Starting today I am going to strive to produce and post at least one rpg gaming entry a week. I’m going to try to brand them with this nifty graphic I tricked up, for those of you who want to tell at a glance if this is something you want to read or not.

Get Outta Town

I didn’t take my first International (meaning, away from North America—Mexico and Canada don’t quite count for this) trip until I was in my fifties. I went to Greece on a family Spring Break vacation/educational tour and it was, frankly, epic. Greece was the birthplace of most of my favorite first edition AD&D monsters, along with some of the best myths, great food, and a 2000-year-old culture on display for everyone to look at. Getting to walk around in places I’d read about in books all my life was nothing short of incredible. I even got engaged on the trip—at the Temple of Poseidon, atop a cliff, overlooking the sea.

I recently got back from a trip to Spain (same circumstances as above, minus the engagement), and it was differently epic and equally awesome. In lieu of 2000-year-old ruins, they have 1000 year old castles, and yeah, you can walk around in them, too. As a Texan, we are inordinately proud of our colorful and violent state’s history, but the few ruins that we have, of old forts and farm houses, do not compare in the least to the castles and ancient sites that are damn near everywhere.

Europe in general is lousy with stuff like that, along with cities that are thousands of years old and still built around narrow streets, cobblestone walkways, narrow alleys, bits of wall and other fortifications, and so much more. We encountered it everywhere we went in both Spain and Greece.

I told you that to tell you this: if you’re a game master of any stripe, you need to go see that stuff for yourself. Travel is good for you in so many different ways that have nothing to do with tabletop gaming, and there’s plenty to check out for yourself in that vein, but let me tell you what it will do for your TTRPG game.

Walk a Mile in Their Shoes

Being present in the physical space of a narrow street intended for the serfs to get to work so that the wealthy people don’t have to look at them? Priceless. Standing in the doorway of a room in a castle and realizing that, at 5’ 11,” you would have been a giant to these people? Looking out from the wall of King Agamemnon’s castle and realizing that you can see the cliffs in the distance that were part of the city of Argos—and that would have been looking out across a vast shallow sea? Now, let’s have a conversation about the optimal size of a travel hex.

Seeing the actual buildings and homes and castles and towers that serve as perennial inspiration for fantasy games and books—really seeing them, standing on the cobblestones, and noting how the walls are made—it’s all fodder for your games. You don’t have have to do massive info dumps on every single detail you’ve uncovered in your journey, but having players notice as they walk through the streets that there’s a shallow gutter on all of the footpaths, right down the center of them, with regular grates for the runoff of rain water, sounds very high tech and sophisticated to a group of people who were pig farmers from the North just a couple of weeks ago—but that’s a real thing. And pointing it out to your players tells them there’s sewers under the city, something they might need to know in order to break into the Temple of Dagon.

Inspiration is Everywhere

Who knows what’s going to inspire you? It might be a dish you try at some out of the way restaurant. A lot of the cathedrals in Spain had plazas with fountains right next to them. How interesting would it be to have players walking into a new city and seeing, just off the main gate, a huge crowd gathered in front of a prominently placed temple, and they are all listening to the edicts of the priest (who will turn out to be the bad guy?) Instead of picking up rumors at the tavern, let them hear what’s up from the horse’s mouth. And having people in the crowd grousing about the increase in taxes is a more dynamic way to drop a plot seed.

The architecture of both Greece and Spain was really interesting to me. For instance, there’s a lot of greenspace on rooftops that you can see from the streets; palm trees and other large shrubs act as a natural windbreak and people spend time on the roofs, drinking and socializing. In a massive city-state, the major shipping point, a marvel of civilization and culture, why wouldn’t there be some rooftop lounge situations? Nice views of the ocean, the surrounding countryside, and sometimes, your neighbor’s domestic squabbles. Another plot seed.

The Devil is in the Details

Let me stress here, that not traveling will not ruin your game. You can write some kick ass adventures without ever leaving the suburbs, especially in a 21st century world full of documentaries, Internets, blog posts, and more media than we’ll ever be able to consume. There’s no end to the accounts you can read, the movies you can watch, and the history channel specials you can binge that will inform and influence your whole game. Lord knows I got by just fine without travel in the 1980s and 1990s. No complaints at my table.

BUT…traveling to the city of Seville and walking through the Jewish quarter outside of the giant combination mosque-cathedral, and walking up a cobblestone path meant for foot traffic, with a shallow gutter in the middle of the street for water run-off, and actually feeling the narrow space; two steps to your left or right and you’re scraping the wall. That kind of detail is something you can sprinkle into your next city campaign with ease. It’s easier to describe these narrow walkways and imagine them crowded during Trades Day or some Harvest Festival if you’ve walked them yourself.

In general, it’s just a good thing to write all of this stuff down as you’re experiencing it, or take lots of pictures that you can use later as reference, to annotate, as you see fit. Take Toledo, Spain, for instance…

This storied city, the origin place of “Toledo Steel” if you’re a swashbuckler of any stripe, has a fascinating history, owing much to its physical location. The city is half-surrounded by a river, sitting atop a massive hill, with walled fortifications to further protect it (for it used to be the capital of Spain, you see). It’s one thing to see it on a map, where it has been necessarily rendered abstractly in order for us to understand the space.

It’s quite another to look at the city from across the river and note the changes in elevation, the height of the bridges leading to the city (one of the tourist-y things you could do was ride a zipline from the city to the outer walls, flying majestically over the river, some hundred feet or more below), and note what kind of hilly terrain is piled up across from the city itself. There’s a small community there, living with nearly vertical climbs up cobblestone streets. I watched someone on a bike pedal, zigzagging from one side of the road to the other, all the way up to the top of a hill with shops and homes on it.

There’s a wealth of detail and little flourishes that you can only experience if you’re in the actual space. Photos do not do the real world justice, especially not from the camera on our phones. There’s just no depth of field, no sense of scale, and no tactile sensation of place.  Seriously. Not even the high-definition letterboxed formats that movies and TV are shot in will really give you an accurate sense of place. Turning up those narrow foot paths finds the wind narrowed and moving faster through the confined space, dropping the temperature about twenty degrees. I would never have thought to include that in a fantasy city, and I’ve run fantasy cities for most of my DM career. I’ve even lived in big cities and visited other places like Chicago, where the wind tears through the wide modern streets and is bite-ass cold. Why the hell haven’t I put that in a game? Even in passing?

Other Considerations

Travel is expensive, as previously mentioned, and the farther away you go, the more expensive it gets. There are ways to offset this and make it cheaper (but not necessarily cheap) to fly. Group travel brings the per person cost down, and it solves a lot of logistical considerations, like where to sleep. If you don’t mind living out of a backpack, there’s a lot of options for students who are doing the whole “walking across Great Britain” thing and lots of websites to help student travelers out with food and lodging.

If money is an issue, and it’s not possible or feasible to save several thousand dollars up just to take a trip, then look around you and see if you can find any historical sites, particularly houses that are more than a hundred years old, battle sites, old forts, and if you’re lucky, some place in the Northeast that’s part of the original 13 colonies that does historical reenactments on historical sites. Lots of those places are now part of the National Park Service and are cheap or outright free to tour.

Granted, it’s not a 9th century Moorish castle, but there’s still plenty of value to visiting historical colonial sites and just taking note of the houses and buildings—and the streets! Some of these cities who have been around for 200+ years have long, narrow, winding cobblestone streets that modern cars grudgingly drive on, but it’s obvious that the road was meant for foot traffic and/ horses and wagons. Any place you can get to that’s not like where you are from is all grist for the mill. You’ll find something you can use in a game, guaranteed.