A good landmark in a storyworld is more than just a place. It’s a place that helps tells stories. As I’ve noted before, landmarks can help a storyworld by establishing mood, conflict, and character. Of course, in the world of Ghost Punchers, the stories landmarks help tell are mostly ghost stories, and the places are usually haunted.
For example, here are a handful of landmarks found in Ghost Punchers storyworld:
Grayhearst Penitentiary
For over a hundred years, this crumbling prison housed the most vile and vicious criminals in the state. Many of them died behind its blood- and moss-stained walls, and their bodies are buried in the cemetery out back. The prison is one of the most haunted sites in America. It was a tourist destination for a few years when it was first shut down in 2001, but lack of funds led to it being shuttered and signed over to a non-profit preservation society.
The preservation society is actually a group of forward-thinking ghost punchers. They run the prison as a training round for ghost punchers looking to hone their skills in a target-rich environment. It’s not safe — the inmates have only grown nastier after death — but running the Grayhearst gauntlet is a mark of pride to the professional ghost puncher. Oddly enough, while countless ghosts have been punched here over the years, its population of spirits seems as high as it ever was.
The Phantom Pugilists’ Club
In 1873, a group of Englishmen with a mutual interest in the investigation and subjugation of the spirit world founded a gentlemen’s club in the West End of London. The club has changed over the years, but its second-story rooms remain largely as they were a century and a half ago — though it now has wi-fi, its records are all computerized, and the library of occult tomes has grown from several dozen to several hundred volumes. Current members are largely descendants of the club’s founders. They are quite proud of this fact, and are reluctant to let outsiders — even other ghost punchers — access the site’s resources. Those wishing to make use of the club’s amenities must wait for weeks or jump through arbitrary hoops. Many are annoyed by this, but others consider it a small price for a chance to study rare tomes while sipping brandy in a luxurious leather chair.
Downtown Dojo
Over the past 20 years, the Downtown Dojo in Detroit has turned out hundreds of black-belts — and dozens of ghost punchers. The building itself was once a tire store on the edge of a residential neighborhood. When the neighborhood collapsed into poverty and crime, the store moved out and ghost puncher Danny Trask bought the place for a song. Since then, Danny’s turned the dojo into a beacon of safety, courage, and hope for the neighborhood. It’s also a training center for would-be ghost punchers. Along with martial arts, Danny teaches meditation techniques that allow his students to see into the spirit world. He doesn’t offer this training to everyone, but only to those recommended by other ghost punchers, or those he himself recruits from his martial arts classes.
I could walk through each entry and point out the mood, conflict, and character each is helping establish, but I’ll leave that as an exercise to the reader. (Besides, I’m running a bit of a sleep deficit with a newborn in the house, so such a thing would probably degenerate into half-formed, typo-ridden gibberish in two sentences anyway.)
