D&D 5E low population world/setting

[GX.Sigma]

I've always been intrigued with the idea of a fantasy setting in which the population - for whatever - is very low. Most of the wilderness is wild, unexplored and dangerous. People are wary of strangers and travelers (and adventurers!). Towns and villages are rare and cities are virtually non-existent.

But how would a world like this actually work?

Obviously every town would need to be fairly self-sufficient and both a food source and means of defense. Trading would be difficult and dangerous.

Does anyone know of any resources for creating and running a campaign like this?

The default D&D assumptions are post-apocalyptic to begin with. Why not start with the 1e DMG, or the original Greyhawk campaign setting?

 

[Hand of Evil]

I have done this, I had cities for some races, like Dwarf and Elves that were far between, the other races were nomads that kept moving because settlement meant creating a target for dragon's and such.

 

[Lidgar]

For inspiration for such a setting, might I recommend Jack Vance's Dying Earth novels.

 

[Sigbjorn_86]

I would do this one of two ways:

1) Populated world recently devastated by (insert catastrophe). Think a post-apocalypse in a fantasy setting. Use Fallout as a guide. The trappings of civilization still exist (perhaps in various states of disrepair). You could go for desolation (Fallout) or desertion / reclaimed by nature (see The Last of Us). What remains of the population live in fortified settlements.

2) A world where the wilderness simply can't be settled. This would largely be a "man versus nature" story. Humanity mainly lives in a handful of large, self-sufficient, heavily fortified settlements. Isolated villages/tribes may exist in the wilderness, but if the characters leave and come back later, they may be gone. Whether they got up and left or were simply wiped out. What settlements do exist are constantly on the brink, whether from invasion, natural disaster, plague, or famine. For inspiration I would focus on some of the early attempts to colonize the Americas, such as the Lost Colony (Roanoke) or Jamestown.

 

[Evenglare]

Video games are all about the low population worlds. Clearly because of space requirements for older games, but for some reason it doesn't feel out of place. There are just a few things you need to remember. Each town simply must be there for some really good reason. Normally that town is a sole provider for some sort of food, or spice or metal or something unique. Second is that traders bring your wares to a large town or city and they get paid handsomely for actually making the trek and they bring back profits for the town. Those are the key things to making a low civilization world work. Basically everything has to be rare, and most every citzen of that world needs to be damn good at their job of getting that rare item, and then traders and merchants are equally as valuable as the item they are selling because of the risks taken to sell it.

 

[GlassJaw]

I would do this one of two ways:

1) Populated world recently devastated by (insert catastrophe).

2) A world where the wilderness simply can't be settled.

Good stuff, I definitely agree. I think #2 would follow more closely to the "rules as written", at least as far as the assumed economy goes. #1 would certainly involve more sweeping campaign changes. I'm thinking The Walking Dead meets Lord of the Rings. The old FFG Midnight setting sort of falls in this category since it's essentially a "what if Sauron wins" setting.

In survival setting, coinage would have very little value. Food, water and shelter/defense would be the priority.

I've been playing a lot of Skyrim lately and watching The Walking Dead. I've also always been a fan of the FR Cult of the Dragon and the movie Reign of Fire. One idea I had was to combine all of those. Basically some dragon cult found a way to raise a bunch of dracoliches, which promptly went berserk and starting destroying everything. Oh, and as an added bonus, their breath weapon can raise the dead. Yay!

So plenty for the players to do obviously in addition to the normal adventurer stuff: protect the merchant caravan, search dungeons and ruins for magic items and weed out the goblins raiding the chicken coop. All the while, watching out for dracolich attacks.

 

[MonkeezOnFire]

This reminds of a campaign called West Marches. It was designed around a single town on the brink of civilization where everything west of it was unexplored. One of the entries in the series describes how to create an interesting wilderness (found here). The rest of the series is also an interesting read, but this is the one most relevant to the thread.

 

[Dausuul]

First, I assume you aren't planning a Stone Age campaign--you want more or less the standard medieval tech level, but with very low population and mostly isolated settlements. In that case, it makes sense to have your setting be one which used to have large civilizations, but suffered some sort of crisis. Medieval technology represents thousands of years of exchange of ideas across large networks of people. A setting where such networks have never existed is never going to get much beyond basic agriculture--indeed, it's unlikely to get even that far. As a bonus, living in a world of fallen civilizations provides a handy explanation for why there are troves of magic items and treasure buried in ruins across the land.

So, assume a world in the wake of some deadly crisis that wiped out most of the population. The first thing is to figure out what the crisis was and how long it's been. Was it a recent event, and the world can be expected to start recovering in a few decades? Or was it hundreds of years in the past, and there has been no recovery and none expected? I suspect "hundreds of years in the past, no recovery expected" is more the feel you're aiming for, in which case the question of why there has been no recovery is important. People are resilient. Give us a chance, we bounce back. There has to be something preventing that recovery. In some sense, the crisis must still be going on. Perhaps a plague of demons or monsters was unleashed way back in the day, and the monsters continue to haunt the wilderness between settlements, making trade a dangerous endeavor and preventing any settlement from growing beyond what its walls can defend.

Next, consider the implications on how the game works. Forget magic item shops--in the absence of trade networks, even mundane gear will be hard to find. Let's say the party walks into town with a nice haul of gold from its last adventure, and wants to buy full plate for the fighter. Oops! No one here can make full plate. There's no iron mine in this town; and with minimal trade, they have no way to get iron from elsewhere. The town's blacksmith operates by reforging scraps and broken tools, or else they've stopped blacksmithing altogether and rely on tools made out of wood, bone, and flint. Making something like full plate is utterly beyond them. You'll have to go on a quest to find a town with a working iron mine, or (more likely) find some leftover armor from days of yore that can be reforged and refitted.

I've written some stories set in worlds like this. They're a lot of fun to explore, but you do have to rethink a lot of assumptions.

 

[GlassJaw]

This reminds of a campaign called West Marches. It was designed around a single town on the brink of civilization where everything west of it was unexplored. One of the entries in the series describes how to create an interesting wilderness (found here). The rest of the series is also an interesting read, but this is the one most relevant to the thread.

Huge fan of the West Marches blog! Even though it's 7 years old, I still keep it bookmarked.

 

[weldon]

If you're going for a scenario where the world has been recently depopulated, then Europe after the black death is a great foundation. One of the really interesting things (IMHO) about Europe at this time is that the black death led to a radical reshaping of social mobility.

The differing loss of population across various regions meant that some areas had very few serfs left to work the land. This created opportunity for some in the lower classes to move away from traditional, hereditary serfdom where they were tied to the land. They could pick up and move somewhere else where they were welcomed to work the land as tenant farmers rather than as serfs.

This mobility created by the black death could be considered one of the primary factors in the breakdown of serfdom in Europe.

I think that in a campaign world, there is a lot of opportunity for great stories in this sort of social upheaval.