Calling small town fa/tg/uys...

>Would the town have its own high school?
Are there any other towns nearby? Dying towns often consolidate their schools with nearby towns, so kids from other areas are all bused to a central location once the tax base can't afford to maintain individual schools in each town.

The plan was to have the small town about 15 miles from the next town and then another 30 or so to a richer, small city with a power plant that supplies the area.

>Would the town have its own high school?
When I started living there, Mount Sterling had its own primary school (grades 1-5) but then shipped kids to another district for higher grades. Eventually, as the town decayed, we lost even that school and every kid got shipped elsewhere.

With shared schools like that, are they named X County High School or is it the name of the town that actually hosts the school proper?

Its the name of all the towns mashed together. So if Jefferson, Beaver's Dale, and Paris consolidate their schools the students will say they go to Jefferson-Beaver's Dale-Paris High School. Their football team name and logo will also be directly stolen from a college or professional team. If they're clever they'll change the colors but probably not.

Am I right in assuming that a town like that would have a lot of commuters going elsewhere for full time work?

For Mount Sterling, it was just Madison County High School. Mt. Sterling didn't get its name on shit (and frankly, it didn't deserve it either).

Dont forget that no matter how small the town is it will always have at least 3 churches.

Yeah, forgot about that. I was going to have a church up the road on the edge of town.

Is it because it always have enough church-goers to fill three churches, or is it three different kinds of churches (Protestant/catholic/mormon/whatever)?

Yeah, that was the case in Mt. Sterling. We had very little business in town, most people commuted to either the nearby town of Washington Court House, the local city of Grove City, or the not-as-local metropolis of Columbus. Virtually no one worked in Mt. Sterling itself, there was no work to be had.

It is also worth noting that a lot of the population of the town just didn't have a job. Lots of folks weren't willing to commute (because they were lazy shits, frankly) and didn't have local work so they just sat around doing nothing. Or, in many cases, doing drugs. Small towns with no hope have a lot, and I mean a *lot* of drugs going on. We liked to say, there was nothing to do in Mt. Sterling other than drink, fuck, and do drugs, and by the gods did people do those things. Don't shy away from showing the hopelessness and shiftlessness of small town life.

Separate denominations. They pull in the country folk living around the town (at least the ones who dont go to their ominous country churches with the suspiciously large cemeteries) and people of that denomination from towns that dont have an appropriate church. The Lutherans just have to have their own church, it will not do for them to go to a Baptist church.

Not OP, just a passing user, but I just wanted to say this is a fascinating thread and I appreciate the insight and understanding it's giving me.

It's not uncommon for folk I know to commute up to thirty minutes or longer to get to work.

Okay, shit sucks. Kids are bored and smoke weed and get each other pregnant. Probably a few closed down buildings in that main street I thought of. Got to have the church, sheriff's office, and clinic.

It's like that here, too. Which reminds me, do towns have any form of public transportation or a cab service for people without cars?

>at least 3
He's really not kidding. Every town I've lived in had five or more, and they weren't all different denominations.

This. Lived in a fucking village of 300 (400 If you count farmers) with four different churches, although the biggest was closed down except for holidays.

>pair of highways running through it
That actually would be a small city. Closest one to where I live like that had a population of around 20,000 and does have most of the nicities, like a mall, hospital, etc., that the surrounding counties use.

The town where I grew up, county population of about 3000, is pretty much just farms and the interstate. Has a fair few gas stations and restaurants, local and franchised, had a hospital but they tore that down almost 30 years ago, no movie theatres, does have a museum I've never been to...oh, and we have a giant peanut statue.

Typical small town BS mostly. Drugs, petty crime and such, mostly on the black side of the tracks, game warden does more business outside of the city than the sheriff to be honest, and that's about all there is to it.

Somebody in town is stocking and maintaining a pop machine that is just sitting outside somewhere.

What system are you using?

What about libraries or public buildings? What is there to do but smoke weed and wait for tomorrow?

