Kentucky

Stealing Gold from the Empire.

I've only been to Kentucky once and I know there's more to it. There's also treating horses better than most people and bourbon.

Gross.

Like it's not that common right?

As a Kentucky Colonel for reasons I don't quite understand you also have horseraces and bourbon.

Kentucky Derby + Mad Max

It's not THAT common but it's one of two states I've heard someone refer to their "uncle-dad" unironically.

As someone who lives in ky, I have heard nothing about incest in years

Something-something Ale-8.

Seriously. They have this shit everywhere there.

Fighting inbred fascists who worship neo-Hitler as an avatar of their zombie god.

That's West Virginia.

I live in central, urban Kentucky and I've never really seen/heard of any incest, but pedophilia- there is a lot of that. It's all hidden by the cousinfucking stereotype.

Based gun laws, tons of wilderness, great food, affordable land, and interesting local lore say otherwise. Plus it's cheaper to build a factory there than it is in New England.

YEARS, I TELLS YOU!

Like, no incest in at LEAST 3 years. Possibly 4~!

Yeah this is pretty much a blank spot in my State Lore beyond "INCEST AND BOURBON" but they create the Water of Life. ...and white lightning, the Water of Death.

It's a great place for dealing with the wildlands or the evil next door stuff.

If someone told me there was a werewolf here I'd be like "oh yeah, that tracks."

>Oklahoma

God, remember how that state only exists because we threw the Native Americans on it, and we only threw the Native Americans on it because there's nothing there? But then we found a LITTLE BIT of something there, and incorporated it?

...

...

...

Wonderful game. Did they ever finish all the "chapters"? I only finished...3, I think.

I started playing the 4th act but I stopped as I felt like I should just wait and replay the entire thing with act5 comes out. It's a fantastic game, the first three acts were amazing.

Sooooooooooo.......Scotland without the Ocean and more trees?

And more rivers?

Feuding clans, bootleggers, rumrunners, grizzled miners, and overbearing and corrupt lawmen from the same stock, all living in a hard land that provides little opportunity without a fight. Plus magic, i guess.

We have lots of green. Thought of doing a cthulu games based in a small mountain town, more Wiccan than sea god worshipping.
Pic is my back yard.

Honestly one of the more universal perversions, all sorts of people from rockstars to rednecks will indulge in that.

Dungeon Crawl Classics has a mini-campaign setting module called The Chained Coffin which is based in a fantasy version of Appalachia and incorporates a lot of folklore from the region into encounters.

Includes such things as:

- A polite stranger named Ol' Blackcloak seen at crossroads and inviting adventurers to sit at his creepy blue campfire and gets mad if they refuse his hospitality or act rude in any way, may strike up deals for their soul

- A family of inbred hill giants living in a cabin surrounded by trees full of various animal and humanoid skulls danging from ropes

- A ghost in an old cabin that is haunted by other ghosts he wants you to help get rid of

- Magic fiddles

Oh look, it's yet another "Americans need to compensate for lack of culture" thread!

Alchemist quest: Secret of the Eleven Herbs and Spices

Hi, I'm from Kentucky. The white people that first came here were adventurers and outdoorsmens.
I can start a fire with my shoelace and sticks. I have tracked deer, bear and all sorts of small game. I sit in the woods and take a deep breath, look around and see my god and goddesses.
Please me what awesome self reliance and natural awareness your culture gave you?

This is what you want.
Appalachia vs witches that steal power from the devil.

You realise that to give a fuck about fantasy or real Kentucky, you need to be burger first... right?

