I know you probably have all your western content planned out already but you can do this later. Trains, just like trains. Faster than horses, more accessible than teleportation. Trains are wonderful bringers of civilization & societal unifiers. Also they’re like really, really cool.
Drafting the Adventure: On track With Trains
I agree Anon, trains are cool. But you know what's not cool? Slavery, Racism, Corruption, and the industrial engine of exploitation that forces the poor and desperate to suffer endless hardship so that governments and tycoons can enrich themselves.
I have always loved trains, they were one of my first hyperfixations, and as someone who goes nuts for sustainable urban design I will gladly hype up the development of any and all rail systems . Sadly, like most other iconic elements of the industrial past, they were born out of widescale abuses that we all to commonly whitewash as signs of progress. The rail industry was built by robber barons looking to exploit government contracts in order to graft as much as they could as cheaply as possible, and to do so they employed virtual slave labor to keep costs low and progress steady. Because the rails were a matter of government interest, any time there was a labor strike (be it laying the rails itself or the production of materials or fuel) or the company simply wanted to appropriate someone else's land to build over, the military was dispatched to brutally pave the way. Think the development of the north American highway system in the 50s and 60s, or the pipeline protests today, and you'll understand how those contemporaries might think of the railroad. Yes, it benefits quite a lot of people, but others have their homes destroyed, all in the name of "civilization".
Now, below the cut I'm going to get into the nitty gritty of how trains might be introduced to a setting and how they change the pace of a campaign, but for the moment, here are some quick and dirty Adventure Hooks for you all to enjoy, sans history/civics lesson:
Just when the party needs to cross the rails as fast as possible, the train they're riding in is subject to a robbery, paradoxically forcing them to think fast while slowing their transportation plans to a crawl. In all the commotion, they might make a good impression on a first class passenger, possibly learning themselves a future ally or at least some good press.
The party is hired by the survey office of a rail company to protect their cartographers on a weeks long journey into the wilderness. There's a powerful monster lairing nearby, is the pay worth it to go disturb the beast?
In order to prevent a villain from shipping troops and supplies across country, the party are tasked with blowing up a key bridge. Do they do the job quick and give their enemy time to plan around it, or do they do the merciless option and time the bridge's destruction to when one of those trains full of soldiers is crossing over it.
Need to know news from across the whole nation? sure, swapping tales at the local tavern is a classic, but no one knows gossip like the folk who hop trains looking for work this way and that. Show up with a bottle to share and a story to spin and you might find yourself learning a few things among the tramps and vagabonds
Something about the liminal nature of train stations means that they're impromptu crossing points to the feywild, the way that standing stones or ruined arches might've been in a past era. Beware of boarding trains that seem deserted, pull in through the mist, or bear the markings of companies you do not recognize.
History: Trains emerged as an evolution of cart technology, as in the desire to move goods and materials from one place to another, we as humans realized that regular old wheels tended to make roads and other paths into pitted slogs by repeated use, and we invented carts that moved on rails instead. Eventually when engines got small and efficient enough to start doing the job of everyday people, we figured out a cart that could move itself with a little oversight, and the train picked up steam from there.
What began then was a patchwork of individual businesses building railways to improve their efficiency, leading to the development of railway companies specialized in installing these sorts of transit mechanisms at their client's expense. Eventually these companies started to pitch themselves to governments (who themselves were made up of business owners) and there was a sudden explosion of rail across the industrialized and colonized portion of the globe.
In order for you to have rail travel in your games ( even if you don't end up using steam engines), you're going to need powerful, centralized governments to make it all work, as individual nobles and landholders will likely be too squabbling to organize such a project, muchless have the funds. Any kingdom/empire/state with an interest in moving goods quickly from one location to another can build rail lines, with the added benefit of being able to project power across vast reaches of territory by way of deploying troops along the rails.
Rail travel makes cities and their surrounding settlements explode in size, expediting the flow of goods and supercharging the economic engines that communities already relied on. This allows for industry to be centralized specialized, and their products to be widely distributed, raising the general standard of living by allowing people in far off corners of the territory to have access to the same goods/tools/medicines as those living in the nation’s capital.
Gampeplay: Much like airships, railways change the way that campaigns have to be run, though rail travel tends to be available to the party much earlier in their adventures.
Travel between major settlements becomes near instantaneous, cutting down on the random encounters that might fill out an early game party’s XP . Compensate for this by having social encounters that occur on/waiting for the train, allowing the party to make contacts that they’ll be able to follow up on later in the game.
Alternatively, if you’re running an open world/travel based game, consider having the first few adventures occur in a region not yet connected to the rail network, to give them a bitesized taste of freedom before graduating to the larger map. This could be by traveling overland to a larger town, or by completing some quest that allows the railroad to finally be extended to their starting town.
Train companies become powerful movers and shakers on the political chessboard, rivaling merchants and powerful nobles as they act as both villains and potential patrons for players. In your classic d&d world, these companies are likely to be a constant source of monster contracts wanting to keep their most profitable lines clear of interruption or attack.
Everything is closer together now that the rails connect everything, meaning that if you want your party to venture out into the wilderness, you’ll likely have to put your hidden vaults full of mcguffins further out past whatever frontier town is the end of the line. Concurrently, Villains can now execute plans across a far larger territory with much fewer minions, which means multiple antagonistic groups might be playing around in a single settlement without the players even realizing it.
Paradoxically, those areas that the railway allows most people to skip past may become increasingly adventure-prone, as wilderness without adventurers to brave it will become increasingly wild, and settlements excluded from the railroad’s prosperity may become a haven for those wishing to avoid the scrutiny of the masses.
I hope that helps anyone thinking of including trains into their campaign, but I might do a follow up to this after doing a little more thinking on the subject.
