Lets Make A Twisted Small Town

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by ericthered

I'll note that this is an "upscale" community. There is more money flowing around than most communities of 10,000. It also means it likely has a number of people who live here and commute elsewhere. Its also going to have more robust services than your classic small town.

Its going to be reasonably close to a bigger city. Small towns of 10,000 don't just become upscale for no reason. Usually they are an enclave of a large community, perhaps on its outskirts.

Yes. All of that is why I situated the Jaivik Technologies facility nearby and assumed the town would be on an busy trucking route. A town of 10,000 isn't really all that small, and if it's upscale, it's attracting money from somewhere – most likely from the nearest big city, where ordinances or taxes are unfriendly to certain kinds of enterprise.

It probably looks like a not-so-cheap suburb, or a college or company town, with a large number big, well-preserved houses with manicured lawns, quite a few little parks, a shopping strip with boutiques and coffee shops, a square with a proper town hall and a couple of other municipal buildings, and plenty of well-maintained fences and flagpoles. It would likely fall on the high end for physicians, police officers, etc. per capita (I'd say at least a dozen of the first and two dozen of the second), and most probably have a full-time fire service (not a volunteer one). The people doing all this would be channeled from the lower-income kinds of jobs found in more depressed areas.

[cptbutton]

When curious people go to the library or the local historical society to research the area's Native American history they are often surprised to learn that there isn't any. No one knows what tribes or language groups lived in the immediate area. No old names of streets, hills, lakes etc. No treaty ceding the land to European settlers, no records of massacres or deportations, no nothing.

Many people insist that it was because this area truly was uninhabited before European settlement. More cynical people just assume that the locals were just hit harder than usual by the plagues, massacres, deportations, etc, and that the records were lost or destroyed with unusual thoroughness.

The truth is that there is no history because the Native Americans in the surrounding areas knew that this area was cursed, and stayed away. They were probably right, too.

[Apollonian]

Originally Posted by Kromm

Yes. All of that is why I situated the Jaivik Technologies facility nearby and assumed the town would be on an busy trucking route. A town of 10,000 isn't really all that small, and if it's upscale, it's attracting money from somewhere – most likely from the nearest big city, where ordinances or taxes are unfriendly to certain kinds of enterprise.

It probably looks like a not-so-cheap suburb, or a college or company town, with a large number big, well-preserved houses with manicured lawns, quite a few little parks, a shopping strip with boutiques and coffee shops, a square with a proper town hall and a couple of other municipal buildings, and plenty of well-maintained fences and flagpoles. It would likely fall on the high end for physicians, police officers, etc. per capita (I'd say at least a dozen of the first and two dozen of the second), and most probably have a full-time fire service (not a volunteer one). The people doing all this would be channeled from the lower-income kinds of jobs found in more depressed areas.

It also probably has a couple trailer parks in out-of-the-way neighborhoods where some of the folks who work in low-end jobs live. Since it's near the interstate, those might be near near a couple of exits. The kind of places someone might move to when they don't want to be found. There's probably a couple small towns (2k-5k) within a half-hour commute that aren't as nice, but where people who can't afford Serenity properties live. (Natives of those towns probably regard Serenity folk with suspicion as "big city weirdos.") There's a small bus service that might be underfunded serving the county; and, of course, there's a cute little farmers' market in the square every week where you can buy fresh veg and fruit, assorted crafts, baked goods, and boutique meats. Speaking of farms, Jaivik Technologies bought out a few failing farms when they moved in; now they're test bed farms run on the sly. A few local farmers and activists aren't happy about the introduction of big agribusiness into the area, but that ship probably sailed a long time ago.

West River College is a very small (student body of about a thousand) liberal arts college a few miles outside of Serenity Falls, down the river a bit. It might even predate the town, if you count the boarding school it evolved from. While small, it's prestigious - in the top quintile for schools its size. Surprisingly, it has few ties to Jaivik Technologies, although they did just break ground on a new science building partially funded by the company. West River is best known for its basketball team (go Boaters!), the historic Pioneer Hall that forms the center of campus, a history of (restrained) environmental activism, and for some very competitive full-ride scholarships. The small town of West River (also about a thousand people) surrounds the college.

