Two games, two scenes

Two games

Horrible, evil illnesses spread across the land, tearing through my gaming groups like the coughing is tearing through my chest, threatening to spill my lungs out through my gullet. A lot of games have been cancelled due to sickness, but the weekend is looking up with two games. Kult, session 1 of Oakwood Height, and Call of Cthulhu, session 2 of the Haunting. And they bring with them some interesting settings I thought I would treat you to. The games of Kult and Call of Cthulhu are on something of the same theme, but totally different. As are the two groups that will be playing in these settings, although both groups have three players. It will be awesome to tackle these challenges, and see what develops!

Detroit

Metropolitan Detroit is home to some 4.3 million people, and the city is known for art, music and architecture, but mostly for the automotive industry. The big three, General Motors, Ford and Chrysler are all headquartered in Metro Detroit. In the 1950 census, the city reached it's peak of 1.5 million residents,  but since then, the recession and decline of the automotive industry has decreased that amount by 60 percent. There's been decades of economic decline, where the city was left with a huge amount of poor, a reduced tax base, depressed property values, abandoned neighborhoods, skyrocketing crime rates and a demographic imbalance. Some parts of the city are now so sparsely populated that there's problems upholding municipal services, such as street lighting and garbage collection. Roughly half of the city property owners failed to pay tax. In 2013, the city was declared bankrupt, the largest city to ever be so.

And then there's Zug Island. It's a heavy industrial island where the River Rouge spills into the Detroit River, serving as uninhabited native burial ground for hundreds of years. Over the years, Zug the industrialist turned it into a steel mill, and it expanded well through the years into such a massive industrial network with environmental destruction worthy enough for parts of Robocop the movie to be shot there.
If you really want to get inspired, though, check out The Hum. I won't say more now, but I can guarantee you we will be visiting Zug Island again in the close future.

Arkham

Arkham is very prominent in many of HP Lovecraft's stories, and it is the location of the reknown Miskatonic University. The University continually keeps funding strange and exotic expeditions, with other notable institutions being Arkham Historical Society and Arkham Sanitarium. The main newspaper is the Arkham Advertiser. Dark legends have surrounded the small community for centuries, and it is reknown for it's gambrel roofs. Arkham figures in many of Lovecraft's tales, but also in other forms of fiction, as well as Cthulhu-fiction by some dozens of other authors.

And so, having investigated the Corbitt House of the Haunting but having been foiled and driven out by incidents with a clear and present danger lurking, the investigators have started peeking into a local cult. In their old headquarters, they found a very old book, half digested by time, and are now heading to Arkham to get help in uncovering the secrets of this mysterious tome.

Arkham will probably be visited very briefly in this scenario, but something tells me that it will quickly become something of a centerpiece. Through the years.