Goshen
City: Goshen, Connecticut
Population: 200
Controls: Town and Outskirts
Government: Despotism
Problem: Serpent Cultists
Heroic Opportunity: Arcana
City Aspect: Mystic and Dangerous
About the good only thing people in Goshen could have said about the initial Serpentfall was that the tsunami didn’t come close to flooding the town. Connecticut and the East Coast shattered under the wave, anyway: the town had a shortwave radio and a reliable generator, which just meant that they got to listen to the world fall apart until the radio operator finally smashed the set and hanged himself. There were a lot of suicides, that week. Almost too many to keep the town from just falling apart completely.
But then it got kind of better; people noticed that there was a feller, living out there in the woods. He called himself Mr. Cunning, and while he was pretty clearly a he-witch he was a smart he-witch who gave good advice and didn’t put on airs. Pretty soon Mr. Cunning had almost the whole town listening to his counsel, and when that turned into ‘following his orders’ there wasn’t much fuss. There was maybe a little fuss when Mr. Cunning finally came in from the cold and people saw what was really underneath its robes, but but only a little. And the ones that fussed most soon stopped fussing about, well, everything.
Since then, Goshen is publicly the most obvious outpost of civilization in what used to be Connecticut, and privately a major reason why there hasn’t been much civilization coming back to Connecticut. ‘Mr. Cunning’ is actually a mobile ganglion of the World-Serpent’s very brain, ripped out of its skull by nuclear fire and thrown into the woods outside Goshen; it calls itself ‘The Cunning of Serpents,’ and has no scruples against turning the humans it meets into either servile followers, slaves, or fertilizer. Typically, it’s safe enough to spend one night in Goshen, but not two. Nobody has ever spent three nights in Goshen, and then left successfully.
Mr. Cunning’s not just in it for the blood and the chanting, though; its long-term goal is to take over the Drowned Coast entirely, both mundane and monstrous, and it plans to use humans for its shock troops. Mr. Cunning also collects magical lore and equipment of all kinds. After several years, it’s acquired some interesting things from the literal wreck of a continent. Should somebody clean out Goshen, they would no doubt find some treasure worth bringing out. Of course, it’d probably be cursed, but that just means that it should get sold to people with no emotional connection to the seller, right?