The Phoenix Highway: The Yellow Forest

The Yellow Forest: Encounters

Entering the jungle

As you move into the forest, the trees get taller and taller, until the tops are sometimes hidden in the sporadic mist. The air is preternaturally still, almost as if you were underwater. The sun lies lost forever behind a huge canopy of trees two hundred feet high.

The jungle is about 228 miles wide. On the tunnel side is a pine scrub for fifteen miles. On the city side are low hills. The jungle is a new addition to this version of the road. After they pass through the twenty-two miles of low hills to the Customs House, if they turn around and go back they’ll find forty miles of low hills and then the pine scrub and the tunnel: the jungle is gone. Anyone or anything traveling with them from the jungle remains with them; if a Saurian player character wants to find their way home, they’ll need to search the ever-shifting road for hints of the world of the yellow moons.

By the time they’ve passed twenty miles into the jungle, the rails have disappeared. Only the road remains, and it is covered in underbrush and dirt. It is visible by the patterns of underbrush that grow over it. Every one to ten miles is a mile marker, but it’s usually hidden in the underbrush. The first one says “808 m.p.”. Each successive marker reduces that number by 1. On the other side the final marker in the jungle says “760 m.p.”

The Yellow Forest: Movement

Movement through the jungle is at twice movement miles per day on the road, except where noted. Movement off the road is at movement miles per day.

The Pax Urbana

The Pax Urbana only applies to violence for the sake of violence, and has no affect on unintelligent creatures. This is part of why the saurians live off of the road. You can’t preemptively attack animals, because you’re intelligent. But they can attack you for food.

The Yellow Forest: Firearms

Firearms will work in the jungle, but are unreliable: any shots where the gunpowder is kept in the open will fail to ignite on a d100 roll less than ten times the number of days in the jungle. Bullets, where the gunpowder is sealed, will fail to ignite on a roll less than the number of days in the jungle. Failures that are within 10 points of the failure chance are actually hang fires: the bullet will fire in d6 rounds.

The Yellow Forest: Food

The Saurians eat bugs, giant and small. But there are lots of other things in the forest to eat, if they’re willing to risk it (which they probably will be by the time they run out of their rations). There are multicolored, oblong squash growing away from the marshes. There are taro roots, though they must be cooked, or soaked overnight, to remove the toxins. (Eating two or more taro roots raw requires a Health roll, or the eater gains 1 injury over the next four hours. They’ll be warned by the burning and swelling in their mouth and throat.)

There’s the durian fruit, hidden behind a thick, thorn-covered husk. Its taste is divine but it smells like death, and each fruit weighs two to six pounds. The jaca (jackfruit) can be eaten cooked before it is ripe, or eaten raw when it ripens. Jaca trees are covered in hundreds of the fruit, which weigh ten to twenty pounds each. Banana fruit are not the bananas we’re familiar with: they have much larger seeds, but are otherwise very edible when ripe. They are often found near large and huge spider nests.

And for meat, there are lots of small deer and giant capybara.

Water is the biggest problem: most of the obvious water in the forest is standing water. It is filled with parasites and bacteria. Any running water and fresh rain water is precious. Other sources of water are the durian fruit. But other plants also contain water; some vines can be cut open; they’re hollow and contain little bits of water that will stream out. Standing water outside of a marsh can be filtered by digging a small hole near the body of standing water. The water will slowly filter through the dirt and into the hole; this will filter parasites, but some bacteria will remain, so you’ll want to start slowly. After a rainfall, water is cupped in the leaves of the canopy, but that water is 200 feet up. By the time it drops, it’s more drinkable than standing water, but it’s not as safe as running water.

If characters draw their water on the fly from plants, they’ll need to do it often. Their movement will drop by 20%, on the road or off.

Characters who drink the standing water of the jungle must make a Health roll at +2 or gain a parasite as a chronic ailment whose effect is to cause 1 injury point every 72 hours. When and if they throw off the ailment, they’ll likely find a long, flatworm-like parasite in their feces.

Weather and sunlight

The temperature in the jungle is a steady 85° to 95° Fahrenheit. At night a mist forms above the ground that obscures vision to less than fifty feet, even for those who can see in the dark. On “cold” days, the mist remains until noon or even later. Light rain barely makes it through the canopy; wild storms and simple heavy rain are about the same under the canopy; even in a meadow, there is rarely a wind of any note below the tops of the big trees.

The canopy is absolute. The jungle is pitch-black at night, and fully shaded during the day.

The Yellow Forest: The Jaguar

Their first encounter will be a jaguar, something normal before dinosaurs and giant bugs. There are no cavemen. The jungle is devoid of any sense of humankind. Unless they’re taking special care to mask their scent and noise, they’ll be stalked by a jaguar while they’re in the low hills and several miles into the jungle. The jaguar is most likely to act in the early morning or in the twilight of the evening.

