The City of Lordsmouth - An Outline

The basic ideas for the city of Lordsmouth comes from the basic principles of Lovecraft country. Lovecraft set up a pleasantly sinister country side among the rolling foothills of the New England region of the US. He dotted this landscape with many towns and points of interest that many in the Lovecraft Circle and beyond would expand upon. A couple of the main points though that are recurrent in the most media are Arkham and Innsmouth. The horror of the miscegenation (now a horribly outdated and racist concept, when applied to human culture) of the deep ones that interbred with the simple fishing folk of Innsmouth provide the backdrop for the horror in that particularly salty town. Arkham on the other hand is nestled in the New England foothills and may be the most famous setting in all of Lovecraft. Arkham is home to the epicenter of all things pertaining to the study of the Cosmically weird, including one of the few copies of the Necronomicon that remain.

The idea for Lordsmouth is to be a fairly variable base setting that could prove expandable. You could set it up in any weird way you'd like, but I am going to develop some tables that will take bits and pieces of the weird, grotesque, and phantasmagorical to generate an odd city. There are a few major elements that I think any central hub needs in a roleplaying game. First and foremost is a way to feed story elements or to give the characters a hook into the story - maybe it is an elder, a district captain, or a particularly new and sinister town manager that will only deliver orders via notes under the door of his down town office.

Another is secondary locations, and the idea is that Lordsmouth is an early industrial revolution city that has plagued the area of dark forest and ancient, eldritch mountains with the smog and choking chemicals. This gives rise to a lot of insecurity that I feel can be a great tension builder. The early industrial revolution is an amazing parallel to modern day. There are a ton of new technologies that are developing paranoia among the citizenry, leaving many to wonder what their place in society is. Use this to draw players into the drama of the setting and greatly unease them with the weirder elements. What really accentuates the weird in any thing is the mundane to compare it to, and even better than that is when you can manage to make the mundane weird. Maybe on the outskirts of the city are vast complexes of archaic and collapsing buildings, and if your party is lucky (they're sacred places in which the belching Machano-Gods live and drive the town from their man-crafted tombs) or unlucky (these buildings are crumbling and sinking into the terrafirm, and maybe not even the terrafirma - but the belly of some gnawing, hungry beast with a mouth like a coal furnace and thousands of eyes.) enough to be sent into these buildings to retrieve this or that object. One of my favorite ideas in weird fiction is the idea of shifting, dimensional streets or alleys. Maybe a party passes by a building's facade that they've passed on their way to the Inn every time they've ventured out, but this time there is no facade. Instead in the place of the building that is too tall and too skinny to house any real people there is a street, and at the end of this street is a quaint shop with a light on.

To think about the city is to think about how you want to build your campaign or setting. The city will be the repository of all the treasure, the home base, and a driving force for the campaign. Maybe in Lordsmouth there is plague that is creeping, and every day a new set of the citizenry are infected. The plague is insidious and nondiscriminatory - it is killing anyone that is unlucky enough to contract it. Possibly the citizens are forming up into roving bands that are policing the districts and summarily executing everyone that has the 'Plague-look'. Maybe the adventurers are a group of outsiders that are coming to the town on the eve of a grand festival, but they catch wind that the festival has more sinister roots. They could be called there by some ancient arcane wizard and task with finding a certain, cursed manuscript that upon reading will drive anyone insane. There are so many tropes, hooks, and story ideas that could be included in a setting like Lordsmouth.   

This are just a few basic ideas that I am rolling over for Lordsmouth and the associated tables I intend to create.