This is a picture of 'the most dangerous roundabout' in the North East of England, not far from where I work. The persistent local rumour is that the roundabout was installed the wrong way around when it was built, in the 1960s, so that the ramps from the central motorway that take traffic up to it (it is built on a concrete flyover) are too long, and those which take traffic down from it to the motorway are too short. Certainly, exiting it northbound can be a hair-raising experience and I see pretty frequent minor collisions when walking in the vicinity - usually when a timid driver has become intimidated and hit the brakes and then been rear-ended by a somebody tailgating from behind.
The vagaries of road traffic in Newcastle upon Tyne being as they may, though, my interest in this roundabout is somewhat esoteric: I like to imagine it as a location for animal fantasy gaming.
I have had a fascination with roundabouts for a long time, partly because they are a peculiar illustration of British design genius (the first having been biult here, in the early 20th century), but mostly because of the way they tend to implant a small island of greenery into the middle of what is often a lake of concrete and tarmac populated by loud, tooting and vrooming vehicles. They are little blobs of tranquility in amongst a lot of noise and bother. And it is easy to imagine them as little universes of their own, untouched by the outside world - populated by creatures unknown, furtive, mysterious, strange.
The roundabout near where I work mostly contains rabbits. In summer, they're often out there of a morning drinking the dew off the grass and frolicking cutely in the golden sun. There are presumably also rats and mice in abundance - not to mention spiders, beetles, ants. With a little stretch of the imagination one could envisage owls and bats in the trees, perhaps a fox. This makes it relatively easy to see it as a potential Duncton Wood or Redwall-type world if given a little poetic license with regard to scale - the roundabout I am describing is perhaps 25 metres in diameter, whereas if it felt more like 100 metres then you would be cooking with gas for a 'mice with swords' or 'moles who war over sacred menhirs' or 'rabbits who set up a totalitarian dictatorship' campaign setting.
But another idea, I think more compelling, would be one in which the roundabout itself serves as a kind of gateway to another realm - a realm of Nature, or Aelfrice, or faerie; something like a Mythago Wood of the big bad city. While the roundabout may only look, from the outside, as though it is 25m across, when one has stepped into the trees one suddenly finds oneself able to travel in deeper, and deeper, and deeper, as though the greenery never ends. There, the noise of the traffic rapidly recedes, and one is then brought into another reality - a world of natural magic, of fox-men and owl gods and crow kings and mole-women, of masked outlaws and lost wanderers from ancient days, of ghosts and spirits and dark creeping nameless things thirsty for blood or men's souls.
There are two ways of taking this latter option. The first conceit could be that the PCs are animals (rabbits, mice, whatever) who have made their way to the roundabout and wandered through the gateway, and have then found themselves transformed into intelligent, humanoid versions of themselves. Perhaps this is just what happens when passing beyond the threshold, and perhaps they return to normal when passing back through it. Perhaps there is a miniature society of creatures who do this.
The second conceit could be that the PCs are urban explorers, occultists, paranormal researchers, or whatever, who know of the gateway and go back and forth through it. Retaining the animal fantasy motif, perhaps beyond the gateway itself there are many 'raised' or 'fae' animals who inhabit an entire world. Perhaps some of these beings are hostile, perhaps some are welcoming, perhaps some are in between - perhaps most are not what they seem. Perhaps they bestow gifts or possess goods that are of use in our world - or impose curses on interlopers.
Either way, the sense of the roundabout as small, visible and isolated and yet the same time a threshold to something vast and unknowable is compelling. Roundabouts, as they are, stand as small pockets of mystery within the urban landscape - the trick is to turn them into more than mere pockets: into worlds.
There's a cool chapter on the isolated nature of traffic islands and roundabouts, though more from a JG Ballard style perspective (Crash, High-Rise, etc.) in the book Off the Map by the social geographer Alastair Bonnett. No excellent extended fantasy musings such as yours above, but a definite starting point on their bizarre solitary ambience.
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