2024-12-09: Minnesota (Hex 9)
The sights along the road alternate between lakes and farmland. Scents of a distant farming operation carry on the breeze. The ways to the north, southeast, and southwest are prone to delays.
Notable Feature: Town of Bondeby (Settlement)
Literally meaning “Farmer Village” in Swedish, this town was founded mostly by Scandinavian immigrants in the mid-to-late 1800s who came in search of opportunities and affordable farmland. The town happened to be located right on an entrance to The Routes that is surrounded by another entrance to The Routes, which meant that far more farmland was available to claim than would be possible in just the real world. Unfortunately, that’s also the root of the town’s biggest problem. By being built atop a place where reality doesn’t line up, it’s incredibly easy to get lost in this tiny town of just under 2,000 people. It happens so often that the locals even have a name for it: “vänsterman” which translates from Swedish roughly as “left-turning man.”
Bondeby doesn’t have the amenities of a big city, but it does have rustic versions of the necessities: restaurants, a 6-room motel, two farm supply stores, a post office, and a well-attended Lutheran church in addition to the service station on the outskirts of town. Aside from the risk of getting lost, the town is quite safe and the residents look out for both strangers and each other. Bondeby’s location also provides a rare opportunity to rest and let your guard down along The Routes. However, it is incredibly difficult to get off The Routes here (or anywhere else in Minnesota) as the exits have a tendency to loop back to Bondeby.
Hidden: The Anti-War Militiaman
In the Minnesota countryside is a modest farmstead that is the headquarters for a secret militia known as the Voluntary Guard who want to abolish military conscription because of how the US got involved in the Vietnam War. The group is headed by a poet named Will Karlsson, who often laments the rise of imperialism. Will has a contact at a major newspaper in Vermont, and Will is trying to convince them to write several articles about the Voluntary Guard to give it some credibility and raise awareness of the group in a way that will motivate more people to join the militia group. If the party is able to convince Will’s contact to do the stories, the party can potentially receive armed assistance from 1d4 members of the group for up to a week if their services are ever needed.
Service Station: Eriksson’s
Eriksson’s is a service station that primarily caters to refueling and repairing heavy farm equipment, so the pumps are farther apart than at other stations. However, Eriksson’s takes this to an extreme, with a single pump at each of the four corners of the property: gasoline on the north side of the property, and diesel on the south side. Travelers pay at a tiny shack in the middle of the property, though the same weirdness that makes The Routes diverge from reality allows the shack to have much more space inside than the outside dimensions would allow. The current owner, a bearded man named Per, operates a large convenience store out of this shack and even has a spot inside where he occasionally plays films on a reel-to-reel projector to entertain lost travelers.
The reality-warping weirdness moves around slightly (though always within a very small area) and Per has the pumps so far apart to prevent the tanks for diesel and gasoline from mixing because of the movement. Although this arrangement does keep the fuels from mixing, there are some other quirks that come with filling up here.
Each time someone uses the pumps, roll 1d10. On a roll of 1, the pump registers more fuel going through the pump than is actually going into the vehicle and filling up costs twice as much. On a roll of 10, though, more fuel flows into the tank than is registered by the pump and making it cost half as much to fill up. On any other roll, the pump functions exactly as expected.
Items From Other Hexes
The wedding that Tony Watson (Hex 3) wants to stop is being held in this hex. Matilda Watson and Victor Pellegrini are very much intent on getting married, though they can potentially be persuaded to give up their wedding bands as a token of "proof" that the party broke up the marriage. However, Tony will expect one of the rings to be an heirloom from his family, and if that is not provided, he will automatically assume that the party is being dishonest and attempt to attack these "foul and deceitful creatures of the realms beyond."
