Thanks a lot!

Not entirely why I decided to set this game there (but definitely contributed to it) but from how I’d seen it depicted in various media, I’d always thought the pacific north west might be a nice place to live someday. My family is thinking of taking a vacation/road trip along some of the west coast someday so who knows, maybe that’ll be what convinces me to move out to this area

Oh wow thank you. There’s a lot to work with here so I appreciate it.

I especially love the idea of a Tree Octopus. Might end up using that if I need to come up with something strange for them to encounter while they’re in the woods

And yeah I saw that about Mt Tahoma while I was looking up info about it as well as indigenous history of the area (since even though it’s just a game amongst friends I wanted to avoid being somehow accidentally insensitive or otherwise dumb about using the areas they’re from/live in for the game). But yeah after finding out about the the name and the push from natives to get the name changed I thought I might as well just retcon all that so that it’s always been known as Tahoma in-game, but used Rainier here just in case it wouldn’t be clear.

Ooh this sounds cool. Even if I wasn’t running this game I listen to a lot of podcasts while at work so will definitely be giving this a listen

Really appreciate these details. Especially the environmental/visual descriptions. And yeah I was thinking this morning about checking out twin peaks.

To give specifics on the game I’m running, I’ve taken the starter set adventure module (Lost Mine of Phandelver) and rewrote parts of it to make sense in a relatively modern day world.

If for some reason one of my players is hear stop reading lol. But some of the important areas include: a cave in the wilderness that a branch of a goblin gang is operating out of.

a small town abandoned in the late 1800s (after an earthquake that I might have slightly changed the epicenter of to make it work for the story) that people have just started to reuse in recent years, so it’s a small unincorporated town.

A human gang’s HQ in the cellar/connecting cave of an abandoned manor in said town from its original inhabitants.

An abandoned very small town (technically a village) that was abandoned shortly after the eruption of Mt St Helens in 1980. The ash that covered much of the village was infused with some sort of dark magic, causing a small infestation of zombies that led to the town being abandoned and a government cover up with only some knowing of the incident as a vague biological contaminant in the area. Since then other dangerous creatures (invasive plant monsters, invasive giant spiders, a young dragon + cultists that tracked it there) have claimed the fenced off area as their own

An old forgotten dilapidated British fort in the forest from the early 1800s that the goblin gang uses as their main HQ

An old 1800s mine that was lost after said earthquake (a large scale magical battle in the mine actually caused said earthquake)

Also if you’d like to know the characters the players are playing as:

Dirk Hoffman, Hobgoblin Fighter: he’s an agent of CMOB (Chicago Magical Observance Board) which keeps magic from becoming public knowledge in the Midwest. He’s tracked a wizard from the Midwest to this area and is after him for selling illegal and dangerous magical items to humans who are unaware of magic. Is also doing a job for a dwarf friend in the area (Gregory Rockseeker) which brings him into the story

Raven Brawen, Fairy Druid: she’s a fairy that used to live in an old Irish forest before moving to the new world. Nowadays she runs a sort of oculty bookstore in Seattle but also works as a witch for hire (was hired by Rockseeker)

Soleil, Changeling Bard: a twitch streamer that goes hiking in their free time. Was planning a hiking/camping trip at Mt Rainier when they came across a Craigslist ad for this aforementioned job, so decided to take it since it’s on their way there

Cheese, Warforged Ranger: (was unnamed until the first session when Soleil named him Cheese). A highly secretive early prototype of Amazon’s Alexa. Their original design was a full on humanoid robot, but they used a power source that, unbeknownst to them, was drawing on powerful nature magic. Because of a magical glitch in the robot’s reasoning, he broke out of the Amazon building he was in and escaped to the forest, where his power source got him to full charge. Afterwards he stumbled across Rockseeker, and mistook him for one of his creators, and with his first priority being to assist, he ended up on the same job as the other player characters

I may be wrong but it kind of sounds like you’re confusing dungeons and dragons for LARPing? An understandable confusion if you’re maybe not super familiar with either. But with d&d being a table top game we aren’t going to be actually traveling there and holding big outdoor events. Just using the area as the setting for the story I create for the game at the table. Regardless I appreciate the insight

It’s set in 2014. But I do like the idea of Oregon Trail but fantasy.

Also I was gonna include the bugbear species and was thinking that if someone not clued into the supernatural saw one they might think they’re Bigfoot or something like that. The art for them in the monster manual certainly looks similar to Bigfoot

Ah that makes sense. I knew Seattle was nearby obviously but largely chose that area because the geography matched up pretty well with a d&d fantasy map I was going off of (positions of mountains and forests and whatnot).

I guess I could probably move the setting to a slightly more rural part of the region, in which case the questions I have in the post still stand. Plus since it’s just a game with my friends it’s probably not too big a deal if I’m a little hand wavey/vague about exactly where in the rural parts of the state it is beyond just the general region of the state. But if I can be at least somewhat accurate in my depiction of the area I’m gonna try to be