“I could sense it in the air even afore I stepped off the train, when the silent woods gave way to those old houses and their sloped and slumping roofs. It sounds crazy, but stepping off the train and into that modern castle felt like stepping into another world. And the feeling didn’t go nowhere as I saw more of Arkham, Massachusetts.” – Wilson Richards
Strange lights flicker and people disappear in the forest beyond Hangman’s Brook. Misshapen silhouettes prowl graveyards and shorelines, leaving savaged corpses in their wake. Nightmarish artifacts and disturbing tomes have surfaced, chronicling gods and incantations the world has tried to forget. Cavalier scientists have glimpsed far-flung worlds beyond our own that shatter the known laws of reality. Are these events somehow connected? If so, what calamity do they portend?
A Storied City
People have lived on the site of modern-day Arkham for centuries, since long before the Puritans made landfall in Massachusetts, with ruins and relics from those time-lost days still to be found for those willing to look.
Arkham as it is known now was founded in 1660 by settlers fleeing religious persecution in Boston, including the Reverend Elias Huntley and his group of Puritan outcasts. The settlement’s position on the Miskatonic River made it an important way station for trade and travel through northeastern Massachusetts, and Arkham quickly grew and prospered.
Despite its sleepy nature, Arkham has a surprising number of inhabitants, with a little under 30,000 souls residing in and around the city proper. Each of its nine neighborhoods has developed its own unique character, from the bustling streets and railways of Northside and Downtown, to the residential blocks of Easttown, Southside, and Uptown. Steamships, motorcars, and the occasional horse-drawn carriage hasten the flow of commerce in the Merchant District and Rivertown, while old money and knowledge-seekers ramble around the mansions of French Hill and campus of Miskatonic University.
“Witch-cursed, legend-haunted Arkham, whose huddled, sagging gambrel roofs and crumbling Georgian balustrades brood out the centuries beside the darkly muttering Miskatonic.” – H. P. Lovecraft, “The Thing on the Doorstep”
In recent years, Prohibition has brought prosperity—as well as danger—to Arkham.
The city has become home to several gangs of bootleggers. Sadie Sheldon and her Sheldon Gang struggle against Danny, Naomi, and the rest of the O’Bannion outfit, with hired goons from Bostonian crime boss Johnny Valone have begun encroaching on both gangs’ territories. Arkhamites are spoiled for choice when they want a hard drink, while much of the speakeasies’ ill-gotten gains flow into the local economy—and the pockets of politicians and police officials. For Arkham’s disadvantaged, however, the gangs bring only exploitation, violence, and cheap gin.
Perhaps more so than almost any other town or city of its size, Arkham is a city full of secrets—a place to be explored and investigated, whether by those of us who have walked the streets of Arkham our entire lives, or those drawn to it by some uncanny chance.