Witchcraft

>What is small town then?
3800 people user reporting

>Does a town like that have it's own police department or is it a county thing?
We have county police.

>The same for hospitals?
We did not have a hospital, no. You had to go to the nearest larger town to get medical service as other user said.

>Would there be a mall or is it all private owned businesses and Wal-mart?
We have small businesses and walmart. Anything smaller that us doesn't have one. We have a community college and a factory. We don't have any nightlife or bars. I would have to drive 2 hours for nightlife.

You dont have any bars? Dang my town only has 2000 and no Walmart but we've got 2 bars.

> We have a community college and a factory.
What's the factory make?

>We don't have any nightlife or bars.
Okay, you guys are fucking with me. How do you not have at least a bar?

>What about libraries or public buildings?
Haha.

>What is there to do but smoke weed and wait for tomorrow?
Drink, fuck, gossip. Whatever amusement you can make for yourself.

anything around 10k pop will likely have a 2-4 year college, 2-5 major retailers such as walmart, menards, etc., 2-5 car dealerships, 5-10 fast food places and at least one gunshop along with 20-50 other reasonable sized buisnesses to match and maybe another 20-50 really small mom and pop businesses. it should also be rural enough that there be a farm equipment place and the like, so surrounding landscape should have a fair number of farms within 2 miles. there should be 2-5 apartment buildings capable of holding 60-100 or so apartments each, and at least 1.5k houses. also, a town that size has a normal elementary school, highschool, at least one pool. shit like that.

also, 1 church for every thousand people and a large library and maybe 5-10 bars.

My town has a library, a pool, and a park with a little playground for the kids. Kids get bussed in from the surrounding towns to use our pool, so we're pretty high on the hog.
A local seed tycoon also recently sold the town some of its own land so they could pay him to build a sport's complex on it, so now we have a bunch of baseball diamonds we dont need.

Nope. We are gettinf a sports bar in one month though. It's aweful. That one is still going to close at midnight.

Copper tubes. Look up Fulton Ms Mueller Copper Factory. Don't have a bar because alcohol was illegal in the county until like 5 years ago. There isn't a "bar" like you're probably thinking of for over 150 miles. The only bars around are like Applebees and Buffalo Wild Wings. Only one liqour store too.

>Look up Fulton Ms Mueller Copper Factory

Tragic explosion related?

I think I'll have the factory town be the one up from the starting place. It'd make sense that the smaller town would have people commuting towards it.

Are there any small air fields typically around these towns?

No, but many a factory have burned down in the past. Not in Fulton mind you, but in NorthEast Mississippi there were quite a few. It's honestly the only big business here. There is only one big factory and it's a Toyota factory 70 miles away. It was such a big deal that they had seminars when I was in high school that it was coming and all the adults were excited.

One of the farmers might have a plane. Hes the one who gets to do all the crop dusting and take the aerial photography that everybody just LOVES

>Are there any small air fields typically around these towns?
Never. Towns like that are in fly-over country, not fly-to.

There is an "airport" that flies to like 3 places in state about 40 miles away in the "big" city. That's were the crop dusters take off.

so i'm already running a campaign that's something like what you're describing (albeit i'm using AFMBE and it's set in the Stephen King mythos)

originally it was set in rural illinois similar to my home town, which funnily enough matches your description pretty perfectly. two highways at the edge of town flanked by convenience stores. everything but the 24-hour gas stations closes at about 8pm. an important thing to note about architecture in small towns like this is that architecture and how houses are built tend to reflect different eras with economic booms in the region. for example, my home town has many old, very nice houses from the early 1900's and prior to. the next group of houses is from the 40's, and after that most houses were built in the 70's in terms of architecture (wood paneling, black/white checkerboard tiled floors, etc.) and after that just kinda shitty buildings made in the 90's.

usually, holes in roads are filled with gravel for months after being torn up for civic maintenance work before they finally pave them over.

the biggest store in town (ShopKo) sucks and has very little, everyone usually just drives 15 minutes to the next town over to go to Wal-mart there.

