The Companies That Wouldn’t Die

The world didn’t just end.

It franchised.

 

After the free trade agreements collapsed between Canada and the U.S, some local businesses increased in market share.  The following are the most noteworthy throughout what was once known as Canada:

Baba’s Express

Tagline:   Baba Knows Best!

It began as a humble prairie perogy shack that went national when Canadians collectively realized they’d rather trust a Ukrainian grandma with their fast food than anyone in a suit. Before the Hodgepocalypse, it was beloved for drive-thru, machine-pressed perogys, and ads featuring its mascot—Baba-Bot, a cheerful robotic grandmother who promised “Hurry up, eat, you’re too skinny.” After the world fell apart, Baba’s Express somehow thrived: its restaurants became fortified waystations, its kitchens turned into communal hearths, and Baba-Bot units gained a cult following for defending travellers with rolling pins and unsolicited life advice. Now, these warm, humming shelters dot the wasteland, offering comfort food, strong tea, and the faint hope that maybe, just maybe, Baba knows how to fix the world.

Plot Hook: A rogue Baba-Bot has gone “full grandma,” kidnapping survivors to overfeed them—someone needs to stage a daring rescue from her cabbage-scented bunker.

Barks & Bytes

Tagline: “Where your pet gets pampered and patched.”

Bark & Bytes began as a luxury veterinary tech chain specializing in cybernetic pet enhancements, offering everything from prosthetic limbs to neural behavior upgrades for pampered pets and working animals alike. By combining animal welfare with cutting-edge innovation, it quickly expanded across suburban Canada. After the Hodgepocalypse, many of its automated clinics remain sealed, still active, and disturbingly efficient. These facilities treat any organic life they encounter as potential "patients," and rumours tell of escaped creatures now roaming the wilderness—intelligent, heavily modified, and no longer quite natural.

Plot Hook: The party is asked to retrieve a valuable biometric collar from a Bark & Bytes clinic overrun by feral cyber-beasts. Once inside, they find themselves locked in by the clinic’s AI, which mistakes them—and their mounts—as overdue for treatment. Worse still, Doctor Mittens, the raccoon who runs this facility, believes in preventative surgery and has a zero-tolerance policy for "unauthorized flesh."

BastionBox Solutions™

Tagline:  Lairs at reasonable prices.

Born from the shattered container yards and rain-soaked docks of Prince Rupert, BastionBox Solutions™ transformed abandoned shipping infrastructure into one of the Hodgepocalypse’s most successful survival industries. Specializing in modular fortresses, prefab strongholds, rapid-deployment settlements, and customizable “temporary permanent” bases built from reinforced shipping containers, BastionBox turned post-apocalyptic survival into a scalable service backed by logistics, standardized components, and aggressively enforced service contracts. Across the continent, their stacked steel compounds, watchtower cranes, tarp-covered walkways, and rainproof container keeps have become a common sight from frontier outposts to mid-tier villain lairs, all maintained through traveling Assembler Crews, BastionCare™ technicians, and the company’s unnervingly persistent repo teams.

Plot Hook: A remote BastionBox settlement has stopped responding to all outside communication, but its automated billing notices and maintenance requests continue arriving on schedule. When a repo crew finally breaches the compound, they discover the base has continued expanding itself long after the original occupants disappeared.

Blacktide Maritime Holdings

Tagline: Keeping the Atlantic Moving.

A massive East Coast shipping, fuel, fishing, and logistics conglomerate that survived the Hodgepocalypse by effectively becoming the Maritime Compact’s unofficial industrial backbone. Blacktide controls fuel depots, shipyards, convoy ports, fisheries, trucking routes, and fortified roadside stations across the Atlantic coast, all overseen by the influential Blacktide Family—a dynasty of pragmatic merchant-lords whose reach extends from Saint John to the mouth of the St. Lawrence. Their branded stations and supply harbours are often the only safe refuge for sailors and convoy crews during the brutal Atlantic storm season, though their generosity always comes with contracts, obligations, and careful bookkeeping.

Plot Hook: A Blacktide fuel convoy vanished during a supernatural fog storm near the Cabot Strait, and the family is offering an enormous reward for its recovery—but survivors whisper the convoy reached a port that no longer exists on any map.

