At 21, Jack London sailed north in July 1897 to join the Klondike gold rush. He came home without gold but with scurvy and the stories that made his name: The Call of the Wild, "To Build a Fire" and more.
This route follows him from the beach at Dyea over the Chilkoot Pass, down the lakes and rapids of the Yukon, through a winter at the Stewart River to Dawson City, where his cabin still stands.
In 1868, at the onset of the Second Industrial Revolution, twin Assassins Jacob and Evie Frye come to a London controlled by the Templars under Crawford Starrick, and set out to take the city back: building their street gang, the Rooks, across an open world of seven Victorian boroughs. Jacob works through Starrick's lieutenants while Evie hunts a Piece of Eden, the Shroud, from St Paul's to the Tower to a vault under Buckingham Palace.
This route follows both threads across the capital, then jumps forward: to Whitechapel in 1888, where Evie hunts Jack the Ripper in the expansion, and to Tower Bridge in 1916, where Jacob's granddaughter Lydia clears a German spy nest at Churchill's request. Every stop is a real building or district you can walk to.
In 1715 a Welsh pirate kills an Assassin, steals his clothes and his name, and ends up sitting in his place at a meeting of Templars in Havana. That is how Edward Kenway enters the Golden Age of Piracy: he takes a ship, the Jackdaw, builds a pirate brotherhood in Nassau, loses his friends to the gallows and to each other, and spends the rest of the story chasing a device called the Observatory that can watch anyone on earth.
Black Flag sets all of it in real ports — Havana, Nassau, Kingston, Port Royal — and then leaves the Caribbean for the Maya ruins of Tulum, an island in the Gulf of Guinea and a final scene in London. The route follows Edward from the harbour where Torres's plot starts, through the pirate republic and the governor who ends it, to the Kingston house where Mary Read drops the disguise, the jail at Port Royal, Príncipe, where the Sage is waiting, and Covent Garden. Most stops mark a real landmark in the town the game rebuilds.
In 1990 Christopher McCandless graduated from Emory University, gave his savings to charity and vanished from his family's life. For two years he drifted across America under the name "Alexander Supertramp" — working odd jobs, living in camps, paddling a canoe down the Colorado River into Mexico. In April 1992 he hitchhiked to Alaska and walked into the bush with very little food. He died there that summer, aged 24. Jon Krakauer told his story in the book Into the Wild (1996), filmed by Sean Penn in 2007.
The route follows his documented trail. The Stampede Trail is dangerous, and this route is not an invitation to retrace the last part of it.