I can go on and on with little detail stuff, what sort of info are you looking for specifically?

How do you get around if you don't own a car? Are you just stuck bumming rides off people?

>AFMBE
That's actually what led me to Witchcraft, it's a unisystem game with more of a magic, spirits, supernatural bend.

You don't. Get other people to drive you or get used to staying put.

t. not legally allowed to drive in my state

>How do you get around if you don't own a car? Are you just stuck bumming rides off people
Yes and people EXTREMELY look down on you. Like holy shit you are a useless sack of shit if you can't drive. I can't stress that enough. There is no bus, there is no taxi, there is no uber.

>do towns have any form of public transportation or a cab service for people without cars?

No. If you don't have a car you either better get friends with cars who will chauffeur you around or get used to walking.

town has a taxi service but it's very shitty. they actually drive from the next town over (same town as the wal-mart) and show up wherever you are, usually takes about a half hour to an hour. mostly i think it's used by old people who can't drive themselves to church, the store, etc. other than that, yeah, you basically just bum rides from people, get a bicycle or walk. a common thing you'll see here are fat, drunken middle-aged dudes riding to wherever on a riding lawnmower because they lost their license to DUI. bicycles with small electric motors (under a certain CC so you don't need a license) are becoming more common too.

>Witchcraft
am going to look into this system actually, it might be good to borrow from if it's similar enough

Bonus points if it carries off-brand soda like Shasta.

an RC cola machine standing next to a shed you've never seen anyone enter and doesn't look like it's even maintained

>going to look into this system
It's free and the supernatural section mentioned stealing from AFMBE for more zed types.

So, is small town gossip overblown or do people really know what everyone else's business is?

...

Weird question, and I'm not sure entirely how to phrase it, but: Do people like their towns? WOuld people leave in a heartbeat if they could, is there some kind of local patriotism, to people cling to memories of better days?

Not really. But where can you go? Nobody in a town like that has the money to move out, and everybody knows that the whole "leave to make it big in the city" thing only happens in movies.

>The plan was to have the small town about 15 miles from the next town and then another 30 or so to a richer, small city with a power plant that supplies the area.

Towns that developed before automobiles are almost always 10-15 miles from other towns, so make sure you include a tiny town that's nothing but an abandoned gas station and a town hall the size of a large shed halfway up the road between the two to fill in that 30-mile stretch.

very much so, yes. anyone above the age of 40 in town talks about mostly other people's business. any conversation is pretty much prefaced with people talking about who someone actually is. "user, what was the name of that boy who got hit by a car in your class? what was his last name? well his sister..." ect.

there's a local newspaper that stays afloat due to the older people in town maintaining their subscriptions. though, mostly what people want to read are either the obituaries, the arrest records or stuff featuring their kids. i can't count how many times i've been in a room with someone idly reading the arrest records out loud and stopping to read the full story if someone sounds interested in the blurb.

Got it. That could make for a nice encounter, too.

>no dr. thunder

plebian

i know my home town has a very old abandoned coal mine underneath it that have long since fallen into disrepair. ideal location for evil rituals/horrors that should not be

Well, if you want anything like the nearest town to where I live(1.3k):

Lots and lots of abandoned businesses, dilapidated gas stations, and the like. Sometimes business signs stick around even when the building has long since been demolished/burned to the ground, and even businesses that are lively are still pretty damn dirty looking. At least 3 shitty homegrown roach motels full of tweakers and dope addicts. Most houses are small single floor bungalows or trailers, with the handful of richer people having two story houses, and there are a fucking lot of Confederate flags everywhere. It does have its own police and fire stations, but it's also the biggest town in the county. School is obviously underfunded aside from the football and basketball stadiums, which are still pretty sad.

>How do you not have at least a bar?
Some towns are more strict with their local ordinances, and the population isn't large enough to support one outside of the city center. In that case, there's probably either a tiny bar outside of town (maybe 10 miles away) or the people drive to a neighboring town that has a bar.

Either way it guarantees that you have a lot more drunk people driving on the road late at night.