It's literally like I've asked you "What kind of campaigns could you set in the fantasy equivalent of Haute-Loire?". About the beast of Gévaudan, of course Does it ring you any bells aside "some place somewhere in France? Assuming you realised in the first place it's in France. Which I doubt, since non-French by default rarely know anything about Fench departments. And I don't blame them, since how the hell they are supposed to know anything about division of another country, not to mention details about specific place there?
All I know about Kentucky is that it's in States, it has lots of coal and is in Appalachians. And that Kentucky Fried Chicken started there. That's all. Based on that, all I can think of is Germinal-esque story about coal miners. Which probably would have as little to do with Kentucky as possible.

forgot pic

You know, going around spouting that meme tends to indicate that you have no culture besides contrarianism. It's "cool" to insult the USA, so you do. Why not build yourself up instead of kicking others down?

You've got a point there, pal.

I swear to god every board needs flags.

I recently created a session based on larger Appalaicha and the midwest. It's primarily an enormous forest, several hundred miles in breadth, with a bunch of weird shit in it. Cryptids, mountain men, wood witches, and weird little towns abound. There's lots of coal mines and caves, and an enormous basin similar to the Cumberland Gap where a lot of logging takes place. A lot of the culture is borrowed from classic American myth, so there's legendary figures like Paul Bunyan and Johnny Appleseed, as well as fiends to beware of like Old Scratch.

The forest rearranges itself at night. Don't get caught in it when it does.

So what we've got to work with are creepy forest spirits and also maybe a devil or two tempting people into wickedness. In the boonies, people ardy done been tempted, and strange rites as well as hard liquor abound. Nature is taking back, little by little, what man carves out, but the folk here are hard and not prone to give up an inch easily. What else can we do here?

What would that do for them?

How fantasy? There's a lot of really kickass Appalachian and Native American folk concepts you could work into a concept like that. Snake handling cults. Crazy, shape-shifting shamans that stalk you through the night. A society of Sasquatches living deep in the woods. The potential is definitely there, it just depends on how much or little tech to wanna throw in.

anything is fine. I just like hearing ideas and discussion

To be fair an american state is much larger than a smaller part in the country of france (which is itself about as big as an american state).

I still agree that probably only americans would care but those states are still big enough that they probably have their own distinct enough cultures that other people like me, an european, could find interesting.

yeah Witches are good for this sort of thing

>he posts in American on an American imageboard dedicated to American culture using American technology based on American science

>dedicated to American culture
It was created for japanese culture and even now there is no board that is soley dedicated to american culture.

Japan is basically a client state of America; it's certainly more American than it is close to any rainy little yuropoor country from where these buttblasted little anons emerge.

Check out some websites on Appalachian and Native American folklore. Those will give you a lot of stuff to work with for supernatural stuff. There's also a couple good documentaries on the snake-handling churches that still exist to this day out there, too. Beyond that, what others have said: Witches. Mountain men. Small towns(with or without dark secrets). Crazy hillbillies. People like to shit on America having no culture, but there's a ton of cool shit you can snap up for a campaign just sitting out there.

Mercenaries are called into Kentucky to deal with some rogue cryptids. While hunting crytids they discover a conspiracy that threatens the USA and potentially the world.

Redneck fae

>I've lived in 9 states and 3 countries, visited 47 continental states and every continent but Antarctica, currently live in Northern Kentucky, and have traveled over most of the state for film projects. Kentucky is both better-off and worse-off than you think.

In the quasi-civilized parts of Kentucky (Lexington, Louisville, northern Kentucky just across the OH river from Cincinnati), you can run basically any sort of modern or near-modern game you care to name. Those places aren't any worse than any other non-coastal city in the country, and aside from the lack of heath care, different accents, and slightly fatter people, they aren't any worse than any given mid-sized city in the UK either. Sure, a modern metro coastal city (San Jose, NY, Miami) is much nicer and has a higher standard of living, but it's perfectly possible to enjoy a modern 1st world lifestyle here with tons of amenities at a reasonable cost.

