What Does it Mean to be a Wayfaring Stranger?

In our last blog entry, we talked about what it meant to be “Strange” in the world of Wayfaring Strange. This time, we’re going to discuss what it means to be a “Wayfarer.” On the surface, Wayfaring Strange is a diceless tabletop roleplaying game about hidden highways, folk magic, urban legends and all that is Strange and inexplicable about life in modern America. At its heart, however, Wayfaring Strange is also a game dedicated to exploring the concept of liminality in the American landscape. 

The characters that populate the world of Wayfaring Strange have fallen between the cracks of society, and often go unseen because the rest of the world chooses to pretend they don’t exist. Many of these characters are ethnic or gender minorities, homeless, veterans, queer or disabled, or sex workers, and many of them straddle multiple categories. Because of their liminality, many of these characters have either chosen or been forced to live transient lifestyles. Throughout history, transient populations have formed networks and communities as a measure of sharing resources and protection. They look out for themselves when no one else is willing to. This is how Wayfaring communities are born.

The physical act of Wayfaring also means something slightly different in this game, other than the basic practice of orienteering. Similar to many places in the world, the United States is ripe with untold mystical energy. Like a river or stream, there are places that this energy pools and directions that it flows. People have been tapping into these lines of power for centuries and, eventually, someone got the idea to map US highway routes on top of them. It’s not a perfect match, and highway construction is constantly changing, but there’s now an otherworldly interstate system that only a handful of people know about and can use. Wayfarers using the hidden highways can bend distance and time, create Waystations that possess protective or healing properties, or use their Wayfaring abilities to track, hide or elude pursuit.

There are other things that can also follow these lines of energy, however, and other entities that feed off of both the hidden highways’ untapped potential and the unwary traveler. Depending on the particular Wayfarer, they can be of two minds: they either see themselves as protectors of the hidden highways and those that traverse them, or they may develop a symbiotic relationship with the darker, older creatures that use the highways as their hunting grounds.