What are the most Lovecraftian regions and cities in your country to set a Cthulhu Mythos campaign in...

A better answer would be the Cotswolds because it's got Oxford. In fact, I'm pretty sure there are Cthulhu Mythos stories set there by some British author.

How would you know the locals are inbred?

Nothing in the US beats Appalachia for me. The mist collects underneath the forest canopy and weaves through barren coalfields, primordial rainforests and colonial graveyards. Strange things happen on the backroads under the cold sky on moonless nights.

New Orleans and the surrounding areas are a close second.

So Slot was an eldritch horror all this time?

>Italy

Amusingly enough we did a mockumentary of Deep Ones living in the Polesine (the marshy area of the mouth of the Po) but while it DOES have a certain feeling and HPL himself journeying there. The place has a certain feeling, especially in the foggy winter, but it's probably too settled nowdays to do it consistenly.

Just like any other people, by looking at them.

Same here, the whole place fits too well, anywhere woodsy In NE can get pretty lovecraftian, not a lot of other places really quite fit as nicely. Actually, one could go with the Middle East, because of some of the elder gods proclivities towards the region.

I know this is probably predictable, but Venice?
If you know some real Venetians, their Sanity is already low.

Already been said but the Deep South and Appalachia would be perfect.

Australia has Tasmania, a huge island full of aging hippies with vast tracts of barely-visited, misty, mountainous forests. It also has a nasty bit of history with indigenous genocide seriously, the colonists essentially did a picket line across the island and killed every native on the island, as well as a lot of clueless tourists getting lost occasionally. Just refluff your bigfootses and sasquatches as bunyips and yowies

>not the Pilbara
user...

Florida.

The Yithians seem like some pretty legit guys.

Next campaign; Shadow Over Innsmouth but it's bigfoots.

Too hot and dry for the feel i was going for, plus no ethnic cleansing for gigantic undead armies raised for vengeance against the living

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Aliens are generally solid guys in Lovecraft's stories, it's the humans using alien knowledge who are cunts.

This has nothing to do with phrenology. Inbred people have very characteristic ugly faces and that's a medical fact.

How about the Isle of Sheppy? I'm stuck here and it's pretty much Innsmouth -
Cut of island from mainland
Locals are considered inbred by everyone else
Large empty areas of woodland and fields
Has an few seaside arcades which are creepy and rotten
Full of abandoned buildings farm houses and shacks
Has a few Prisons nearby
Has 20,000 Tonnes of unexploded ammo off the coastline that may or may not sink the island if it goes off

But one of HPL's best stories was set there.

Sure, shadow out of time is great and all, but if i was going to do a CoC campaign, it'd be in tasmania. Pilbara is hot and dry and uninhabited, and i'd definitely do a homage to Shadow out of Time session there, but as a campaign setting it's lacking.

Camp Century, aka the cover story for Project Iceworm, was an American attempt to set up stations under the Greenland icesheet to potentially launch missiles or planes from. It was scrapped in real life because glaciers proved too unstable to build permanent dwellings inside and abandoned. They've recently been rediscovered/interest has picked up because warming temperatures means it's starting to be uncovered again.

Might be hard to explain the presence there, but abandoned military installations under the Greenland ice sheets would be a pretty neat place to set a CoC campaign. Maybe they're climatologists or something who stumble across a previously undisclosed base just barely peaking out of the ice, get trapped inside during a blizzard, and discover the real reason the bases were abandoned/built in the first place.

Also, pic related is why you can't actually build in a glacier. Seems plenty claustrophobic and generally spooky to me.

some other images to give an idea of scale. It was supposed to be a pretty extensive complex.

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>intro sessions
Getting the group together to do investigation into slightly weird shit, probably a client wanting some vaguely occult bits and pieces (exhuming a corpse for its pendant, buying a scroll from an auction house, tracking down a copy of Alhazrad's tome and acquiring it)
>campaign
Weird shit starts going down, a cult is rising in Hobart, your previous client has disappeared, for some reason they go on a vision trip in the Pilbara, come back and learn that the cult leader was the client and has some nefarious plot in mind-that being the raising of a hundred thousand skeletons
>climax
Villian has been collecting elder knowledge to raise the unjustly slaughtered, the living start to go insane, skeleton armies are actually terrifying in a modern setting since they're very hard to damage effectively with small arms and have no problems operating vehicles and firearms without care for their own safety. Are you a bad enough dude to track down the necromancer and kill him before his skeleton army kills every human in Australia and then the world?

