Everybody who’s made their life on the highways winds up there eventually. It’s the kind of middle-of-nowhere, beacon of respite that truckers, roadtrippers and holidaymakers all come to associate with the open road and long journeys. It’s the modern oasis, making impossible journeys into something probable. That place of safety and comfort far from the fruits of civilization. And yet, unlike civilization no one settles there. It’s a place with people, but not for people. Somewhere to be visited, but not a destination.
Taboo: Nobody lives at the truck stop (I mean, I guess you could but that’s not what it’s for). Staying longer than overnight is taboo. So is making it a destination, always be passing through on your way to someplace else. Employees occupy a weird liminal space, they’re excluded from a lot of the benefits even as caretakers.
Associated Avatars: The Masterless Man, the Outsider, the Salesman, the Solid Citizen.
Resonant Avatars: The Charioteer, the Explorer, the Guide, the Loyal Labourer, the Pilgrim, the Unsung Champion.
Symbols: The squeegee for wiping windshields (and you know some prick has wrecked one by wiping down their entire filthy vehicle), air fresheners and the stink of spilled gas and oil, food that’s either been sitting under a heat lamp all day or really good.
Adjuncts
1%-50%: Need to plot out the next leg of your journey? Gain a hunch roll to figure out where you’re going while drawing on a road atlas with a marker or fiddling with google maps in between scarfing down questionable sandwiches. Alternatively use it to pick up information about where you’re going by eavesdropping on conversations, noticing discarded tourist brochures or hearing voices from that inexplicable concrete dinosaur sculpture by the roadside.
51%-70%: Gain your choice of the Medical feature for performing first aid or the ability to flip-flop a roll to make temporary repairs to a vehicle at the truck stop. Temporary being the operative word, any benefits only last until you get to where you’re going. Go to the friggin’ hospital for your snakebite already.
71%-90%: The truck stop is a place to rest, wool-gather and marshal your resources before plowing on. It’s a bulwark against the long distances people have to travel and comforts them like a watering hole in the desert.
- Better: Truck stops offer more facilities and travel-oriented products to smooth out the stresses of the road than ever these days. By taking advantage of them gain a hunch roll for your next stress check, if it winds up passing you can use it while you’re still travelling. Otherwise disregard it and roll normally.
- Faster: Just a little shut-eye and then back on the road. A 15-minute kip counts as a full night’s sleep, once per journey. Pushing the envelope again unravels the effect without you realizing it, as many have fatally learned.
- Cheaper: On your last legs, broke and your vehicle won’t run? This one’s good for one freebie that will get you out of here but only if you’re truly desperate, there’s no guarantee it’ll get you where you’re going but finding a discarded half-full fuel can in the bushes is better than a kick in the teeth.
99%: Whatever their differences all truck stops look the same in certain ways: that flickering fluorescent tube in the overhead lights outside, the one wrecked bathroom stall that you don’t want to know what happened to, the food, the graffiti, the people. Part of this is a frequency illusion, you see and remember the things that you expect. Part of it is that they’re all the same place. Make a roll, cutting the length of your journey by the resulting percentage. It only happens when you’re not paying attention, go into the bathroom or sleep in your cab and come out or wake up in a different stop. It’ll be obvious later, like when you drive someplace and suddenly realize you have no memory of how you did it.
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