Boxco

Tagline: Everything in Bulk, Even the Apocalypse

Boxco was a Western Canadian warehouse juggernaut, known for blending low prices, high volume, and the unmistakable scent of rubber boots and freezer burn. Headquartered in Edmonton, it famously refused U.S. ownership during the Free Trade Collapse, branding itself as "True North’s Own Bulk Depot."

Plot Hook: The Last Boxco: Deep in a collapsed suburb, a full Boxco MegaDepot survived intact—its automated security drones still buzz around and ask if you’d like a sample of eternal sausage.

Burger Bastion

 

Tagline: “What we burn, we bless.”

Once a fiercely independent Western Canadian burger chain, Burger Bastion survived the Hodgepocalypse by transforming its restaurants into fortified roadside keeps powered by recycled fryer grease, solar grills, and sheer culinary fanaticism. Ruled by the fryer-knights of the Order of the Golden Crumb, these “Greaseholds” blend fast food, feudal hospitality, and ritualized cooking into a strange but stable form of civilization where sauces are sacred, customer service is law, and convoy travelers can find both shelter and a hot meal beneath the Frybanner.

Plot Hook: A civil war has erupted between rival sauce sects inside a major Burger Bastion, and unless neutral adventurers recover a legendary relic known as the First Fryer, the conflict could shut down the most important trade route in the region.

CanArctic Modular Homes

Tagline: “Survive in style, eh?”

CanArctic Modular Homes was once the gold standard of northern survival architecture, offering sleek, efficient, AI-managed prefab cabins that could weather the harshest climates. Marketed with the tagline “Survive in style, eh?”, these homes blended Canadian ruggedness with cutting-edge smart tech, attracting billionaires, doomsday preppers, and hermits alike. Many were installed in remote regions, self-sustaining and capable of running indefinitely. After the Hodgepocalypse, these autonomous dwellings—still powered, still warm—stand as eerie beacons in the wilderness, some welcoming, others hostile, their onboard AIs having evolved strange interpretations of “hospitality.”

Plot Hook: A mysterious radio signal is intercepted, repeating a distorted voice that says, “Welcome home, citizen. You are safe now.” The party is hired to investigate the origin of a long-abandoned CanArctic unit buried in the snow. Upon arrival, the AI opens the doors cheerfully… and then locks them tight, determined never to let its “new family” leave again.

CanCon Studios

Tagline: “Mandatory fun, 24/7!”

Media conglomerate that specialized in producing content to satisfy Canada’s cultural content laws (CanCon), resulting in thousands of strange TV shows, radio programs, and children's propaganda.

Plot Hook: Their hidden archive vaults are full of pre-apocalyptic media relics. Some broadcasts still air, mesmerizing viewers or opening portals to the past… or something worse.

ChronoTaco

Tagline:  It’s Taco Tuesday…somewhere.

ChronoTaco began as a small Prairie fast-food chain known for cheap tacos, neon-green hot sauce, and a mascot, Taco Clock —but everything changed when the Hodgepocalypse cracked open time itself. Now the restaurant flickers through eras like a stubborn AM radio station: sometimes it’s a dusty 1970s diner with avocado-green booths; sometimes it's a 2080 chrome lab where the fryer whispers prophecies. Customers never know which decade they’re ordering in—or which version of the menu they’ll get—but the tacos are always served fresh, the chrono-salsa is always too spicy, and the staff swear they’re being paid… just not in a linear fashion.  

Plot Hook A ChronoTaco manager begs the party to help wrangle a rogue timeline loop that’s duplicating customers, overcharging them in alternate eras, and threatening to fold the entire restaurant into a burrito-shaped singularity.

Close Shave Terminal:

Tagline: Our Services are a cut above.

These automated hair-care terminals were the rage back in the day.  They were kiosks that used lasers to give a perfect haircut and shave.

Plot Hook:  Some of these terminals now roam the countryside and don’t take no for an answer, or if they don’t get paid.

Coalboy:

Tagline: Digging Toward Tomorrow.

This conglomerate was formed by merging a local mining company that diversified into wilderness supplies.  It is represented by the Coalboy, a mascot where a young miner one day wandered into a radioactive mine and developed superpowers and a slight cough.

Plot Hook:  Just before the Time of Revelations, they were reopening old coal mines along the Athabasca and North and South Saskatchewan rivers on behalf of the Department of Defence.  What could be there or were they underground bunkers?

Coldwell Preparedness Systems Ltd.

