Kingdom Come: Deliverance — Medieval Bohemia in Real Life

Henry grows up in Skalitz, a silver-mining town where his father Martin is the blacksmith. Their finest sword is finished for the royal hetman, Sir Radzig Kobyla, when Sigismund's Cuman mercenaries storm the town and kill Henry's parents before his eyes. The real Stříbrná Skalice — "Silver Skalice" — was named for the silver mined here, and a castle stood in its Na Hradě street in the 14th and 15th centuries. Today it is a quiet village near the Sázava, with a small Romanesque church of St James, patron of miners.

Location precision: The game's Skalitz is a reconstruction; the pin marks the present village of Stříbrná Skalice.

Visitor guidance: Stříbrná Skalice has a station on the S80 line from Čerčany along the Sázava valley.

Henry rides through the night to warn Sir Divish at Talmberg, and Sigismund's army appears under its walls the next morning; Divish talks his way out of a siege. At the end of the game the castle is taken by treachery and has to be won back with a trebuchet. The real Talmberk castle did belong to a Diviš of Talmberk in 1385, and a Diviš was burgrave of Prague Castle in 1400. Its ruins are now partly built into the houses of a small village three kilometres north of Rataje.

Visitor guidance: The red-marked trail from Sázava to Rataje passes through Talmberk; the ruins are only partly accessible among private houses.

Rattay is Henry's base for most of the game: a town strung along a ridge above the Sázava, ruled by Sir Hanush of Leipa for his young nephew, Hans Capon of Pirkstein. History matches the story closely. In 1403 the castle at Rataje really was run by Hanuš of Lipá because the heir, Jan Ptáček, was still underage, and Racek Kobyla — the game's Radzig — sheltered there with his men after fleeing Skalice. Rataje's two castles survive: the château at one end of town and Pirkštejn, with its round tower, at the other.

Visitor guidance: Pirkštejn is entered over a masonry bridge at the end of the town; Rataje is popular with players retracing the game.

Investigating a raid on the stud farm at Neuhof, Henry tracks bandits and Cumans to a hidden camp in the ruined village of Pribyslavitz. There he finally faces Runt, the bandit who beat him and stole his father's sword, and kills him in a duel — but the sword is gone. The real Přibyslavice, near Stříbrná Skalice, is itself a vanished village: first recorded in 1557, it dwindled to two houses, and its last permanent resident died in 1945.

Location precision: Little remains of the deserted village; the pin marks its recorded site.

The trail of counterfeit coins paying the bandits leads Henry to Sasau, a town grown up around its monastery. The real Sázava monastery was founded around 1032 by St Procopius and was unusual for using the Old Church Slavonic liturgy until 1096. The present buildings are mostly Baroque, but the unfinished Gothic basilica and the 14th-century fresco of the Madonna of Sázava, showing Mary walking with the young Jesus, survive from the age of the game.

Visitor guidance: The monastery has a permanent exhibition on Old Slavic Sázava; the excavated ruins of its first stone church lie in the garden.

Henry infiltrates the bandit band and is taken to their stronghold at Vranik, where he is captured and tortured by the Hungarian lord Istvan Toth, who holds his father's sword. Toth also reveals that Henry is really Radzig's illegitimate son. Henry escapes, and the lords' combined army storms Vranik. The real Vraník is a small hamlet west of Ledečko, above the Sázava, known for the earthworks of a Slavic hillfort rather than a castle.

Location precision: The game's fortress is invented; the pin marks the hamlet of Vraník.

In the epilogue, Wenceslaus's cousin Jobst of Moravia asks the lords to join a peace alliance, and Henry and Hans Capon are sent to Otto von Bergow at Trosky Castle to test his loyalty to Sigismund — where the sequel, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II (2025), begins. Trosky is real and spectacular: two towers, "Baba" and "Panna", on twin basalt volcanic plugs. It was built by Čeněk of Wartenberg and passed through King Wenceslaus to Otto of Bergau in the 1390s, just as the game says.

Visitor guidance: Trosky is in the Bohemian Paradise region; both towers have stairs and a viewing deck tops the Baba tower.