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Message: <blockquote data-quote="GreenTengu" data-source="post: 6391680" data-attributes="member: 6777454">You are looking at your world quite backwards. Cities are not self-sufficient and spawn towns as a result of being successful and self-sufficient. Cities are quite an advanced form of habitation and arise from small towns being ridiculously successful so that they grow and grow and grow and then become a city.Yes, in the modern world I suppose that a city that has become too built up might well spawn new suburbs from which people will drive in their cars to the city every day to do their jobs. But from that sentence alone it ought to occur to you that there are numerous reasons this isn't true in a low technology world, even with one that has some amount of magic.Even your smallest little hamlet is the result of several farming families getting together and creating a center of trade and craft to make their lives easier and more successful. Any town, even the smallest hamlet, that was incapable of defending itself from that which would appear within a few years would be destroyed and gone well before any adventurers showed up.In fact, let's be quite clear about this... any region where just residing there or traveling there is almost certain to run into something too powerful for them to handle within even a 10 year span has no human residents. No towns, no cities, no hamlets. Not even farms. Agriculture would be literally impossible in the region. That means if when traveling through the region you pull out a random monster encounter table and say "okay, well within a day/week/month of traveling you are guaranteed to run into something on this list, so let's roll and see what tries to kill you" and literally everything on that list would be flat out impossible for a group of commoners to defeat... then that region has no human residents, it has no farms and thus no towns to speak of at all.If you are even remotely interested in portraying your world in a way that is remotely realistic, you are going to have to just accept this. I suppose you can say 'well, we all know this is fantastical and utterly remotely unrealistic but we kind of need to accept this farcical situation in order to make this game function and we'll need to add this as part of the craziness of the world that we won't think about too much in order to create a story'.Are there ways around this? Hmm...Okay, let's say that you accept that humans and the like are limited to only a small region of the world. And in this area you have very powerful human guard/watchmen/soldier patrols that take out most of the dangerous stuff. The monsters that still exist in this region are either weaker than the average person so a human peasants with clubs and farm tools can kill them without vastly endangering their lives or at least drive them off (so you'll need to adjust the human commoner stats in the MM to be able to take a Kobold), they have little interest in killing humans and generally benefit from living under human's feet and stealing from them, but generally avoid lethal force (maybe alter the personalities of goblins in that region), are relatively docile 99% of the time and for some reason once every 50 or 100 years they just go completely insane and berserk destroying everything around them until they can be beaten down and calmed (probably works as a nice little fiction for Gnolls or Orcs), or are diplomatic and actually have sort of a general peace accord with humans and somehow that recently broke down into warfare (works for Hobgoblins, Dragonborn and possibly Drow). Everything else in the region needs to be so rare that most people go their whole lives without seeing one or laid dormant for ages and only recently erupted nearly overnight (dragons, undead and such works well for this) or they didn't exist in this plane at all and only now are they popping into existence (elementals, demons/devils/celestials, gith, etc.)And let's be clear. The label "monster" being applied to kobolds, goblins, orcs, gnolls and especially hobgoblins is pretty questionable when the label isn't applied to elves or dwarfs. In truth, they aren't monsters at all and they wouldn't be in the above situations. They are just generally unfriendly neighboring tribes whose society's morale standards don't match your own and whose leader's goals and ambitions aren't favorable towards you.But if one were to walk back and forth across this land where you want to have towns and one is likely to run into Ogres or other things that would easily murder and eat you, then you would never have towns there. And if you have towns there then you need to accept that the very notion that they are there is plenty ludicrous enough that bothering to put any more thought into their details beyond that is self-defeating. They are mystical things that ought not to exist at all, so don't fret about the details regarding how they work.</blockquote>

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