PoL & population density

[Ragnar69]

Why does PoL mean equilibrium all across the world? Why not only PoL in the place/time of the campaign? I.e. kingdom ravaged by war, border setting, natural disaster etc.
Heroic adventurers could save a PoL town while the new king strengthens the country as a whole to make it a blob of light. In paragorn tier they have to defend that blob from armies or monsters or demons and epic level could be about unifying different kingdoms to make a very large patch of light. The next campaign then begins in another place of the world that's currently in trouble.

 

[Cyronax]

Here's the real question, regarding historical examples of a Points of Light setting: is your fantasy setting in an equilibrium PoL state, or is it a momentary lapse in civilization.

In Western history, there have been at various points, good PoL examples. However, they've never remained that way for long. A generation later either things have gotten significantly better or rotted away entirely.

Charles Martel (Battle of Tours), his son Peppin the Short, and his son Charlemagne all successively improved the situation that followed the collapse of the Merovingian kingdom and the destruction of the cultural and social remnants of the Roman West. By Charlemagne's time, it's not really PoL anymore, it's more of an empire.

The Viking Raids of the 10th century were crippling to northern Europe, but it wasn't terribly long before people gravitated to a more feudal arrangement better for local defense and figured out that putting gatehouses/bridges over rivers was a good way to stop the inland Viking travel. By the end of the 10th century, Hugh Capet had established the basis for medieval France, and in 1066 things were sufficiently improved that the Normans were able to get organized enough to invade England. No longer PoL there either.

No, to my knowledge there are no good sustained examples of a PoL setting in Western history. We were always either moving forwards or backwards. A PoL setting in rough equilibrium requires a related but different set of assumptions, in large part, I think, related to the monsters. I'll post my thoughts on this later, when I've had time to think it through.

I think China's history during several separate periods would be a good guide for a POL setting. Look to wikipedia and view the Warring States period.

As to other sustained periods of Pol examples on Earth, I'd say look to the Vikings.

A campaign based on the Icelandic Sagas, Beowulf, and the conjectured explorations of Erik the Red and Leif Erickson into North America evoke some cool ideas.

Such a campaign could also be faced with a great existential crisis in the form of climatic change: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age

Glaciers crushing in from the North would be a terrible thing, but what if it could be stopped by a group of doughty heroes.

C.I.D.

 

[Piratecat]

Why does PoL mean equilibrium all across the world? Why not only PoL in the place/time of the campaign? I.e. kingdom ravaged by war, border setting, natural disaster etc.
Heroic adventurers could save a PoL town while the new king strengthens the country as a whole to make it a blob of light. In paragorn tier they have to defend that blob from armies or monsters or demons and epic level could be about unifying different kingdoms to make a very large patch of light. The next campaign then begins in another place of the world that's currently in trouble.

Well said. I'm probably doing this, myself.

 

[frankthedm]

Except for the high level characters that lived there. The PCs aren't the only ones with PC classes out there, at least in my worlds.

How many are there? The leveled character is supposed to be the anomaly, not the standard. Are there so many even small towns can count on them for a reliable defense?

 

[Zurai]

I imagine nomadic elves will defend themselves from attacks just like any other nomadic group in history has done. Nomadism in and of itself is a defense mechanism, because the unfriendlies have to find you before they can kill you. A walled city is easy to find, because it's going to have roads and farms and outlying semi-civilized areas covering quite some distance from the actual walls. And, once you've found that city, you will always know where it is. Not so with something that moves every week/month/season.

I imagine a nomadic people would also place much more emphasis on knowing where their enemies are, so they can avoid camping within sight of the dragon's lair (or whatever).

 

[ThirdWizard]

One thing I've been thinking of doing with my campaign is have traveling troops of dragonborn constantly moving in and out of settlements. They take care of the simple problems, a pack of goblin raiders, maybe a monstrous beast that moved in, things like that. In exchange, these troops can expect a place to sleep and food to eat for perhaps a week.

A troop probably comes through about once a month on average and cleans up the riffraff that would normally threaten the settlements, keeping them relatively safe from mundane dangers. Many of these troops live like this, traveling from town to town and taking care of some problem that each town has.

Sure, sometimes they take on things they can't handle, and sometimes they just aren't around when things go bad. These troops aren't adventurers; they don't go kill the necromancer that is raising ghouls and sending them after the town. But, they'll fight out the ghoul attack, for example. That helps explain how I can use small towns in dangerous locations that aren't constantly being destroyed. It also creates some interesting plot-hooks I can base these groups around and some fun NPCs who the PCs can interact with.


