I associate the American Midwest currently with small family farms, oil rigs, wild game hunting, and Native American Reservations. I also associate it with the frontier, when brave people left everything and attempted to settle the area. I live near areas where Laura Ingalls Wilder would have traveled and lived. The "urban legend" crap is not something I have not heard from anyone. Especially since Hollywood made a terrible movie that was actually making fun of people with Scandinavian accents and purpentuating bad sterotypes about a fake event was made about the city I live in. BTW, that event never actually happened it was a fake made up murder story. The closest we got to what I associate with the Midwest is Cottage Living, but instead it needed flatter terrain and long very cold winters and the ability to hunt the wild animals.
I DO get the hunting thing WHICH I think that in itself would be a really fun mechanic. Also, sorry, as a midwesterner I have never heard of that movie or urban legend at all. We just must've grown up with different cultures/sides of the midwest. I grew up around urban legends/ghost stories, trailer parks, camping and hunting, and where the plains meet the limestone with the main "downtown" area with those old brick shops from like, the 1900s 😅 speaking of which I think food trucks would be a fun addon too. Especially like that one that I see everywhere now and again at cons in Arkansas (mainly) with brick oven pizza 🤤
Arkansas is a southern state, at least from what I remember when learning about the regions while is school almost 30 years ago. That why I can say it didn't remind me of the American Midwest. It is interesting you have never heard of the movie Fargo. Btw, it wasn't filmed in the town it is named for.
