Slogtown

By most accounts, Slogtown is less an actual town and more a frontier outpost located at the southernmost tip of the western Middle-Route Run. It is a dusty, dirty, scummy, collection of outcasts and travelers, who are brave (or foolish) enough to take the dangerous road to the city of Harp’s Edge. But it was not always this way.

Slogtown was originally called Middle-Route Mark, and was born from the bones of a mysteriously abandoned wagon train, packed to the gills with goods, bound for the sparkling cities of the northwest. A boggart by name of Jandy Marrow found the wreckage while on her way to Port Bayle. Without hesitation, she staked her claim on the find--an impressive haul of exotic fabric, fine wine, and shiny, dweorg jewelry--and set up shop as a trader. Before long she had made a fortune, investing and reinvesting her wealth to grow her claim’s footprint--and soon after, other enterprising merchants followed suit. 

In the years that followed, wagons and tents were replaced by shanties, taverns, inns, and gambling halls--all capitalizing on the steady flow of merchants and travelers taking the well-trodden Middle-Route Run to achieve their dreams of fortune and fame. But times change and as the Dungeon Era began, so too came with it the slow decay of law and order. Now rife with unchecked brigands and beasts, the famed Middle-Route Run would come to be known as the Great Slog, and Middle-Route Mark would take on the dour name of Slogtown...the town where dreams go to die.

Fewer and fewer travelers dared the trade road, so in time only the strongest, most prepared, or most insane, would take on the challenge of crossing the Middle-Route Run. Eventually, anyone that volunteered was subject to a kind of morbid celebrity, as all the town’s denizens wanted to be present to see the next fool attempt the run across the wild and dangerous wasteland.