Australia doesnt have the witchcraft traditions and anti-nazi history of europe, the shamans of africa or the men in black of america, so its an easier spot to begin your skeleton army until it reaches critical mass. Also i get to make all the bone puns

The bleaker parts of Yorkshire fit the bill perfectly. Less the Towns, but the Dales, or the Moors.

There's parts of those hills that feel like they've never known the touch of humanity. There's villages up there where you can see ten generations or more of like, 3 families in the church graveyard. There's villages that get shut off for weeks in a bad winter.

Sounds nice and isolated for an investigation or two.

Centralia, PA

Ohio
i live in a smallish town in ohio
no one goes outside. if you are caught walking outside or down the streets you will be arrested. The only thing happening here is the weekly defeat of the highschool football team. Everyone is violently and almost pathologically opposed to a sewer project people have tried to get off the ground since the 50's
large number of teen suicides
one of note is that a black girl supposedly slit her own throat.
despite the police report stating she had her arms tied around a tree behind her back.

I live in Florida. Just go deeper in and hit them wetlands and you got some creepy shit

>The Yithians seem like some pretty legit guys.
Other than ensuring our eventual nuclear destruction in order to help birth the beetle species they will some day mindswap with, dooming the minds of those creatures to be trapped in their conicle bodies and this destroyed by their ancient fungal enemy.

Some parts of Oregon can get pretty creepy, mostly up in the mountains and near the costs. Very wet forests.

There are a shit load of abandoned cold war bunkers in Swedish forest and they are spoopy as fuck.

Almost every cold war building also has a bunker under it, top tier place to play as a kid running in the cool underground.

No. Venice is sensual as fuck, has been from the start and will stay that way when the sea finally eats her. Not lovecraftian.

Also oddly enough the growing number of tourists means it's not even that easy like 20 years ago to walk at night without ecountering anybody - the city in winter still has this kinda of Twilight Zone feeling but less.

The lagoon has (especially in winter, again) a feeling of unwelcoming plain with stillwater and half-ruined shit, but generally I wouldn't call "lovecraftian" (it's still too populated, probably).
But I guess Malamocco or Pellestrina, with the older towns, can do it - especially when they are in the not-freezing-but-almost there december days, the sun is veiled by clouds, the light is scarce, both the Adriatic and the laggon are still and silent, vegetation has a dull dark green (lots of brambles), waters receding during low tide, then you feel like you're in a tiny island of sleeping life in a cosmic stage.
It's way more melancholic than scary, but I think Howard would've approved. There are also the abandoned islands with a very nice aesthtic of half-ruins half retaken by the lagoon but they're surprisingly modern for the most part (basically, while historically the lagoon was polycentric and there is a metric shitton of abanodened islands, before industrialization when an island was fucked buildings would be destroyed).
(Pellestina has the bonus of a honest-to-god closed fishing community, but here the similarity stops, 'cause pellestrinoti are loud motherfuckers. Rednecks in Italy seem always happier than city dwellers)

Source: I live in the cyberpunk part of Venice, Mestre.

>if anything I'd say our mountains. Everything south of Genoa is fast becoming not only abandoned, but basically forgotten, people don't even use it recreationally. Which IRL is kinda of a shame, but ecologically is interesting. For our purposese, there are really sweet abandoned Tuscan Appenine villages and the Sila in Calabria.

These anons know what's up. Alternatively, Alaska or Northern Canada.

That image is both incredibly creepy and comfy at the same time

The South has some seriously spoopy locales. I live near Uwharrie, which is apparently a Mecca for Bigfoot sightings. Sasquatch aside, our underbrush is thick as hell and, if I'm entirely honest, we're a rather superstitious lot. I don't think you'll find a soul down here (myself included) who doesn't think some kind of weird shit lives in the deep woods.

