Real Life Cities in Your Campaign

[ajardoor]

Okay, ITT, we discuss what cities out of real life we use as settings for our games.

In particular, what kind of gameable material do you get from the real city? Why did you decide to use the city in your game? (For the sake of the thread, we'll be counting "renamed" or "fictionalized" (ala Liberty City in GTA4 as a stand-in for the real NYC) real life cities as counting.)

Like, if you were writing a Locations or Hot Spots supplement highlighting it, what would you include for the reader?

For example;
My current GURPS campaign (one of them) has a stand-in for Miami Florida as its setting - in particular, I emphasis both the city's chaotic reputation for natural disasters, violent drug wars and crazy antics. Big swampland is a great way to include tense scenes on murky waters with threats of gators and disease.

[khorboth]

Extremely variable.

I ran a supers game in "New Metroplex, Maine." I just used Portland, Maine, and took a few liberties. It was useful for grounding the game in reality, but I always took it lightly because that game was really cinematic. I was frequently saying things like "well, there's a military base over here." And "It's about three times this size, but still the same basic layout..." It did help me improvise, though. What's across the street from the bank robbery? um... let's look on street view.

In my Vatican Hit Squad game, I set the game in 1667 Europe. I used period-accurate maps and cities. I referenced historical sources as much as possible. One of my players majored in history, and the others care about immersion, so it helped a lot. I learned a lot that I wound up not using.

When running in World of Darkness, I tend to just use real-world cities and maps. It helps evoke the feeling of the world-in-shadows. It adds to the feel that this world is hidden in the corners of our world. I like that feel better than the gothic-punk version, so I tend that way. Also, less world-building is less work.

As with most world-building decisions, it's a matter of deciding what tone & themes I want and working backward from there.

[Icelander]

Boston Mystic
I have run a campaign set in Boston, MA, with visits to several Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine locations in individual sessions.

That was chosen for the atmosphere, the euphonious and apposite name of the river Mystic, for a game about paranormal phenomena that we ended up calling Boston Mystic.

Other factors influencing my choice were that I had an uncle living in the city when I was growing up and Boston was always my favorite city. I'm a long-time, diehard Patriots fan and though I was never much of a basketball fan, followed Larry Bird and the Celtics as a kid.

Plus, Boston just seems like one of few big cities in the United States where there might be Mana, pooling in old houses, historical sites and around centuries of culture. Boston feels like a bit of Old Europe transplanted to the New World.*

Nightmare by a Rocking Cradle
Set in Nasiriyah, Dhi Qar Governorate, Iraq, shortly after the departure of United States Forces – Iraq in 2011. The PCs were contractors working under the U.S.–Iraq Status of Forces Agreement, to train Iraqi law enforcement in modern investigation methods and technical expertise. Unofficially, they were also there to investigate certain mysterious reports and statistical anomalies that were bothering a lot of tidy-minded people. The Green Zone in Baghdad appeared for a couple of sessions.

Caribbean by Night
Despite the name, is actually set on the US Gulf Coast as well as on a superyacht travelling the Caribbean. A season took place in Galveston, TX, some events in Houston, TX, and part of another season was set in a safehouse in Beaumont, TX.

Galveston has a colourful history, a wealth of old ghost stories and oozes paranormal possibilities. The PCs' Patron comes from there and being a centenarian, he has plenty of personal connections with the 'Free City of Galveston'.

Houston is near enough so that some PCs live there and other PCs sometimes have to work there, especially after they were put on the federal task force investigating the shooting incidents in Galveston and Houston harbour.

Beaumont was chosen because that's where the PCs elected to hide their witness while terrorists/cultists were looking for her, in a safehouse belonging to an old friend of one of them, a recently retired law enforcement officer still holding a badge as a Reserve Deputy of the Sheriff's Office (the PC is also a Reserve Deputy and was working as part of a federal task force led by the USMS, which is how he came to be part of the security detail for the witness).

New Orleans, LA; Mobile, AL; Panama City, FL; Key West, FL; Miami, FL; Fort Lauderdale, FL; Freeport, Grand Bahama, the Bahamas; Nassau, New Providence Island, the Bahamas; Roseau, Dominica and a rural area near Derniere Riviere, St. Lucia have also come up.

*Philadelphia has a bit of the same vibe, especially the old downtown area, but I hadn't been there when I ran that campaign.

[whswhs]

I pretty much always use real cities in my campaigns, if they're set in the modern world, and often if they're historical: Bourdeau for my late Roman fantasy campaign, Paris for my early eighteenth century swashbuckling campaign, New Orleans for my black folklore themed horror campaign set in the 1930s. Back when a friend and I ran DC Realtime, we decided that Gotham City was a nickname for New York, Metropolis for Chicago, Central City for St. Louis, and so on. (I think we interpreted Coast City as Los Angeles, but I just discussed it with C and she made a strong case for San Diego.)

You can see the kind of treatment I go for in GURPS City Stats, with its writeups of ancient Athens and modern San Francisco. Among other things, I recommend giving Status, Rank, and Contact information for leading citizens and residents. City Stats also suggests the kind of information that's essential to provide about a city.

[thorr-kan]

What I run is mostly 2E AD&D Al-Qadim, so there's no real life cities.

If I can ever get it pulled together, I have some notes and ideas for an In Nomine Twin Cities campaign, set in Minneapolis and St. Paul, MN.

[Dr. Beckenstein]

I use a post-big-quake Los Angeles in Shadowrun and Cyberpunk 2020 campaigns. I used the (few) canonical infos and spiced them up with real-life trivia about the city and self-invented bits.
The CP 2020 stuff was reused for my Infinte Worlds Campaign. I am lazy.

[Black Leviathan]

We've run a lot of games set in RL cities. More often in Seattle because people around my table know the geography and history well. But we've also run games in Portland, Baltimore, and Paris Texas, and of course most of Poland. It's easy to get road maps of cities to show relative distance of places or how streets are laid out. You can get theming photos easilly. It's easy to google information about how industries or events run in the city.

[seaweedbrain]

I've used NYC many times, one session the players used street view and google maps to help plan a heist

[RogerBW]

I used Jacksonville FL for my recent Monster Hunters game – well, the Florida! version of it anyway (largely inspired by comments in The Good Place). Even though I've travelled a bit in the USA, Street View was very useful because the utter sprawl of it (most places have nothing over a single storey) gives it an unusual feel.

https://tekeli.li/hurricane-season/ includes a map I built, with links to Street View for the key locations.

[patchwork]

My absolute favorite is Texas; 2 large cities, 3 small cities, 20 unconnected overgrown towns, deserts, alligator-infested swamps, lots of guns, lots of bibles, no one regards corrupt and incompetent local government as unrealistic...if I'm running in the real, modern world, I'm running horror, and Texas is gloriously horrific. I prefer the two large cities, Houston-Galveston and Dallas-Fort Worth. If you want a road trip, New Orleans is not far away.

I focus on universities, local government, and physical infrastructure. Business is important but in the modern age can change in the blink of an eye.