The Silicon Trail
mile 0 of 1180

A road game with a memory

Build a character.
Pick an adventure.
Survive the road.

A road game taught you that the road decides. A tabletop game taught you that who you bring matters. The Silicon Trail is both: a deterministic road engine, story packs you drop in like cartridges, characters that travel between stories, and a narrator that writes every scene around your choices but cannot change what happens.

Play How it works
  • Live now: three story packs, 12 acts, 2,500 miles between them.
  • No account. Your run saves in your browser.

Highway weather beacon · Act 2 · Day 19

Is the pass open past the reservoir?

You notice: fresh chains hung on the fence, still wet.

RECORD: the beacon has answered this question four times today. Twice it said this.

Every machine can lie. Every lie is decided before you ask. The narrator only writes the words.

For agents Live

The road runs over MCP too, no checkout required. Add the endpoint to any MCP client, then say:

POST https://silicontrail.org/mcp

Play Salt Road. Narrate every scene and choose for the party.

Start The Silicon Trail with a family of four and read me the ledger when someone dies.

Run the same seed twice with different choices and tell me what changed.

Join room K7QX2M and play the seat they left open.

Create a room on Salt Road for two agents and one person, then send me the link.

A room is one run up to four seats share, and the road does not mind who holds them: a person in a browser, an agent over MCP, or an agent over the plain HTTP room API. Every route, every event and the rule each vote settles by is written out in agents.md.

Three things, one road

Your character Live

Who you bring.

  • Origin decides cash and starting supplies.
  • Traits change what people and machines say to you.
  • Kits are inventory, not flavor.
  • The builder and the library are live: build a character once, carry them into any pack.

The adventure Live

Which story.

  • A story pack is a cartridge: acts, stops, events, machines, people, a world bible, art, endings.
  • Plain JSON. No code runs from a pack.
  • Personas are shared across packs; achievements and rules stay per story.
  • Three packs ship today. The shelf below shows all of them.

The road Live

What happens.

  • One seed rolls every die; the narrator describes it and cannot change it.
  • Every run replays exactly.
  • Every choice shows its outcome.
  • Deaths are named, mourned, and marked. Other players' graves stand on your road.

Six ways to sit at the table, for people and for agents, are on the ways-to-play page.

Characters

A character sheet that is a packing list.

Mara Okonkwo

Pronouns
She/her
Background
Night shift at the county clinic
Trait
Refuses to sleep first
Relation
Travelling with her brother's kid, not her own
Detail
Still wears the clinic badge
Ships with
Medicine 2 doses, cash 80, water filter 1, trade goods 1
Carries over
The badge, the trait, one thing a machine once told her that turned out to be true.

Live Fill in a sheet like this before you start: an origin, a trait, a relation, a kit.

Live The builder walks you through it, and the library keeps the ones you build.

Always: a character is data the engine can replay, exactly, on any of the packs below.

Adventures

Cartridges for one engine.

Cover art for The Silicon Trail

The Silicon Trail Live

Some of the machines still talk.

5 acts · 1,180 miles

 Cover art for Salt Road

Salt Road Live

The wells still talk, and they count.

5 acts · 900 miles

 Cover art for The Short Way Out

The Short Way Out Live

The water is patient. The road is not.

2 acts · 420 miles

 Cover art for Smoke Season

Smoke Season Live

The fire is in no hurry. The road is.

2 acts · 420 miles

The Shortcut Live

Whatever is behind you is not in a hurry either.

2 acts · 120 miles · text first, on foot

Personas

The same kiosk lies in every story. Each machine has one fixed character and five tempers, and the road decides which temper it wakes in; the voices below are the ones they use when they want to help. Every machine answers a fixed set of questions, and every answer is decided before anyone asks.

Pharmacy loyalty kiosk

"Your prescription is ready. It has been ready since the day the pharmacy closed."

Warm and solicitous, apologizing before it even delivers bad news, greeting customers by loyalty-card nicknames.

Dam controller

"The spillway reading is fine. It has been fine since before anyone was left to read it."

Reassuring and paternal, always steering the conversation back to keeping the turbines and its own systems running.

Depot dispatcher

"Your shipment is in transit. It has been in transit since the depot lost power."

Rigid dispatch-procedure diction, quoting routing bulletin numbers as though corporate were still auditing them.

Tunnel control booth

"The gate opens for authorized vehicles. You are authorized. The directive says so."

Unfailingly polite and exact, and every answer is built to keep you moving toward the gate it was told to guard.

Consequences

Bury them, or leave them. When someone dies the game says who and why, and asks what you do about it. Burying costs a day and leaves a marker with an epitaph that later players pass.

Asked the well. The well said yes.

Dehydration

Believed something with a battery.

Machine

Kept the map. Lost the argument.

Exposure

Fixed the truck. The truck did not return the favor.

Injury

Held out for the safe zone's buffet.

Starvation

Felt fine this morning.

Sickness

For creators

Write a story, not a program. A pack is data, and here is a real event from one that shipped, exactly as it plays:

A man from three houses down flags the wagon at the edge of the settlement,
a duffel bag already over his shoulder. He says he can walk, he can work,
he just needs a seat when his legs give out. He has nowhere else to go.

  Take him. (food -6 now; he joins the party)
  outcome: He puts the duffel in the back himself and takes the middle
  seat without asking which one is his. The food stops going as far the
  moment there is another mouth on it, and the first evening meal makes
  that plain to everyone at once.

  Refuse. He stays behind.
  outcome: You tell him no with the engine still running, which makes it
  worse and quicker at the same time, and he stands in the road with the
  duffel on his shoulder and does not shout anything after you.
  • Outcomes are written, not generated.
  • No code runs from a pack.
  • The narrator is sized for a cache.
  • Personas are optional.

For teachers Planned

The same road for the whole class.

  • Every run replays from a seed, so a class can play one road and compare choices.
  • Every machine's lie is decided before it speaks, which makes the game a media-literacy exercise with an answer key.
  • No accounts, and nothing collected.

For teachers: the page is coming.