10 Interesting Fight Settings

While considering ideas for my Battlegrounds series, I brainstormed a pretty long list.  A lot of these ideas aren’t likely to sustain an entire post, though.  They’re too limited in one way or another — often, just too reliant on a single, fairly obvious element.  However, they still make for memorable fights.   Here’s a selection of ten that might provide some inspiration .

1. A Dark Alley at Midnight

The shady back alleys are a standard of many genres.  From the crooked, garbage-littered paths in the dockside district of a fantasy town to the narrow side streets of a modern superhero campaign, it’s a setting for muggings, murders, and various acts of skulduggery.  Setting the fight during the dark of night, in a cluttered alleyway, means that there will be plenty of concealment and cover for the combatants to take advantage of.  This could be a tense brawl, where nobody is quite sure where their enemies — or their friends — might be.

2. An Open Field… In Midwinter

Take one of your standard outdoor encounters — the open field, the trade road, the mountain pass.  Then drop two to four feet of snow on it.  Instantly, it poses new challenges.  The snow is, at best, difficult to move through.  It might be slippery.  Ponds and even streams have iced over, although the ice may be thin.  Faster-moving rivers are still open water, but the cold makes them more dangerous than they otherwise would be; the characters need to worry about hypothermia and other exposure-related perils.

3. An Open Field… A Minefield, That Is

Take one of your standard outdoor encounters — the open field, the trade road, the mountain pass.  Then bury a few dozen mines in it.  Instantly, it poses new challenges.  Mostly related to avoiding being blown up.

4. A Rope Bridge

A pitched battle in a confined space is usually pretty tense.  A pitched battle on a rope bridge over a chasm usually has players fearing for their characters’ lives.  Especially if the ropes supporting the bridge start to fray or burn after an untimely miss.  It’s a particularly evil place to set a battle if the enemies are capable of flying.  (Just make sure the players have some possible way out, if you pull that one…)

5. On Top of Another Creature

A hero and a villain battle it out on the back of a charging mammoth.  The party and their enemies face off on the back of a gargantuan dragon.  A couple of people trade blows from the shoulders of an immense titan or golem.  Some spies or pulp adventurers wrestle and shoot on the top of a truck or a train.  The creature or vehicle should pose some threat (direct or indirect) of its own — but the characters will need to keep an eye on that while they first deal with the more immediate danger of the enemy combatants.

6. Zero Gravity

Not so much a location as a scene element, admittedly.  A fight in zero gravity is interesting because of the limitations it puts on movement.  Namely, you can’t move (or stop) unless there’s something to push off of or grab onto.  Just hitting an opponent with a melee attack can get pretty tricky — and ranged attacks might be a poor idea, if the atmosphere is maintained by an artificial barrier.  Knockback also takes on a whole new dimension.  In fantasy games, this environment could occur as a result of magic; one potential major threat would be exiting its area of effect while quite a distance off the ground.

7. The Theater

Backstage, on stage, in the aisles, on the scaffolding above the stage, in the orchestra pit… a theater is just a cool setting for a fight.  Bonus points for having it happen while the opera/play/concert/movie is on, and especially if the characters have some reason to want the show not to be disrupted.  This can become as much a roleplaying/acting/skill challenge as a combat challenge, as the characters try to conclude their fight stealthily — or try to convince the audience that it’s all part of the show.

8. A Nursery

Or a pre-school, or a daycare, or an orphanage, or a techno-creche… anywhere you find a lot of children, basically.  Obviously, the wrinkle here is in keeping the innocents safe while attempting to stop the bad guys.  Area-effect attacks are out; subtlety, stealth, and precision are musts.  If things go badly for the villains, hostage-taking is likely.  (Be aware that this one might push some peoples’ buttons.  Be careful with this setting unless you’re reasonably sure your players won’t take it poorly.)

9. Inside a Vehicle

Space inside a vehicle can be fairly cramped, and the physical layout of the area might prevent the combatants from using leverage ideally.  Wrestling in the back seat of a car, for instance, is awkward.  With larger vehicles, such as a train or an airplane, space is less of a concern, but there are probably other NPCs around who might get in the way.  For extra fun, kill the driver, so that the vehicle is careening out of control while the fight rages on.

10. Inside a Vault

A decently-sized, mostly-empty space… but the combatants are locked in!  For extra fun, it’s (nearly?) airtight, or its security system has been tripped and is filling it with a poison gas — if they can’t get out in time, they fall unconscious, begin to suffer damage, and/or die.  The door is pretty tough to break, and it doesn’t open freely from inside — though a skilled enough character might find a way to circumvent that.  Shutting down the gas trap is also a priority…

Related posts:

1. Battlegrounds: Alchemist’s Lab
2. Battlegrounds: Clock Tower
3. Battlegrounds: On Deck