Tags
1960s, 1970s, American Fantasy, Americana, Americana fantasy, Fictional Road, Gothic America, Groovy Era, Groovy Horror, magic realism, Midwest Horror, Prairie Horror, Road Crawl, Road Trip, Roadtrip, Rural Horror, Science Fiction, science-fiction, scifi, Seventies, Sixties, Small Town Horror, Southern Gothic, Weird America
The schematized map below shows the approximate path of U.S. Route 28 across the continental United States, and how the Highway is broken down into named “Sections”. These Sections are usually 100 miles long, but may be shorter if the road changes its general direction, goes into different terrain, or crosses a State border.
The Engine of Oracles 
Awesome, this setting is really coming together!!!
Have you read Caitlín Kiernan’s Agents of Dreamland? Great book for the “Uncanny Highway Appendix N”… cultish surreal backwater paranoia turned up to 11.
Thank you for the compliment! The finished release is going to include procedures for breaking down each named Section of Highway into 10-mile Stretches, and record sheets that interface with the random tables for the various locations, media outlets, and encounters PCs might interact with. The idea is to have a “road-crawl” over 12,000 miles in length, along which Players can choose to do whatever they want. The a “story” will emerge through game play. The various bits that comprise the setting will be provided for you, but how they come together and interact will be unique for each group.
As for the book, I’ve never read it – but the synopsis I’ve seen definitely looks interesting! The Salton Sea is a Gothic location if ever there was one.
I love that concept!
Not sure if my group would go for it (well, definitely not for 12,000 miles), but with so many random tables, I might just solo it.
I’ve actually given a lot of though to the possibilities for solo play with the Uncanny Highway. The eventual release will include structured “record sheets” for the Sections of the road, and for each kind of Roadside Attraction. You’ll be able to easily roll up an entire 100-mile Section of Highway, but only need to record the die rolls for the various characteristics of each place (size, layout, event, etc). When you actually interact with a particular characteristic, you just match the die roll to the corresponding text. For example, the die roll defining a Truck Stop’s bathroom is already written down on the place’s Record Sheet. But, you don’t know what that number means until you choose to actually go into the bathroom (and then read the text on the associated random table). So, you would not just be “making it up as you went along” on your solo adventure, because the die rolls (and thus the characteristics of each place) are already determined before you uncover their significance.