Small Town Ideas

[catsgomoo]

I'm from Montana and my group is trying to think of a place of play. We havn't been able to decide if we should go local, since we have plenty of Native American history/ideas, but that doesn't quite fit the ambiance of the Dresdenverse. So my question is, do we stay small town and rural or do we go with a city

[MWKilduff]

I think that you could do just about as many small town adventures as you could big city.  Just remember that the area you play in is not subject to just this realm.  You can have all kinds of never never action.  Ghost stories, hidden gold or cowboy stories, native american you mentioned (which is a fabulous way to bring in Injun Joe and the native american wizards because you know he is not the only one), bring in the wendigo, abominable snowman, fae protecting their woods from man, and who knows what else.  Dig into your history or cheat like I am want to do by using Wierd US and other sources to satisfy any need for knowledge with little work.

[Richard_Chilton]

The thing about small towns is everyone knows everyone - or knows someone that someone else knows.  They are usually 2 to 3 degrees of separate.

Which means the supernatural community will know each other.  It's hard for a faction to work away in secret because the groups tend to bump into each other.  I've run a WoD LARP in a city where the "GMA" (everything within an hour's drive on the highway) has about 125K people while the city itself has around 70K, and it is hard to keep the various WoD groups separated in a town where most of the players have visited every bar in town.

I'll repeat that for people from larger cities - the players have been to every single bar in the city.  Off hand I'd say there might be 30 or so bars in the entire city.  Which means that if the White Court runs a bar then all the PCs will know about it.  More importantly, they will know people who drink there, or they are friends with people who are friends with people who drink there.  Supernatural predators have a hard time in a small city because enough people just don't die or disappear in them.  The per capita murder rate might be the same (or higher) than that of a major city but there just aren't enough people for that to matter.  One of the short stories mentioned in the game has a bit to say about per capita, that while the virginity rate might be a bit lower than a hundred years ago but that there are more virgins running around because there are so many more people around.

What that means is you have to have a different mindset when designing your city.  Anything that kills people will get noticed quickly - if not the thing itself then the fact that people aren't around anymore (which could be an incentive to solve problems quickly).  Rather than having faceless victims you have Blah, whose nephew went to the same high school as a PC's cousin.  On one hand that limits what kind of things are out there, but on another it makes things so much more personal.  Your PCs will investigating in areas where all the players know and some of those areas will have emotional investments for the players.  An important bit is spelling out up front what's the same and what's different in the city.

On the other hand, using a large city - a place where you can invent entire neighbourhoods when you feel like it - can be good.  There's no emotional investment to the places there on the players' parts so there's no discomfort when a random building burns because they don't know anyone who works there in real life.

My advise is try to play in your own city, and if that doesn't work than to shift it into the nearest large city.

Richard

[Morgan]

It really depends on the types of stories you want to tell and characters you want to play. There's nothing that says you can't incorporate a whole bunch of Native American history and ideas into your version of the Dresdenverse. So far in the novels there have been a fair number of Native American myths and monsters that have shown up, and Listens to Wind is a senior member of the White Council, I say go nuts.

To me it would really come down to what types of stories you want to tell, rural locales, small towns, and small cities have a flavor all their own. You also have the advantage of knowing your own surroundings and what can be mined for story potential. Big Cities have the advantage when you're doing the Vancouver Method, as those cities get to be in lots of media, so everyone has at least an idea of what they are like. Since that is the case you can also tell certain types of stories, or just emulate certain shows, movies, and books that are set in those big cities. What sort of genre excites you and your players, if you don't think you can tell those stories in your home town or a nearby Montana city then you should probably think about coming up with a new location.

Now if you asked me to set a game in Montana I'd be at a loss as to where to start even if you let me set it in a city like Billings, but being locals you know what your town and state is like and you can imagine it through the Dresdenverse's urban fantasy lens a lot more easily and probably make it an awesome place to set a game. So really it comes down to you and your players and what you want from your game. Either way I hope you post your city and setting here, I'd like to see what you come up with.

[catsgomoo]

I like the whole Never Never idea those responses are actually really helpful and thanks to all