Secret: West River's trust owns land in Serenity Falls. A lot of land, masked by several shell companies. If someone were to really dig, they'd find that the college owns, wholly or in part, about a third of the city. The rents from this land are what let West River keep its costs down, and with Serenity Falls' property values rising, the college is coming into quite a bit more money than expected. It's all legal, but the college administration likes to keep it quiet.

Dark Secret: The college archives hold a complete history of Serenity Falls and surrounding area. It's in the restricted holdings, though, and rather hard to get hold of, if you even know it exists. The college administration - at least, those members of the admin who are in on it - maintain the history, and using it for blackmail material is one of the ways West River College managed to own so much land. There's a problem, though: Certain volumes and items of the history have gone missing and reappeared in recent months. The college librarian has kept this a secret from the rest of the administration, but desperately needs to find out what's going on.

[Kromm]

I just poked around some . . . A prosperous town of 10,000 is likely to have its own:

• Full-time police and fire departments, with their own building (possibly shared) and vehicles.
• Hospital (a small one).
• Post office.
• Town hall, with clerks and records.
• Full-time municipal staff tasked with maintaining water mains, storm drains, streetlights, roads, parks, etc. These, too, will have their own building and vehicles.
• Elementary and high schools – one or possibly two of each.
• Churches, at least one per religious denomination of importance.

Where corners are cut relative to cities is in services that aren't needed all the time. For instance:

• The animal-control officer will just be someone on the police force.
• If there are paramedics at all, they'll also be firemen.
• The hospital won't have surgeons, advanced diagnostic gear (anything that requires a technician), or specialists such as oncologists and neurologists.
• Problems with the telephone or electrical lines require a truck to come from a central utility facility (see below).

Other services towns this size commonly have:

• Bars, cafés, diners, and restaurants, usually plural for each. Probably not more than one show bar or fancy restaurant unless there's tourism (see below).
• Car lots, sometimes even more than one.
• Cinema – a small one, with a single screen.
• College, albeit a small one. However, if the town is built around it, it could be larger, even a significant university.
• Gas stations, typically one on each approach into town.
• Inns, usually one motel near the highway, one hotel in town, and quite a few bed & breakfasts in the nicer residential areas.
• Real-estate offices – either one company, or two or three agents working out of home offices.

As I posited with Slim Winkler's place, it's common for a diner and gas station to be combined into a truck stop out on the nearby highway. Other things often found on the outskirts of town – and technically not inside town limits – are:

• Agriculture. Farms, ranches, that kind of thing. Most towns have their roots in this, even if it hasn't been relevant to the local economy for most of a century. The people who live and work here are in addition to the town's population.
• Businesses that often have legal troubles, because they're seen as dangerous (e.g., fireworks stands and gun shops) or immoral (topless bars, strip joints, even "stag ranches").
• Corporate campuses. The employees might not actually live in town, but may commute there from nearby towns or even the big city. If the town is nice, the people in charge are more likely to live in town while their lower-downs have to commute.
• Military facilities. These are very often built near towns, and may engage in an exchange of services (e.g., townsfolk can go to the base hospital, but the town takes care of the roads up to the gates). Any troops here are in addition to the town's population. Tons of these are abandoned: camps not used since WWI or WWII, old radar stations or missile bases from the Cold War, etc.
• Regional centers that serve many nearby towns. For instance, one town in the region will have the depot for the electric company, another will have the depot for the phone company, and yet another will have the regional mail-sorting facility.
• Resource exploitation. Mines, quarries, logging . . . whatever brings in money. Like agriculture, these things are often the original economic reason for the town, but may well be nearly irrelevant – or abandoned – in 2017.
• Tourism. Things like boat rentals, campgrounds, and ski hills are rarely in town, though if they exist, there will be businesses in town to exploit the opportunity (from some extra restaurants and inns to full-on sporting-goods shops).

[cptbutton]

Geoffrey McWhirter is 59 years old, with brown hair mostly gone to gray now. Friendly and in good physical shape, he does not fit the computer nerd cliche that closely, though strictly speaking he does live in his parents' basement.