The vast majority of the young people who aren't deadbeat drug addicts filter out and the older people don't want to leave because it's usually where they've always been/it's different from where they moved from.

damn that's rough, even my shitty town has a few bars. i feel for you user

>What is there to do but smoke weed and wait for tomorrow?
Stone nothing, man. If you don't already have hobbies that you pursue in a real town, little little towns like this don't offer much.

>Are there any small air fields typically around these towns?
Mount Sterling didn't have a dedicated air field, but at least one farmer had a landing strip in his fields that he could land a puddlejumper on. Never saw a plane, but there was definitely a long strip of land that could have served one.

>How do you get around if you don't own a car? Are you just stuck bumming rides off people?
Yeah, basically. If you don't have a car, you're pretty much fucked. And with jobs being scarce, cars are hard to get, creating a cycle of failure where people can get stuck: they want to leave but can't afford to so they spend their money on whatever fleeting distractions they can get so they can't afford to leave so they so on and so forth.

>WOuld people leave in a heartbeat if they could
Absolutely. The only people who like the town are people who've been there so long they develop Stockholm Syndrome for it. Most young folk want to leave and would do a lot in order to do so. Some even manage to but "making it big in the big city" is harder than you think and a lot of these kids have terrible starts with awful education and little opportunity to advance life skills or expand their knowledge and skills.

Irrigation, power lines, and other bits of infrastructure are often very visible and poorly maintained. A cell tower that's somehow still standing can be seen for miles during the day (and at night if it's powered, due to flashing lights at the top for aircraft to see). This could be a good landmark.

It's also extremely dark at night. If your players intend to do anything at night, make sure to do it during a full moon or with military grade tech else they'll be seen very easily.

Random junkyards, sheds, and other abandoned buildings are quite common along roads and in woods. If you need a quick way to give your players an item, they can feasibly find a scrapped version somewhere off the side of the road. Speaking of roads, they're not maintained at all save for highways. Depending on how far into the future you're looking towards, there might be no roads at all.

>do towns have any form of public transportation or a cab service for people without cars?

many people have to get jobs in other towns because their own town is too small to have any good employment options.

>Are there any small air fields typically around these towns?
Yes, municipal airports for the larger towns (1500+) and airstrips for the crop dusters in the smaller towns (as long as they have the agricultural base to support having an airstrip).

It's worth noting that everything people are saying about small towns is HIGHLY dependent on where in the country you are. I'm up here in lakes country and somebody else might be talking about Idaho.

in cold weather there's likely going to be very little to serve as a windbreak so cold temperatures will be very hard to escape outdoors

airstrips will be present in almost any farming community for crop dusters to use

I hate the circumstances of the people in my town but I hate the people in the city more. especially how they look down on the hicks out in the boonies.

The place is a bit of a dump, to be honest, but I don't live there, I live about 10 min outside of town and commute 2 counties over for work. Only reason I live there is because I inherited a house and it's hard to pass up free rent.

How often does violent crime go down? Chicago isn't the best base for what's a normal amount of shooting.

>Do people like their towns?
I voluntarily moved here from a city that had a huge and famous college and a thriving nightlife scene because I like being able to see the stars at night when I sit on my back porch swing in the summer and look out over my big yard that borders the county fairgrounds and my house was dirt-cheap.

Plus I'm only 20 minutes from a town with a Walmart and only an hour from a city that's big enough to have three Japanese sushi steakhouses.

Not all that often, but when it does basically everybody talks about it. break-ins and thefts are more common

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waverly,_Ohio
heres my small town OP. Its got a wal-mart, grades k-12, like 4 bars, lawyers and car dealerships, a fire department and police department and its own(shitty) airfield. Its noticeably less shitty than the towns of the other people in this thread. It only has one major highway running through it though.

If domestic abuse counts: a lot, and most of it doesn't get reported.

like maybe one murder every 4 years. Recently though drugs have been fucking things up and we had a no shit cartel assination
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pike_County,_Ohio,_shootings

What is the tallest building in your small town?