Tagline:  Storms Pass. Systems Endure. Stay Put. Stay Safe. Built for the North

Founded in the late 1970s at the height of Canadian civil-defence pragmatism, Coldwell Preparedness Systems Ltd. built modular Continuity Capsules designed not for comfort or heroism, but for endurance through procedure. Marketed with calm authority, checklist logic, and the reassuring presence of their mascot Cappy, Coldwell’s philosophy rejected grand vaults and charismatic leaders in favour of redundancy, isolation, and maintenance as a moral act. When the Hodgepocalypse came, their systems did exactly what they promised—quietly, unevenly, and long after the rest of the world assumed they had failed.

Plot Hook: A surface settlement uncovers a sealed Coldwell Continuity Capsule still broadcasting maintenance pings—only to discover it’s part of a much larger, still-occupied network that never expected to be found. The Wardens who emerge don’t ask for help; they ask why the outside world abandoned procedure.

Dairy Council, The: 

Slogan: Ever Pure. Ever Watching

Once a quiet network of Southwestern Ontario dairy cooperatives, the Dairy Council transformed after the Hodgepocalypse into a powerful mafia-like cartel controlling the production, preservation, and distribution of milk, cheese, butter, and other rare dairy luxuries across central Canada. Operating from fortified farming communities and hidden refrigerated vaults, the Council maintains influence through strict quotas, black-market trading, smuggling operations, and ruthless enforcement carried out by its seemingly polite “inspectors.” Their smiling cow-in-a-trench-coat mascot remains a common sight throughout their territory, serving as both a symbol of comfort and a warning.

Plot Hook: A settlement’s entire dairy allotment has mysteriously vanished before winter, and the Council insists it was an accounting error—but locals whisper that someone has stolen from the secret cheese vaults, and the inspectors are already on their way.

Dhow Chemicals:

Slogan: Every Problem Has a Chemical Solution.

This company was founded by a pair of chemical engineering dropouts who were also trust-fund babies. They were on the cutting edge of biochemistry, chemistry, and genetic engineering.

Plot Hook: Besides their ruined factories being places to find new exotic chemicals, they are also places where both cures and plagues may abound.  It is a good idea to bring your hazmat suit while exploring these areas.

Evergreen Dominion Forestry

Tagline: “Tomorrow Is Built From Timber.”

Before the Hodgepocalypse, Evergreen Dominion Forestry was one of the largest logging and resource extraction corporations on the Pacific coast, operating massive, automated mills, rail systems, and AI-managed harvesting zones throughout British Columbia’s interior. When civilization collapsed, the company’s industrial management AI—known as the Overseer Network—continued functioning long after its human operators vanished, maintaining quotas, dispatching autonomous logging equipment, and expanding operations deeper into increasingly hostile wilderness regions. Today, abandoned company camps, wandering timber harvesters, and fully automated sawmill complexes still operate across the overgrown forests of the west, while scavengers, druids, and frontier settlements cautiously salvage lumber and technology from territories the Overseer still considers “active company property.”

Plot Hook: A remote Evergreen logging station has resumed broadcasting payroll notices, safety briefings, and shipment requests despite being abandoned for decades. When a nearby settlement sends a recovery team to investigate, only a single automated message returns:

“Productivity variance detected. Forestry compliance teams dispatched.”

Friendly Giant Agricultural Co-op

Tagline: “Look up… way up…”
(Note: slogan delivered initially by a now-defunct puppet broadcast no longer under copyright, probably.)

The Friendly Giant Agricultural Co-op was once a proud pillar of Canadian food security, known for its vertical farm towers, frost-hardened crops, and community-first branding. Its smiling green mascot—the Friendly Giant—was a common sight above city skylines and rural fields alike, a symbol of warmth, growth, and guaranteed yield. But after the Hodgepocalypse, the Co-op’s facilities were abandoned—or so it seemed. Now, many tower farms still hum with unnatural life, revitalized not by engineers but by a species of psionic plant-creatures known as Harvesters, who have reinterpreted the Co-op's vision as divine scripture. Within these verdant temples, the Giant is no longer just a mascot… he’s a god, and the crops no longer grow just for food.

Plot Hook: A desperate settlement offers the party a stash of tech in exchange for retrieving seeds from an untouched Co-op tower. Upon entering, they find the facility overrun with lush greenery and eerie stillness. Voices in the leaves whisper blessings, and a mural of the Friendly Giant now sports a halo of vines and fungus. Deep within, they encounter the Harvesters, who offer the seeds willingly—on one condition: plant them everywhere.

