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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dlsharrock" data-source="post: 4245555" data-attributes="member: 55833">Places people live (Adam West):A few streets west of the Powder Mill district and things change with surprising abruptness. Here are the white picket fences and wooden shingle houses characterised by colonial architecture and the roving building designers of Nantucket. The Church District.The streets are wide and clean. Cars are rare, people rarer still. There's a quietude to the place, broken only by the cry of birds or gentle chatter of locals meeting and greeting as they pass one another in the street. On a Saturday the sounds of the market in Powder Mill filter across, but this generally lends a pleasant, rather than obtrusive, background ambience. Strangely, the throng of Powder Mill give this part of town a wide berth. When they choose to travel west they go out of their way to take one of the other roads. Indeed the junction at Powder Mill and Peabody has been barricaded with a high brick wall topped with shards of broken glass. Thus does the area remain peaceful and unfettered.Lich Street is a long, orderly road, flanked on one side by the Old Arkham Graveyard and its high stone wall, and on the other by a mixture of colonial style houses and typical Massachusetts architecture, some laid out in neat rows, others collected together hamlet-style, gathered in a decorous fashion around the grounds of the Lich Street Church. On the eastern corner where the detached buildings of wealthier residents stand is East College School and its accompanying playground. At a glance, and to the casual visitor taking a well mannered stroll toward the busier side of town, the Church District is a place of good people and clean living. Large manicured gardens are well presented and the homes are well maintained. All in all, a fashionable, though not overtly wealthy, part of town.But look a little closer and there is evidence of disquiet, or at least an atmosphere of misgiving. The gates of the graveyard are firmly bolted, criss crossed with a tangle of heavy iron chains, padlocked in many places. None venture into the cemetary from this side of town, only ever through the larger entrance with its wrought iron archway leading out onto Church Street.Some of the houses, particularly those at the corner of Lich and Peabody, are derelict, though they remain well tended by the inheriting relatives of those who once lived here. The gardens, somewhat overgrown here and there, and one or two broken windows round back, the only sign that anything may be amiss.Most notable of all is the school, closed and deserted, its windows boarded up, playground swings swaying untended with the passing breeze.--Adam West, a local inventor, eccentric and introvert is an atypical Church District resident. He occupies number 6 Lich Street, his house being one of the more grandiose structures, a hybrid of colonial and New England design. The walls are shingled with wood and the roof tiled with neat rows of grey slate. The layout is unique, with a variety of bay annexes extending to conical roofs upon which weathervanes spin lazily in the wind.Looking upon this castle-like house from the outside, with its picket fences, whitewashed walls and grey painted woodwork, one can imagine a veritable labyrinth of rooms inside. A front gate opens onto a gently snaking path which wanders up to a wide porch. A mailbox of dynamic proportions stands just inside the gate, resembling a cross between a bird-house and a smaller version of number 6 itself. Mail men approach it with caution, knowing that within is an intricate device which takes letters and propels them through vacuum shutes to the heart of Adam's house. Several postal employees have nearly lost fingers. There have been several complaints.Within the house Adam has made the space his own, many of the living areas doubling as part of an ever expanding system of workshops and laboratories. Half completed creations adorn every surface, and scattered about them are screwdrivers, ratchets, tenon saws, nuts, bolts, nails, files, hammers and every other imaginable tool required for the fashioning of this, that or the other. Mote filled light streams through the high bay windows, illuminating metal cannisters, pipework and cogs, wheels attached to pulleys and mechanical turbines attached to motors and belts of varying sizes. Dismembered engines and engine parts fill almost every nook and cranny and yet despite the chaos, there is order here. Each step of the grand sweeping staircase leading to the mezzanine landing houses a different size cog and in many cases a small pile of different sized screws. Turbine belts hang over newel posts and schematics are nailed to walls where paintings might seem more appropriate. Every drawer and dresser is filled with an orderly array of washers, rubber connectors, wire lengths and other items of miscellany, all stored in and seperated by tiny wooden slats. Whenever Adam needs something, he invariably knows exactly where to go to find it.Downstairs in the basement is a fully fitted workshop with fret saw, sander, engineering press and work table. Here are more tools, and the main substance of his work in progress. Steps lead up to a trapdoor which leads outside to his back garden.Upstairs, the many rooms are preserved much as they were when he moved in, save for the addition of a library in one corner of the house and an archive in which he keeps the majority of his paperwork, keepsakes and memories. The library stands in a circular room in the southwest tower. Here he stores his vast collection of occult books on a series of custom made curving shelves which reach from floor to ceiling some twenty feet above. There's even a moveable ladder on wheels allowing easy access to the higher shelves. An iron spiral staircase leads to a turret at the top of the tower and here Adam often goes to sit and flick through the pages of one of his favourite titles, gazing out over the rooftops of Arkham and giving his mind, and his imagination, free reign to wander.He knows little of the area, being relatively knew to Lich Street, and knows even less about Arkham itself, though he has read of several bizarre historical occurences in his books, particularly those related to Salem and the witch-hunters of that era. Suffice to say he's hoping to explore the town in more detail. The strange pall that seems to hang over Lich Street is a mystery to him. Being an introvert and not the sort to hang over his garden fence for a chit chat with the neighbours, he's had little chance to delve into the matter.--Again, this is my vision. It's not my intention to take characterisation away from players, but in the creation of the setting it sometimes requires some assumptions, and sometimes I get carried away <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> Please feel free to change anything you want about the interior state of the house, Dire Lemming, but everything about the exterior, the size, the general architecture and the Lich Street area should remain unchanged. The mail box was just an idea, feel free to discard it, or change it <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> Also, the ordered chaos may suggest he's a bit fussy, which may not be the personality you're going for. Change as you see fit.</blockquote>

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