A little bit back someone mentioned cavemen were in a PoL setting while living with dinosaurs. And if cavemen had actually lived with dinosaurs things would have been strange because there was a reason there weren't a large number of mammals around. Natural selection means if there's a whole bunch of high power monsters around (above CR 8 or so) then human civilization can't really exist in a PoL setting because it needs big armies or plenty of high powered adventurers to survive. And on roughly the same track, the PoL setting assumes that there aren't evil empires springing up anywhere, you can certainly have one as the focus of your campaign, but it isn't normal, evil is fractured all about at least as much as the good races are.
So how does a smallish town survive in this world? For a number of reasons.
The first is that the world is a big place. This is hard to grasp for anybody that grew up where a car is the primary form of locomotion like pretty much all of us did. I mean I hear fifteen miles and I think right next door. But that's about five hours away on foot. So human settlements in general aren't going to be right next door to monsters, at least not very many.
The second is that monsters aren't going to attack towns very often. We'll look at the humanoid tribes of monsters first. We imagine that orcs, gnolls, goblins, kobolds generally exist as hunter-gatherer groups and not in any agrarian groups (not that there's any reason not to have them do so, the races are intelligent and perfectly capable of picking it up from humans). So why don't the raid the human town? The better question is, why would they? Remember that evil does not mean 'goes out of its way to inflict pain on others', evil means that it doesn't have any moral objection to inflicting pains on others. Why should the orcs raid the human village? What do they want from it? Non-mobile Hunter-gatherer groups have population limits, you aren't going to have a group of a hundred orcs (yielding maybe 35 warriors) just living off the land in a normal scenario. In general these groups simply don't have the people to throw away waging war against human groups. A group of orcs rushing twelve humans with bows hiding behind a simple wall is going to take heavy casualties and might just get wiped out. And there's simply no reason to attack, wiping out the humans only serves a purpose if wiping them out makes life easier for you. If it does there will probably be conflict, but we might as well ask why the humans don't go and wipe out the monsters themselves. Groups large enough to not be hurt by the members they would bleed off from conflicts with local groups simply don't generally exist in the PoL campaign. There isn't a horde of a thousand orcs (with roughly 400 warriors) moving around the countryside, or if there is then it's balanced by a human force roughly capable of meeting it in battle.
The second group of monsters is the ones that the townspeople can't even touch. Dragons, beholders, and other similar high CR creatures. The first question to ask of course is, why does the creature care about the human town? Towns don't have material wealth, they aren't a sustainable source of food if you're eating the humans (A dragon who demands that the humans raise cattle in order to have regular meals). Again, evil doesn't mean going out of your way to hurt people, it just means you don't have any moral objection to hurting people. Human towns are really only worth it to destroy if you need human sacrifices or something in a similar vein, in which case, say good bye to the town.
But if the big bad does come a knocking and just feels like destroying something then there's a simple solution. Running away very fast. I mean if the things decides to hunt you all down then you're dead but chances are it'll get bored and wander away after killing a few people and knocking some buildings down. Of course this is the same problem faced by every single orc, gnoll, goblin or kobold village as well, evil isn't nice to other evil.
So humans surviving makes as much sense as any other group surviving. The CR .5-1 creatures are checked by other CR .5-1 creatures, the CR 5-10 creatures are a lot rarer and checked by other CR 5-10 creatures, and as CR goes up the monsters get rarer and rarer although they'll still be checked by other creatures of the same CR.
So how does a smallish town survive in this world? For a number of reasons.
The first is that the world is a big place. This is hard to grasp for anybody that grew up where a car is the primary form of locomotion like pretty much all of us did. I mean I hear fifteen miles and I think right next door. But that's about five hours away on foot. So human settlements in general aren't going to be right next door to monsters, at least not very many.
The second is that monsters aren't going to attack towns very often. We'll look at the humanoid tribes of monsters first. We imagine that orcs, gnolls, goblins, kobolds generally exist as hunter-gatherer groups and not in any agrarian groups (not that there's any reason not to have them do so, the races are intelligent and perfectly capable of picking it up from humans). So why don't the raid the human town? The better question is, why would they? Remember that evil does not mean 'goes out of its way to inflict pain on others', evil means that it doesn't have any moral objection to inflicting pains on others. Why should the orcs raid the human village? What do they want from it? Non-mobile Hunter-gatherer groups have population limits, you aren't going to have a group of a hundred orcs (yielding maybe 35 warriors) just living off the land in a normal scenario. In general these groups simply don't have the people to throw away waging war against human groups. A group of orcs rushing twelve humans with bows hiding behind a simple wall is going to take heavy casualties and might just get wiped out. And there's simply no reason to attack, wiping out the humans only serves a purpose if wiping them out makes life easier for you. If it does there will probably be conflict, but we might as well ask why the humans don't go and wipe out the monsters themselves. Groups large enough to not be hurt by the members they would bleed off from conflicts with local groups simply don't generally exist in the PoL campaign. There isn't a horde of a thousand orcs (with roughly 400 warriors) moving around the countryside, or if there is then it's balanced by a human force roughly capable of meeting it in battle.
The second group of monsters is the ones that the townspeople can't even touch. Dragons, beholders, and other similar high CR creatures. The first question to ask of course is, why does the creature care about the human town? Towns don't have material wealth, they aren't a sustainable source of food if you're eating the humans (A dragon who demands that the humans raise cattle in order to have regular meals). Again, evil doesn't mean going out of your way to hurt people, it just means you don't have any moral objection to hurting people. Human towns are really only worth it to destroy if you need human sacrifices or something in a similar vein, in which case, say good bye to the town.
But if the big bad does come a knocking and just feels like destroying something then there's a simple solution. Running away very fast. I mean if the things decides to hunt you all down then you're dead but chances are it'll get bored and wander away after killing a few people and knocking some buildings down. Of course this is the same problem faced by every single orc, gnoll, goblin or kobold village as well, evil isn't nice to other evil.
So humans surviving makes as much sense as any other group surviving. The CR .5-1 creatures are checked by other CR .5-1 creatures, the CR 5-10 creatures are a lot rarer and checked by other CR 5-10 creatures, and as CR goes up the monsters get rarer and rarer although they'll still be checked by other creatures of the same CR.