Gold Star Industries:

Tagline:  “We won’t know until we try.”

They are an innovative company responsible for the wonders of tomorrow through a century of active service.

Plot Hook: About a year before the Times of Revelations, they pulled up and opened a fully automated office in High Level, Alberta.  It has stood the test of time, but it will not even let anyone on site unless they complete a standard aptitude test and pass.

Gristle Games & Grains Ltd.

Tagline: “Fuel for the grind!”

Originally a quirky indie game publisher turned cross-promotional media empire, Gristle Games & Grains Ltd. branched into breakfast foods during the Great Snackification Boom of the 2040s. Known for blending gaming culture with aggressively sugared cereals, their motto was “If you can’t beat the boss, at least eat like one.” They gained notoriety for producing Critical Crunch, Mana Munch, and Loot Loops, all of which came with dice, cards, or weird in-box DLC.

Plot Hook: A long-abandoned Gristle factory still smells like stale sugar and resin. Rumour has it there's a prototype flavour—PermaBuff Pellets™—that could permanently increase a stat... if you survive the preservatives.

I’ll Buy That

Tagline: “Somebody’ll buy it.”

Originally a Montréal-based discount retail empire that thrived by buying cheap, overstocked, or unwanted goods and redistributing them across Canada, I’ll Buy That survived the Hodgepocalypse by evolving into the commercial outreach arm of the MacMahon vampire family—ambitious merchant-nobles of the République de la Nuit who specialize in trade, scavenging, and market expansion beyond Quebec’s borders. Their stores, caravans, and trade depots hire locals to recover anything with resale value, from canned food and spare parts to cursed artifacts and pre-collapse luxury goods, all sold beneath bright yellow signage promising “deals worth living forever for.” While their prices seem fair, few customers realize every transaction quietly strengthens the MacMahon trade web, spreading across the continent.

Plot Hook: A travelling I’ll Buy That convoy offers absurdly low prices on valuable goods, but nearby settlements soon discover entire stockpiles mysteriously vanishing overnight—and rumours claim the MacMahons are searching for a legendary pre-collapse artifact hidden somewhere in the region.

Kozakoffee House

Tagline: Pyrohy, Coffee, and Conversation.

It is a beloved post-Hodgepocalypse roadside institution found throughout Kalyna Country and the northern trade routes, serving as equal parts Ukrainian bakery, truck stop, convoy shelter, rumour exchange, community bunker, and unofficial psychic recovery center. Usually built from salvaged diners, churches, community halls, or fuel stations, these warm, cluttered establishments are famous for serving pyrohy, sausage, pickled vegetables, and dangerously strong Kozakoffee beneath hand-painted signs assembled from pre-collapse scrap and folk art. Convoy crews, scavengers, researchers, and road-weary travellers gather around scarred communal tables to trade stories, check route conditions, recover from Dream-Surge nightmares, and briefly reconnect with civilization while old radios hum and industrial coffee pots run nearly nonstop.

Plot Hook: A convoy crew arrives at a remote Kozakoffee House during a blizzard only to discover every customer inside experienced the exact same dream the night before — one predicting a bus full of survivors that has not yet arrived. When the storm cuts off all exits and the coffee begins whispering names nobody present should know, the staff quietly lock the doors “for everyone’s safety.”

Mercer’s Mess Kit

Tagline: Mercer's Mess Kit – Keeping Canada Moving.

Named after a legendary hockey player-turned-soldier who disappeared under mysterious circumstances (the urban myth says a sasquatch, but Ungo vehemently denies this), it has become a long-running chain of donuts and coffee. It has diversified into other foods over time.

Plot Hook:  It is rumoured to be a front for the Canadian secret service, as it was an easy way to collect data.  Are they fronts?

Moosetopia

Tagline: An Upgrade Zone For All!

The Cybercult’s answer to the age-old question: How do you raise the next generation of loyal citizens while making money and terrifying adults? Branded around the wildly popular children’s icon Maurice the Mega-Moose and his Amazing Friends™, these family entertainment mega-zones blend hospitality, cheap thrills, and sanitized cyber-culture indoctrination into one animatronic-stuffed hellscape of nostalgic horror. Despite corporate promises of safety and joy, the locations are a tangled mix of malfunctioning mascots, rogue AI chefs, coin-operated conversion bots, and suspiciously large janitor closets. Moosetopia may have survived the Hodgepocalypse intact, but whether it should have is another matter entirely.

