historical references for "points of light"?

[Alratan]

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.

That kind of reciprocal gifting works, but you don't choose which gift you receive.

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.

In a PoL setting what would be high value and portable? The only things I can think of really are salt and maybe spices. There would also be nearly nothing to buy, as the kind of population density we're talking about dosen't generate the kind of surplus required. In this context, there also isn't really trade on a wide scale (or even on a small scale), nearly everything is restricted to local production. This means that things don't have consistent values. Most of the time your gold and jewelry is literally valueless, as there's no one within a hundred miles who has any use for it.

Without the economy of at least antiquity to support you, it would be an adventure in itself to simply spend your loot, or to acquire metal armour, as your point of light can't really have the resources to create one.

 

[Prince of Happiness]

Without the economy of at least antiquity to support you, it would be an adventure in itself to simply spend your loot, or to acquire metal armour, as your point of light can't really have the resources to create one.

I think this is ultimately hinging on what you're choosing to define a PoL setting as. Clearly there were people in historical time periods who did trade, who made the hell out of some treasure, etc. There is a reason why gold was valued by so many societies: Doen't tarnish, doesn't corrode, shiny. If it was good enough for the Scythians to horde, intricately work and trade en masse to Greek city states, there's no reason why it shouldn't happen in a PoL setting.

 

[Alratan]

I think this is ultimately hinging on what you're choosing to define a PoL setting as. Clearly there were people in historical time periods who did trade, who made the hell out of some treasure, etc. There is a reason why gold was valued by so many societies: Doen't tarnish, doesn't corrode, shiny. If it was good enough for the Scythians to horde, intricately work and trade en masse to Greek city states, there's no reason why it shouldn't happen in a PoL setting.

I agree with all this. I just wouldn't describe even early Antiquity as remotely fitting this criteria:

Most of the world is monster-haunted wilderness. The centers of civilization are few and far between, and the world isn’t carved up between nation-states that jealously enforce their borders. A few difficult and dangerous roads tenuously link neighboring cities together, but if you stray from them you quickly find yourself immersed in goblin-infested forests, haunted barrowfields, desolate hills and marshes, and monster-hunted badlands. A

or:

The king’s soldiers might do a passable job of keeping the lands within a few miles of his castle free of monsters and bandits, but most of the realm’s outlying towns and villages are on their own.

If the basic economic unit is an area of a few square miles, which are tenuously linked by exceedingly dangerous transport links, then its simply too hard and too unprofitable to set up the trade routes like you describe from antiquity. We're talking about a situation more economically primitive than neolithic Europe.

 

[HeavenShallBurn]

In a PoL setting what would be high value and portable?

Might want to look at what was being traded during a comparable period in History.
Examples
http://www.dover.gov.uk/museum/boat/trade.asp
http://ina.tamu.edu/ub_main.htm
http://www.malcolmwiener.net/Articles/Nature_Control.PDF

There are more, but I think the idea stands. There was trade and a lot of it during the Bronze Age despite the dangers involved. And certain kinds of objects generally held value in portable form across cultural boundaries. One was metals, another was gems and trinkets(status items) and both of these are portable.

 

[TwinBahamut]

Even if gold coins were only made a hundred years prior, and no one living even remembers who the face on the coin is, and it is not a standard currency, a gold coin is still a piece of gold. Gold has value without being a part of formalized currency.

And if for some reason you don't want to use gold coins, then salt, dyes, spices, silk, furs, ivory, leather, metal, gems, etc, are all perfectly good things to trade and use as a form of wealth.

In a Points of Light setting, where trade is difficult and trade routes are not well-established or safe, such things would be even more valuable then they would be in a more settled setting, simply because they are harder to get.

 

[Alratan]

Might want to look at what was being traded during a comparable period in History.
Examples
http://www.dover.gov.uk/museum/boat/trade.asp
http://ina.tamu.edu/ub_main.htm
http://www.malcolmwiener.net/Articles/Nature_Control.PDF

There are more, but I think the idea stands. There was trade and a lot of it during the Bronze Age despite the dangers involved. And certain kinds of objects generally held value in portable form across cultural boundaries. One was metals, another was gems and trinkets(status items) and both of these are portable.

Trade during the neolithic and bronze age was apparently a lot safer than what PoL setting implies, as things like stone axe heads from good flint being traded right across western Europe shows. Things like combs and amber were traded to high status individuals, but adjacent places were a lot closer together than in PoL, so diffusion can occur, and the marginal return per mile traveled is much higher. I mean, we talking about a situation with each economic unit controls just 7 square miles of production, and is separated by days of travel. We also know trade is so rare that communities can just fall of the radar and no one have any idea about it.

