Roadmage

[drake113]

Well, I just got my copy of OctaNe and spent the entire morning basking in its chewy goodness (not to mention wasting a huge amount of company time doing it).  Here's some rough notes on what I've come up with for retrokitsch mysticisim; lemee know what you folks think:

The roads that people travel on throughout the West isn't just composed of asphalt and concrete, it's the actual physical residue of the American Dream.  It isn't just the road, it's The Road.

The Road goes on indefinitely throughout the West, and is almost certainly alive, but not quite sentient. The Road isn't really fixed, either- distances between Stops are never constant.  The Road doesn't move (at least, nobody's ever seen it move), but a good Roadmage can drastically reduce travel by "asking" the Road to shorten the journey for them ("Shortcutting").  Because of the shifting nature of The Road, printed maps are all but useless.  Most maps are drawn by hand on napkins or paper placemats, which, for some reason, tend to be extremely accurate.

The Road acts as a sort of kitsch leyline—trained Roadmages can draw energy from it to cast spells or even communicate with it to some degree. The shoulders of The Road can be "tamed" temporarily— for example, a skilled Roadmage or Musgician can tame a short stretch of it for a day or so to camp out on, and taming the Road gives much of the same protection against the wild as being at a Stop (see below).  Road that has been permanently tamed (usually by the existence of a settlement or the formation of a Stop) becomes Street.

Street is "tamed" Road that exists in civilized areas—generally, Street forms up to city limits and around Stops.  The only visible difference between The Road and Street initially is that Street has sidewalks.  Street also has a magic energy similar to The Road, but they vary enough in uses that knowing how to cast Road Magic doesn't let you cast Street Magic, and vice-versa.

Old Street becomes tamer as it grows accustomed to people living on it and taking care of it.  Regularly cleaned Street with manicured lawns eventually start giving back- providing power, sewage, and other infrastructure-type perks to those living near it.  Given time and care, Street will produce fire hydrants, lamp posts, telephone booths, etc.

Stops are random pockets of humanity along The Road- not as big as settlements but still useful in general.  Stops are usually gas stations, honkytonks, firework stands, roadside attractions, and the like that dot the length of the Road.  Stops are generally pretty safe; their symbiosis with the Road affords them protection from the things that roam the Wastelands while allowing travelers to stop and unwind.

There's just one radio station out in the Wasteland, KROC (K-Rock), and one DJ, the K-Man, who seems to work 24 hours a day, seven days a week.  K-Rock plays mostly classic rock, the kind ideal for long road trips.  Nobody knows where it is—the signal is equally strong all throughout the West, and when K-Man mentions his location, it always seems to get washed out in static.  Strangely enough, the weather report is always perfectly accurate for wherever the listener is currently located, and advertising is always for businesses near the listener, too. On other radio channels, only fragments of different stations can be heard, and often the snippets of sound are from different times.  Some people claim to occasionally pick up radio stations on the now-mythical East Coast while out in the Wasteland, but these claims are usually dismissed out of hand.

Some Roadmages have speculated that K-Rock doesn't actually exist; rather, it's generated by the force of The Road.  This is, of course, silly.

[Jared A. Sorensen]

Cool stuff. Interesting because octaNe started out as two different ideas. One was a game about Mexican Wrestling and Monster Truck Racing in a post-apocalyptic world (!). The other was for a school of magic for Unknown Armies dedicated to "road mages."

[Spooky Fanboy]

Yep, it's stolen. *swipe!*