Help me out. PoL. Why don't small towns get overrun?

[Vigilance]

Id imagine there are frequently communities that get overrun.

This is an excellent idea for an adventure scenario. Maybe the PCs are investigating what happened to a nearby village, or leading a rag tag band of refugees to the relative safetly of a nearby village.

Also, if you want to invoke the fantasy tropes that goblinoids can't stand the light much, that provides a chance for the villagers to catch their breath, since the goblins might have to retreat with the sunrise.

And of course, a village under attack might send for adventurers. That's a time honored wild west trope, also seen in Seven Samurai.

 

[Pbartender]

What's worth pillaging in a simple hamlet with a couple run-down cottages?

Not much.

Which is probably these tiny hamlets mostly get ignored by the Big, Bad Evil Things... There's far more worthwhile targets, than a handful of insignificant hovels that won't yeild up much more loot than a couple sackfuls of food, a sick mule and some dirty clothes.

 

[Surgoshan]

Ghengiz Cohen (leader of the silver horde) knew that you don't kill merchants. If you kill merchants, then you can't rob them again.

Also, sense many monsters will be less organized/live mostly on hunted meat their populations won't be as dense as a human farming community. In a fight between a hundred human minions and a dozen kobold minions, the humans will win. Thus the weak monsters will typically stage small raids on human communities, rather than wage full-scale war. And the humans won't be living in pup tents cooking smores, they'll be in fortified communities and homes.

The more powerful monsters will probably be rarer because they tend to keep their own numbers down (do you seriously think you can keep a thousand dragons alive on the quantity of meat you'll find on top of a mountain?).

 

[Mal Malenkirk]

And of course, a village under attack might send for adventurers. That's a time honored wild west trope, also seen in Seven Samurai.

No, NO, NO!

If you gonna bother mentionning it at all, you have to mention Seven Samurai first and then say how it influenced westerns. The Magnificient Seven is somehow considered a classic but is a very inferior remake of Seven Samurai.

(And yes, it's not like Kurosawa invented the 'band of heroes against brigands' storyline, but it's the 20th century classic version and it's that movie that was responsible for the sudden upsurge in various variation on that theme in Hollywood in the following decades.)

 

[Nahat Anoj]

If the world is filled with big, bad, evil things in the wilderness that separates scattered settlements, why haven't these towns been overrun?

My sense of PoL is that, while really nasty things are indeed out there in the wild, these nasty things aren't particularly common. So a good portion of PoL's dread may be in the minds of frightened human peasants, wary elf rangers, and skittish dwarven merchants. People keep to the towns and settlements because it's way less dangerous than going out into the wild - while something may not happen to you, it's still too much of a risk for the majority of people.

So it's just that the world is so big, vast, and essentially unexplored that makes it PoL IMO - monsters are indeed out there, but a lot if not most is "simply" fear of the unknown.

 

[Surgoshan]

Oooo, yeah, Kurosawa was ripped off many times by makers of westerns.

When he first saw Per un Pugno di Dollari (Fistful of Dollars in the US), Kurosawa wrote to Director Sergio Leone and said, ""It is a very fine film, but it is my film." It was lifted from Yojimbo almost scene for scene.

 

[Fallen Seraph]

I could also see various creatures living amongst these small villages and simply using them but not destroying them.

We could see things like:

-A village where the children are periodically stolen by the Fey, and replaced by changelings.

-A village where a cult has formed around some sort of monstrosity.

-A village where underground it lies a cavernous area ruled by a band of monsters. The village simply keeps it hidden.

-They simply slowly feed off the villagers.

Many different ways the monsters/creatures can interact with villages without destroying them.

 

[small pumpkin man]

For "hardcore" PoL, one would assume most decent sized villages have at least a motte and baily(or cultural equivelent), and adults of the appropriate gender would be trained (if very poorly) for combat.

Smaller places would generally only get by if nobody really knew they were there, or there was just an old poor hag, who probably doesn't have anything anyone wants (And intelligent monsters stay away from in case she's a Hag anyway). Or they could be "paying off" the evil, like the villagers at the start of Seven Samurai, or that warren in Watership Down. Or they could be in a geologically secure place.

Thing is, I look at this like Jack of Tales' other thread about Simulationism and PoL, about how "villages all need to be near a river and need bunch of other stuff", and I just feel like saying "pick up a history book sometime". Yes there are horrible things out there, but there's the NPCs do actually have acces to some magic, and the occasional hero too, I don't see it as being fundimentally dissimilar to the Dark ages, or any time/area period known as the "Warring states" period.


But it should be remembered that this isn't the only type of PoL there is, it could be like Eberron where you've got Powerful Citystates, but lots of ruins and battlefields other places between them where nobody goes because it's incredibly dangerous, or like Midnight, where you often play the "monsters from the forest or the mountains" to the Orc's Empire, it could be like Darksun where the enviroment plays a large part of the "PoLness", it could be like Conan, where there it's not necessarily any real civilization at all for large parts of the world, but there aren't actually that many monsters around. (although there's quite a few), What PoL means is that there is a good reason for opponents to be accessable, and conversly that there isn't a force you can reasonably turn to when problems come up (expect from the PCs), that can mean a lot of different things.

 

[Cadfan]

Answer Number 1.

Your typical local village has local problems that can be dealt with by people of the strength they have locally.

As the characters advance in level, they encounter bigger problems that affect larger regions. These problems are, by nature, less common than the local ones, because there are more large regions than there are villages.

Eventually, the characters are of adequate strength to become embroiled in political and national level conflicts that threaten entire nations.

And....

Answer Number 2.

This question is meaningless. The world exists as a backdrop to a plotline. Asking what happens to villages when the player characters are not around is like asking who fought Sauron's orcish hordes during massive sieges at Helm's Gate in the years before Legolas and Gimli were born. No one did. Sauron didn't HAVE orcish hordes back then, and he didn't besiege Helm's Gate. For some odd reason, the main characters and the plotline coexisted. Huh.

From this perspective, the wilderness between towns isn't so much filled with deadly monsters as it is mildly dangerous and mostly unknown. When problems arise that need heroes to solve, they will coincidentally arise nearby the player characters. Because otherwise the game would suck. Maybe lots of other would be heroes dealt with a local orcish tribe, or cleaned out an ancient cursed tomb, and then once the village was peaceful since they solved the only major problem nearby other than random low level bandits and wolves, immediately went on to settle down, marry a local girl, and grow fat and old.

That's fine. This isn't THEIR story.

 

[malraux]

Because the local band of giants is just smart enough to grasp the basic concepts of domesticating livestock, and they like to grind our bones to make their bread?

Or alternatively once a year the town sacrifices the most beautiful maiden to the local dragon in exchange for protection?