Unfamiliar Settings

[tbug]

Do most of you set your games somewhere familiar to the players? We had our first session yesterday, and when I said that the PCs were in Weyburn, Saskatchewan, three of the four of them started checking the internet to learn about the place. (Normally I discourage computers at the game table, but with In Nomine they mostly have their rulebooks as pdfs so I make an exception.)

The players had fun, so by definition it wasn't a wasted session, but we did hardly any plot. Two of the four players have never seen the prairies, so I repeatedly had to stress how different it is from British Columbia (our home). The players learned about a bunch of stuff happening in and around Weyburn, including things I'd missed in my prep, and I mostly just improved while they explored. I had plot, but if was unfolding over several days and less than twenty-four hours of game time passed during the session.

So a fun time means a fun session, but I'm curious to know if this is a typical occurrence for when players are unfamiliar with a game's setting.

[Rocket Man]

Our (online) GM dropped us into Madison, Wisc., a place that was home to her and unfamiliar to the rest of us. (The initial group was from Colorado, California and Oregon). It proved to be a very entertaining game -- she knew the area well enough to bring it to life and the rest of us got the chance to discover a new place.

It sounds like we got into more plot than you did, but yeah, there was quite a bit of time spent in exploring the place and getting to know the people and key locations in an unfamiliar region. Then again, our GM also enjoys relationship plots and "sandboxing," so it might have happened that way even if it were somewhere we all knew cold.

To my mind, if the players start researching the place as well, so much the better. When my PC first came into IN: Madison, the first thing I did was start looking through online realty agencies to see where it made sense for him to live ....

[Jason]

I've done it two ways with my current group.

Our first campaign took place in Windfleet, Connecticut, a city I made up. The map was sort of based on Portland, Maine (turned 90 degrees clockwise), and the skyline was inspired by New Haven. The benefit was that I could make up things however I wanted about which establishments existed, how long it took to get from place to place, what the city's history was, and so on. The downside, I found, was that my players got very confused about where things sat in relation to one another.

Our second campaign is currently taking place in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where I lived for several years. It's somewhat familiar to my players, but I know it better than just about all of them: One lived there as an undergrad, but rarely left West Philly, and another (my girlfriend) visited me a lot, but mostly just for weekends here and there. This has a huge advantage because none of them know the city well enough to contradict me on issues of geography, but all have a sense that it's a real place with interesting locations and photos available on Google Street View of anyplace I send them. I set up a map on Google Maps with descriptions of known Tethers, suspected/potential Tethers, and other relevant locations, which went over well. It provided them with a ton of the background info that they weren't likely to bother reading if I had just sent it to them in an email. I really like this approach overall, using a real place that is only semi-familiar to them but very familiar to me, and I suspect I'll keep using it in the future.

The third, untried way is to set the game in Boston, the area where most of us grew up. I'm am hesitant to do that, though, because they know it so well that preparing a campaign for it would be like developing a sandbox-style video game. At any time, my players could say, "Well, why don't we just go to (insert place I forgot existed) instead of the locations Jason mentioned?" I like doing things fairly open-ended with lots of agency on their part, but I do have a sort of narrative direction in mind, and I worry they'd derail that frequently. Plus, some of them would definitely interrupt me to disagree about points of geography, reactions of local police, hours that certain establishments would realistically be open, etc.

[Attercap]

I typically try to GM locations less familiar to my players, that way I can invent and change regions to suit the game needs without being called out for inaccuracy. I do try to throw regional flavor in, but, for the most part, all my players have treated settings as "The City", "The Farmland", "The Small Town", etc. using any area as less of a prop and more of a generic backdrop for the game's plot and their machinations.

[Kelly Pedersen]

The first In Nomine campaign I GMed, I deliberately set it in Saskatoon, Sk, the city where I live. I think it did help the players get into the game, since when I described locations, it was easy for everyone to picture them, and I was able to reference local events to make the game feel more "real".
I also played in a campaign, which was set in Montreal, Quebec. That worked pretty well too, since it allowed the GM to use a preexisting setting we were all reasonably familiar with, but without so much knowledge that we'd complain about slips in geography and such. :-)
I've also been planning on running a game set in Calcutta, in India, although that hasn't got off the ground, so I can't really comment on how well it will go yet.

