Post

I've been doing this! I picked South Dakota in 2006 for my most recent game and it's amazing to watch the players gleefully rediscover what kind of music and tech was available that year, and look at real world maps to figure out travel times to other places.

Top-class performance!

Some systems work better than others for modern stuff, but yeah, I love that sort of game. Still wanna run a Persona-like game in Fabula Ultima one day.

The version I keep coming back to: keep the real geography exact and change one institutional fact, so player knowledge stays useful right up to the moment it betrays them. The transit map is real, but the last stop was renamed in 1974 and nobody remembers why. Familiarity does the unease for you.

Oh yes, you even could use "generic city office building" or "subway station" or whatever, then: a) transform into ruins; and b) add something fantastical