He grew up in town but left at age 16 for early admission to an elite out of town university, desperate to get out to somewhere interesting. His older brother Arthur stayed in town, he liked it there. Geoffrey will quite vigorously deny that wanting to get away from his brother was a factor.

He got involved in computer science and got very heavily into "ethcial hacking", "information wants to be free" activism and the like. He was working at a Route 128 startup when Arthur became severely disabled, from some cause that no one seemed very clear on. Geoffrey was forced to move back to Serenity Falls to help his parents take care of Arthur. He won't admit to resenting this. Not while he's sober, at least.

He started up the town's Internet Service Provider back in the days of dialup as a way to get Internet access himself. As broadband moved in he merged with the local cable TV company. But as the ISP business consolidated, he had trouble competing with the huge telecomm companies taking over the field. In desperation he used his hacking skills to get some dirt on local politicians so he could pressure the City Council into keeping them out*.

The town has very good broadband and public WiFi service, which he works hard on to give the Council justification for their actions. This is expensive, and the company has been losing money for years.

His secret is that for all his prattle about information freedom and ethical hacking, he has been steadily sliding down the slope of compromising himself in the name of survival. It started with just a little blackmail research to keep the big ISPs out. And then to skim some money from somewhere to keep the company operating. And to figure out why the crime statistics spike in the late summer. And to ...

These days he routinely plants spyware anywhere he can in the town, and has even started planting hidden mikes and cameras in public places, and private homes when he goes there to help people with computer issues. He restricts his use of all this though, telling himself it is all "just in case", only used to keep his company alive, or to put at stop to really nasty crimes or situations. That's what he tells himself, anyway.

(He may be the source of the emails to Detective Quentin Boles.)

But he keeps finding more and more hints of dark secrets, all over the place. He can't decide if he is imagining things, if this town is unusually full of dark secrets, or if the whole world is really like that. He really worries he is turning into a crazy conspiracy theorist.

While some women in town show interest in him, he rarely dates. This lead to the inevitable assumption that he must be gay, but the truth is that he is conflicted. Since so many people in town have dark secrets, he assumes that everyone does, and fear getting involved with someone who isn't what they seem. Which is this town, seems to be everyone.

While he could use his access and skills to research prospective dates, he refuses to. If you might love someone, you don't do that sort of thing to them, it is grossly dishonorable and shows that you have fundamentally the wrong attitude about them.

* I don't know enough about the realities of the ISP business these days to know how wildly implausible this is, but hey.

Edit: He has started sneaking subtle hints into peoples' search results, random music playlists, etc, on the theme of waking up and seeing the truth. Especially his favorite song from Lords of the New Church, "Open Your Eyes" (to the lies right in front of you.)

[Phantasm]

I've been basing my suggestion on the twin boroughs of Stroudsburg and East Stroudsburg, PA, which are close to where I grew up. Together, they tend to have 10K people, not counting the college students. (There really is no difference between a borough and a town in Pennsy; the main difference that I can tell is the mayor in a town is part of the town council, while in a borough he's separate from the borough council.) The entire twin borough area and surrounding townships have about 50K people as of the 2010 census.

Stroudsburg, being the county seat, has the county courthouse, a main street with a number of small businesses and lawyer's offices, a high school that covers not just the borough but also Stroud, Hamilton and Jackson townships, and the Stroud Mall which has an 8-screen cinema and is bounded by a Penny's and a Macy's (last I checked). The main street has a small 1-screen theatre (where I first saw Star Wars in '77) which has been converted into a revival church.

East Stroudsburg is home to East Stroudsburg University, Pocono Medical Center, and Frank Frazetta's gallery, as well as a high school that covers not only Eastburg itself but nearby Smithfield and Middle Smithfield townships, and the much smaller borough of Delaware Water Gap. It used to have a passenger train station; the tracks are still there, but the trains are now mostly just cargo headed for a number of cement plants in the nearby region. It also has a number of other medical services, and a K-Mart shopping center that may now be taken over by Wal-Mart.

Both boroughs have volunteer fire departments - same with every other fire department in the county - mostly because there is no funding for full-time fire departments. They have full-time police for each borough. Between them, they have four funeral homes, though most of them service the surrounding townships (subdivisions of the county) as well as those in the borough itself.