 

[HeavenShallBurn]

You've got a point I'm getting off my **s to do some comparative math now on population densities and settlements. Looking over the starting figures I actually think the population density for a PoL setting ala the OP is going to be similar to Neolithic Europe.

But that still leaves the question of danger. Here I'll concede that going by the numbers and the MM a PoL setting will be chock-full of creatures far deadlier than any the real world saw and that would have an effect. How much is pure speculation and will be different from one DM to another.

 

[Baduin]

"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.

The best era is the end of the Bronze Age - the Great Era of Grave Robbing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12th_century_BC
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twentieth_dynasty_of_Egypt#Tomb_robbing

See Wunderlich's Secret of Crete. He may have made mistakes in details, but the overall picture is perfect.


http://www.philipcoppens.com/crete_dead.html
http://www.amazon.com/Secret-Crete-Hans-Georg-Wunderlich/dp/0285621645
http://www.amazon.com/review/R1RUE52GZ1IGHB

The Bronze Age was an era of the Artificial Immortality. They thought that the corpse lived on in the Underworld. It had to be fed, not always symbolically (That belief lasted even longer even in Classical Greece they feeding pipes to literally feed the dead with soup). As long as the corpse lasted underground, the soul could survive in happines, (usually somewhere else, on the Isles of the Blessed etc), using all the treasure gathered in its tomb. But it had to have that treasure, and regular sacrifices to feed it. The state was basically an association to worship the ancestors.

At that time there were gathered enormous treasures in many tombs - in Mycean Greece, in Egypt, for example in the enormous, now-destroyed Egyptian Labyrinth etc.

http://www.amazeingart.com/seven-wonders/egyptian-labyrinth.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labyrinth

People believed the treasures were protected by gods and monsters (Minotaur etc). But, in the end of the Bronze Age, it fell apart. The Grecian tombs, with their riches, were looted by Dorians. Egypt was attacked by Sea Peoples and disintegrated.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Peoples
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Intermediate_Period_of_Egypt

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priam's_Treasure
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heracleidae

When people understood they cannot protect their dead, the mode of burial changed. They began to burn bodies to save them from being desecrated.

Those "Dark Ages" were much darker than those after fall of Rome. All of the states were conquered by barbarians. Since they had centralized economy based on the palace/temple, they simply fell apart. In Greece they even forgotten that they ever had a writing. The roving "heroes" such as those that conquered Troy amassed unbelievable riches robbings tombs and temples.

http://www.ancient-greece.org/history/dark-ages.html

This is the original "Heroic Age" of Hesiod.

http://ancienthistory.about.com/cs/grecoromanmyth1/a/hesiodagesofman_4.htm


In D&D this suggests an idea of wizard-kings building elaborate tombs to protect their bodies and riches, while their spirits live happily as blessed spirits, fey princes, or even gods - but only as long as their body and treasure is safe.

On the other hand, marauding heroes rob their tombs and destroy their kingdom.

 

[Kesh]

Take a look at modern Alaska, anywhere north of Fairbanks. Some of these towns are so isolated, you can only get to them by sled or by plane. Bush pilots are the lifeblood for many of these towns, bringing in mail and supplies. Though things have become more comfortable the last few decades (what with the Internet and such), they're still very isolated communities.

 

[loseth]

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.

I know it sounds implausible, but believe it or not, the idea that the 'dark ages' or 'feudal age' was a time when barter reigned supreme and coins were meaningless is actually a popular myth rather than a historical reality. After Rome ceased to control its territory in the West directly (i.e. the 'fall' of the Roman Empire), the new Germanic rulers of the Roman West largely continued business as usual, minting and spending coins just as the Romans had (see a couple of examples here). Even in Britain, where things really were fairly 'dark,' there was plenty of coinage about. Barter will be more important in a PoL setting than in a non-PoL one, but a barter economy and a coin economy are not mutually exclusive.

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.

Check out the example I gave earlier of the Medieval Baltic. It really was as PoL as I claim, and a coin economy operated just fine. As long as you're strong enough to protect your points of light and the trade routes that connect them (as the monks militant and warlike pagan nations who ruled the Baltic were), then coins will equate to spending power even in a bandit-ridden war-torn land of mostly untamed wilderness.