I used to live in a neighborhood of Los Angeles called Eagle Rock. I think after reading Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman, I was sort of inspired to think of places I knew having a sort of magical equivalence. Perhaps Eagle Rock could have some powerful eagle spirit one could visit.
I've always been drawn to the idea of fantasy in modern settings, though I'll confess I often balk at the magical realism genre. Perhaps it's because many of the stories I was assigned to read as a student were of that genre, never "fully committing" to the genre by coming up with a new world.
Of course, one of my biggest influences was Stephen King's Dark Tower series, which one could argue is a sort of mix of the kind of epic world-building fantasy I tend to prefer with magical realism.
I suppose it's sort of a question of definition: Many of the "magical realism" stories I've read and felt underwhelmed by were ones that introduced maybe one minor supernatural element into a setting that, even within the fiction of the story, felt like they were there purely as metaphor.
Fully committing to the reality of the fantastical, however, makes the idea of magic in the real world a pretty exciting idea (though if you've seen any of my fiction, it tends to skew toward a modern-like world that nonetheless has its own fantastical history and geography.)
All of this is a roundabout way of saying that I've just watched the free-on-YouTube half of The Unsleeping City, Dimension 20's D&D game set in modern New York.
Conceptually, the premise behind the Unsleeping City is that there is a Sixth Borough, called Nod, which is in the dreaming world, and as such, New York is a sort of portal into the fantastical. Most people don't see things for what they really are, but those who have, for one reason or another, pierced the veil can perceive the trolls, fairies, and mutant Santa Claus clones that inhabit New York.
The game is your familiar 5th Edition D&D, but the interpretations of the various classes and such are updated for the setting. For instance, probably my favorite character is Sofia Bicicleta, a Staten Island aesthetician who has just gone through a gutting divorce and has become something of an alcoholic. After getting drunk, she realizes that some of the ogres outside the bar are actually, literally ogres, and she also realizes she can fight quite well - becoming a Drunken Master Monk.
DM Brennan Lee Mulligan crafts a hilarious and compelling series of adventures for them to get into - one of my favorite bits is how the swarms of rats summoned by the Splinter-like rat-man sewer druid all cheer his name and proclaim their loyalty like he's a medieval king - and naturally, because this is how my mind works: I want to do something like this too.
Now, I'm about to launch a pretty big campaign in less than a month, so modern, real-world D&D will probably have to wait. The campaign will be in Ravnica, however, and I figure we could have some fun with similar urban concepts - my conception of Ravnica is one in which the Izzet League has really allowed the city to have a lot of modern conveniences, and I think there will be plenty of New York accents (it's one I can do decently, which is odd because I'm from Boston but suck at the Boston accent.)
They do manage to sidestep some of the issues you might find in translating the more medieval aspects of D&D. Only two characters are really melee-based, and one of them is a monk fighting without armor or weapons. The Paladin, Ricky Matsui, is a fire fighter (he's Mr. March on the calendar) and uses his fireman's axe as a weapon, so it's decently justified.
Things like armor are handwaved. Money, I think, is relatively easily converted. I think you could make each copper a dollar (New York is expensive! A mug of ale for 5 bucks isn't too bad!)
Ideas like faith are dealt with in a pretty interesting way. The group's Cleric is of the City Domain (found in the "Modern D&D" Unearthed Arcana) and he's basically one of those people for whom loyalty to New York is a religion. His holy symbol is an old subway token he wears on a chain, and the city's blessing toward him manifests in things like traffic moving around him as he walks across the street or the busses always showing up right when he gets to the stop.
Using the real world, it behooves the DM to really delve into the history of the city. Robert Moses, for example, an architect that helped to shape modern New York, plays a role in the Unsleeping City, though naturally he's given a more supernatural position than in real life (as far as we know.)
If you like Critical Role, I recommend checking this out. I have yet to see their other shows, except for a limited run one (in which the players, including Matt Mercer, essentially played Sauron's followers immediately after the ring was destroyed,) but it's quite entertaining. Unlike CR, Dimension 20 is pre-recorded and edited with sound effects and sometimes voice modulation (and I believe editing around rules questions - either that or the players on D20 are really on top of things.) The effect is that it feels perhaps less spontaneous, but also much more polished.
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