Afterschool TV Tropes Special: Location. Location? Location!

Dave Chalker, AKA Dave The Game here (from that other website) (and that other, other website) filling in for the Chatty One while he does whatever it is Canadians do on vacation. I decided to aim high. Sure, I could have done a post about RPG blogging, on how to snare your friends into writing for your website in exchange for occasionally being given free things but usually just getting hassled, but I think I’ve learned this past week that there’s tons of people blogging about RPGs already.

Four gratuitous plugs in the opening paragraph? Check! Fake checklist that I make up as I write this? Check!

Today I have decided to enlighten you with a post in the Trope series, that life-ruining pastime that somehow manages to translate into fame and fortune. Sure, you’ve seen plenty of tropes before, but do you have anywhere to put them? I didn’t think so! As you might have guessed from the title, this is a post about settings, and how they can inform your campaign design. And by the end, I might even relate it to the reason I’m posting here today.

“Frylock! What are you… doing… here?” “I live here.”

There are many famous cities in RPGs, and I’m sure I’ll annoy someone by leaving out their favorite, but Sigil is by far the first one that comes to mind. The famous inter-planar hub ruled by Rebus-speaking weirdos and an enigmatic, purposely unexplainable ruler keeping things in check is the cornerstone of the Planescape setting, and a great base of operations for your party. Then there’s Ptolus, which is a bit more grounded, but a very hefty setting filled with cults, odd magic tech, and machinations for your party to sink into. (And you’d have to be really crazy to mash them up into the same game.)

But I’m here to say to you: you do not need to look to the fantastic to have your source of adventures. You need not look any further than your local university, or your home town. Any place can be a City of Adventure, providing endless hooks, characters, and places, without having to do a thing.

Wottsamatta U

My favorite campaign was a Call of Cthulhu campaign in college, where the PCs played students at the university we attended. (I babble on about this campaign all the time.) The beauty of it was no additional buy-in: I didn’t have to explain the locations, what day to day life was, who all the NPCs were (though I was able to populate it with a number of new eccentric professors and crazy college students), and didn’t need to provide a campaign map: we could just swipe one from the Student Union. At the same time, there was never any problem with introducing a little Geographic Flexibility to add whatever I needed for the horror/weirdness adventure of the week.

At the same time, I didn’t have to worry about the PCs not being interested in dealing with whatever was going on or calling the police: after all, “this is an isolated midwestern university, nothing exciting ever happens here.” Besides, the citizens know that couldn’t have been what it looks like!

Of course, this doesn’t just apply to University settings (though I recommend you try it!), but even your local sleepy town has an adventurous side. One of the players in the University campaign went on to run a similar game on his summer break from school… and you wouldn’t believe how much mileage you can get out of a giant picnic basket.

“From beneath you, it devours.”

So you’ve got your place, but you need some more justification on why these strange things are happening now. After all, you live there, and you’ve never had an adventure that required a series of skill checks, right? Well, it just so happens that in your campaign, your town has its very own Magnetic Plot Device, that gives off Weirdness Magnet Radiation (WMR.) It’s entirely possible to never explain why the things are happening to your town, and now, but thinking of one can often give you inspiration for what to do from week to week. Both episodic campaigns and myth arc games benefit greatly from having even the tiniest shred of connection between it all, giving the entire campaign the feeling of building to something great.

Some easy examples of explanations:

• The whole town is built over the resting place of an ancient evil thing… and its dreams are starting to leak out. (Or something is trying to release it.)
• The place was built on top of a portal to another dimension.
• The town just happens to have a high concentration of people who make it strange. (Or a high concentration of people who aren’t quite people.)
• Or maybe there isn’t anything supernatural about it at all, but everyone’s got something to hide.

“Strange and bizarre things happen to you with alarming frequency.”

From there, all you have to do is see what plots work well with location + reason. There’s a few trope-adventures in particular that I’m fond of in this setting:

• “Hey, there’s a lot of stuff that went wrong today that we just found out about. And it happened to fall on a Holiday. If only we had known for the start of the day that so many thing were going to go wrong…”
• Mr./Mrs. Right comes along for the PCs, or a close contact of the PCs. Surely there’s nothing wrong with him/her.
• Everyone around town seems to be acting just slightly odd today. Or maybe just one of the PCs is acting slightly odd…
• Heck, grab ANY White Wolf book, and decide what supernatural thing has infiltrated your town, a way to get the PCs involved, and ways they can stop the threat.
• Of course, after a while, even the most devoted citizens want to get out of the city for a bit. Then it’s time for a vacation! (See? Vacations! It all connects!) In a college campaign, spring break is the perfect opportunity to inflict mayhem- I recommend checking out the adventures in GURPS IOU (obviously the book as a whole is a strong inspiration) for a few good off-campus adventures. And whether it’s for holiday break at a university, or the PCs just have off their jobs on Christmas day, you can always unleash A Kringle in Time.

As always with tropes, the surface of the roleplaying potential is only scratched here, even just looking at all the setting tropes. Hopefully I’ve encouraged you to try something new (and yet familiar) in your games. I’ll give back up this space to the other fine guest posters, and catch you in the comments.