American games.. but setting them in Scandinavia?

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Ivan NWG

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Cheers. A lot of American roleplaying games assume that you will play in the United States (such as Vampire or Buffy) either implicitly (they are written by and for Americans) or explicitly (Buffy very much assumes you are playing in an American school environment).

Back in the day we always set our White Wolf games in the United States but we never really thought about why. The books talked about being in America and so thats what we did. Ditto for most Call of Cthulhu games (which is of course relevant with Swedish CoC being a thing now).

So what did you do? For games that assumed Americans, did you ever set them in Sweden?
 
I think growing up there was definitely a sense of Sweden being "boring" and it being almost impossible to imagine anything ool ever happening here. I'm sure the general lack of good action/scifi movies and other media set in Sweden had something to do with it, but I guess we just have this self-image of just being awkward and uncool. Trying to do superheroes in a Swedish setting just runs up against our grand tradition of making absolutely everything some sad and/or cringey "realism". Someone running around with their underpants on the outside…

So like a lot of others, I guess, when we played we pretty much exclusively played games set Somewhere Else.

Often the US, because we were kind of familiar with at least the movie version of the US…

I still have a hard time personally to do "cool" stuff in Sweden. Horror, probably. Urban fantasy, that sort of thing? Maybe. Still no superheroes.
 
Both. On the one hand the published materials supported playing in the US and it seemed cool because of movies, but on the other hand we knew Sweden better which made it easier to improvise stuff. We played CoC set in Sweden decades before anyone thought of doing a translation. And our Vampire LARPS were set in our own local towns and cities.
 
We played mostly swedish games and quite a few of them was set in Sweden. I do recall playing Vampire set in Sweden but thats about it.
 
  • About 40 years ago, I played a few CoC scenarios set in Sweden and Finland in the aftermath of World War One.
  • Wastelands (an English title on Swedish RPG published in 1991) was set in a post-apocalyptic Sweden 30 years after a "Falling Sky" event. A gritty setting with mostly rural survivors striving to establish organized communities while fending off marauders and trying to keep the human henchmen of the alien invaders at bay. I was one of its designers.
  • Viking-era games were popular in the 1990s. The adventures generally took place in the Nordic countries, England, or Normandy. For example, I wrote Ansgar, an educational RPG that dealt with the arrival of the first documented Christian missionaries in AD 830-50.
 
When we played pre-written scenarios and campaigns for Vampire we used the supplied locations. All campaign play that we sandboxed ourselves were set in Sweden.
 
I tend to generally stick with the default setting, so Vampire was largely played in the states (though we did run some that were set in other places, funnily enough never in Sweden). Call of Cthulhu tended to see a lot of diverse locations though, but so did the official adventures & campaigns, so that was a game that wasn't strongly tied to the US, but again nothing set in Sweden. I once ran a short Shadowrun campaign that was set in Stockholm, using the setting descriptions found in an old Sverox (a magazine released by Sverok, a youth organization here in Sweden focusing on gaming)
 
I guess we set most urban fantasy games in Sweden (Stockholm) as it was easier to play when we knew and had walked the streets ourselves. To me it made the games feel more grounded and coherent.
 
Fnord said:
I once ran a short Shadowrun campaign that was set in Stockholm, using the setting descriptions found in an old Sverox (a magazine released by Sverok, a youth organization here in Sweden focusing on gaming)
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You make me recall writing that article. Way back in late 90s. An amusing undertaking. I couldn't resist poking fun at the Swedish royal family. ;)
 
I recall running a Buffy campaign set in Sweden, at least.

I think the "Cirkeln" trilogy shows beyond reasonable doubt that small town Sweden can be just as evocative a setting for YA Urban Fantasy as small town America. The troubles of youth, I suppose, are universal.
 
As teenagers, we definitely had the feeling that things in Denmark (in our case) could not possibly be cool :)
Oddly when we did Werewolf Dark Ages it was always in England though I don't remember if that was the default in the book. We could just as well have done Scandinavia I suppose.

For the Twilight 2000 fans, did you play as Americans?
 
A certain class of game does become mildly ridiculous when set in Sweden. Vampire for instance is supposed to be hyper-cool and gothic, and setting it in modernist Stockholm and having a Prince of Haninge (as one LARP had) may not hit the right tone. While Kult (unsurprisingly) works perfectly fine.
 
JohanL said:
A certain class of game does become mildly ridiculous when set in Sweden. Vampire for instance is supposed to be hyper-cool and gothic, and setting it in modernist Stockholm and having a Prince of Haninge (as one LARP had) may not hit the right tone. While Kult (unsurprisingly) works perfectly fine.
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Here's an interesting thing to consider: I think the ridiculousness of Vampire in Stockholm increases a lot for people who've lived in Stockholm, especially for people who've grown up here.

I moved to the general area 15 years ago, and I'm still not familiar enough with Stockholm to feel it's impossible to do hyper-cool things here. If they're possible anywhere, I'd say definitely here. For me, Vampire might be "gothic" but it's above all urban, and brutalism/functionalism works pretty well in my mind.

Familiarity breds contempt, maybe? A Prince of Haninge might work better for a group based in, for example, my home town of Hudiksvall. For me growing up, Stockholm was a mythical Great City I got to visit once a year.
 
JohanL said:
A certain class of game does become mildly ridiculous when set in Sweden. Vampire for instance is supposed to be hyper-cool and gothic, and setting it in modernist Stockholm and having a Prince of Haninge (as one LARP had) may not hit the right tone. While Kult (unsurprisingly) works perfectly fine.
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I've set a Vampire setting in Eslöv lol
 
Back in the days we mostly played Swedish games, often set in Sweden or in a Sweden to come (post apocalyptic or not). Right now we're playing TSR's Marvel Super Heroes set in Stockholm 1994.
 
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