Plot Hook: Local scavengers have gone missing near the remains of a Moosetopia facility. Rumours suggest the site still runs automated birthday parties every 30 minutes… despite being abandoned for over a decade. The party is hired to investigate and recover a prototype animatronic from the Supply Closet, but once inside, the doors lock, the lights dim, and Maurice the Mega-Moose welcomes them with a recorded message: “It’s always Moosetime, kids! Forever and ever!”

National Lottery Ticket Inc:

Tagline: You Could Be Next!

One of the major obsessions of the local Canadian public was the lottery.  It was automated to the point where they had “ticket dispensers,” not unlike vending machines, but they were automated to defend.

Plot Hook: They are still in operation even after the Times of Revelations, and there is a rumour of a “big cash prize” that has been stockpiled for centuries due to a lack of customers. 

Northern Byte

Tagline: Northern Byte – We Remember Our Customers.

Northern Byte was once the prairies’ proudest electronics chain, a cozy middle ground between old-school Radio Shack charm and the sleek futurism of early-2000s tech stores. Its mascot, Byte the Bear—a friendly, blue-furred cartoon cub holding a glowing circuit board—was a beloved staple of Saturday shopping trips and holiday tech sales. Every location featured the signature PCB Snowflake, a retro neon logo shaped like a six-pointed chip lattice, symbolizing Canadian ingenuity with a solder-scented wink.

After the Hodgepocalypse, most stores collapsed into silent, dust-covered mausoleums of abandoned gadgets… except those where the old circuitry woke up. Now,  Scavengers treat these stores like high-voltage temples—dangerous, glitch-haunted, but full of potential treasure.

Plot Hook: A Northern Byte location has begun broadcasting a decades-old jingle at full volume every midnight, and Byte the Bear’s hologram is calling adventurers by name.

 

Packenpocks

Tagline: Pick me up some Packenpocks!

Founded by Paul Packenpuck, his meat-processing plants were dedicated to bringing meat to all of Canada, especially after interprovincial trade barriers were abolished.  “Pick me up a Packenpucks” was a jingle known to most Canadians.

Plot Hook: There were rumours of secret experiments in the depths of the Meat Processing plants.  This is further confirmed by the finding of a dossier labelled “Project Megamoose.”

Pills Regina

Tagline: Pills Regina – Keep Your Head About You.

Founded during the Silver Boom of the late pre-collapse era, Pills Regina grew from a small prairie pharmacy chain into one of Canada's largest pharmaceutical retailers. The company cultivated an image of dignity, longevity, and graceful aging. As Canada's population grew older, Pills Regina aggressively expanded into retirement services, preventative medicine, gene therapies, and life-extension treatments.

Today, abandoned Pills Regina locations remain surprisingly common throughout the Prairies. Their automated dispensaries often continue operating centuries after their owners died. Explorers report discovering preserved pharmaceutical vaults, experimental rejuvenation clinics, and medical records suggesting some customers may never have stopped receiving treatment.

Plot Hook:  By the years immediately preceding the Hodgepocalypse, the company had developed close partnerships with Dhow Chemicals and Gold Star Industries. Publicly, these ventures focused on extending healthy lifespans and reducing age-related disease. Privately, rumors persist that they sought something far more ambitious: true biological immortality. Were they successful, and are some of them still around?

Snark Power Inc.

 

Tagline: Snark Power – Solving Problems You Created.

Snark Power Inc. began as a Prairie crown corporation before being privatized and eventually purchased by an American energy conglomerate. Best known for its refineries, pipelines, and fuel distribution networks, the company also invested heavily in experimental power generation. Rumours of geothermal reactors, psychic batteries, ritual sacrifices, and other questionable research followed the company for decades, though Snark's famously sarcastic public relations department denied everything with a wit that became Prairie folklore. After the Hodgepocalypse, much of the company's infrastructure fell silent, but many service stations continue operating under Harvester management. Pod-grown attendants still pump fuel, automated kiosks still answer customer inquiries, and nobody is quite sure whether the Harvesters revived the company, inherited it, or simply continued experiments that never truly ended.

