Wednesday 13 June 2012

Hometown Heroes

So as I learned through the WW forums, a Glasgow fanbook for Vampire is coming.

I couldn’t resist suggesting that Something is buried under Red Road, about to be released.

I've never been too keen on setting games in or around home - too easy for everybody to lose suspension of disbelief, to go “that’s wrong” if I change something, or indeed get something wrong. London or Cambridge are close enough, in terms of the kinds of stories I could tell there. Of course, I can also see the appeal of having years of experience of a setting, all its foibles and quirks and stories, of being your own sourcebook.

London and Cambridge in my head look rather like Edinburgh, too. (Which having visited them both, I can get away with.)

Do characters have a “home” where their adventures start and end, or happen? Are they rootless wanderers or townies? How does the environment impact on the series?

2 comments:

  1. There are issues when your players know the place in question better than yourself. I ran one CoC game set in Edinburgh, which was all well and good, till I picked a small village outside of town at semi random on a map for a short scenario. I had the place pictured in my head as rather generic, but no specifics. Turns out I had a player who knew the place rather well. It didn't have too great an effect on the game.

    I ran another CoC game based in NY, but where the PCs visited Montreal, where all the players were living (some for all their lives). It was a good group, and they were all playing Americans, and got into the tourist visiting role very well, but yeah, it could have gone very wrong.

    In both circumstances, it can get a bit meta, but it's also fun for players to do things in their own town that they would never dare to, or have the chance to in real life.

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    1. Good point: The first time I did it (as an experiment) was Cthulhu as well, while I was in high school. The PCs blew the school up.

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