On the whole, I'd say that the Montreal game worked best, for a couple of reasons. First, Montreal is a much bigger city than Saskatoon - it was much more plausible for there to be enough celestial activity to be interesting without straining plausibility too much. Second, Montreal was familiar enough to get the emotional resonance of "reality", without, as I said, being so familiar as to prevent the GM from fudging distance and location and so forth.

My advice, overall, would be to set a campaign in a larger center, in order to have more, and more varied, plausible celestial activity that can keep the players interested. If you're going to go for a bigger center, either set it in one you're intimately familiar with, or set it in one that's familiar enough for people to picture things, but not any more familiar to any of the players than yourself, in order to avoid mistakes.

[Ex astris, veritas]

My group often tends to run in familiar settings -- many of our games have taken place either here in Raleigh, NC or in nearby Chapel Hill, NC (where most of us have lived and gone to school). I've enjoyed these a lot, although small settings like these limit certain stories.

I'm about to begin running a new In Nomine chronicle, set in Philadelphia, PA. I lived in South Jersey as a kid, and loved visiting Philly, and I think I've got a strong grip on the "feel" of the city, even if I'm not up to date on a lot of the specifics. None of my players is familiar with the city, which gives me leeway to mix fact and fiction in shaping my story. I get to mine books and movies and the Internet for story ideas from Philly's past and present, but I'm not tied down to anything.

In our semi-weekly World of Darkness game, we're playing in a completely fictitious California city of the Storyteller's creation. Creating a setting from scrath like that is hard work, but a lot of fun.

[JCD]

I have taken a map from one city and renamed it somewhere else so we have a hard copy to work with.

Recently, I've run a campaign in Columbus Ohio. I have lived here for 7 years. Since the Celestials involved were recently relocated here, or were only here for a year or so, their knowledge is foggier then mine.

What I like best about the real city is the wealth of information underneath it if you dig just a bit. There is supposedly a Mother Superior Ghost in a local College. One of the biggest quack patent medicine moguls lived here. Dozens of potential tethers suggest themselves with a mere shovelful of research.

This means less work and since the GM puts his own spin on things, the players can't get a heads up.

[Captain Midnight]

I've set a game in Memphis, TN, where I grew up, but none of my players had ever spent any significant time there. The one thing I'll warn about when you do this is that your players will all hit on the few things that EVERYONE knows about (in this case, Elvis and Graceland), so you'll need to figure out how those things interact with your game, even if it's just "Nothing celestial about it". I decided to have Graceland as a Tether to Gluttony, and it turned out to be the site of the climactic showdown between the Angelic PCs and the Demonic opponents.

I've also had good luck with setting a game in a part of a city that I knew much better than my players, even though they knew the city (Baltimore, MD) passably well. It's important to remember that YOU run the universe, and that just because Thing X was a Tether in someone else's game, that means exactly nothing now. Try not to let things get away from you if you do get into an area the players know well; seriously avoid open-ended "You're in this city. What do you do?" games if you don't want the players to (justifiably) head for familiar ground.

Then again, I hate games where there's either no detail, or the only things that are detailed are things that are essential to the plot. You can wind up with the equivalent of "I run my mouse over the entire screen until the pointer turns into a hand", and everything else gets ignored. I've had some great games where the story took a radical, unexpected turn when the players picked up on a detail that changed many things. As the GM, you just have to roll with it, and hope that your players can improvise well.

[ladyarcana55]

I have been avoiding the familiar settings. I didn't want to give my boys the feeling of security, but the downside is that I am not familiar with Columbus Ohio. But it also gives me the opportunity to make places up without having to worry about them calling me on it.

Thanks to JCD for helping me with it. The boys are uber impressed with the amount of research they think I've done.

[tbug]

Okay, this is really helpful. My plan is to give the PCs lots of opportunities throughout the three Canadian prairie provinces, so they won't feel too tied to one place (unless they want to) and that will let the players do whatever research they'd enjoy doing on real-world locations without it interfering too much with the game.

I've worked out all of the Celestials in the three provinces, and know the route and schedule of the roving triad. At this point I think I'll throw stuff at the PCs and see what sticks.

Thanks for the advice, everyone!