Also, North Carolina has a place called the Great Dismal Swamp. Eat your heart out, Moon Bog.

Really 20th century eastern Europe for the same reason it was a good place to set horror films.

>isolated communities fairly common
>strong belief in supersitions/old faith
>has a nice element of distance from the players (setting is foriegn/unfamilliar(
>has a nice class of modernization and old time traditions

The coasts of Oregon are pretty creepy, lots of swamps.
Also the deserts of Arizona can be very unsettling at night.

Severn Valley Estuary and bonus points if you can tell me why.

This goes for northern europe too.

Scandi lore isn't usually that spooky but vittrar are spooky in a weird way.

They are a people that live in a different time and parallell to us and building on their roads was a big no no so people who suspected that their house was on one would tear it down or move.

you meet someone but as soon as you look away they disappear, not that scary but can be spoopy if done justice.

Iowafag here. What in the fuck.

Ye gods, user, Lovecraft is gloomy enough. No need to bring the goddamn Welsh into it. Ibid Finland. Finns may try to defend their lovely home. They are wrong. While the welsh have hiraeth and a hundred other words for depression, the finns have christmas songs that make you want to slit your wrists like an emo kid.

So no, no existential dread in Wales. They're full up.

Hush, corn worshipper. We all know about the walker between the rows. Seriously, flyover states with vast fields of whatever are prime territory for cults and whatever else. Hide where no one looks, not out of dread, but because looking involves mind numbing boredom.

youtube.com/watch?v=0N8BTyY_Uyc

Have to preserve your species somehow.

La zona del silencio where supposedly where radio signals and any type of communications cannot be received. Or Mexico City given its size.

Arizonafag here. I can confirm. The aptly named "superstition mountains" claim dozens of lives every year. In the same area around the first or second world war the government brought in an arab and a bunch of camels to see if they would be a viable replacement for horses or otherwise useful as a service animal. We had Japanese internment and WW2 prisoner of war camps here. (If you look into it there's a rather funny story about some german POWs who made a daring prison break, intending to escape on an improvised inflatable boat, only to find that while the river on the map was blue, in actuallity it had no water in it)
We have had cults and paramilitary groups. Got those crazy fundie polygamist LDS up north. Countless dead in the desert and mountains.

Some crazy rich guy bought the original London Bridge when it was being torn down to replace it and had it rebuilt in Lake Havasu.

For native ruins New Mexico is a better bet, cliff dwellings.

Got some ancient, dead volcanic cores here in AZ. Jutting hunks of black volcanic rock worn down by weather and time. That movie 128 hours where the guy got trapped in a canyon and had to cut his arm off was set here, iirc. Lots of narrow, maze like canyons. More native spirit stories and tales of lost treasure dating back to the conquistadors than you can shake a stick at.

Aside from Robert Howard, and The Horror Of The Mound, there is a paucity of good cosmic horror set here. Tremendously ironic when you consider the fact that we have many observatories and consistant clear night skies. Can see the milky way when I turn my porch light off. We are also reknowned for our lightning during the monsoon seasons.

Lots of very large ravens here, too. Couple feet tall. Also, burrowing owls. Most angry looking things.

Southeast Ohio could be pretty good for a Mythos story. Lots of empty rural areas, wooded hill country, depressed Rust Belt communities. Plus you've got the Athens Lunatic Asylum there, with all the ghost stories and shit surrounding that. And Ohio University right there is the oldest university in the state...doesn't exactly have the venerable reputation to go with it, but you could apply a little artistic license there. Maybe it was secretly founded with a mission specifically to investigate Mythos shit that was going on in the area, and ended up getting thrown under the bus and declined when the elites decided to disavow all knowledge of what they found. But the records of that research are still there, hidden away...

My hometown.

Clark Asthon Smith lived here, has the library and a road dedicated to him, and is buried in a carefully hidden plot. They have a recording at the library of CA smith reading poetry to HP Lovecraft, and the towns nearby all definitely qualify as inbred hick towns of spookiness that they both wrote about.

