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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Irda Ranger" data-source="post: 4101342" data-attributes="member: 1003">Do you have Worlds & Monsters? They have whole essays on this sort of thing. The Wizards site also does a good job of explaining it. But for me I guess som standard tropes are NPCs being generally ignorant/misinformed of goings-on outside their pol; travel between pols being primarily an affair of large, well-armed caravans (safety in numbers); randomly divergent forms of social organization and government from one pol to the next; lots of ruins/old roads from Empires whose names are long forgotten; a high turnover rate of pols (towns succumbing to monsters; new territories being settled by adventurers; etc.); any point on the map that isn't a pol is a potentially monster infested wilderness; etc.That's a matter of taste. Note that Rohan and Gondor are kingdoms with some form of territorial integrity. They suffer raiders, but they also have armed patrols and rule of law. Pol as WotC has presented it is more like The Fellowship of the Ring, with long stretches of "the Wild" between Hobbiton and Bree, between Bree and Rivendell, &c.One of the "dials" on the campaign setting generator is the size of your "points." Some have indicated that they would prefer a "blobs" of light setting where small kingdoms (like Cormyr or the Grand Duchy of Karameikos) with relatively safe intra-kingdom travel are the norm, rather than city-states and lonely burghs.That's a metaphysical question which is probably best answered in a way that makes sense to you. I like to think that there's a little bit of Astral spirit, Primal power and Worldly magic in every living thing, and that some are simply born with a greater ability (or simply have better opportunities) to develop these powers.Watch Spiderman I and II.Describe the transition from open fields to overgrown paths. Describe how the snapping sound of the flag waiving from the last watchtower slowly fades into the distance is and overcome by the sounds of the woods.When the PCs ask an NPC "What's over that hill?" answer with "I have no idea."Move things around. When the PCs return to a town, a halfling caravan has set up its tents outside, or the mill has been burned down by Bugbear raiders and rebuilt (in stone).When PCs ask why NPCs call the nearby monastery "the new monastery", explain "Oh, because the old monastery was further up in the hills but got sacked about 50 years ago now by a clutch of frost wights that wandered down off the glacier. They ate every monk they caught while they lived, and the old monk's ghosts still haunt the hills up there."Encounter an ancient barrow, wherein a King of ancient lineage is buried. No one knows his name, as no one can read the language the headstones are written in. And an owlbear has been nesting in there for the past year anyway.Two towns at opposite ends of a valley are largely ignorant of each other even though they can see each other from the highest towers of their respective castle fortresses.  The center of the valley has a deep, craggy ravine running through it with impassible river rapids and a nasty ogre infestation. Although the two towns were founded by two brothers almost four centuries ago, years of separation mean that the one has become a constitutional monarchy ruled by an elected council in consultation with the descendant King of Brother A, while the descendants of Brother B succumbed to a religious coup some two centuries ago and are living as Kings in Exile in the mountains to the North while the city is ruled by a "Church" whose Circle of Bishops are all Infernal Warlocks.</blockquote>

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