Season One Setting Dump

The Death Save campaign takes place in some kind of alternate-fantasy Earth. It started in a Hungary analogue, Magyar being the name of the people who settled Hungary in or around the 9th century A.D. Here's a list of some of the places from Season One and their Earth counterparts

• Riverstone - Szolnok
• The decision was based on what Taulbee and Spike came up with at the beginning of the game - a landlocked city on a decent-sized river. Looking back I probably should have used Riverstone as the common nickname for the city with it's official Magyar name being Szolnok. Not that that kind of completeness would have come through on the podcast but if you're going to worldbuild, worldbuild motherfuckers. Also, the Tisza river, upon which Szolnok sits, flows generally northeast toward the Carpathians.
• The Goblin Wood
• Speaking of the Goblin Wood (even if it never came up in the game), in the context of this setting, it's imagined as a resettlement area for goblins. At some point in the past goblins were almost eradicated but the church intervened and relocated the goblins to a remote 'unpopulated' forest in northeastern Magyar. Now that area, beyond being one way into Voivojda, is akin to DCC's Shudder Mountains setting but rampant with human/goblin feuding. It's roughly equivalent to an expanded and perhaps more heavily forested Zempléni Tájvédelmi körzet, or Zempléni Landscape Protection Area.
• Vornek - Jászberény
• For this one I looked at roads north out of Szolnk, er Riverstone, heading north. One of the first images that pops up for Jászberény is of a sweet church. I honestly can't remember if I was already thinking of inserting A Single, Small Cut into the game or if seeing the church put me in mind of the adventure. As to the name change, I think I was using the Storygames Name Project to name stuff so it probably came from there.
• Salgo - Salgótarján
• Salgótarján is decently sized city in the North of Hungary and looked like a pretty good spot to place to put the border entry from Magyar into the elf lands of Naristria. Also, 'salgo' means 'shining' in Hungarian, so the city nickname became the Shining Gate in reference to the alabaster gate that fronts the mountain tunnel leading to the elf lands. Salgo is heavily influenced by both traffic around the Shining Gate and relative distance from the monarchy in Budapest, and as such, when there are not extraplanar incursions fucking shit up everywhere, tends toward a much more cosmopolitan city than most of the rest of Magyar. The Church is perpetually fighting against the influences of the elfs there, but mostly from afar, Salgo being seen as a hardship placement for troublesome church officers.
• Naristria, the Elf Lands - Slovakia
• Naristria, although not visited in-game, is envisioned as maintaining Slovakia's current borders and geography but those borders being tightly controlled by the elfs that live within. So, a closed-off mountainous country, riddled with rivers and caves, and almost exclusively populated by elfs.
• Russia - USSR
• The bounds of Russia roughly equate to that of height-of-the-cold-war U.S.S.R. Unless that counters anything already established. It's church and state are similar to that of Magyar but more controlling. Also, it's where orcs come from. Orcs were originally bred magically by Russian boyar magicians but that shit got out of control. Now they are all over the place, can interbreed with humans, and are a large part of the Russian military might and the main reason it's bounds are so extensive.