Arkham

Arkham sits on the Miskatonic River in north-central Massachusetts, a town of steep gambrel roofs, leaning Georgian houses, and lanes too narrow for the automobiles that have started to crowd them.

Its old families still talk about the witch trials of the 1690s as if they happened to their grandparents. Some of the oldest houses have rooms whose angles feel wrong to anyone who sleeps in them, and landlords have learned not to explain why rents in those rooms are so low.

The town is dominated by Miskatonic University, which gives Arkham a scholarly respectability that the rest of the valley lacks. Professors, students, and visiting researchers mean that strange artifacts and stranger questions have a way of arriving in Arkham before anywhere else.

The surrounding hills are wild, poorly mapped, and avoided after dark by those who know them.