In this article series, we’ll be revisiting and reviving the Insomnia project, a book designed to bring horror to your D&D game.
The first of Insomnia’s three included settings will doubtless be the most challenging: a small town in rural America, as far as one can be from the rest of the world. Capturing the sense of uncanny detachment and isolation that pervades many small towns will be the easy part. Making a streamlined set of modern equipment rules will be a bit harder. For now, we present the overview of Nowhere, including a few of its landmarks that might feature in your campaign.
Nowhere, USA
The American West is a place defined by its vast, open nothingness: empty prairies as far as the eye can see, beautiful rock formations breaking up the monotony of dry weeds and cacti, and above all else, roads. Long, serpentine highways and interstates weave together the lonesome western towns dotting the otherwise featureless landscape. Innumerable rural towns, each with the bare essentials to call themselves a town, serve as mile-markers along the main roads, with even more remote towns down less trafficked roads, and more remote towns down even smaller roads, and so on, ending in towns as lonely as Nowhere—no less than 70 minutes from its nearest neighbor.
Towns like Nowhere have a sense of being liminal, connected to a vague state of decaying rural Americana and separate from the rest of the world. Perhaps that is why strangeness seems to aggregate in towns such as it. An oral tradition of spotting monsters out in the desert and seeing strange lights in the night sky pervades Nowhere, not in a weak bid to attract tourists, but as a persistent note in the town records. Perhaps people there are just bored, or perhaps, strangeness is easier to spot when there’s nothing else around.
Around Nowhere
As its name implies, even the people who founded Nowhere knew that it was as far from the world as a place could be. On the state map, there are only two towns near Nowhere: Weatherby and Chiron. Weatherby is a scant 40 miles away, but to the people of Nowhere, it might as well be across the state, for there is no direct route between the two cities taking less than two hours of detours on the interstate and lonely backroad driving. Curiously, not a single person in Nowhere can attest to visiting Weatherby, but everyone agrees that Nowhere is much nicer in every respect. Chiron, on the other hand, is a phantom city—a fictitious entry on maps probably meant to deter map plagiarists, which has nonetheless been copied countless times into every map of the area. Where the town of Chiron supposedly stands is instead a bare field of sun-scorched earth and dry weeds.
Only two paved roads lead into Nowhere: Route 91, heading south, and Black Pine Road, heading East. Responsible for connecting the two, there is but a single red stop sign in the town, a landmark all its residents can navigate by. The remaining roads crisscrossing the desert outside of Nowhere are forgotten unofficial paths, leading from places abandoned to remote dead-ends.
A single charter bus, the Schedule 1212 (the “twelve-twelve” to the locals), treks out to Nowhere monthly, passing dozens of small towns on the way. Almost nobody takes the 1212 unless they’re trying to leave the world behind.
Magic in Nowhere
True magic in the real word is almost unheard-of, solely the domain of fantasy and theatrical card tricks. But in Nowhere—a place far from the ordinary (and everything else)—stranger things have happened.
In the modern day, magic is a forgotten art, a remnant of bygone civilizations that is only now being rediscovered. Most contemporary magic practitioners find their knowledge on obscure message boards and dated web forums, and must sift through veritable mountains of misinformation to find an ounce of real arcana. These amateur wizards are part experimentalist, part archaeologist, reconstructing the theory and practice of magic from loose documents and shrewd conjecture.
Others, however, are gifted with magic at birth. Many laugh off evidence of their magic as spectacular coincidence, but a rare few practice harnessing and focusing their talents into true magic.
Conjuring magic of any sort unleashes ripples of side effects: flickering lights, malfunctioning computers, sensations of vertigo, and spatial distortions. Such byproducts seem to be connected to the invisible auras radiated by arcane effects; different auras warp the laws of physics in different ways, and cause unique physical echoes. As such, photographs and videos of magical effects exhibit a characteristic arcane distortion which makes them nigh impossible to capture properly. Even magic items and arcane diagrams exhibit this property, meaning that the distortion might be connected to some physical or geometric property of magic itself.
Landmarks in Nowhere
Like many small towns, Nowhere carries the slow rot of a town abandoned by time. Businesses never come to town, and people only seem to leave. The few businesses and landmarks that remain become stagnant for generations, somehow untouched by the march of time.
The Bostwick Place
The rotting structure, with its boarded-up windows and peeling paint, is a festering sore on the town of Nowhere. For three generations, children have been told to “stay out of the Bostwick Place,” mostly to no avail. Teenagers are fond of daring one another to venture within the building after sundown, staying there as long as they can bear the sounds of rodents underfoot and the structure groaning overhead. Rumors abound about why the home—larger than many around it—was abandoned in the first place, but that fact may have been lost to local history. Apart from the atmosphere of the structure, the people of Nowhere worry about the Bostwick Place for the same reason they worry about their town: the old building stands as an ever-present reminder of the fate which could eventually befall every home and business as the town stagnates.
