D&D 5E low population world/setting

[GlassJaw]

I've always been intrigued with the idea of a fantasy setting in which the population - for whatever - is very low. Most of the wilderness is wild, unexplored and dangerous. People are wary of strangers and travelers (and adventurers!). Towns and villages are rare and cities are virtually non-existent.

But how would a world like this actually work?

Obviously every town would need to be fairly self-sufficient and both a food source and means of defense. Trading would be difficult and dangerous.

Does anyone know of any resources for creating and running a campaign like this?

 

[Riley37]

That's an interesting idea. There's quite a few ways that could work out in detail. You might look at Europe when it was most depopulated by the Black Plagues; but that had all the infrastructure from before - roads, walled cities, etc. - it was a temporary situation, and arguably a cause of the Renaissance (fewer people + same amount of cultivated land, tools, other resources = more per capital wealth).

You might want to look at older mythic sources. I often point at the Epic of Beowulf and the Odyssey, as heroic stories with heroes, monsters, and a LOT of different assumptions than D&D. Those are stories which mostly don't assume high population density (except at Troy, maybe at Mycenae). The early versions of Runequest were trying for Homeric, before they switched to Glorantha and talking ducks.

You'd have to adapt a lot of the setting assumptions. No one is going to make articulated full plate mail, when there isn't an economic pyramid which supports that concentration of wealth. People might still make Potions of Healing, but I doubt that 50 pieces of gold is a standard, widespread price.

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

I don't know of any resources specifically for a campaign of this type, but the Judges Guild Wilderlands could probably be used as an example; it seems that a lot of the assumptions are that the world in the campaign setting is very sparsely populated. You might look more to post-apocalyptic games settings for inspiration rather than fantasy games, too.

A lot will depend on the reason for the low population - recent disease or war? Just a generally really dangerous environment keeping numbers way down? In the first scenario, lots of things from a previously more populous world might still exist - sort of a Gamma World scenario, where hunting for artifacts of that civilization is paramount, and some things (like Riley37's plate mail) might be achievable. If its just a really dangerous world, people may be living in essentially hunter-gatherer villages, as they don't have the social capital to do much more than that - but there might still be some people who achieve amazing things.

 

[edhel]

Some kind of Strange New World setting would work well. Think of Americas but without the people. Dimensional portals and Stargates might work too, depending on what the players are actually supposed to do.

 

[MechaPilot]

I don't know about any resources for that sort of thing, but one of my homebrew campaign settings has a low population. Most of the people are part of nomadic or semi-nomadic tribes. There are other people who have settled permanently in villages; very occasionally, one of these villages manages to become a town, but there are no cities.

The land is a wilderness, and it's populated mostly by magical and non-magical beasts, plant creatures, fey, and elementals. It is a primal world where civilization is struggling to scratch a foothold for itself while always on the lookout for the eyes shining in the dark, or the wrath of nature itself.

 

[painted_klown]

This idea is GREAT!

It has a LOT of potential for surprise twists, cool things to discover, etc.

Underground societies with high tech (or traditional middle earth tech), maybe a village atop a tall mountain (that is nearly impossible to get to) that are wanting to rid the world of it's population, enslave them, etc, (this could also explain why the population is so small) so they can continue to sustain their extravagant lives forever and not run out of resources. Either of these ideas could also explain the existence any random items you would want your party to discover along the way.

You could do anything is a world like that.

 

[the Jester]

Funny you should ask!

My 4e game started with the end of a great empire as it was overrun by a combined army of goblinoids, orcs, gnolls, ogres, kobolds and lizardfolk held together by a cabal of death knights. This army, the Six-Fingered Hand, crushed civilization, and only one real city survived (thanks to the heroic efforts of the pcs).

The city in question had to undergo some major changes in order to make it- the entire upper district, previously home to the aristocracy, was cleared and converted to rice fields and orchards. They managed to hold out against a prolonged siege and finally the pcs drove off the enemy, sought out the death knight in charge and laid him to rest by exorcising the spirit of his lost beloved.

In the aftermath, the Six-Fingered Hand collapsed into feuding bands of marauding humanoids. Outside of the city that survived (Fandelose), the 'civilized' races were severely depopulated and driven into desperate tribes of refugees barely able to survive. The remnants of the Hand hunt and kill or enslave them, so there really isn't much left outside of the city.

That was about 30 years ago. Since then, the city has struggled to survive, swinging back and forth between civilian government and military dictatorship. Tensions are high. The military desperately wants to keep the people in the city- it just can't protect them outside- and the farmers have lost more and more rights, now being bound to the land. This has led to increasing numbers of protests and the founding of a small, pretty much completely-unsustainable village a dozen miles away that has a great deal of support from the populace but is officially condemned by the army.

The population of Fandelose is slowly diminishing, unable to sustain itself. Much of the empire's culture is gone, many technologies have been lost, most of the empire's gods are forgotten or half-forgotten, and the more organized humanoid bands are still a very real threat.

I don't have any good resources for you to draw on, but there's a good example of a largely depopulated world.

EDIT: For clarity, this is still the setting I'm using in 5e, just a few decades after the siege (those 30 years I mentioned).

 

[was]

Create city-states with farmlands surrounding the walls. Maybe have very few roads, waterways would be the major trade routes. Tribes of semi-nomadic people would probably suffer food shortages and raid frequently.
Check out the ancient Greeks, Germanic tribes prior to 300 CE and pre-colonial Native Americans (Cahokia and Mississipian cultures)

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I've always imagined that a good number of campaign settings would end up this way, just through the natural course of events. Not every group of PCs is going to slay the Big Bad in the end. Maybe the world is conquered by the evil necromancer and an army of demons, only for some other group of heroes to come through after the world has been ruined.

You'd end up with a world that's designed to hold the normal populations you'd expect, but with not enough people to fill the big cities, and with most smaller settlements abandoned entirely.

 

[Sadrik]

I am thinking Starman Jones the classic Heinlen novel. They jump off course in their ship. Their star maps do not align with their own. They land on this habitable planet that happens to be a few months within their burn distance. They land and try and make a base and the indigenous life has some interesting properties and causes them some problems...

This is a classic story of exploration and unknown. I think you want to go that way with a game setting with a population of zero. They discover everything. Perhaps there was an ancient extinct race. Perhaps one that was not there until very recently, where did they go? Why did they go? Did they leave behind clues? Were the people destroyed perhaps they were sent to another plane? Perhaps they did not leave but moved (to another continent or underground) because of a danger/cataclysm/awakening?

Effects:
Commerce is 0, if they came with a big group of a hundred or so maybe trading is it.
You don't have any background knowledge, knowledge skills are weakened.
You may need to fight for just provisions and survival.
Things you find may be alien and weird.