Unknown Armies Location: Mummy Roads

Beginning with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798, and heightening throughout the 19th century as European powers displaced the Ottomans as Egypt’s colonial overlords, European (and American) interest in Egyptian mummies created a vibrant tomb plundering industry among the fellahin, who were more than happy to sell the stupid things to gullible foreigners as quickly as they could exhume them.

While some of the preserved corpses were purchased for legitimate scientific and archaeological purposes, large numbers were acquired by private parties as trophies and decoration, and more still were ground up and recycled into fertilizer for their high nitrogen and potassium content. Still more were consumed in a more obscure and vaguely occult capacity as paint pigments or medicine.

And a few were used to pave roads.

Egyptian morticians of the New Kingdom embalmed bodies using a mixture that was around 50% bitumen by volume. Thus, mummies so preserved were not only a source of potash for the growing of crops, but also a grudging source of petrochemicals. This use was never widespread because of the narrow overlap between the end of the Egyptology craze and the burgeoning popularity of asphalt roads, but Claridge's Patent Asphalte Company did employ a “boiled mummy” mix to pave a handful of roads in the UK.

Though the majority of these facilities have since been repaved with modern materials, torn up and converted to other uses, or abandoned to nature, there are a handful of these Mummy Roads still extant in the British Isles.

WHAT YOU HEAR

A small town outside Lincolnshire keeps the last piece of their “first asphalte road” in the village museum. The piece could substitute for a human body, living or dead, in any ritual that required one.

Mummy Roads grant charges to place-based casters. Every surviving segment is an automatic ley line. 

• Cliomancers can harvest significant charges from Mummy Roads even if they are totally unknown and in unimportant locations.
• Completing a Mummy Road - laying down corpse tar of your own to link it to its ultimate destination - is a Geomancy major.

The crumbling segment of Mummy Road on Scotland’s West coast was abandoned sixty years ago when they built the bypass. The brown crabs that scuttle over the kelp soaked fragments build tiny mastaba out of shells and stones.

Mummy Roads contain every death curse of the corpses used to produce them. The curses in the Birmingham segment, buried under three layers of modern HMA, BST and chip seal, still occasionally leech out with the oil when it rains, “sticking” to travelers and killing them in unexpected ways, days later and miles away.

The Mummy Road in Milton Keynes is under the floor in the basement of a pub, whose foundations were laid overtop of it. A group of teenagers regularly sneaks into the basement, to siphon beer from the kegs and swim naked in the primordial watery abyss that opens up when the cellar is plunged into complete darkness.

If you die on a Mummy Road, you come back as a tar golem. You return home and live out a pantomime of your former life, not realizing you are dead. Your body poisons, boils and burns everything it touches.

A petrophage who eats a piece of a Mummy Road can speak in the voices of the dead.