Why a fake city?

[SteelCold]

Now i want to run a campaign in Frankfurt or Stuttgart.

[IndianaJoe3]

For my current campaign I vacillated between St. Louis and, "Gateway City." I eventually settled on St. Louis.

[Balabanto]

Marvel has some interesting quirks involving it's version of NYC. When Daredevil was created his home neighborhood, "He'll ' s Kitchen," was a slum worthy of its name. But it gentrified twenty years ago and is now called "Clinton," containing most of the theater district and lived in by trendy affluents. Ben Grimm ' s home "Yancy Street" doesn't exist, but the still highly Jewish "Delancey Street" does. Doc Strange would have been priced out of his Greenwich Village home years ago unless he has money magic, which he may well have.

 

Doctor Strange was the foremost surgeon of his day. Even being forced to retire, he would have more than enough money to maintain that home.

 

That being said, I always use real-world cities because it gives me a population density basis to figure out how many superhero teams a city can realistically support. (It's really kind of stupid. I take the total number of baseball, football, and basketball professional sports teams a city has in the real world, and that's how many it is.)

 

But also, that gives just as much grounding as I need to make things fun. It saves me from having to describe things like the George Washington Bridge, the Sears Tower, and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. People know what these things look like.

[Blue]

Lack of aspersions. Your city is what you want it to be. My campaign city is a per planned city that would have benefitted from geomagnetic lay lines if it hadn't gone so wrong; a failed utopia essentially.

 

Also, if it's your city you can put it anywhere. We already know where Chicago and Miami are, but Loothaven, TX, home to more robberies per capita than anywhere else? That's where you want it.

[Vondy]

Ed McBain started out writing his first 87th Precinct book in NYC, but it quickly became "The Big Bad City" with "Isola" standing in for Manhattan, etc. His reason was that he got tired of constantly bothering the cops down at his local precinct in order to get the details right. So he started renaming things and made no bones about making direct and obvious parallels to New York while keeping it "fake" in order to win some latitude and get back to the important part -- the plot and characters themselves.

 

A fake city allows you to take some liberties, add elements you need and ignore others that impair your craft, and not be accosted by pedants at every turn. And, when you are dealing with gamers or genre readers (esp. crime genre readers) you had better get the details right or everything else about your story will be passed over amid the the gnashing teeth of criticism.

 

Incidentally, I run many of games in Haborview-Queen County on Wulj Sound which has a view of Mount Talol. Harborview is a major trauma center in the greater Seattle Area, Queen is a replacement for King (county), while Wulj and Talol are native American names for Puget Sound and Mount Rainier respectively. There is even a Talol Valley in Harborview. And, the waterfront overlooks Frasier Bay instead of Elliot Bay. In the show Frasier he had a view of Elliot Bay from his penthouse. The list of replacements continues...

 

One reason I did this is that the King County Sheriff's Office has a Major Crimes Unit with a broader mission (more potential plots and range) than the Seattle PD homicide unit, but it doesn't work in the city. To avoid jurisdictional issues and use the city more, I wanted a Sheriff's office that operated more like the Miami-Dade Sheriff's Office. So... Harborview-Queen County has the HQSO, which provides a ton of special units and services to Harborview.

 

Trivia point: I renamed the Green River / Duwamish Waterway the Coffield River. Can you guess why?

[bubba smith]

no why?

[Roter Baron]

Dunno. I hope Vondy is gonna tell.

 

But somebody mentioned Vibora Bay. First off: The drawings are godawful, crossing to plainly bad and peaking at so-so for amateurs. But the whole settinh has a very nice Urban Fantasy or Supermage campaign feel to it.

 

I never gamed in VB, but I consider the setting to be a clear winner (and the illustrations worth a lynching).

 

Stark City for ICONS is a nice setting (even comes with downloadable city brochures for newly arrived citizens!) if you are titred of another New York City knockoff and are desparately searching for a Chicago knockoff.

 

And if Hudson City is the best (and I think - improved) knockoff of Gotham City (which emulates a dark NYC), but you always wanted that big city-small town feel of a down-on-its-luck rustbelt-city, try Bedlam City for M&M/ Savage Worlds. While Hudson City has more badguys than you can fire your uzi at, Bedlam City has a mob that you get to know on first name basis and no more than a handful of gangs.

 

One of the endearing things of Hudson City is that you have criminals and crimes for every taste and of any variety:

Monday the Mob.

Tuesday some Outlaw bikers.

Wednesday karate at the gym.

Thursday breaking up the amphetamine hustle at said gym.

Friday night is Serial Killer Night.

Saturday is Tong-Triad War Extravaganza and

Sunday is finally Dark Executioner's day with the kids in the park (including a kidnapping attempt by Blood-Red Cannibal).

 

Bad about that is that the impact of the PCs is limited: You can cut the weed of crime, but it always grows back. Of course that gives you more to do next week.

 

Bedlam City is limited in its crimes and syndicates.

No tongs.

No triads.

Two Mob families.

Some 1% bikers.

About 6 sets of streetgangs.

Some four-colorish badguys.

 

But make no mistake: When I read the descriptions a lot of them make Hudson City criminals want to go back to Crime School to finally get that diploma in Advanced Callousness & Total Badassery. Some are really merciless, bloodthirsty bastards - even for a dark champions campaign.

 

Good: You can really make a difference. If you kill 8 mobsters and Don Dominik, the Luginato crime family is in total disarray and possibly done for for good or a long while (years).

