Using real places in fantasy settings. . .opinions?

[Gilladian]

I use the "real world" for my campaign setting. I like it a lot. I found a map from an online map store that had minimal markings on it (just state boundaries) and I plopped my main campaign area down on the Chesapeake Bay. I also bought a world atlas and a world weather guide. Now I know what the natural resources and climate and weather patterns are, without having to do extensive work (I'm detail oriented). I download topo maps whenever I can find them for areas where the players are going, or I use a big atlas at the library for more detailed info. Of course, being a librarian helps with that.

I find that being able to show pictures of the (for example) New Jersey pine barrens and say "this is what you are looking at right now" is remarkably helpful. And the players have never complained of a lack of originality. In fact, I think THEY like it; it gives them a sense that they really do have some grasp of the world their pcs live in.

Gilladian

 

[Ace32]

You are running your campaign in my backyard!!

Hey! Get that halfling out of my birdbath!

 

[qstor]

There's proably maps to a lot of places on the Web too that would make interesting encounter areas like the Great Pyramid of Giza, (Tomb of Horrors anyone?) Stonehenge or Chartes.


Mike

 

[chatdemon]

I'm with Echoes.

While I use Greyhawk as my campaign, I have dragged many a real world building, town, or area in with minor alterations to fit some place I'm developing. The historic cities column in Dragon is wonderful in this regard.

 

[Brudewollen]

For topography I've mainly just relied on what I remember of places I've been. I draw a lot from my countless hikes through the Blue Ridge Mountains for natural stuff.

For castles I will often use castles found in our own world and plop them down into my campaign setting. I bought the Palladium Weapons & Castles book years ago and used many from that source. It worked out well because a great many in that book are French and German castles and I had set my campaign in a fantasy version of that part of Europe. It was nice to just hold up a picture of the castle they saw as they approached it, whether a massive fortification like Le Krak de Cevaliers or some tiny round keep of some petty lord.

 

[MooseHB]

It adds realism

One other good aspect of using real-world examples is the realism that is inherent in them. The locations are actual results of plate tectonics, erosion, climate adaptability, and emergent civilization. Every ancient Roman city is a nice orthagonal grid, except Rome. Rome just gradually developed from a little village to a sizeable town to a great city to the center of an empire, so new streets and neighborhoods developed in an unplanned sporadic sequence. That makes for an interesting map.

I'v got this map of Jerusalem that was an insert from a National Geographic a few years back, and I can't wait to adapt it to a campaign setting. It gives a great and believable history to the campaign world when a real setting can be adapted for role-playing.

 

[Maldur]

We used real world locations in two campaigns:

one (the easiest) we played shadowrun and used our city as it is (just tacked on several stories to most buildings but left the rest alone) this made going toa particular bar easy and chase scence where very nice. (ill cut by my house and at tha bakery ill go left )

the other one was more work but in a after the bomb campaign our gm used a mapbased on norway but with the sealevel raised for about a meter. This changed the map enough, so we wouldn't recognize it. (until another player went on vacation there and recognized a certain highway grid) but ikt also left enough features intact to be able to tell us about abondoned roads and overgrown towns.

both campaigns were great fun.

Another use of some Reallife effect was the following:
Two Americans temporarily lived in Holland and wanted to play but they didn't really speaked english. My DM said ok ill play in english.
Their characters were knights from a feudal country, on a mission they travelled to another country. Because they didn't speak the language they rented a guide, me . So in Reallife they only spoke english, I spoke both english and dutch and when speaking like the locals in the land the knights travelled through
the DM spoke dutch. And I translated. As my character was a rebel against the knights'homeland I didn't always translate very well, and the players of the knights could make out that I wasn't really translating but they couldn't really tell where and what. It made for great roleplaying.

 

[gothwalk]

Using real places

I used the centre of my home village as the basis for a village in one campaign I ran. The players all knew the village, most of them lived within 20km of it, and I don't think anyone ever realised the correlation, even when they had the map in front of them.

It made it much easier to come up with names on the fly - just base them off real people - and made describing the place so much easier - I knew that from the hill south of the village, you could only see part of the main street because the "temple" (church) was in the line of sight to part of it, and that the road outside the "monastery" (school) was particularly prone to flooding in spring and ice in winter.

I don't have any places based on real world locations in the campaign world I have now, although there are a few correlations between certain cities there and certain countries here - the city of Dilis Amarin has some connections with France, the city of Setting with Helsinki, and the nation of Haelthan is generally Saxon in tone, although the native language is more Gaelic. But using the real world locations taught me a lot about what kinds of details go towards making a campaign setting "3-dimensional".

Drew.

 

[Gez]

Myself, I prefer to mix and match until the culture seems both exotic and familiar, yet the sources are not clearly visible.

For example, I have a country whose culture has mix of Middle-East, Ancient Greece, feudal Japan or China, and Renaissance Europe, plus some of my own ideas thrown in. Each time, I grab just one or two elements, and modify them a bit so they blend better in the rest, and here you have a fantasy culture that can give some "déjà-vu" impressions, yet don't leap to the mind as a blatant copy of something in the real-world.