Road to the End of the World

The Road to the End of the World is an ancient highway dating from the First Age. While scholars and scavenger lords sometimes find records speaking of adamantine filigree across sheets of ice that neither melted nor felt chill, today the road is mostly a track of mud, in places still paved with stones in Shogunate style, the work of warlords and daimyo attempting maintenance during that tumultuous time. Still, while the cold wind can be biting, the Road remains somehow touched by magic: debris shifts and snow drifts to keep the road clear and navigable regardless of the weather, even the heaviest rain rendering mud merely deep and not a flooded torrent.

Today, the Road’s southernmost point peters out north of the township of Basten, in the Linowan Nation. It winds and twists its way northward, a path many traders cut across in the warm summer weather but value greatly in the winter months when overland travel becomes more difficult. Some small towns and villages are found along its reaches, though there are dangers as well: Icewalker barbarians and Vatal cannibals, as well as the Fair Folk of Yseult's Domain, can menace travelers on the road. Moving further north, the dangers become greater as the weather worsens, frozen tundra stretching out to the horizon, Wyld barbarians probing southward in the vast open spaces. Here, where snow and glaciers have advanced to cover the landscape, there is little in terms of trade or habitation, but some brave adventurers and scavengers make the journey up, in search of the fabled (and dismissed by most academics) treasures found in the great palaces where the road finds its destination at the End of the World.