It’s tricky. The smaller the thing, the more you can say “there are so many places like this that nobody would bother to list all of them”, the better it works; the more the location is tied down, the worse. So in P&P it doesn’t really matter what the farmers are growing/herding/whatever because this isn’t a story about farmers, and therefore it doesn’t matter where in Derbyshire it’s happening.
I haven’t read Sinclair Lewis, but from a quick skim of the Wiki of a Million Lies it appears that the stories are largely set on a fairly small scale, not for example dealing with state-level politics where one would have to consider how Winnemac’s senators and representatives affect things at a national level. (Also that he did this after he got negative feedback from the inhabitants of the real place he’d used in a previous book – which I suppose would be a consideration for published RPGs, but generally not for one’s private campaign. Though I have had feedback from people who’ve found my occult WWII game writeup out of context, and want to know e.g. “did my ancestor really have an interest in the occult, I believe so but I haven’t found anything about it elsewhere”.)
The long-running radio soap opera* The Archers is set in the fictional English county of Borsetshire; it’s meant to be generically West Midlands rural, but inconsistencies abound. There just aren’t that many English counties, and since the characters sometimes travel outside the enclave it becomes clear that stuff doesn’t quite fit together.
* it claims not to be but really that’s what it is
A great thing about putting a vaguely modern game in a real location is the availability of maps and business listings – chunks of Hurricane Season were inspired by virtually cruising round Jacksonville FL with Street View and getting an idea of what the place looked like, and I posted elsewhere about turning a geodata file of significant game locations into a map players could look at.
In whswhs’ fantasy taxonomy I’d put most urban fantasy in the first category (“it’s the real world, but with vampires” etc.) – though longer-running series, where the existence of supernatural beasties has become public, have to do sudden world-building to consider how everyone would react to this. (Or, as in the Kate Daniels series, set the world post magical apocalypse, which bumps it into category 3 even though significant bits of it are still familiar.) But of course classic fantasy RPGs are category 3, but cheating by invoking archetypes: your character may come from Sillynamia, but you still know how a knight or a barbarian or an elf works.
The moment-of-silence I particularly recall was only partly my doing; I wasn’t the GM. We’d had a long-running but intermittent game (we only saw each other 1-2× a year) of alien invasion. The PCs had found and infiltrated the aliens’ master base, with the plan of getting key intelligence data, but realised that we’d got trapped and didn’t have any chance of escaping. But we did have communications, so we called on our allies to launch their nuclear missiles at our position.
My part in this was that, during the fighting through the base, I’d been playing various bits of a sound effects CD in the background for atmosphere, so I was familiar with the track listing. So when the GM said something like “there’s a sudden overwhelming noise, and everything goes white”… I switched to the Last Post.