I want a game to take place in the spooky deep south. Inbreeding, creepy families on falling-apart plantations...

I want a game to take place in the spooky deep south. Inbreeding, creepy families on falling-apart plantations, spooky swamps, all that. But one of my players is an autistic shit that won't play anywhere that doesn't exist in reality. Is there any city, like an actual city, where spooky crap like that would be readily accessible?

My hometown of Savannah, Georgia would be perfect for that. Most haunted city in the US.

Do you prefer all-but-abandoned or actually abandoned?

>But one of my players is an autistic shit that won't play anywhere that doesn't exist in reality.

So do you only play GURPS in modern day settings or some shit? Or only historical games?

Nah, nigguh. You and ya boi can fuck off

All-but. The PCs are freelance spooky-hunters.

Try St. Francisville, Louisiana. Home of the Myrtles Plantation, one of the most spooky places in the US. Or so the stories go, anyway.

The south is very much Sout interplay between cities and their surrounding countryside-Savannah, Charleston, Oxford, and New Orleans and their surrounding areas could all do you.

Savannah and Oxford get special mention because O'Connor and Faulkner wrote their grotesqueries of the South around or based on them.

I remember the time we played a game that had a long spooky trek through the south. Poor Dave, one of the worse fates to befall a character of our games.

Southerner here. Seconding Georgia or South Carolina. Read southern Gothic stories for Inspiration, I recommend A Good Man Is Hard To Find for a start.

>Savannah natives
>in muh Veeky Forums

I guess it's more likely than you think.

Charleston here, pick a plantation, odds are spooky shit happened there

Your solution is simple: beat your player about the head and neck with a wooden dowel everytime he starts to say 'Muh Authenticity!' Eventually he'll stop. Or die from trauma. Either way problem is solved!

Real life Deep Southerner here. Unfortunately those places don't really exist as you imagine them, at least not today. If you had a plantation house you'd get it on the historic register and run tours, host weddings, etc. The insular, backwoods town still has public wi-fi and cell reception, and if it's anywhere near a larger city is probably heavily suburbanized. That being said, you don't really need the classic Southern Gothic trappings to make an effective spooky South game.

This tbqh. Dont get me wrong, you can still find shitty small towns with no or bad cell reception, but you really gotta go out there to fucking find them. What you're more likely to have is long, long stretches of wilderness where no one will ever find you or know you were there

Honestly if it were like that one episode of King of the Hill about Bill's family that would be good enough for me.

Tell him to fuck off. It's fiction.

Gonna third this. Small towns are far between on poorly maintained state roads and are more likely to be ravaged by a disappearing populace and poverty than ghosts and large redneck families. Run a depressing game about how the pcs witness a mortgage and drug problem destroy a family and scream AUTHENTICITY at your sperg friend.

I ran a oneshot like this. The players were Civil War soldiers during the Savannah Campaign, sent to a town at an important crossroads ahead of the main Yankee force with orders from General Sherman to demolish a particular house.

Inside they found all kinds of weird shit, dead things pickled in jars, balls of human hair all over the bed, and all the shelves and drawers facing toward the walls

It turned out the sorcerer who lived in the house actually lived inside the walls, never leaving and depending on the townsfolk to leave him packages of food, strange alchemical reagents, and the occasional slave, in exchange for money from the family fortune, which had been steadily declining for almost a century. With the town abandoned (save for a few Confederate pickets) he didn't have anyone to feed him and had taken to squeezing into the tunnels beneath the house to eat corpses from the nearby cemetery.

When the players weren't looking he'd reach out from the walls and grab strands of their hair or lose objects from their belts, which he used as a magical focus for the curses and hexes he silently cast on them.

They never figured out what his plan was for when the Union army arrived. When they realized there was someone there they all fired wildly into the walls until a lucky shot through the clapboard killed him.

They didn't find his secret room in the basement either. Finding him was spooky enough that they axed a few support beams and load bearing walls before setting the house on fire and running.

That episode is a pretty explicit parody of the Southern Gothic genre.

Best bet would be to set it in a town whose local employers have shutdown. Failed businesses, foreclosed homes, a town that's dead during the workday because those that still have jobs commute out of town, the kind of place where all that's left is a liquor store, some fast food joints, and a Dollar General.

As for the wilderness, the woods can provide not only an atmosphere of claustrophobia and isolation, but also desolation and vulnerability.

True Detective season 1 managed to do it, with the insular backwoods folks having cellphones and everything.

Oh damn, that is freaky. I may be stealing that idea.

Most of the shown investigation was during the 90s, before a lot of touristy things and Internet apps, and in the poorer rural areas, which still exist.

Definitely would be easier to do if you set the clock back a little like they do in the flashbacks.

Most of True Detective season 1 takes place in 1995, but you're right, it is a great place for inspiration for running this kind of game.

Oh yeah, it's been a while since I watched it. The memory was clouded over by trying to forget that awful second season.

The concept for the sorcerer I took from the Goblin Punch guy's 'city of necromancers' masterpost

>Consumate Yarb. Possessed with an intense agoraphobia. Lives inside the walls of his house, and will stick his head out from behind portraits and onto bookshelves to address guests of his house. Powerful sorcerer, but if he is ever pulled from the wall (his body is pale and deformed) he will suffer a powerful psychotic break.