historical references for "points of light"?

[Thaumaturge]

Mighty Halfling has a very good point, gothic literature is rife with isolated mansions/monastaries/towns all beseiged by inexplicable evil. Much more enjoyable reading suggestions than my previous post: The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, "The Fall of the House of Usher" by Poe (really, anything by Poe), The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Stevenson, and many more all have entirely absent or completly inept societal structures (i.e. law enforcement) to protect people from themselves or the unknown.

Thaumaturge.

 

[Prince of Happiness]

Isn't the Sengoku era which follows/overlaps with that Shogunate the better example? Japan was split up into many hundreds of different autonomous domains, each ruled by their own lord. War and banditry was incredibly common. If anime is any indication, getting snacked on by a demon was pretty common in that era.

Early period-Ashikaga was still relatively weak compared to the later Edo Jidai. I use Ashikaga Shogunate as an indicator for myself because Sengoku Jidai tends to suggest to me proper daimyo who have finally consolidated their territories and are moving against each other, such as the Date, Uesugi, Takeda, Oda, and Hojo clans who were able to field large armies and had proper assessments of their domains carried out and urbanization was in full swing. When I refer to the Ashikaga Shogunate, I refer mainly to the period during/after the Onin War when the shugo, shugo dai, and local strongmen noticed that the Shogun had no clothes, as it were and started to make grabs of their own.

 

[Alratan]

Although Dark Age Europe might be said to be a good PoL setting, the problem with it is that it destroys part of the point of being an adventurer. Mainly this is an inherent problem with PoL based games.

Simply but, PoL cannot really support currency based economies: wealth = land + people. Whilst stealing loot is all very well, if its not really convertible into spending power, then what's the point.

 

[HeavenShallBurn]

"Points of Light" is only a marginal fit for the Dark Age in the first few centuries after the fall of Rome. What it really fits perfectly and where you'll find the best ideas and examples is much, much earlier. You want the Bronze Age if you're going to really get a handle on what it meant for Points of Light. Populations need to be far below Medieval levels but what population exists should concentrate together at roughly Medieval densities where population exists. Best advice is to go to a secondhand bookstore and pick up some History books about Europe during the Neolithic/Bronze Age transition. For places where you intend to have settlements larger than the village pick up books on the Mesopotamia/Western Asia region or pre-Aryan Indus civilizations. Another important part is NOT to use the standard "good" races versus "bad" races paradigm. Align things along a civilization versus barbarian line and mix up things so that every standard race for your setting exists on both sides of that line.

 

[Prince of Happiness]

Although Dark Age Europe might be said to be a good PoL setting, the problem with it is that it destroys part of the point of being an adventurer. Mainly this is an inherent problem with PoL based games.

Simply but, PoL cannot really support currency based economies: wealth = land + people. Whilst stealing loot is all very well, if its not really convertible into spending power, then what's the point.

In the time period I reference, there was a thriving trade in the importation of coins from China for a cash economy, and extrapolating from that, even with a barter economy, the value of the land was very precisely fixed into how many koku the land could produce, the koku being the theoretical amount of rice that can support one man for one year and was a fixed weight. Assign a value of koku and denominations/weight for less amounts and then you have a barter economy where dungeon loot can be traded for like amounts of stuff based on the value of treasure.

 

[Alratan]

"Points of Light" is only a marginal fit for the Dark Age in the first few centuries after the fall of Rome. What it really fits perfectly and where you'll find the best ideas and examples is much, much earlier. You want the Bronze Age if you're going to really get a handle on what it meant for Points of Light.

These have the same problem, as I said above, to an even greater extent. The concept of portable wealth is largely meaningless in such fragmented societies.

 

[Alratan]

In the time period I reference, there was a thriving trade in the importation of coins from China for a cash economy, and extrapolating from that, even with a barter economy, the value of the land was very precisely fixed into how many koku the land could produce, the koku being the theoretical amount of rice that can support one man for one year and was a fixed weight. Assign a value of koku and denominations/weight for less amounts and then you have a barter economy where dungeon loot can be traded for like amounts of stuff based on the value of treasure.

Yes, but could you spend it on goods, really, or was it just a means of exchange within the elite.

 

[HeavenShallBurn]

These have the same problem, as I said above, to an even greater extent. The concept of portable wealth is largely meaningless in such fragmented societies.

The thing is portable wealth=/= coinage
Coinage doesn't need to have even been invented for portable wealth to exist. All there needs to be is a relatively consistent idea of what Kind of things are valuable. Instead of finding a pile of coins in the dragons hoard they find a pile of gems, jewelry, and raw gold nuggets. When they arrive at the village the weary party is met by the local petty-king who calls them guest-friends. And they give him a gift of gems and swords found in the dragons lair and in return he gives them a gift of equivalent value. Wealth can be portable even without coins, it's transactions which are fundamentally different as they take on the mantle of an "equitable" potlatch as a means of establishing face.

 

[HeavenShallBurn]

the value of the land was very precisely fixed into how many koku the land could produce, the koku being the theoretical amount of rice that can support one man for one year and was a fixed weight. Assign a value of koku and denominations/weight for less amounts and then you have a barter economy where dungeon loot can be traded for like amounts of stuff based on the value of treasure.

What he said

At the core, it's about value and value is about an agreement on how the worth of things relate to one another. Even in a pure barter economy so long as a thing is considered to have value it can be traded for other things based on that perception of value. There will always be things of high value that are portable even if they aren't systematized in the same way as coinage. And we can easily use an abstract coinage value to track the value of these items in game terms.

 

[Prince of Happiness]

Yes, but could you spend it on goods, really, or was it just a means of exchange within the elite.

Yes, and "money"lenders also came about at this period as well.