UNQUIET DEAD: Jaunt Info

[powersthatbe]

THE UNQUIET DEAD
An Eldritch Ghost Story Jaunt In the City of Harrogate
August 7th–September 16th

Harrogate is a little British resort town with a dark past. A little over one hundred and twenty years ago, a large portion of the town died when a fire consumed a theater in the middle of a performance. But time passed, the dead were forgotten, and everyone rebuilt.

But in death, as in taxes, forgetting something doesn’t always make it go away. Harrogate has been dying of the same forces that kill towns everywhere: a sluggish economy, a stagnant middle class, corrupt management, being a tourist town in a decade when nobody can afford to be a tourist in England. It’s a slow, grim death, but a mundane one. Ignorable. The sort of thing that starts a clawing existential dread in your heart, but you push it down and get on with your day because that’s life, after all. That pain and uncertainty? That is normal.

What is happening now is anything but normal. People have been seeing ghosts. Not diaphanous white figures. Just - people. People they lost. Reflected in windshields, mirrors, still water - just for a moment. Hearing their voice on the wind, or in the creaking of a settling house at night. Probably just the power of suggestion. Probably, except that it’s happened to almost everyone, even people who didn’t know that this was going around like a rumor, or the flu.

Artie Grove has just died. A local celebrity, a philanthropist and former child actor, Artie was always considered the luck of the town, almost like a mascot, and their sweet, too-public romance with a stranded tourist was the stuff of gossip right up to their star-spangled wedding last month. Now Artie’s gone, car wrapped around a bridge abutment in one of those accidents that looks like a deliberate and unhappy act. Shocked, devastated, the town - and an all-too-cynically welcome flood of tourists - have come into Harrogate to pay their respects. But when wild, undismissable supernatural events plague the funeral - what will everyone think? Is it a public health crisis? Mass hallucination? Publicity stunt? Cover-up?

Of course, it can’t really be the spirits of the dead. Can it?

Travelers are struck with a worse problem. Mundane circumstances, fewer people here than expected—it must be a Walkabout, mustn’t it? Only—Harrogate’s a horror story among Travelers, one of those where almost everyone dying was actually the best available end to the Jaunt. Is this really the same town?

And some Travelers—investigators and infiltrators alike—will be waking up in an empty, mist-wracked city full of dark memories that echo. Ghosts, knowing and unknowing, will slowly discover that there are no revivals here—but possession of the living is far too easy… whatever that portends.

It’s coming. Soon. And death, or the dead, and the twists and turns of wicked history may be the only way to stop it, if the living cannot be made to see the truth.

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MAP/LOCATIONS

[powersthatbe]

Harrogate: a quaint, provincial English resort town, famous for its sulfur-spring baths and its scenic, undeveloped vistas. Harrogate has a population of about 20,000 and is isolated, surrounded by woods or moors on all sides.
The Stray: a hook-shaped two-kilometer long, half-kilometer wide park near the center of town, with groves of oak and hornbeam and towering, shaggy hedgerows. A favored getaway spot for young lovers, beachcombers with metal detectors, and opiate users and their dealers.
Yew Tree Lane: a crooked northwest-to-southeast road that defines the southwestern edge of the Stray and leads up towards Killinghall and the Empty Sinkhole and down towards Burnbridge.
Cold Bath Lane: the kitschy, tourist-trap road coming in off the nearest major highway, running north of the Stray but not quite bordering it, southwest to northeast. Further northeast is the new town centre, including the New Harrogate Theater (almost a century old) and the Harrogate Clinic.
Leadhall Lane: running due west from the intersection of Yew Tree & Hookstone, Leadhall contains the Chapel of St. Bruno & St. Benedict, Mother of Sorrows Cemetery,
Hookstone Chase: the lane along the southern edge of the Stray before it curves, running southwest to northeast, containing the oldest standing buildings in town, including the Historic Inn and the Harrogate Historical Society, just north of Burnbridge.
Killingshall: a village district on the northern edge of Harrogate, mostly sheep and cattle farmers, with a historic slaughterhouse, a wishing well, a fish and chips shop, and several historic inns. The hills around Killingshall have a number of unmarked paths through the woods which serve as windbreaks between farms.
Sicklinghall: a village district on the southeastern edge of Harrogate, known for its strict parochial school, its stables, and ongoing rumors that there are poppy-fields somewhere hidden between the clover and hayfields.
Burnbridge: the main residential district of Harrogate, south of the Stray and built on a man-made hill. Home of Grove Manor - a stately faux-Victorian estate. There are no buildings in Burnbridge that date further back than the Second World War.
The Bath-houses: mainly on Sulphur Street & Electric Row, just north of the Stray & south of Cold Bath Lane & the touristy areas of town.
The Empty Sinkhole: a dry lakebed with steep sides past the hills of Killingshall.

Infiltrators are very welcome to submit local businesses or residences in any of these locations, or to fill empty corners or districts of the map. Mod consultation is appreciated but not required unless the location is intended to be plot-important.