[World-Building] Tourist Destinations For a Superhero Universe

[David Johnston2]

1. The Sentinel: A fifty foot tall giant robot that showed up during an alien invasion to fight the invaders. After the invasion it apparently went into a dormant mode in the Arizona desert. The area immediately around it is cordoned off by the American military but it is so large that tourists can get a good view of it from outside the cordon.
2. Battle Lake: The site where what was likely the most powerful hero on Earth disappeared along with his foe, leaving only a melted blast craster in northern Ontario. Since then the bowl has filled with water and the resulting lake is an object of pilgrimage for fans of the hero hoping to see him return. A museum dedicate to him has been constructed beside the lake.
3. Old Atlantis: Ruins of a city have been discovered near the Azore and are being explored by archaelogists who believe it to be the surviving relics of antediluvian Atlantis. Apart from the archaeologists, there's a private submarine in which wealthy tourists can descend to get a glimpse of the partially excavated ruins. The aquatic inhabitants of current Atlantis have been expressing some anger about surface dwellers poking around in what they fancy to be the home of their ancestors.
4. The Eternal Speakeasy: If you learn the secret knock, then the Eternal Speakeasy can be accessed through the door of any building that was once used as a drinking establishment during American Prohibition. The Speakeasy is quite large accomodating a couple of thousand permanent residents dressed in authentic 1920s style and a thousand or so visitors from more modern times. Once filled to capacity the doors to the Speakeasy stop working until the visitors leave again.
5. Palace of the Moon Queen: A favored destination for space tourists, the Palace of the Moon Queen, is a bubble of magical habitability on the Moon, with comfortable temperature and gravity for humans. The palace is impressive but in some disrepair, showing damage from some long ago battle.
6. Goblin Market: Goblin Market appears only one day a year and predicting which day and which location in England where it will appear is a challenging mathematical puzzle. The small magical humanoids who man the various stalls sell food, drink and various curious artifacts. Street entertainers display flashy displays of illusion and entrancing song. However the food and drink is not to be trusted by humans, and the Market has no use for Earth currency. The goblins will trade in things like occult tomes and artifacts but also things like memories, body parts, children, talents and abilities. Anyone doing more than looking at the Market is best advised to be very clear what it is they are trading and what they will get in return.
7. Yesterville: In 1958 a prototype IRBM was fired from an American military base against a small town in New Jersey. After the explosion the town survived without damage, but covered in an impenetrable dome that seemed to freeze the area in time where it has been preserved ever since. Visitors can clearly see inside the red-tinted interior of what appears to an idyllic town from the past. Slow motion cameras have revealed that the people on the street are moving very slowly and it is calculated that the ratio is one internal second per 3.4 years, meaning that Yestervilles inhabitants have experienced under half a minute. There is no telling when or if the slow time bubble will end.
8. Ivanovograd: One of the hidden research cities of the old Soviet Union, this one has since been revealed to the world along with it's population of sapient gorillas who make up 90% of it's 500,000 inhabitants.

[L.J.Steele]

At some point DC created a tourist guide to Gotham and one for Metropolis. I don't know if they expanded out to Central City or any of the other locations.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Battle Lake: The site where what was likely the most powerful hero on Earth disappeared along with his foe, leaving only a melted blast craster in northern Ontario. Since then the bowl has filled with water and the resulting lake is on object of pilgrimage for fans of the hero hoping to see him return. A museum dedicate to him has been constructed beside the lake.

On a related note, you're likely to see memorials to those (heroes and villains alike) lost to fighting monsters from beyond space and time, conquering space-warlords, etc, and these can turn into tourist destinations. I know in the web serial Worm there tended to be one constructed anywhere the capes banded together to fight the Endbringers (recurring giant monsters that tended to attack at semi-random, always targeting something that would cause a lot of destruction; multiple heroes and villains tended to get killed fighting them off, but they were often successful in preventing the Endbringers from accomplishing their goals... except for maybe the Simurgh, who tended to cause much more long-term damage by corrupting anyone in the vicinity in subtle ways), and I believe some of them became tourist destinations.

[J. Edward Tremlett]

Super-excellent stuff.

[Irish Wolf]

Originally Posted by Varyon

On a related note, you're likely to see memorials to those (heroes and villains alike) lost to fighting monsters from beyond space and time, conquering space-warlords, etc, and these can turn into tourist destinations.

In Champions Online, the central social hub of Renaissance Center is lined with statues of heroes who fell in the defeat of Dr. Destroyer's plot in 1994 (he designed a machine to attract meteors to specific targets so he could hold nations hostage; a group of student heroes from Ravenswood Academy happened upon his HQ in Detroit before he could carry out his plans; he tried to call down an asteroid strike, but most of Earth's heroes who could go to space went to stop the asteroid while the others gathered to fight Destroyer and his robots in a fight so massive it killed most of them and wiped out much of the city, which was later rebuilt and renamed Millennium City). Not only does RenCen attract its fair share of visitors, so do the remains of Destroyer's lab just north of there (in addition to Foxbat occasionally trying to use it as a new base of operations). There's also a statue in a nearby park dedicated to heroes who have fallen since, but designed after popular player character Crimson Bolt. (There was discussion of another statue for Thundrax, created by Champions writer Scott Bennie, but before his passing he had explicitly asked that this not be done.)

[SSlemmons]

I've got a non-RPG writing project where part of my worldbuilding has been making a list of magical artifacts that ill-defined properties that I could use if I had to pull a McGuffin out of a hat -- the Quasmaux Configuration, the Sun Hammer, the Broken Fang, the Undying Heart, the Bavarian Eye, the Orb of Arthong, and the Chains of Horus, among others. Then I pick out locations around the city or the world where they might be hidden, in case I want to send the heroes after them...

It's also useful to keep a technobabble generator around, in case you need generic hyperscience gadgets to leave around the mad scientist's hideout. There are a lot of them out there, but this one seems pretty good: https://www.scifiideas.com/technobabble-generator/

[David Johnston2]

9. The city state of Eklips located in the Balkans has the notable peculiarity of being constantly in the shadow of a large circular supernatural entity which floats in the sky above it. Despite being surrounded by one of Eastern Europe's poorest areas, Eklips itself is a magnet for tourism and money with a local economy revolving around gambling, live entertainment, sex work and drinking establishments. It's a European equivalent of Las Vegas where the sun never rises. Notoriously though, if you can't pay your gambling debts in cash, they will take it out of you in blood.

10. Olympios is an island in the Atlantic Ocean which belongs to no nation, belonging instead to entities who claim to be the gods of Greek mythology, raised out of the ocean to host their version of the Olympic Games, a version which does not exclude superhumans from competition as the mundane games did.