Bad: "I wanna fight the Tongs!" - "No, Nunchuck Chap, we are not travelling to Hudson City AGAIN! We don't have 'em here. Punish what's wandering in the streets, whydon'tcha?!" = Less variety.

[Chris Goodwin]

I did up a whole fictional US state once.  (Jefferson, whose major city was Edge City)

[Vondy]

no why?

 

Dunno. I hope Vondy is gonna tell.

Its admittedly a touch macabre, but Wendy Lee Coffield was the first victim of the Green River Killer found on the banks of the Duwamish Waterway in 1982. Its a Seattle-centric and true crime genre reference.

[Roter Baron]

You ought to give people a chance to solve your riddles, Riddler!

 

THE BATMAN (moping)

[Rebar]

When playing Champions I always use the city I am living in (or cities - since I am in the Twin Cities).  I do this because it makes it easy to describe a certain location or look up a location.  My players have had a fight in the Mall of America, local Science Museum, one of the big parks in town, University of Minnesota, the Governor's Fishing Opener, and the West End.  Their headquarters happens to be in a building right next to where my family and I go on Sat. mornings for a Sat. morning coffee jam.

 

If I want to twist things around it isn't a problem.  I just create 'fake' officials.  Also since I am running a Silver Age Style game (not time period but flavor/tone), corrupt city officials are few and far between.

 

I too have always set my campaigns in my home city. There's a touch of vividry that comes from battling Mechanon at the very intersection where you're actually stood.

 

The way we deal with any discrepancies is to put the campaign set 10 years in the future. This kills two birds with one stone:

1] 95% of the city is familiar to all, but anything I want to change is simply something that's changed in the last 10 years of the campaign (still in our future).

2] It explains where all the extra tech came from that my games invariably have. There was (is) a technology revolution.

[Vondy]

I am a product of my culture ... even in gaming.

 

There is nothing wrong with that! Identity matters and has value. Let alone the old adage, "write what you know."

[Vondy]

I did up a whole fictional US state once.  (Jefferson, whose major city was Edge City)

 

In Lois & Clark the city of Metropolis was in the state of New Troy.

[steriaca]

Humm...what the Champions Setting needs in fake citys which they curently lack:

 

1) A western fealing city (Sergestion Name: Star City). A medium size to large city where many people wear ten gallen hats and cowboy boots, where spanish and native american toungs are spoken as much as english, and where the superheros and supervilians tend to get there insperations out of western lore.

 

2) A whosome mid-western city much like Milwaukee (Sergestion Name: Midsberg), a place where you can get to anywhere else in the campain world from, but is still enougth going on inside it to keep thoes who don't want to wander away to do. (Of course, all whosome citys have secret slimie underbellies).

 

3) A "company town" ("Corp City") where most everybody is employed by one big company. Think Detrot from RoboCop, but cleaner.

[SteelCold]

Humm...what the Champions Setting needs in fake citys which they curently lack:

 

1) A western fealing city (Sergestion Name: Star City). A medium size to large city where many people wear ten gallen hats and cowboy boots, where spanish and native american toungs are spoken as much as english, and where the superheros and supervilians tend to get there insperations out of western lore.

 

2) A whosome mid-western city much like Milwaukee (Sergestion Name: Midsberg), a place where you can get to anywhere else in the campain world from, but is still enougth going on inside it to keep thoes who don't want to wander away to do. (Of course, all whosome citys have secret slimie underbellies).

 

3) A "company town" ("Corp City") where most everybody is employed by one big company. Think Detrot from RoboCop, but cleaner.

Or just combine all 3 and get StarCorpBerg.

[Cassandra]

In Lois & Clark the city of Metropolis was in the state of New Troy.

 

So was Cosmopolis, in the Squadron Supreme Universe.

[tikiman]

Another advantage for using a fictional city is for those GMs who have moved residences a lot.  In some of those cases, the players know much more about the local town the the GM does.

 

Of course, such does not preclude said GM from using a real town that is not local.  Ex: When I first moved to Detroit in 1986, I set our WestGuard Champions game in Honolulu, where I served two years with the Coast Guard.  Later, as I learned more about Detroit, I used Motown as a setting.

 

Nice photo.

 

Would love to play a game set in Hawaii.

 

My username is Tiki Man after all.

[assault]

I should thank Roter Baron for mentioning Bedlam City. I'm still reading it, but it's really cool. Conversions to HERO shouldn't be too hard - what the characters can do is described fairly clearly.

 

Of course what I'm doing now is working out how a small group of heroes could clean it up.

[Ximenez]

I tried for the best of both worlds by using an alternate reality. My superheroes are the product of genetic mutation that started to show up in the 1960s. So my superhero campaigns were set in Detroit, but a Detroit that was slightly different from the real one. The "real" part of the city was the scenery--the PCs and their adversaries were entirely fictional.

[Christopher R Taylor]

I've always used a real city for my campaigns because its easier to describe and familiar to players.  These days with the world's largest research library at your fingertips (the internet) for very little price, its so easy to get information for a real setting its silly to break your brain creating a new one to compete.  Unless you're going to publish your campaign, there's no danger of lawsuits, hurt feelings, or conflicts.

[drunkonduty]

My current game is set in New York. I'm pretty sure that it's a fictional place.

[Scott Baker]

My current game is set in New York. I'm pretty sure that it's a fictional place.

Never heard of it.