Roads, Trails, and Traveling by Land for Storytellers
A well-worn path meanders through the forest. You’ve walked this path a hundred times before. It takes you down to the river where you gather water. Breathing in the scent of pine and sap while trodding along, you wonder what beauties you will run into on your daily chore.
From the Neolithic to the modern-day, roads and trails have shaped the human world. From the wealth of our cities to the spreading of information, and even our own survival can be attributed to the creation of roads. It’s important for your storytelling to recognize where roads are and how they impact the places your characters will be interacting.
Origins of Trails
I have spent years of my life wandering the forests of Michigan. I regularly head out to a 10-acre plot my family owns to spend time alone in the woods to recharge and sometimes to write. One of my favorite past-times is finding animal trails throughout my walks. In the forests of Northern Michigan, these trails are largely white-tailed deer trails, and as a hunter myself it’s important to know where these trails are.
Which is actually where the first trails humans started to use were, animal trails. This is because it’s far easier to walk along a well-worn trail than to trounce through the underbrush (take this from personal experience). It’s a cleared space with relatively even ground. Even in large fields, there is an unevenness to the earth. I equate it to a sea of dirt and earth, with waves and undulations. This makes it very convenient for animals to travel long distances for food and shelter.
Because we humans were hunter-gatherers, these trails would have given us our own avenues for fast travel and a source of food. This is the essence of roads: ease of travel, and the moving of resources.
As humans started to settle down and do the agriculture thing, our domestication of animals helped us develop these trails into something that would resemble the modern road. Larger herds of animals would trample any plants living on paths that would be regularly used while farmers would take their animals to grazing locations or to neighboring villages.
I would be remiss if I didn’t bring up megafauna, the giant trailblazers of our world. It has been documented that tigers use grassland trails that have been worn down by rhinos.[1] This lets predators move silently but means that the presence of megafauna is incredibly important. The next stage of road development is actually the removal of trees and rocks. Megafauna tend to knock down trees in search of food and trample saplings. Along with their droppings, these trails create healthy ecosystems with complex networks of roads, all without humans.
The March of Rome
During my schooling, I took a summer to learn archeology and history while staying in the town of Carlisle, England. I learned a lot about culture and archeology, and a lot of history. One prominent feature of the city was a line that was marked on the roads that showed where the ancient Romans built Hadrian’s wall. There is a lot of fascinating history behind the wall and the Roman conquest of Britain. To me the wall showed the extent of the Roman Empire at its peak. One Roman fort stood out against all of them, Hardknott Pass.
One struggle that early people had when making trails and traveling was encountering treacherous terrain that a simple foot path could not get you through. Swamps and marshes are a personal example that I have encountered, but mountains and valleys also prove to be particularly harsh barriers. This is where the creation of roads actually becomes far more important. If you can cut through the stone on a mountain or build a walkway through a swamp, you have a significantly easier time navigating that environment.
That brings me back to Hardknott Pass. It is considered one of the most challenging roads to drive on, even for modern standards. It can be absolutely terrifying when you are in the passenger seat of a vehicle that is under the control of an experienced driver in that country. And yet, through the narrow roads and up craggy hills, there rests a Roman fort. It is by far one of the best preserved Roman forts that I have seen and for good reason.
Masters of engineering, the Romans came up with numerous clever ways to conquer these challenges. In school I was taught that the Romans never invented anything, they simply improved on things invented earlier. With the use of elements such as roman concrete and the arch they were able to create roads and bridges in order to get their roads almost anywhere.
The Romans didn’t just build roads to make trade easier, that was one reason, but the majority of Roman roads were built by the military. Romans used their roads to conquer the known world. These roads allowed them to transport troops and supplies quickly. This network of roads also permitted vast amounts of wealth to be extracted from conquered territories. These roads impact today, with many of the major routes they used are still in use today in Europe.[2]
The Wheel
Roads wouldn’t be what they are today if we didn’t invent the wheel. The wheel let us carry more than we could on our back. Attaching wheels to a cart and strapping a stronger animal, like an oxen, to the front transformed the way we travel. Put those wheels on a road and you have a smooth trip with the ability to carry so much hay.
It is because of the wheel that our roads are the width they are today. The Romans (yes again) loved their chariots. So much so that the width of the chariot is what we use for the width of our lanes. After you ride over a section of road thousands of times (probably more) you begin to wear down the road itself.
Over the course of the Roman Empire, the width of a chariot was worn into their roads. It was much easier to make new carts and vehicles match what roads were already there. (as an aside, this is why you invest in infrastructure to make wide changes).