People fight from time to time, but they dont shoot eachother often. When I was in High School one kid got stabbed, but he was buying drugs off a dealer from the city at the time. There was also a string of break-ins for a bit, but people started talking about it and I think it scared the thief, or maybe the deputy caught them, I dunno. He didn't break into my house so I dont give a fuck.
Its kinda weird going from a small town to the city in a way, you find yourself thinking "Oh I cant just hit this guy cause he'll call the cops and they'll actually show up." a lot.

courthouse

The Farmer's Co-op. If that doesn't count the apartment building.

tower at the top of the old courthouse.

Oh yeah, its 4 stories tall.

>How often does violent crime go down?
Uh, well, in Mount Sterling there wasn't a lot of violent crime, since everyone knew everyone else and if someone broke out the shotgun to solve an issue, the victim's clan usually came down on them like a ton of bricks. It just didn't happen. Occasionally, some kid would get drunk or high and do something stupid, usually dying along the way, but it wasn't frequent.

Domestic abuse and drug use were pretty much rampant though, so it's not like crime didn't happen or anything.

>What is the tallest building in your small town?
Courthouse. Two story stuff was about as big as it got.

Fairly rare if you go by the numbers, but if you go by the rate it spikes every now and then because there's only 3000 people in total.

This thread is certainly making me feel guilty. Not that I remember ever doing anything specific, but I've probably done my part to carry that attitude.

Seems like courthouse is the way to go then. Alright, I got work in the morning but thanks for the help. This thread gave me a lot of ideas.

good luck on the path, user

in short, 10,000 is too much, around 5,000 is around where the community can be really self sufficient with fire police and school services as well as a local library and 1-2000 is just poverty level.

>What is the tallest building in your small town?
Elevator/ co-op

Tallest actual buildings are the factories, which are two-story warehouses.

these can also be in the middle of nowhere too

Yeah but those are the ag company elevators for the ag company farms.

you right user

Everybody knows everybody and people talk. If someone's pregnant before marriage you can bet your ass rumours are spreading like wildfire. There's an even split between thugs, hicks, and city people living in the country, and there's usually a lot of overlap. Very few are openly racist, but most are secretly cautious around visibly nonwhite strangers.

People typically don't trust people they don't already know, unless they're relatives or relatives of relatives. Most small towns haven't had many newcomers in some time, and the average joe is (at least distantly) related to at least a third of the town. Monogamous sex between a married husband and wife is considered the only acceptable way of doing things.

Open homosexuals, transexuals, and polygamists are by default shunned, but most people don't openly disparage them unless they're drunk or among friends. There's a distinct "militant survivalist" undercurrent to the culture, even if most don't realize it. Prepping is seen as a wise thing to do, those known to have considerable skill with firearms and/or roughing it in the wilderness are widely respected, and a not insignificant portion openly oppose the "Deep State."

If someone's older than you, especially if you're related to them, it's considered amoral to insult them, and the only thing worse than sexual deviance is violence toward women, unless they did something "to deserve it" and even then, it's looked down on.

Christian piety is the default, atheists and agnostics are the odd ones out. Everyone votes Republican, unless they're thugs, then they vote Democrat to continue to abuse the welfare system, and even then, they typically have conservative sentiments. Most people are normal if somewhat "behind the curve" ideologically, as many as a tenth of the men fantasize about fighting a race war or another civil war against the coasts, and as many as a tenth of these browse /pol/ on the daily.

Hope that helped OP.

Tough question. I like mine, at about pop 5k. I have to commute about a half-hour to get to work every day, but on two meh-tier salaries, we can afford a house big enough to raise a family with twenty acres of forest. I've met good people and have the time to enjoy my hobbies. Life is good.
Mind you, we don't have much of a drug problem. So that might be part of it.

Mostly lines with what I've seen around here, NE Indiana. Racism not so much, although the evangelicals always seem to get a little more, well, evangelical when I've got an Asian compadre along.