A large cat, five or six feet long, its fur an orangish yellow in the [pale or sickly yellow] moonlight, mottled black. It snarls and growls, showing you four very large teeth in the forefront of its mouth.

Jaguar (Animal: 4+3; Survival: 27; Move: 18; Attack: claws/bite; Damage: 2d6/2d8; Defense: 5; Special defense: +2 camouflage)

The jaguar enjoys swimming, and may choose to sneak across rivers or small ponds to pounce on a straggler. The jaguar avoids the area near the Station of the Sun, and usually prowls the area from eight miles out of and into the jungle near the road.

The gas swamp

The smell greets you first, like the worst of a bad farmer’s cattle herd, rancid and odiferous. The land to either side of the road is marshy; a warm wetness rises from it. It goes on like this for a mile; it’s getting progressively more odorous and wetter. More and more of the road on each side disappears into the green, slowly lapping waters. Another mile, and it’s become a full swamp. The swamp is covered in a pale, mottled pea-green that ripples occasionally when huge bubbles burst slowly from its surface. What little you can see of the road disappears into the stinking waters.

This gas swamp is a big one. It is 400 yards across, almost a quarter mile. The road is nearly destroyed within the swamp, although it will keep them from sinking if they follow it, and it continues on the other side. Movement within the swamp is at 50% normal. They can go around it if they go off the road, but they’ll need to backtrack about two miles.

Giant mosquitos permeate the swamp. Every minute, unless they have some means of warding them off, they’ll be attacked by a swarm of giant mosquitos.

2d20 Giant mosquitos (Animal: 1 pt; Number: 2d20; Move: 12; Attack: bite; Damage: 1/2 pt; Defense: 4; Tiny: 2-3 inches)

For swarming purposes, damage progression is 1/2 point, 1 point, 1d2, 1d4, 1d6, 1d8, 1d10. The swarms will not join together, so normally the damage caused by a swarm will not exceed d8. A particularly industrious party might be able to rile up larger swarms from the swamp.

There will also be one encounter in the swamp (or at its far edge, depending on what the encounter is). Roll normally on the encounter list.

On the other side of the swamp, the road slowly comes back into view, and the ground more solid, over a distance of about two miles.

The Deer and the Archaeopteryxes

One of the first things they see on entering the jungle will be a herd of tiny deer chased by a flock of archaeopteryxes. This will give them a sense of the weirdness of the jungle, and, if they haven’t talked with Saurians, a false sense of security that everything’s going to be small.

A tiny animal rushes out from behind some fern-bushes, across the road. It looks like a tiny deer. It is followed by a herd of similarly dwarf deer, reddish-brown, and only two feet tall. They run swiftly past you across the road. Several of the deer sport long, two-pronged antlers. The few beams of sunlight shining through the canopy spotlight one or two of the creatures as they race past you.

Suddenly, a flock of birds, the size of large falcons or large owls, swoops in after them. Two birds pick off a straggler among the deer and tear into its hind flesh. The deer stumbles, and falls, and two more birds swarm over it in a frenzy of claws and teeth. The deer’s antlers wound one of the birds, but the deer finally succumbs to the avian onslaught.

The deer are not aggressive; they’re fleeing the birds. If anyone’s in their way they’ll move around the obstacle. The birds are aggressive, but most likely the deer will remain their preferred target. If someone vulnerable gets in their way, four to six birds will swarm the obstacle.

17 Dwarf deer (Animal: 1; Move: 12; Attack: antlers; Damage: d3; Defense: 3; Small: 2 feet tall)

11 Archaeopteryx (Animal: 1; Move: 32; Attack: claws/bite; Damage: d3/d2; Defense: 4; Small: 1-2 feet)

The Beetle Trees

There’s a 50% chance that the first drop will land on someone.

[You feel a big bump on your head.] A loud, chitinous plop clicks down beside you on the slightly marshy path. Another one, and then another one. Big black bugs, as big as your hand, are landing all around you—and some of them on you.

2d8 giant beetles will drop on them per round in this one hundred yard area.

Giant betles (Animal: 1; Move: 8; Attack: bite; Damage: d2; Defense: 3; Tiny: 6 inches)

The beetles won’t attack unless attacked first, but once attacked all beetles will swarm the attacker(s).

In a classic pincer action, three hundred yards out from the beetles, there are huge webs all across the road, hidden in shadow. In the day, perception rolls to see them are at +16. At night, they’re at +4. But anyone running away from the beetles are at penalties as normal for running. Huge spider webs trap their victims until the victim makes a Fortitude roll, at an additional -2 each round beyond the first.

Disturbing the webs will attract 1d10 huge spiders each round that a web is disturbed; the spiders arrive 2 rounds afterwards.

Huge spiders (Animal: 2; Move: 10; Attack: bite; Damage: d3; Defense: 2; Small: 2-3 feet high and wide, Special attack: poison strength 2, d3 injuries)