Okay, after some major overhauling of the B plot of my story (mostly prompted by the epiphany that my main character's original social circle was way too well-adjusted and normal to be a proper foil for my shy and cautious protagonist), my main character is going to find himself in the following situation: Basically, my setting is the modern day right as an unexplained event slowly starts giving everyone on the planet super powers. My protagonist, Keaton, is one of a handful of people on the planet who was given an extra, unique power, and through a chain of weird events set off by the initial empowering event, Keaton finds himself being blackmailed by a bunch of obsessive LARPers into using his power to help them win their games. The idea is that these LARPing matches start off being hilariously dorky and stupid, but as more and more superhuman abilities become available to them and start getting incorporated into their games, they evolve from mere games of pretend into these genuinely epic superpowered adventures. Since the location of these games is a recurring and important setting of the story, I want to make sure I get it right, and I'm trying to think of a suitable location for these LARPs that: 1: Is large 2: Is rarely visited by anyone but them 3: Has multiple buildings or other structures that could be used as bases or just interesting terrain to strategize around (and best accommodate the later-appearing powers that let people climb walls, double-jump, and do other crazy parkour stuff) 4: Can be decently meshed with a LARP's fantasy narrative 5: Could believably be within reasonable driving distance of a New Jersey suburb. The place that most leaps out to me when I think of these things is some sort of abandoned and overgrown theme park, but I don't know much about how those happen or if it qualifies for #5. If anyone has any insight as to my abandoned amusement park idea, or if they have any other setting candidates to suggest, I'd really appreciate it.
It falls down to how varied you want the environments that you want them to encounter. Larger states have much more varied environments than the smaller ones, which would maybe at best offer 2 dependent on where they are. You can do as many well known authors do, and just make up a fictional town or place in a real state, that works as the world within the fictional narrative.
That was the idea. I'm talking about more general locations and general believability that such places could be near fictional suburban towns.
Well off the top of my head I'd go immediately to abandoned trailer parks or abandoned amusement parks. Abandoned amusement parks are a little cliche and heavily used, though. An old abandoned trailer park would be a good swathe of clear, flat land with a bunch of dilapidated trailers all over the place to serve as buildings. Maybe one of the LARPers fixed a trailer up into a makeshift fortress 'castle' or something, I dunno. As for privacy, there are trailer parks that have been abandoned for decades and people just leave them there, doing nothing with the land. It's a little cool, actually. Just shitty old abandoned trailer parks that no one goes to anymore except the random explorer.
Think Chernobyl, Fukushima, those sorts of disasters clear out a place like nothing else and people rarely go back to them even when it's safe to do so.
Oh man, I watched a video not too long ago that would be the perfect setting for some superpowered LARP adventures: What if, nearby the protag's house, there was a theme park that ran out of funding before it was ever completed? The company went out of business, it was far enough out in the wilderness to not be a horrible hazard to anyone, and the cost of tearing it down is too much to bother with. It was abandoned long enough ago that people sort of forgot about it, and the company went bankrupt before they even advertised, so not a lot of people knew where it was in the first place. Then you'd have the fantasy setting complete with all sorts of potential hazards. Check out this place in the Philippines:
Hmmm... a theme park with castles would work quite well, but I was thinking I’d avoid the obvious by using a more normal theme park and having the Larp’s plot be a perpetual war between the last humans on earth after a cataclysmic event caused the entire planet itself to lose the will to live and become monochrome, inert and lifeless, leaving the remaining handful of survivors to fight in the only habitable place on earth: the remains of a lost advanced civilization now bursting with plant life thanks to the power of a magic artifact that will allow whoever claims it to restart and recreate the world in their own vision.
Why not write up a ghost town? There are plenty of ghost towns around the world, and many of them will be in a dilapidated enough condition to suggest post-apocalyptia. This way, the players can wreck buildings with impunity.