The door to San Francisco is marked with a crude crossroads. Introduce crossroads symbolism (perhaps in the Celtic lands, or using ankhs in some abandoned castle). You may also use the same oracle that brought them to Red Jack’s:
“Can you not feel it in the seasons? Have you no tales of ancient times? The world is a wheel, and the wheel is winding down.”
“The eternal crossroads. Where, or whether, it stands today I know not. It may lie beneath the ocean, or hidden deep in the cavernous earth. Or it may lie across the world. You have seen echoes of it, I think. The eternal crossroads is the pivot of the world. Its echoes ripple through the roots of the world. Cartoril was the first and strongest echo. The Brilliarch’s Rainbow City was dimmer but an echo all the same. Tialnambe walked in its shadows; her husband knew the crossroads itself.”
You might include this with the vision that brings them to Red Jack’s:
A wave of orange, yellow, and brown rolls over you, like an autumn at the edge of a clearing. Then there is the silence as between thunder and lightning. The ground cracks open in a tumult of noise. You tumble into an endless abyss; below you a dull fire sucks in sound and feeling. Ancient gears of a giant mill turn slowly in the unearthly orange glow, grinding the world into dust.
A rust-red path leads out of the gears and into a coruscating mist. The mist rolls back as you fall and reveals a great city upon a green lily-covered plain. Two wide ochre roadways wind through the plain and intersect at the center of the city. Crystal spires rise from the city; they project all of the colors of the rainbow and then some onto the thin mist. Great silver towers, lined with green and gold, reflect the stars—unless the stars are a reflection of the great silver city.
As the world crumbles into the city, vines rise from the crossroads, twirl around the pieces of the world, and roll them together. A woody vine twines itself around you and lifts you from your descent. You are passed from vine to vine, root to root, branch to branch, soaring now high above a great green forest. Mighty roots thread across the two sides of the world, sealing them together like a jagged unmatched puzzle. Far in the crevasse of the world, insects of rust and worm climb from the burning gears, eating at the vines. One of the vines snaps. The world teeters, and the great forest bends around you at the horizon.
The San Francisco adventure shows a world in its death throes. All the foundations of society are crumbling, and there is nothing anyone can do about it. Only a small group called “The Summit” is even bothering to try.
The crossroads are almost always near a pyramid, and a field of lilies. In Highland, there are ruined pyramids at the far south of the Dark Forest, and a ruined road that leads into the mountains but never arrives there. There is also a painting in the castle of the Stigmas di Cristo that depicts the crossroads.
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