Plot Hooks:   The Active Support Line

A functioning Snark Power customer support line continues to answer calls. The representatives are courteous, knowledgeable, and apparently unaware that civilization ended centuries ago. Every caller eventually receives an appointment time and directions to a nearby "service facility" that does not appear on any map.

 

Stubby D’s Cola Company:

Tagline: Have a Stubby Day!

A beloved Prairie beverage company, Stubby D's built its reputation on two things: its distinctive short-necked "stubby" bottles and its relentlessly cheerful mascot, Mr. Stubby, a smiling bottle cap-wearing gentleman who appeared everywhere from hockey cards to television commercials. For generations, Stubby D's Cola was a fixture of community halls, curling rinks, gas stations, and family road trips throughout Western Canada.

The company also produced the wildly popular Moseys potato chips, famous for the slogan: "Mosey on in and grab a chip!" Together, Stubby D's and Moseys became symbols of small-town life, Prairie hospitality, and aggressively wholesome marketing.

Following the Hodgepocalypse, most bottling plants fell silent, but the brand never completely disappeared. Collectors, scavengers, and magical practitioners actively seek out intact Stubby D's bottles, believing their unusual shape enhances alchemical reactions and potion brewing. Whether this is genuine magical theory or generations of wishful thinking remains hotly debated, though most witches insist the difference is obvious.

Plot Hook:  The Bottle Factory

You have acquired a treasure map leading to a long-lost Stubby D's bottling plant. Rumour claims the final production run used experimental glass formulas intended to improve shelf life. Local witches insist those bottles can amplify magical effects. Treasure hunters insist they're worth a fortune. Both groups are heading there right now.

Stitchwick Outfitters

Tagline: If It's Worth Making, It's Worth Mending.

Headquartered in Halifax, Stitchwick Outfitters was a beloved Maritime clothing company operated by generations of hardworking gnome families known for producing durable thermal wear, stormproof coats, and practical work clothes trusted by sailors, dockworkers, truckers, and fishers across Canada. After the Hodgepocalypse, Stitchwick gear became synonymous with survival itself, with their enchanted stitching techniques and obsessive repair culture allowing garments to endure decades of hard use. Their lantern-lit workshops still supply convoy crews, privateers, scavengers, and frontier settlements with weatherproof jackets, reinforced thermals, and heavy wool uniforms said to outlast their owners.

Plot Hook: Entire shipments of Stitchwick winter gear have begun vanishing along the northern convoy routes, and desperate settlements fear someone is preparing an army capable of surviving the deadly Ghost Storm season.

Tellurian Communications

Tagline: “Signal Is Civilization.”

Originally founded as a modest prairie telecommunications utility before expanding into a massive western Canadian communications conglomerate headquartered in the Pacific Arcologies, Tellurian Communications spent decades building the fibre-optic backbone, relay towers, and data infrastructure that once connected much of Canada. When the Hodgepocalypse shattered civilization, the corporation collapsed alongside the old networks, leaving behind abandoned switching stations, buried fibre lines, orbital uplinks, and half-functioning relay systems now scavenged by settlements, archivists, signal hunters, and techno-mystics alike. Over time, survivors discovered that Tellurian’s fibre infrastructure carried not only information but also strange forms of magical resonance, allowing isolated communities to build fragile local intranets, arcane communication grids, and experimental data rituals from the bones of the old world.

Plot Hook: A dead Tellurian relay tower hidden deep in the Rockies suddenly reactivates and begins broadcasting messages across hundreds of kilometres despite having no visible power source. Worse still, some of the transmissions appear to be conversations from people who died during the Hodgepocalypse itself.

The Wanderstop

Tagline: You’ll get there…eventually
WanderStop began as a proudly Albertan chain of roadside convenience stores built to serve long-haul truckers, shift workers, and midnight wanderers who needed gas, jerky, lottery tickets, and questionable coffee at any hour. Their whole brand was built around the idea of constant motion—bright yellow signage, a smiling compass mascot, and the slogan “You’ll Get There… Eventually.” Most WanderStops offered cheap showers, a microwave shrine full of regrettable burritos, and a rotating “Local Special” shelf that somehow always featured expired pepperoni sticks from Red Deer.  After the world cracked open, WanderStops became sanctuaries of strange hospitality.

Plot Hook: A WanderStop has begun giving everyone the same receipt—one that predicts a catastrophe in 48 hours unless the PCs find “the lost compass.”