Although there is no telling where the PCs might end up, the odds are good that they will spend a substantial portion of their time within artillery range of HPL High. Here are brief descriptions of some interesting places in Miskatonic County, sufficiently lacking in detail to not infringe upon a GM's ability to startle and appall her players.
The small city of Arkham is situated at the mouth of the Miskatonic River, giving it an excellent harbor opening onto the Atlantic Ocean, through which strange goods and stranger people from all parts of the world flow.
Modern Arkham can be roughly divided into three parts:
The Squiggly Part, so named for its narrow, twisty streets, is the original town of Arkham, with many buildings dating back to the 1700s. (Many of the inhabitants also look like they date to the 1700s.) The streets have archaic, picturesque names like Crookneck Road and Short Pizzle Street, and are lined with archaic, picturesque buildings that list ominously toward each other overhead, providing an archaic, picturesque dimness to nurture archaic, picturesque skullduggery.
It's not that the inhabitants of the more modern parts of Arkham can't get to the Squiggly Part; it's just that they mostly don't. It's always easier to take the new expressway around than cut through. Thus, behind a protective cyst of Ye Olde Antique Shoppes and Ye Olde Jolly Publick Houses, a surprising amount of real history has survived mostly unmolested by tourism.
It is also not the case that the inhabitants of the Squiggly Part never interact with the rest of the city. Some of Arkham's most socially prominent families maintain their ancestral homes there, and when people in Arkham say "Old Money", they mean it.
Not surprisingly, a large fraction of the Squiggly Part lives in Lovecraft Country.
The Square Part of Arkham is the sprawl of housing developments and suburbs that grew up in the post-WWII decades. The streets are actually soothing curves, and are named for plants that no longer grow there, or never did (Philodendron Circle, Eucalyptus Court), or for natural features that have been bulldozed flat if they ever existed (Creekside Drive, Alpine Way). The home consist of two-story Colonial-Style(TM) bungalows in your choice of six different floorplans, interspersed with shopping centers, municipal athletic fields, and day-care facilities. The inhabitants of the Square Part vote the way their fathers did, attend church regularly, and have 2.3 children per family.
The Square Parters are mostly oblivious to the existance of the abnatural, and are the most likely to say "Lovecraft Country" when they mean "Miskatonic County".
The Shiny Part is the new development since the 1980s, and consists mostly of glass-sheathed high-rises and ostentatious shopping malls that have replaced the brick and stone of the older commercial district. (What remains of the original architecture has mostly been converted into yuppie lofts.) The gaps are filled by Starbucks, fast food, and never enough parking lots. The Arkham Historical Society carries on the majority of its terrorist activities in this part of town.
The Shiny people have heard that Strange Things happen in Arkham, but rumors of mysterious disappearances and hideous mutilations can't be allowed to interfere with the American Dream of quick unethical profits. Those who do believe the rumors mostly live in hope of being abducted and turned into immortal hipsters by stylish people with fangs and lots of black leather.
As the Chamber of Commerce avers, all of Arkham is interesting, but some sites may be of more importance in the game than others.
Miskatonic University is sited on the edge of the Squiggly Part, embedded in the protective tourist-appeasing shell. The graceful Victorian buildings and densely-wooded landscaping of the campus seem a world apart from the surrounding city, a world devoted to the peaceful pursuit of intellectual knowledge.
What was was that saying about books and covers?
Although it was originally established as a institution of the gentlemanly arts and sciences, Miskatonic U's emphasis on archaeology combined with a tradition of eccentric individual study and a succession of particularly open-minded presidents to make Miskatonic the foremost center of study of Things Man Was Really Truly Not Meant To Know, And How To Suppress Them. The selfless and dedicated graduate students of Miskatonic have travelled to the five corners of the Earth and beyond to conduct original research in the fields of applied hypergeometry, paleotechnology, xenobiology, paraphysics, and unethical biology, as well as dozens more. In every generation, several of these grad students survive to become professors, and thus the tradition is carried on.
Not all research is conducted in the field, and to support its more sedentary investigators, Miskatonic has a plentitude of well-equipped laboratory space, most of it underground to keep out prying eyes and keep in explosions. The university also boasts several telescopes of various sizes and wavelengths, a small particle accelerator, and a fission pile with a brass plate indicating it was built in 1872.
