is the crossroads where Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil. It crosses the Mississippi via a steel tied arch bridge. Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan grew up on Highway 61. Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered here.
The roads are good roads, but cracked. Every once in a while they come across abandoned barricades. Even more rare are small villages, enclaves of sanity in a crumbling empire. None remain on the road. As the move further in they come into cold, ice, and snow. Near to the city is eternal winter. The days are getting longer, but darker. The sun rises lower and lower into the sky; twilight lasts longer and longer.
The railroad also continues, but the tracks are rusted and in many places gone to red dust and disappeared. They won’t be continuous again until the other side of the yellow jungle, and even then there are no trains until past the preacher at the gates of hell.
Possible extra adventures this side of the mountain are gargoyle raids and wyvern raids from the Station of the Sun.
Time should slip some as they pass through the tunnel, because they’re passing between branches of the world. Most likely when they return from being gone for several weeks (or months) they’ll instead have been gone for several years. If they left things unfinished at home, they’ll come back to a very changed homeland. But also note that time really is passing; it’s just slipping. If four years pass as they go through the tunnel, they are now four years older. Some of them might notice it, some might not; you’ll need to keep track of it.
- The Station of the Sun
- You stand upon a plateau against a mountain. A cold, reeking wind blows intermittently past. Forward, the mountain rises steeply to the stars. Behind you the matte dark abyss looms as high. The rails are rusted, and on this side there are four of them, two to your left and one to your right. They continue into a multiply-arched tunnel straight into the mountainside.
- The Yellow Forest
- Beyond the foothills of the Station of the Sun, the the foliage changes to a small, one-mile-wide plain with wide, curling, fern-like grasses and, closer to the jungle, cattails and ferns. Then, a wall of giant ferns and great cycads, three hundred yards thick. Finally, the massive trees and wet land of the jungle. The jungle is a fetid, yellow, miasmic swamp, stagnant, in no sense a vibrant place. Within the jungle the sky is blocked by a canopy…
- The Phoenix Highway: Angwat
- Angwat in The Phoenix Highway
- The lost city
- The Angwat call it Luputac. Humans outside of the jungle call it Thracia (Mahukia also knows this name). Both call it the lost city. It is covered by a warm mist coming off the swamps most of the morning. If you’ve been aching to use some of your old-school adventures, this is the perfect place to put The Caverns of Thracia. It looks like the caverns would be a good adventure for 2nd to 7th level characters. The ancient, abandoned city it lies…
- Mad scientist in the temple
- “Every day the world groaned to turn and we were making our appalling studies of the night.”
- East of the Jungle
- No description available
- Clanricarde’s Grave
- “I felt like lying by the side of the trail and remembering it all. I felt like sleeping and dreaming in the grass.”
Related Pages