Other than that, most of what Kromm says is true for the area.

The boroughs sit off I-80, and have US-209 as their main street. PA-33 branches off from I-80 on the west end of Stroudsburg to head south to Bethlehem Township, PA (separate from Bethlehem, PA, which it's near). PA-611 runs north-south through Stroudsburg from Mount Pocono down to Easton, PA, and ultimately into Philly, following the Delaware River for much of the run. PA-191 also runs north-south, crossing 611 in southern Stroudsburg (south of the Interstate) and headed toward Bethlehem proper.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by ericthered

I'll note that this is an "upscale" community. There is more money flowing around than most communities of 10,000. It also means it likely has a number of people who live here and commute elsewhere. Its also going to have more robust services than your classic small town.

Its going to be reasonably close to a bigger city. Small towns of 10,000 don't just become upscale for no reason. Usually they are an enclave of a large community, perhaps on its outskirts.

Or within easy driving distance. You see that a lot in some parts of the country, a modest-sized city or large town, surrounded by suburbs and then further out, in the countryside, various smaller communities ranging from large towns to villages, within say an hour's drive.

Or alternatively, it could be one of several modest communities of comparable size, clustered in a region without actually touching, but within easy driving distance. You see that in places too, instead of a single city there are several modestly separated large towns functioning (less efficiently but sometimes more pleasantly) as a single city-ish group.

One such town might have a substantial hospital, for ex, too big for its town, but it also serves as the main hospital for the other towns too. Another town might be the site of a factory that employs people from all the towns about.

It's not quite common, but it isn't rare, either.

[adm]

Originally Posted by Apollonian

...There's a small bus service that might be underfunded serving the county; ...

That will limit the town's location, the only bus services in SW MO are in Springfield and Joplin, with limited routing, and indifferent scheduling. With the possible exceptions of Kansas City, and St. Louis, County wide bus services do not exist in Missouri, and outside of the West Coast, New England, and the Great Lakes region, such things will likely be limited. In much of the U.S. you either live close enough to work to walk there (rare), rely on other people for transportation (many people do this from time to time), or own a car (even if it is a crappy one that's falling apart).

[David Johnston2]

Robert Twining is a spectacularly good high school science teacher. He has a real gift for getting the students interested and involved. He gets them to take samples of their own blood and hair so that he can show them what they look under the microscope, shows them what their brain activity looks like when they think about differents, and it isn't at all rare to see his students going around town and the surrounding area taking samples of soil, water, plantlife and even animal droppings. His high school is consistently ranked at the top of the state when it comes to STEM subjects. And his dedication goes past that and into his students emotional well-being. He almost always notices when when a student is feeling particularly stressed and he can be relied upon to listen sympathetically to their problems. He gives himself regular injections that he explains as controlling his diabetes.

His secret: He secretly records all his conversations and the recordings, and the samples and scans from his students end up in a lab filled with state of art equipment underneath his house. He's trying to figure out what's wrong with the town.

His dark secret: He works for a government project descended from MKultra. He's trying to figure out why something that should be making people calm and and a bit suggestible is instead producing erratic behaviour. He believes it's the result of an unidentified interaction between the pollen and some local element of the environment.

[Phantasm]

Based on a RL open secret:

The local fast food fried chicken joint has a reputation for being THE absolute Worst Place to Eat 15 years running. It has been shut down several times by the food and health inspectors due to many reports of food poisoning, supported by tests done at the county hospital. Yet it always re-opens, and always turns a profit, despite no one local EVER eating there.

The Secret: the place is a mafia money laundering front. It's not even that big a secret, as people talk openly about it.

The Dark Secret: There is no dark secret about the place! That doesn't stop people who are trying to find out the secrets of this town and its residents from tying it to pretty much every dark secret in this thread and then some. Face it, sometimes you need to throw the PCs a red herring. :)


(Based on the KFC on Lower Main St. in Stroudsburg, PA, which has long been rumored to be a mob front because there's no way a place that bad should have re-opened the third time, much less the fourth.)