Street View Roleplaying

I stumbled upon an amazing new tool for running roleplaying games in a modern setting – Google Street View.

To test some new roleplaying rules, I’ve been running a post-apocalypse adventure set in and around Washington D.C. Almost everyone in the world had been wiped out by a mysterious disease, and the players were among the few survivors trying to rebuild society in the Arlington suburbs. The players had a paper street map of the area, but I started using Google Maps on my laptop to figure out where their travels were taking them. When they asked where they could find a sporting goods store, I just asked Google, and when they went to a local 7-11 store to scavenge food, I went to Street View and showed them what the place looked like.

“I want to check out that van in the parking lot,” one of the players said. He was playing a homeless character named Skinny Pete who was very happy about the apocalypse because now he could have whatever home he wanted. Skinny Pete was also an alcoholic and had a habit of breaking into abandoned cars to see if there was any liquor in the trunk.

I let him break into the van, and we used the Internet to look up the “AM-Liner” name on the side. We found out it belonged to a local Virginia company that specialized in “quality full service sanitary sewer and manhole rehabilitation” – no liquor back there.

This started an unspoken rule that if it showed up in Street View it was actually there in the game. Over the next few sessions the players used Street View to design better defenses for their commandeered home, discover an “abandoned” Pepsi delivery truck at the gate to Fort Myer, and "rescue" two dogs from a kennel in the neighborhood. They even went on line to see what cars a local dealer had in stock and found a nice Black Jeep Grand Cherokee that his since taken quite a beating.

For me, as the gamemaster, Street View has become a great way to inject real detail, and in some cases new story lines, into the game – that is until my laptop battery dies.

The Liquorless AM-Liner Van in Post-apocalypse Arlington