I live right next to a port city in New England so I mean one foggy night and everyones getting mindfucked by Cthulhu.

Also live right near a nuclear power plant and a couple of military installations so technically a lot of crazy shit can go down in the very compact region.

Look into the burrowing owl's eyes. It wants your soul.

Also, fuck me, we have the plain graveyard here. Largest group of mothballed fighter jets in the country. Looking at google maps, ya see concentric rings in remote areas. Apparently part of old WW2 bombing training ranges...

On the subject of nuclear plants, you know what city dwellers have to use?

Industrial parks.

Believe me, shit looks INHUMAN. Especially when they're past their peak, oversized, and empty.

Reminds me, we have two nuclear power plants here. One out in the middle of nowhere, heavily guarded by private military "security" contractors. The other is small. A "teaching" nuclear reactor directly underneath the U of A football stadium. U of A also has the unique degree course of "optics" for refining lenses for lasers, observatory mirrors... They use a lot of pyrex.

>England, England
Stonehenge, is easy mode. the druids go down there all the time.
Dartmoor, It's real easy to get lost down there when the mists roll in. also the army dose their training there, wouldn't be too much of a step to say the the Training is just a cover story and they're really
and the Chanctonbury Rings, tho those are "suppose" to be aliens

more locally there's Graylingwell Asylum, which is well a fucking Asylum.
Kingley Vale's meant to be full of fairies
ooh and Racton Monument's not too far away and that's got ties to the Occult (pic related)

in fact I might see if I can talk people into going down there tonight

Compared to a shit ton of other mythos creatures, the are by far among the least malevolent.

The aussie outback at night, all types of shit could happen out there

Oklahoma City has some interesting stuff. The nearby AF base houses the E-6 which is the plane used in Operation Looking Glass. The abundance of tornados could also be used as some sort of wind god (similar to Cold Dead Hand, I forget the god's name)

Just about any non-major city or township in florida. If Howard had visited the trailer park spice/meth covens in Leesburg he would have met people who actually talk like the people in his books.

Already been done, by Lovecraft himself no less
see

>Finland
I'd say Lapland(barely any people, strange natives with their own culture, long winters with little to no daylight), but as points out, the entire country qualifies pretty well, with people who'll barely say two words to a stranger.

1920's Seattle or 1910's Spokane

Shadow over Innsmouth could easily work in the Pacific Northwest, considering all the rusitc coastal towns.

Ay Ideas of what you would do?

>Austria

My country is actually realy well suited for this.

>Alps
Pretty much anything in secluded mountain valleys where forgotten things still dwell.

There were people in WW2 that never knew WW1 ended, would make a good setting for an Innsmouth type of tale, or something like the Whisperer in the Dark or Dunwich Horror.

>Vienna
Viennese Upper class for the proper posch lovecraft setting.
Something like the Final Test could easily happen here.
An old aristocratic University Professor tapping into the Dark Arts and forbidden sciences.

>Carinthia

A huge valley dotted with lakes and the poorer people in the country, slovenian minorities

The latter which would make for some great "Inbred natives" stand in i suppose. Also old deep lakes with who knows what lurking within.

>Perchts
One of our Local traditions, young men dress up as Demons and beat people with wicker rods around Christmass, makes for a great Forgotten Tradition from dark, nameless times" which it actually realy is.

>Ötzi

The entire story of the cursed ice man...

Now I'm thinking how water pollution would wreck Deep One populations

>ensuring our eventual nuclear destruction in order to help birth the beetle species they will some day mindswap with
That's just fan headcanon. There was no such thing as nuclear weapons back when Lovecraft wrote the story and he couldn't possibly have thought of it. It's like some fans are arguing that Azathoth is a metaphor for some enormous nuclear reaction because it's been called "nuclear chaos", while in reality nuclear reactions were scarcely understood when The Whisperer in Darkness was written and Lovecraft merely suggested that Azathoth is located at the centre (in other words, nucleus) of all creation.

centralia, pa

a vein of coal in a mine caught fire in 1962 and it's still burning (expected to burn for another 300+ years, iirc) over a dozen square miles. ground breaks and noxious vapors pour out of cracks. everything had to be evacuated and abandoned and the highway was rerouted around it

>Russia

North Urals may in all honesty be THE Lovecraftian location. First things first, it was the site of what is probably the best known real life Lovecraftian story:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyatlov_Pass_incident

But it gets even better when you know the background of the place. The Urals are the world's oldest mountain range of such size. While the South is tightly settled and industrial, the North is nearly completely barren and mostly inhabited by the natives. The natives there are really weird, they belong to isolated ethnic groups that have no other relatives anywhere in the world, except for an extremely distant, extremely tenuous relation to the Finns.