Most importantly, or at least most notoriously, Miskatonic is home to the largest library of abnatural knowledge known to be in human hands. Besides the reknowned collection of historical tomes dating back to antehuman times, the Miskatonic library has all the theses, papers, and miscellaneous publications of the faculty and grad students, as well as the only complete collections of several important journals in the field, such as Proceedings Of The Dark Council, Non-Euclidian Mathematics Today, and Journal Of Applied Astronomy. Scholars from all over the world travel to Arkham in hopes of being allowed access to the library, but many are turned away by the Head Librarian as being unfit to wield such knowledge. Disputation of such rulings has required the library to be made the most secure building on campus. Would-be book thieves are rarely seen again, at least not in one piece.
Nodens State Beach lies just south of Arkham proper, easily reached from the main coastal freeway. Scenic white sand, blue waters warmed by peculiar localized volcanic activity, and steep bluffs with many sheltered nooks make this a favored spot for loafing not only during spring break and summer vacation, but year-round. Although several monster movies have been filmed at NSB, Deep One raids for breeding stock are really quite rare.
Parts of the Waterfront have been yuppified with hotels overlooking the ocean, an aquarium, deep-water fishing boat rental establishments, and the like, but much of it is still a working port with all the appurtenances such as strange ships from foreign shores, foul-mouthed longshoremen, sordid recreational facilities, eerie sodium lighting on towering piles of anonymous crates, and mysterious disappearances. Most teenagers have been forbidden by their parents from ever setting foot within a kilometer of the waterfront.
Back in the 30s, Innsmouth pretty much belonged to the Marshes, who stocked half the local government with their fishy relations, and bought off the rest with the profits from their Refining Company. Things haven't changed much since then, except that the Marefco refineries have gotten larger and more modern, and need more people to run them. Innsmouth is now a thriving industrial town, with a busy port and numerous rail lines, and the whole place still jumps when Marefco says "Deep One".
Obed Marsh High is a soul-deadening modern prison of a school, all concrete cubes and swimming pools. The students are uniformly a tough lot, mostly the children of refinery workers (children of executives go to Whately, or other private schools) who sort themselves into gangs according to the various plants their parents work at. The curriculum is strong on chemistry, ichthyology, and ancient languages, but Marsh High is hardly a beacon of academic glory. However, their swim team has held the state championship 29 years running.
Being inhabited almost entirely by Deep One hybrids, the whole city of Innsmouth is in Lovecraft Country.
There are rumors of a submarine city of unhybridized Deep Ones, possibly ruled by Mother Hydra herself, in the oceanic deeps off the coast. It would explain a lot.
Innsmouth is half an hour's drive south of Arkham along the coastal highway.
Dunwich is not so much a town as a bunch of expensive chunks of real estate situated in moderate proximity, with accompanying support infrastructure. The original village, which had remained substantially unchanged since Colonial times, was bulldozed to make room for a polo field in the 1960s. It was undoubtedly historic, but the current inhabitants of Dunwich are not moved by the history of poor people.
Dunwich has its own school, the prestigious Whately Preparatory Academy, which features such courses as Microeconomics, Macroeconomics, Voodoo Economics, Feudocapitalism In Modern Society, and Sneering For Credit. Whately Prep usually takes the state championships in skiing, transoceanic yachting, and of course polo. (The football team obligatory for any American high school is composed of the students' valets and bodyguards.) Whately students go on field trips to the Louvre and Tokyo instead of local historical sites and businesses.
For obvious reasons most Dunwich teenagers attend Whately Prep (if they aren't sent off to other equally prestigious schools to start making contacts). However, although noisome rites in honor of Alan Greenspan are the closest the average Dunwicher comes to Lovecraft Country, a few of the family fortunes originated with Miskatonic researchers who spotted market opportunities for certain bits of the abnatural (the most famous examples being Professor Monagely and the reusable adhesive from Yuggoth, and Doctor Shin's recreation of the advanced Yithian bar-code scanner after his mind returned to the modern era). These families tend to send their more expendable scions to HPL High, just in case. Needless to say, attending a public school is a grave social humiliation, and the teenagers so afflicted drastically overcompensate, deeply endearing themselves to the rest of HPL High.
Dunwich is inland from Arkham, about half an hour's drive (twenty minutes, if you have an expensive European car with a huge throbbing engine).
A large section of the county is still dense New England forest, set aside by the state legislature in the early part of the century. Although many similar preserves have been sold out to rapacious developers by corrupt politicians, no one seems to want to develop MSF. As a result, most of it is still dark and forbidding to human sensibilities. Some hiking and hunting goes on around the edges, but the depths are mostly unvisited, despite the archaeologically unique sites of Native American or even earlier origin.
The State Forest is about an hour's drive inland and north of Arkham.
This file was last modified at 1556 on 28Jul01 by trip@idiom.com.