Here's another old piece, my take on H. P. Lovecraft's Arkham.
I drew this shortly after my introduction to horror role playing vis Palladium's Beyond the Supernatural, which means that it's mostly likely from 1990. I believe this map, and the fact that I had made my first character a resident of that town, led to the next round of our player characters made for that game also being residents. This, in turn, led to the town becoming the center of our long-lived horror RPG campaign.
I'll admit that, aside from a few elements, this town probably bears little resemblance to the place as found in the details scattered across HPL's works. It was less a faithful reproduction of the Old Gent's locale and more a combination of the few details I recalled at the time and a conglomerate of the local college towns with which I was intimately familiar (Clinton, Morrisville, Hamilton, and Cazenovia). It also included a couple locations that reflected real-world ones that had figured heavily in my life in previous years (such as the old, overgrown graveyard on the hill, which was modelled on what we called "The Loomis Gang cemetery"). This approach, I believe, made Arkham something more than of a far-off (not to mention fictional) college town, a place that was more familiar to all of my fellow game group members, as they also knew these towns and their institutions well.
My Arkham and its map were replaced by the (exquisite!) ones from Chaosium's Arkham Unveiled when that fine tome was released a few months later. But during the intervening period, this was how we saw Arkham, and many fun adventures were had within the area it covered.
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| The Map |
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| The Key |
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