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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kigmatzomat" data-source="post: 9528549" data-attributes="member: 9254">That's not fantasy, its reality.  Unless the assailants get mobbed or someone untrained gets lucky fighting back, two armed killers will carve or shoot a bloody swath through any community of non-combatants at any point in time.My point is that threat exists everywhere. So why is this place that is little more than a tiny neighborhood sufficiently special to deserve their own armed guards?As for supplying food, generally medieval farmers produced about 115% of their needs.  Meaning a village of 66 fed themselves plus another 10 people.  This is why in medieval periods the population was ~90% rural and only ~10% urban.  Tweak that how you want (priest of harvest spends the year wandering the countryside casting Plant Growth), but 66 people are providing a trivial amount of Greyhawk's food.There are are plausible reasons to have guards adjacent to a small village.  Perhaps the guard post there first and the community built up around it.  It is on a set of crossroads so it allows one squad of guards to patrol a host of communities.  It is really more a guard rest stop where there's no convenient inn for the four or five times a year it is needed.  Maybe it is a place for messengers to swap horses pony-express style.  Or its located on a ridge and had a warning pyre or heliograph.Or maybe its not plausible, other than "Captain Spell Bomb" is being exiled awsy from people anyone cares about and his "junior" troops are actually there to baby sit him and kill him if he turns out to be possessed.Either way, saying "there's no resident cleric or herbalist so no healing potions without riding to Townsville" is perfectly reasonable.</blockquote>

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