Camp Bailoak
After a half-hour of driving, the featureless landscape outside Nowhere gives way to hills and greenery surrounding a small lake. This oasis plays host to the only summer camp in the area: Camp Bailoak. Over summer vacation, the children of Nowhere are bussed out to Bailoak by the dozens to learn the staples of survivalism, engage in arts and crafts, and swim in the lake.
Nestled among the pines and hills around the lake are a number of cabins, seven of which belong to the camp, and many more which do not. Some are extravagant getaways for wealthy folks from well outside Nowhere with a desire to get far away from the world, whereas others are dilapidated and apparently abandoned.
The Dairy Prince
A legally-distinct version of a popular ice cream and burger franchise, the Dairy Prince is the sole fast food restaurant within Nowhere. For all its idiosyncrasies, the Dairy Prince is clean, inexpensive, and family-friendly. Its menu is also inexplicably large, listing everything from burgers, to tapas, to shrimp, to teriyaki chicken. With few other food options (and no other quick ones), the Dairy Prince is a common meeting place for the people of Nowhere, a neutral ground where everyone from Ol’ Mariam Webster to the mayor himself come to grab a quick bite to eat.
Last Stop Motel: Free Wifi
The weathered door of the Last Stop Motel is illuminated only by a flickering lightbulb and the dim glow of the motel’s neon sign. Incidentally, the word “Motel” on the sign is perpetually out, causing the sign to read “Last Stop (Free Wifi).” The rest of the building is in a similar state of disrepair: rooms have cracked windows, dingy furniture, and the occasional cockroach. The motel’s owner, a venerable former mechanic, will only incoherently growl at complaints from his desk and point at prices on a poster behind him. Despite the inhospitality, visitors to Nowhere will likely find no other place to stay—for as long as the Last Stop manages to remain open, it has something of a monopoly on the small town.
Nowhere High
From 6th to 12th grade, the children and teens of Nowhere attend the rundown but serviceable Nowhere High. Each graduating class hovers between 75 and 100 students, and usually manages to field an entire football team, which is bussed multiple hours in any given direction to compete (and usually lose) against other small town team. Their mascot, Argo the Astronaut, is a begrudging hometown symbol, even though the costume has historically been terrible.
Whenever odd (or indeed, supernatural) happenings crop up in Nowhere, chances are that a group of high schoolers have caught onto it early. This might be simple precociousness at work, for students often have little better to do than spread rumors and scary stories, or it might be that weirdness collects in a few students at Nowhere High each year.
Ol’ Jeb’s Place
The ominous creaking of a rusted windcatcher cuts the silence over this lone barn and farmhouse. The specter of abandonment hangs over everything on the farm: tractors sit unused, the chicken coop collects dust, and the unplanted corn fields have become overrun with weeds. Yet as locals will attest, the farm isn’t abandoned—Ol’ Jeb is just a recluse, and will meet any visitors to his homestead with a shotgun and a short temper. Though some people speculate about Ol’ Jeb and his farm, most people just steer clear. After all, privacy and property are king this far from polite society.
Owljay Caverns
The howling maw of this cave system might have been a tourist attraction in any place other than Nowhere. Instead, despite its shimmering array of stalactites and stalagmites, its only marks of human visitation are a string of lightbulbs hanging in its very entrance, connected to a generator outside. The winding caverns twist and turn in the pitch black within, plunging deep within the earth to new and undiscovered chambers and tunnels that no human being was meant to walk. Every few years a daring spelunker goes missing in the caverns, searches are conducted, and nobody is found. Without any better recourse, a new sign proclaiming that the cavern is “strictly off limits” will be erected, and swiftly ignored.
Salt Crater
A baffling natural phenomenon, salt crater is a deep, circular gorge outside of town. Inside, a thick layer of salt lies cracked atop the stone, as if a shallow, spherical salt lake dried up on the spot. Residents of Nowhere regard the crater with a measure of superstition and annoyance, as it invites attention from a wide audience of U.F.O. conspiracy theorists whenever a new article is written about its existence. Geologists, for their part, have a few potential explanations for the crater, ranging from the straw-grasping theoretical to the inconceivably complex.
This is really neat stuff to read, and I assume that the Ol’ Jeb’s farm is a more direct reference to Courage the Cowardly Dog beyond the name of the town. However, I must point out that it really rubs salt in the wound. that your town in the rural America has a larger graduating class then my own. Which was 34 by the way. This is more of a jab at me then you though as I said neat stuff keep it going.
You know, we sat down and tried to figure out a correct graduating class, and it’s surprisingly tough! I used a combination of census data and approximate populations for small US tows. I can definitely fiddle with this for the final release.