>directs attention to pic related, dividing KY into very rough "zones"

It's once you get into the country (red and gray zones), and very specifically once you get into the hill country in eastern Kentucky that things start getting really bad/wierd/creepy. The inbred hill people that everyone jokes about really, really, do exist. The gray zones can be equivalent in lifestyle conditions and violence level to certain favelas, or to the areas of Somalia *outside* Mogadishu (adjusting for environment, obviously). There are areas where there's been no jobs available for a decade and the entire "economy" runs on barter, and there's areas where the entire town actually is related to each other and the "incest" thing happens because there's no new blood, hasn't been any for 50 years, and nobody wants to/has the money to leave. These are usually but not always found near coal mines.

To be totally frank, at the level people are living in the gray zones specifically, your best RPG options are either survival horror or post-apocalyptic genres.

-4 Int.

It's cheaper because of a lack of infrastructure in place that has to be paid in utilities.

I can not believe that parts of a country like America can be that bad but I don't know enough about the USA to actually refute it.

Can someone tell me if this is bullshit? Because STALKER tier conditions in the middle of a first world country sound like something that can't possible exist.

The other one was West Virginia, I take it?

Not as common as in Iraq and Pakistan.

From what I'm told it's mostly just meth heads in the mountains these days.

Keep in mind most of those grey areas are hardcore mountain. Shouldnt be anything there anyway

The USA is a massive country. Money and power aren't spread evenly, and there are parts of the country that are so far out of the way that outsiders rarely visit. These places tend to be poor and stuck in their ways; combine that with the trackless wilderness that surround them, and you can get some weird shit.

So would making them zombies in the setting be a detriment or improvement to their current way of life?

You have to keep in mind the massive scale of the country and how the population is spread out.

Louisville resident here.

Parts of that map are true, but some of it is exaggerated. There should be a few more pockets of yellow-green South south of Louisville for example. College towns like Elizabethtown are red on the map, but are perfectly fine places to live. The whole western red/gray area is mountain country and has a lot of stereotypes also associated with West Virgina (hillbilly cousin-fuckers).

>reasons I don't quite understand

Naw it's pretty true. Only slight exaggeration.

No, that's West Virginia.

We're a very strange country. If we can't tell you what's in a place, it's fair game to assume that there's injuns in those hills.

Similar to a midevil New Jersey campaign

A campaign for ants?

A campaign in Mammoth Cave wouldn't be half bad.

...

I'd argue its not even there for the most part. Cousin fucking is a stereotype like welsh or new zealanders fucking sheep. They probably don't actually do it but its a really effective way to make a native really mad.

>worse than detroit
Yeah that's Camden alright.

No, there aren't actually that many chickens.

Thats because that map is stupid bullshit. They won't kill you for daring to bring the wonders of the internal combustion engine to their small inbred minds. That map was probably made by a bitter californian city fag who only goes to kentucky to stay in their lakeside summer home.

actually all the people in the gray zones are probably old geezers because all the young people moved to Louisville for work. You have the same thing in West Virginia.

t. never lever Louisville.

*left

Dunno about Kentucky, but as a Georgiafag I'd believe it. Remember that states are kinda-sorta like mini polities. I was studying to become a social worker for awhile, and in georgia something like 90% of federal money for social programs is focused on the capital city, Atlanta, and the immediately surrounding area. Since the state legislature /hates/ programs that use money to try and help poor people the rest of the state tends to get jack shit besides food stamps. Combine this with literally all the young people leaving for places with actual opportunity, and shit can get weird.

The US is a lot like China in that everyone is magnetically attracted to the cities, but we have a LOT of land where the only residents are poor farmers. The US has never had huge government programs to forcibly resettle large groups of people on farmland though. We tend to just ignore it.

European and Buddhist monks innawoods.

>Learning to DEUS VULT with your bare hands innawoods
Sounds comfy

If you're looking for a hillbilly type thing, consider the towns that were pretty much entirely built around the coal industry. Hazard county, etc.

Western Kentucky is not that different from northeastern Tennessee and southwest Virginia. It's a backwoods place largely, though there are some decent sized towns. Still, even those places retain more than a touch of that old school, unique mountain people flare.

