I like environments. I think environments are cool; they tell entire stories about the people inhabiting the area, its history, the time period - YOU CAN READ MINDS IN A ROUNDABOUT WAY. Basically you can make your player feel like Sherlock Holmes himself if you encourage them to explore.

So how does one make the environment tell a story?

DETAIL

But knowing what kind of detail to put in takes practice. Which is where this whole explanation of my super fun exercise comes in to play. Disclaimer, the example I use here is a map I made ages ago since I haven't touched HPL2 in a while.

STEP 1: Start with a location.
My favourites to map are bedrooms, labs, and gardens. For this example, I'll pick bedrooms (so many HPL2 assets work for that).

STEP 2: Add a concept.
Something like disease, war, chaos, loss, love, or education. I'm picking disease.

STEP 3: Relate the two.
So for my two, disease and bedrooms, I'm going to go with the obvious of a person being bedridden by a fatal illness. Some other combinations could be a house with a secret room where a family is hiding from the war going on outside (that would be interesting; how do you tell the player that there's a war?), a garden kept by a man who just lost his wife, or a deserted pub where one of the patrons started exhibiting signs of the black plague.

STEP 4: Make a story, flesh out some of the details you might include.
A young girl has caught tuberculosis. The parents can barely scrape together enough change to afford her doctor anymore, but soon they won't have to. Symptoms of tuberculosis include coughing up blood, chest pain, weight loss, fatigue, fever, night sweats, chills, and a loss of appetite. One of the parents deals by devoting themselves to religion, the other prefers the bottle to the bible.

Now obviously HPL2 is not too great for scenes involving people, so lets make-do with what we can! Send the player forward 30-odd years in time and have them discover the room where this all took place.

STEP 5: Build the room and make sure to include those details you scrounged up in your story phase.
So for mine, I included some dried blood stains on the end of a broom stick, a bucket of bloody water, a plate with very spoiled meat on it, a bed with a pile of blankets beside it, a very out-of-place metal table containing instruments that a doctor might use (along with a note detailing the patient's symptoms, and age), a chair sat facing the bed (but distanced from it), the pile of clothes that has a dress on it, a book shelf where the centre pieces are a painting of a church, and a cross, and broken wine bottles behind the bookshelf. There's also a bible thrown into the corner and covered in cobwebs, to indicate that the parent lost faith when their child died. Unfortunately I think the final product of my example might be gone... I checked the old thread and my link's broken. Sorry >_> Have a screenshot

Alright your turn ;D