3 Tips for Adapting Real-Life Places into Your DnD Setting
The Magic of Borrowing from Our World
Dungeon Masters are constantly called upon to create hundreds of locations filled with thousands of details over the course of a campaign. You have to come up with unique places for your heroes to explore, investigate, conquer, or save. This creative process could become taxing rather quickly. To avoid burnout, a DM might look to real-life places to make creating settlements and wild regions much easier.
Borrowing a real-world location allows you to gracefully steal some of its actual history instead of needing to write your own from scratch. While you can always write your own original lore, it might be highly convenient to say that your San Francisco-inspired city boomed in population due to the sudden discovery of gold. You might explain that cunning merchants and sea trade kept the population employed long after the gold dried up. Using real history provides a massive foundation that makes your world feel deeply lived-in, allowing your group to survive and thrive in a believable environment.
Tip 1: Find a Striking Visual
The Forgotten Realms vs. Real-World Inspiration
A significant portion of worldbuilding for tabletop RPGs comes down to painting a vivid picture for your players. There might be no better way to do this than by finding a striking visual or image to anchor your descriptions using carefully chosen words. For instance, the fictional city of Gotham is instantly recognizable by its constant rain, gothic architecture, and the shadows of vigilantes.
If you want to build a dense urban center based on New York City, you could describe the scene as your party approaches the massive metropolis at dusk. You might tell your players how the towering houses and steel structures begin to fill with magical lights. The streets are not empty like in many rural towns; they are filled with any person still going to work or going about other business. Carriages swerve through pedestrians as they race to get paying customers where they need to go. You could even introduce an underground carriage system powered by arcane forces that mimics the New York subway system.
If you want to borrow more of a climate or natural wilderness, the process might be even simpler. There is no need to drastically reflavor an area of natural inspiration unless you want to. You could simply describe an environment inspired by Yellowstone National Park:
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A wild, vast plain teeming with large, feared wildlife and roaming monsters.
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Explosive geysers shooting boiling water into the sky.
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Beautiful waterfalls and dramatic vistas that stretch toward the east.
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A plane of existence where primal gods might still walk the earth.
Tip 2: Blend Two Places Together
Creating Other Worlds Through Synthesis
Perhaps you don't want to take New York City and simply plop it directly into your campaign map. Maybe you like the idea of a bustling city that never sleeps, but your players are headed towards a treacherous mountainous region, and you don't think it is a good fit for your world to have a sprawling, flat metropolis in this area. You might find a mountainous city in real life, and begin to combine elements of the two to build something entirely new.
For this example, you could take the lights, public transportation, and hustle and bustle of New York City, and combine it with the aesthetics and layout of La Paz, Bolivia. La Paz is much more spread out, with single-family homes spread out over the rolling hills and mountain ridges. La Paz features a unique cable car system, so our fictional blend could have deep tunneling transit for moving around the lower districts, while the high mountain ridges rely on enchanted cable cars. Though La Paz has a lot of red brick construction, the New York influence could take over, meaning even the small houses get built with steel and glass because those resources are widely available.
When your heroes arrive, your description could sound something like this:
"As you crest the mountain pass, the canyon opens up before you, revealing a sprawling metropolis that defies gravity. Thousands of tiered structures and steel-framed dwellings spill down the rolling hills, climbing the very walls of the valley and clinging fiercely to the steep mountain ridges. Instead of rough stone or clay, the valley glints with the cold, sharp light of spell-forged steel and enchanted glass. Arcane neon signs and brilliant, floating streetlamps cut through the evening mist. Even from up here, you can feel the heartbeat of the city: the distant, subterranean roar of the deep-tunnel transit, and the resonant thrum of a thousand glowing cable cars weaving a web of magical light across the night sky."
Tip 3: Keep the Quest in Mind
Aligning the Setting with Your Own Goals
When your players visit a town, a city, a forest, or a lake, let's hope they are going there for a good reason. There is likely a quest there, a job to do, a lead to follow, or some narrative driving force pushing them there in the first place. If they seek to cast a specific ritual or locate a hidden artifact, you should not forget the origin of their journey.
If the group is on their way to assassinate an evil, corrupt king, you might borrow the history of a real-world assassination, then take elements of that real city to use in your campaign. In this example, we could look to King Gustav III of Sweden, who met his death after being shot at a masquerade ball in Stockholm in the past year of 1792.
Your players could head to the fictional city of Stillhold just as they hear the local kingdom is throwing a grand masquerade. When they arrive, you might describe a city buzzing with thematic elements:
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Citizens wearing elaborate costumes and masks in the streets, with almost no exception.
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Tailors frantically making new cloaks and capes for the nobility.
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The wealthiest merchants throwing their own lavish parties as appetizers to the main events.
You can easily ground the culture of Stillhold in Stockholm's actual history, giving you a chance to focus your prep time on crafting NPCs, political factions, and roleplay elements, with your favorite parts of Stockholm's history safely written down on a page for reference. By keeping the quest in focus, you keep the players moving towards their objective while maintaining a living, vivid fabric around them.
How WorldSmith Can Help
These DnD writing tips are fantastic for sparking inspiration, but organizing all those details can be a challenge. WorldSmith serves as an incredible digital tool to help you track your borrowed history and unique locations, offering powerful homebrew generators for maps, NPCs, shops, and sessions. It can instantly generate maps, complex NPCs, dynamic shops, and complete sessions.
More importantly, it uses the files you have already created to provide context and memory for the generator. If a piece of lore no longer fits, it can easily be deleted or updated. Whether you are building a faction of cunning knights or a wild frontier filled with dragons, WorldSmith ensures each item is tailored to your specific cosmos. If you create an account, you can easily connect your ideas, draw inspiration from the system, and export everything directly to your tabletop, freeing up your ability to simply sit at the table and play the game.
Expanding Your Created World
Borrowing from reality provides a fantastic foundation for your tabletop RPG. It gives your campaigns a sense of grounded realism, providing your fighters, wizards, and every other character class with a deeply immersive environment to explore. You can easily incorporate the rules of real-world physics or economics to make these events happen organically.
However, it is always important to remember that as the Dungeon Master, you hold the ultimate power to shape existence. For major capital cities or settings that are central to your story, you might still want to craft your own places entirely from your own imagination. But for side cities, minor settlements, or those inevitable moments in the future when your imagination bank is completely drained, it is perfectly fine—and highly effective—to borrow from reality. Taking a real-world location and injecting it with a little magic might be the exact trick you need to keep your adventure moving forward!