It's not a dangerous fucking horror movie scene though like a lot of these idiots are claiming. Typically, backwoods mountain folk are the nicest kind of people that you can meet. Very polite, very willing to go out of their way to help you.

The coal industry has done a number on us though.

Here, this'll help you figure it out.
youtube.com/watch?v=lYqc052xv9g

A campaign centered around simple people being exploited by magnates would be interesting. Decimation of natural resources, displacing people, killing a good number of its young men, suppressing the rights of workers, etc.

South Carolina fag here I live in the upstate and the red in the middle towards the cost is pretty damn accurate. We call it the corridor of shame also our roads suck because the state refuses to give us any money for them so yeah

It's funny cause they're the least DEUS VULT/Kung fu fightan monks imaginable.

Towards the coast

Kentucky is one of the poorest places in the developed world. It's basically what you get when the entire state revolves around the coal industry, and then that industry packs up and leaves. The state and county governments there are stuck in the past and still exist solely to please what few aspects of the coal industry remain, so the people are largely left to fend for themselves. The federal government has sometimes attempted to bring in electricity, running water, and basic medical care to the mountainous parts of the state, but that usually gets cut after a little while and what little infrastructure is there rots, rusts, or just collapses.

It is basically a third world country nestled inside a first world country.

A campaign to get the fuck out of kentucky.

> californian
> goes to kentucky to stay in their lakeside summer home
Californians don't go to Kentucky unless they have to. If you want some place to go for the summer, there are a ton of states that are better than Kentucky.

I've spent time in Louisville, and it just...

Why does nobody go to the dentist? Are there no goddamn dentists in the state? Fuck, even dentures would be fine. But get those goddamn gaps in your mouth filled people, it's disgusting.

It was a gift.

Born Kentuckian here

Kentucky's got everything you need for a high-intensity, fun campaign of discovery. The state has a massive amount of ecosystems- mountainous highlands, murky swamplands, rolling prairies and dense, lush forests, all interspersed by quite literally hundreds of rivers. Fishing, lumber and coal are all abundant industries that supply the state with resources to support large city-states or kingdoms. Good bourbon and gambling are quintessential parts of the upper-crust lifestyle, with a large horse-racing industry and massive riverboats that host tempting casinos and the wildest parties north of the Gulf. Outside of the elite, most people are normal until you get to the eastern half of the state, which has been drug into poverty by the loss of coal and tobacco, leaving thousands living off whatever they can get ahold of. They're good people for the most part, but if you're in their situation and don't know what you're doing you will not survive the winter.

It can't be that bad out in the sticks. I don't believe it. They gotta at least have electricity and running water. You make it sound like they're perpetually stuck in 1830.
t. Los Angeles

No, it really is that bad. If you're poor, you get electricity and running water as the result of government infrastructure. If you're poor in rural Kentucky, there isn't much government infrastructure that reaches you, and what little there is is so poorly maintained that it fails more often than it functions. You aren't stuck in the 1830s, you do see some modern technology. But you're pretty much on your own. The counties don't have any money, the state doesn't want to help, and the federal government only helps in brief bursts that are then cut soon afterward.

It absolutely is that bad. I grew up on the fringes of that area without internet access, reliable electricity, and for a 6 month period no running water. My mom had a lottery win for a couple million and used it all to pay off debt, move out, get a home in the city and educate me. I know exactly how fortunate I am.

t. Lexington

That map is absolutely not bullshit if you're non autistic and capable of understanding some of it was clearly written for humor. You can and do get guns and farm tools pointed at you for driving into some small eastern kentucky towns. Outsiders are bad. I've done the pointing, and I've been on the recieving end.

Anyway, the gist of the map and the rough zones it's divided into are pretty close to accurate. The moral is that the further you get from the cities, military bases, college towns, and highways, the more backward and insular it becomes. It's not a nice place, and the user characterizing it as a 3rd world country embedded in the middle of a 1st world one is on the right track.