The range has curious rock formations that look like ruins of ancient Cyclopean temples. Indeed, they were worshipped by the local tribesmen as houses of the spirits, and are presently worshipped by all kinds of new age freaks.

The best thing is that the legend of an ancient race that lived there before humans and escaped underground when the humans came, promising to return one day, is one of the principal legends of the local lore. You can't make this up. It's like Lovecraft went back in time and let the local shamans read his stories.

A city that is just a façade of grandeur with a rotten core, and at night turns into a misty labyrinth seems pretty lovecraftian to me. More King in yellow than Innsmouth, but still.
And there's still the inland part for inbred retards.

ghe sboro

Fun fact: HPL was inspired to write The Shadow over Innsmouth by his utterly horrific discovery that he had Welsh ancestry.

>Dartmoor
Can confirm
Also gets bonus points for being the location of The Hound of the Baskervilles and the birthplace of Sir Francis Drake
Exeter would make a fine Arkham

So the beetles appear after some other generic apocalypse?

Not from there but im sure if it existed back then he would have written stories in the Rust belt.

From where i live (Quebec) There's a lot of creepy legends about places but generally its hard to find somewhere where the people arent nice. Although we do have the Lac-St-Jean which is a very big lake with people around it. It has a reputation for the entire lake being a bunch of inbred people with the same family name. And with that much water from the lake and it being so shallow theres a shit ton of fog during all of summer. And the horizon must look really creeppy during the long winter months where nothing happens, everything but the houses are empty and all you can see is a seemingly neverending frozen pond.

Not from Quebec but
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goler_clan
That's some Innsmouth shit right here.

Isn't there that plague sanitarium island?

Poveglia - used to be both a plague quarantine station and an insane asylum for a while.

The islands of the north of scotland have been inhabited for a very, very long time, and there's shit like barrows aligned to light up on the winter solstice.
Combine with being on an isolated scottish island in the middle of the north sea, that's pretty lovecraftian. Worked for the wicker man, at least

>Poland
Anywhere in the east of the country, since it's pretty much a memetic underdeveloped shithole(arguably it got closer to rest of the country in last few years), but especially the Bieszczady Mountains. Anywhere else in Polish mountains would work as well though I guess.

Louisiana, and really any swampy region of the Deep South. There are things and beliefs there that ought to be buried. People deep in the backwoods do genuinely believe in elder gods

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Otzi is italian tough. Well, found on our side. I don't think we have an idea of where he came from, if trom south or north.

Never tought about him possibily be considered "cursed", I guess that's a real meme or something?

I dunno, I honestly feel it's another kind of horror altogether. Stereotipycally Venice is vampire country (at least that's how WW did it) and I think they're mostly right.
Also as resident I always found funny that in truth it's almost impossible to lose yourself - you can take a wrong a turn but as the streets are all different from each other it's pretty easy to remember where you came from.

ta morti, ti sarà miga pelestrinoto?

Oddly enough it's an internet legend. Poveglia was up to the 1700s a check point for ships (at the time the Malamocco mouth was the only safe entrance to the lagoon), then a military station, then progressively abandoned with some agricoltural shit going on. Not really spooky as activties go.
The actual Lazzaretto Nuovo is the (most used) plague station back at the time but nowdays is (luckily) a decent archeological site; there is also the Lazzaretto Vecchio, which oddly enough was the site of dogcatchers up to recent years and just now is being investigated. Kinda of a landfill with a dark secret, tough seeing it it's not that creepy at first.

