Odd Hours: Dead End

The road was always going to end somewhere. (it picked here.)

Dead End is a 23-page expansion for Odd Hours: Horror and Absurdity. It assumes you already own the core rules. What it adds is more of the night to survive.

The station was always a little wrong. Now it's worse. A graveyard turned up in the empty field next door sometime Tuesday — no announcement, no construction, no warning — and the headstones don't seem interested in staying where they were put. The things drifting in off the road have started arriving with purpose. Dusty Jack is sweeping aisle four and humming a song nobody can place. And there's a delivery order on the counter for a Dead End Memorial Garden that nobody remembers signing, with Old Joe idling in the lot under the floods, clipboard soft with crumbling paperwork, waiting to know where you'd like the first lot placed.

Clock in. Keep some kind of light on you. The raccoon does not actually work here.

What's in the binder

• The Bestiary — ten new visitors who won't leave. From the Shelf Creepers (skittering things stitched from torn price tags and dead barcode stickers, chewing quiet holes in reality) to the Siren of the Pumps (do not listen) to the Beverage Bandit — a heavyset raccoon in a stolen vest whose name tag reads STEVE and who is sincerely convinced he works here. Plus a full field profile for Dusty Jack, the station's patron spirit: friend until otherwise.
• New Hires — nine backgrounds, ordinary and otherwise. Four for the kind of person who ends up working a forgotten gas station, five for the kind of thing that ends up wearing a name tag — the Alien Castaway, the Decommissioned Construct, the Mystery Hire (you don't remember applying). Each gives +1 to an attribute and +1 to two skills.
• New Specialties — fourteen narrow focuses for narrow nights. Paranormal Negotiator. Vending Machine Whisperer. Improvised Ritualist. Snack-Based Strategy. Corporate Double-Speak. +2 on rolls inside the focus; build your own with the OM.
• Strange Abilities — ten small, eerie powers, vaguely yours. For employees who have bent reality enough times that it started bending back. Each one is a little helpful, a little dangerous, and unmistakably strange.
• Rituals — seven procedures, half-magic and half-superstition. The Coin Circle. Lights Out. Gasoline Glyphs. They work just often enough to keep you trying. Read the entire procedure before you start. Mind the risk line.
• Graveyard Shift — a four-phase mini-adventure. The graves keep moving when no one's looking. Dead customers come in for coffee. A headstone appears for the station itself. And then the Undertaker walks in, calm and patient, and explains that the station has operated beyond its time — and that payment is one employee, willingly checked out. He has paperwork. It looks legitimate. Negotiate, fight, outsmart, or out-ritual him; win and the graveyard mostly fades by dawn, lose and the station becomes a landmark — the kind you don't leave.

The whole thing is a Gas N' Go field supplement

Laid out as a training binder issued to the night shift: numbered modules, margin notes in a previous employee's handwriting, a sample stat block, a time card you probably shouldn't read too closely. Cross off each section as you complete it. Don't try to skip ahead to the adventure. (you will anyway. nobody is going to stop you.)

Requires Odd Hours: Horror and Absurdity V1. Built on the core rules as written — same Wit, Grit, and Strangeness, same Sanity that only goes one direction. No conversion needed; plug it in and run.