Port of Call

Port of Call: You’ve been to this place once, on some vacation or business trip or another. The smell of salt seems to season everything in the heavy, washing mist and sea-swept rains. Port August sits quietly on the coast, poxed with wave-blasted homes clad in bright, chipping paints of yellow and baby blue. The usual summer traffic seems to evade this little town, for one reason or another: perhaps the highways curve around it by sheer coincidence, perhaps the silty black sands, dotted with pine needles and driftwood, slight the chance of urban vacationers, or perhaps something still stranger puts people’s instincts on edge. The way the chill wind from the coast rides in seems to carry with it a howl, like that of some deep forgotten dream.

Housing only a few thousand residents, Port August has a grand total of three police officers, one grocer, and two multi-million dollar tourist destinations abandoned during construction, including a fully completed luxury hotel complex left to be weathered by the tides, artificial white sands dumped and marbled with the mottled grey of the rest of the seaside. Most strange of all, the relentless growth of pines, ferns, and verdant ivy seems to avoid these places, and black mold never reaches its tendrils in. The picket-fence vacation homes sit untouched, the Northern Museum of Natural Sciences, fully fitted with exhibits and all, remains unchanging, the lights eternally flickering in some kind of indecipherable pattern. The people of this town are wise enough to never enter. The power lines were cut years ago.

Something seems to lurk in this place. A woman’s outcry is occasionally heard from an old chapel on top of a wooded hill. The people have strange dreams nearly every night, often preceding future events. Twelve recorded missing persons cases have been filed in this town of five thousand in the past decade, and a thirteenth was filed just two weeks prior to your arrival. Your reasons for coming here are your own; perhaps a winter vacation away from the ennui of urban life, perhaps a short stay with a relative in the north, or perhaps you stumbled across this place by what you may assume to be coincidence. Whatever the case may be, in the coming months avoiding brushes with the supernatural may prove all but impossible. Navigate with safety, and you may find out what happened to those people who went missing all those years ago, and uncover the dark miasma haunting this failed tourist town; ignore due precautions, and you may end up on a milk carton.

Recommendations:

Threats: Hauntings, The Unknown
Survival/Paranormal Oriented Skills
The Black Abyss

Synchronizes With: Black Collar Worker, Eden Lake Residence, Ontological Nightmare