Darkpoint
A Persistent Small Town Setting for Sisu TTRPG Adventures
Overview
Darkpoint is a small, secluded town nestled deep within a North American forest - the kind of place that doesn’t appear on most maps, and when it does, locals tend to notice. The smiles are a little too practiced. The questions you ask never quite get answered. And certain roads that lead toward the edge of town tend to be blocked for one reason or another.
Darkpoint is a setting designed for ongoing mystery and conspiracy campaigns. Digging too deep is always hazardous here.
The Corporation
Darkpoint is owned and operated in all but name by a nameless corporation whose upper leadership remains deliberately obscured. They maintain a factory on the outskirts of town - publicly, it manufactures industrial components - but the real work happens in a secret laboratory complex concealed beneath or adjacent to it. Their headquarters building sits in town, officially listed as a regional administrative office.
The corporation has funded and constructed most of Darkpoint’s commercial buildings, creating the appearance of a normal small-town economy. The diner, the motel, the general store - many are corporation facades, staffed by loyal employees or family members of workers. This manufactured normalcy is intentional and carefully maintained.
Control and Loyalty
Workers and their families were relocated to Darkpoint under a formal agreement: the corporation provides housing, income, healthcare, and security in exchange for complete loyalty. Residents are not permitted to discuss internal town affairs with outsiders. They are watched. They know they are watched. Most have decided the arrangement is worth it - or have been in it long enough that leaving no longer feels like a real option.
The town has its own police force, but it reports directly to the corporation rather than any county or state authority. Attempting to contact outside law enforcement is discouraged, quietly intercepted, or simply handled by the local police before it goes anywhere.
Outsiders are permitted to pass through or visit. They are treated with surface-level friendliness and low-grade deflection. Moving to Darkpoint permanently requires corporation approval and a signed agreement - though what exactly that agreement entails is not discussed openly.
The Experiments
The corporation’s true purpose is research of an unusual and ethically unchained kind. They conduct studies on the local population - biological, psychological, and otherwise - under the guise of routine company health programs or quietly, without consent at all. They sometimes abduct outsiders who pass through and disappear them into the lab complex as involuntary test subjects.
The nature of the technology being developed is unclear, even to most corporation employees. Rumors circulate. Some of what the research produces is strange enough to suggest it may not be entirely human in origin - though this is never confirmed, and those who ask too loudly tend to stop asking. A handful of outsiders and former residents have reported witnessing technology that seemed decades or centuries ahead of anything known - and a few have described things they could only call magical, effects with no mechanical explanation they could identify.
Strange occurrences in Darkpoint - unexplained lights near the factory, disappearances, animals behaving oddly, residents acting unlike themselves - may have mundane corporate explanations, may be side effects of experiments gone wrong, or may be something else entirely. The GM decides.
The Players
A small group of people - the player characters - are aware that something deeply wrong is happening in Darkpoint. Whether they are residents who have seen too much, outsiders who stumbled in and couldn’t leave, or something else is up to the GM and players.
Going to the police is not an option. Going to any authority is likely to make things worse, or make a character disappear. The challenge is uncovering the corporation’s secrets, helping the people of Darkpoint, and surviving - all without tipping off the wrong people that you know what you know. Exposure doesn’t mean safety. It usually means something worse.
Tone and Era
Darkpoint works best in a tone of creeping dread, quiet paranoia, and isolated community pressure - think rural conspiracy thriller with the occasional genuinely unexplainable event. It is not a horror setting by default, but it can go there.
The GM should choose the era that best fits the campaign. The recommended range is the 1970s through the 1990s, when institutional cover-ups were harder to expose, information harder to obtain, and the isolation of a remote company town more plausible.
1970s
Post-Watergate distrust, Cold War paranoia, government conspiracy undertones.
1980s
Reagan-era corporate power, early tech secrecy, a veneer of suburban optimism.
1990s
Pre-internet information isolation, early cell phones, X-Files-adjacent unease.
Darkpoint can also be adapted to a contemporary setting with appropriate adjustments to how the corporation maintains information control.
Adventure Modules
Being worked on.
Maps of Darkpoint
Feel free to use these maps in your own adventures. Click any map to view at full size.