Dangers of the Road
When you consolidate the resources traveling in your country on the roads, this makes it a vulnerable location. Any number of disruptions can inhibit the movement of those resources. This could spell literal death if those resources are needed desperately at their destination (food, medicine, etc). Since I’m in the business of writing, it's my job to create conflict to be resolved.
Highwaymen
Thieves, vagabonds, criminals, whatever you call them people are an obvious danger on the road. The name highwaymen even got their names because of the existence of roads. The range of the danger can be just holding you up for your wallet to killing you and stealing all of your goods. The history of highwaymen in Europe is a fun topic itself to learn about, and sadly I don’t have the space here to go deeper.
Animals
As I mentioned earlier, the original trails were made by animals. Just because that’s how they started doesn’t mean they stopped using roads. In fact, animals have gotten a huge upgrade in the quality of roads they can travel on, even if they now run the risk of becoming roadkill. But not all animals on the road are things that you can easily kill with a car.
In places where they still have wild megafauna, they have been known to stop traffic. They can be enough of a danger that they have attacked people in their cars and even killed them in accidents. It can be a bigger issue if they die on the road because you can’t coax them to leave, unless you are a necromancer. With dead bodies means scavengers and predators, and some of them will defend their catch ferociously.
Natural Disasters
I sometimes forget that we live on a sea of dirt and rocks that actually moves on us. Not only is infrastructure the target of movie directors and writers, but also the planet itself. In fact, it seems to have a particular problem with things that sit still for too long. Disasters like hurricanes and tornadoes obstruct roads as they pass through while earthquakes, landslides, and volcanoes destroy the road itself.
The Potential of Fantasy Roads
Now for the icing on the cake, adding magic and monsters! There are so many incredibly interesting things you can accomplish by incorporating magic into your roads. When I’m looking to magicfy any mundane element of our world, I try to focus on the properties that I have access to in order to consider the possibilities.
Material
All the elements made to build the road serve a purpose. From the bottom up for a Roman road they are: rubble, stones, gravel, and then finally the paving stones with an angle to let water slide off. The base rubble, stones, and gravel are meant to act as a foundation and act as a sort of reservoir for water in the event of large amounts of rain. Paving stones take the brunt of abuse but also need to be fairly flat to make walking or driving on them bearable.
From here we can play with these elements to create whatever effect we want. For instance, you could enchant the paving stones to grant anyone walking on them to move faster, increasing the efficiency of that road. Or you could have the roads be thirsty, and drink up any water that falls into them, making them permanently dry roads.
What happens when they get damaged? Does a portal to another dimension open? Or in the case of the swift road, does it launch people walking over it into the distance?
Location
The most legendary of roads are those that take you to places you would normally never be able to make it on foot. As an example, in the world of Ifiron on the plane of Ellethraw (the plane of Fey) roads are incredibly important because the plane itself is nearly impossible to navigate. Even going off the path could get you lost for years. From the magic of the archfey, roads on the plane are considered constants. There are so many places to put roads.
Transportation
What goes on the roads matter just as much as the roads themselves. Do you have unique vehicles that may shape the way your roads need to be laid out? If multiple types of transportation travel on it, in what ways do the roads accommodate all forms of travel or do they fail at it? This will give you more insight into the amount of damage done to the roads and what needs to be done to upkeep them.
Dangers
I love to make monsters. It’s a pastime of mine that really drives my friends crazy. While there are more dangers to the roads than monsters, it's my favorite. In an ecosystem creatures change to survive and thrive. Usually this is by evolution which takes millions of years, but with fantasy we have magic. There is no reason a monster would not be transformed by magic and couldn't use a road as hunting grounds. Take my Engorfa for example, they use illusions to trick travelers into walking off the road so they can eat them.
Using roads as hunting grounds for creatures creates a whole system of protecting travelers along it. Heck, it gives adventurers even more to do. But you can also create unique natural disasters. My personal favorite is using zones of wild or dead magic in places. Imagine hitting a dead magic zone while zooming along the road that increases your speed. (The more I write this the more I’m thinking fast travel roads are a horrible idea)
Conclusion
I love roads. It seems like a simple concept that completely changes how societies function. While I may have covered some ground on the topic, I am by no means the expert on the topic. I highly recommend the documentary series Ancient Engineering on CuriosityStream as that was the original inspiration for this article. I would also love to read any stories you have that have a road as a focus, including interesting roads both real and imaginary, in the comments or by email.
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Bibliography
The Secret Lives of Big Cats. Directed by Martin Dohrn, CuriosityStream, 2020. Curiosity Steam, https://curiositystream.com/series/408.
Ancient Engineering. CuriosityStream, 2020. https://curiositystream.com/series/539