What might be interesting is San Clemente, the actual honest-to-god old women insane asylum. Which now has been restaureted and it's pretty cool. What did they put on it?
Why, a pretty comfy luxury hotel! Not making this shit up, you can book a room right now.

Also, the old ossuary in Sant'Ilario. Lots of non venomous snakes, not your usual rats.

I'm not sure why Poveglia of all islands had this "let's put in all the scary stuff". I mean, I can understand why do that, but it's a pretty sunny place, seen from the Lido or the lagoon. Probably it's just more prominent and big.

Redneck friend of mine says the smokey mountains are fucking creepy at night, because of how drop dead quiet it gets.

Personally, I find the stretch of road between the Fargo ND and Moorhead MN is freaky as fuck in the winter. Between all the snow and mist it looks like the rest of the world just doesn't exist, and something about that fucks with me.

>Switzerland
I could imagine some lost valleys in the cantons of Graubünden or Wallis, or maybe the Jura.

The Jura is famous for some of its inhabitants moonshining absinthe, believing in healers and sorcerers, eating dog meat, and being members of some sects. A long time ago, different cults in Switzerland where exiled in the Jura mountain and were prohibited from living under a certain altitude (fun fact: many of those families emigrated to the USA). The Bernese Jura is regularly hit by economic crisis and is a pretty much depression-inducing area (by Swiss-standards high unemployment, lots of old and run down buildings, fog, long winters, empty factories and hangars, roads full of cracks and pot holes, nothing to do apart of getting drunk in the villages bar...).

Graubünden is the largest canton and it has a very low density population. It's full of remote alpine valleys and has a rich mythology, so it's probably also a good location.

The Wallis is famous for the Roitschäggättä festival (see picture). It could also be linked to some Lovecraftian-roots since similar masks can be found all around the world.

I am from north-eastern Finland. Especially around Kuusamo. Kuusamo is schitzophrenia-capital of Finland (mayb even Europe). This is result of inbreeding, in 17th century there were only 40 families and most of the people there are descendants of them. Also large margin of more cult-like sects of christianity. Rich folklore (3 different ghost-stories located within few hundred meters of our summerplace). People are very jealous and brooding, perhaps even malicious. Source: I'm from there.

There were villages in Valais up until the XXth century where the people didn't know what country they lived in. Also they speak R'lyehish or the next closest thing to it.

Anoher Italian here, not the one talking about Venice.

Honestly the entirety of the Lazio region (the one with Rome in it), especially the north can be kinda lovecraftian once you leave the city.
Tons of woods and forest punctuated with every sort of ruins here and there.
You could go for a walk near a smal town of 1000-ish inhabitants, turn around a hill covered with impenetrable woods and see old roman ruins or a medieval castle just sitting there spitting in the face of time.
My branch of studies keeps me often in these woods and it always give me this strange eerie feel to be there about sampling trees and then BAM, out of nowhere a piece of acqueduct blocks you and if you check your maps it shouldn't even be there because there are no modern or ancient cities around. Or maybe a large blocky edifice clearly of ages past with only an entrance and two small holes for windows. No roof, no signs of people or animals, no activity whatsoever, just standing there.

Sometimes it feels like exploring Earth after humans.

South Italy can also become creepy very fast.
Especially when you come across cities where people all talk the same strange dialect and refuse to talk Italian, and you go up and down in these little towns by the sea with all the houses painted blindingly white, nobody talks your language, let alone english, and if you're looking for trouble you can just look funny at someone in the streets at night.

These are also not counting the myriads of old medieval towns with cramped streets and max two thousand souls that get foggy at night and give you chills at every turn with those saint statues glaring at you from the street corners.

Ötzi is on the Italian side but there are descendants of him living in tyrol in austria tirol.orf.at/news/stories/2608349/

Also, money cults in Geneva.

Also, Raggi is clearly linked to the King in Yellow

I don't know about the thing where people didn't know in which country they lived in, but I can confirm that R'lyehnish is the main language in the High-Wallis.

forgot abou the curse thing.
Everyone that touched his corpse originally died pretty soon under mysterious circumstances.

It is also believed that he was cast out from his tribe so the idea started to rise that he was cursed.