Also, in PoL, I'm going to have "strong" kingdoms who can control any one area, but to do so they have to lose their control of others. In other words, they can repel an orc invasion in the west, perhaps, but that will leave them wide open in the south. The orcs in the west know this, so they don't push too hard. The kingdom can't push too hard either, or they sacrifice lands ot the south, so its a stalemate. The area is dangerous for travelers, and a small town might disappear now and then, so the PoL situation is preserved just fine without having to worry about how realistic the economics of it all are.

 

[jgbrowning]

For a more medieval view here's a list of average yields of various grains (wheat, rye, barley, oats) in England, France, and Germany. This is the return ratio when compared to how much was used to plant. Example: a yield of 3 would mean that for every pound of grain sown, 3 pounds would be yielded. (from Cipolla's Before the Industrial Revolution)

Date England France Germany.
1200-1249 3.7
1250-1499 4.7 4.3
1500-1699 7.0 6.3 4.2

Another chart indicating min/max yields per acre of land in bushels based upon crop type from the period of 1209-1349 on the Estates of the Bishopric of Winchester.

Grain Yield per Acre
Wheat 5.8 (min), 13.8 (max)
Barley 11 (min), 27.6 (max)
Oats 7.5 (min), 16 (max)


Bushel weights per grain (roughly):
Wheat: 60 pounds
Barley: 48 pounds
Oats: 32 pounds


Wheat was greatly preferred but one could often get better total returns using Barley and Oats because not all terrain is suitable for wheat.

In comparison, the modern US yield ratios for irrigated land(roughly):
Wheat: 70
Barley: 80
Oats: 88


If one wants a more european feel, ingore rice and corn (maize) as food sources. They return at amazing rates and are the reasons for the large populations of asia and the new world civilizations. Corn, for example yields around 160 bushels per acre in irrigated modern farms.

joe b.

 

[the Jester]

Points of light really does a good job of fitting my preferred style of play.

One of the reasons I think I have never much cared for Forgotten Realms is the fact that it feels very "big city" to me, in other words, even if you aren't in a city, the big city is what I sort of feel is the standard location for FR. I prefer settings with more of a "border town on the edge of the wilderness" feeling to them. PoL makes it so that the border town under threat by monsters and the wild is actually pretty much the standard, vs. the safe town or city that we've all come to expect over the years.

It's interesting- I've been sort of moving my campaign towards both a heavy fey influence, more sinister than most 3e fey would imply, and a points of light style- I have several islands and continents that are sparsely populated after being overrun by monsters, and only recently have they been repopulated. In the island that has been repopulated for a longer period, the population has rebounded to the point where there are about three or four big cities (with tens of thousands of people) and several more in the high thousands. Plus a lot of small towns and such with anywhere from four to 1000 people in them, usually averaging around 100. Few roads in good repair- the island had them before the tarrasques depopulated it, but that was a lot of destruction ago.

The big continent has only had people back on it (or vegetation, for that matter) for about thirty years now (? maybe less by a half dozen or so). So, in this case, even the big cities only have a few thousand people in them, there are only three of those on the entire continent, and there are not very many small communities yet either. Actually, one of those big cities has 20,000 people, but that's largely the military presence there. The total population of the continent is somewhere around 215,000,

PoL being core in 4e sounds really cool to me.

 

[Ahglock]

I imagine nomadic elves will defend themselves from attacks just like any other nomadic group in history has done. Nomadism in and of itself is a defense mechanism, because the unfriendlies have to find you before they can kill you. A walled city is easy to find, because it's going to have roads and farms and outlying semi-civilized areas covering quite some distance from the actual walls. And, once you've found that city, you will always know where it is. Not so with something that moves every week/month/season.

I imagine a nomadic people would also place much more emphasis on knowing where their enemies are, so they can avoid camping within sight of the dragon's lair (or whatever).

That works in a non-POL setting. In a POL setting there nomadic wandering are through some incredibly dangerous terrain and territory. Nomads work fine when walking through the forest usually doesn't kill you, when walking through the forest gets you killed being a Nomad walking through the forest as a way of life doesn't work out that well.

 

[Zurai]

That works in a non-POL setting. In a POL setting there nomadic wandering are through some incredibly dangerous terrain and territory. Nomads work fine when walking through the forest usually doesn't kill you, when walking through the forest gets you killed being a Nomad walking through the forest as a way of life doesn't work out that well.

You're misinterpreting Points of Light. The darkness is absence of information more than a black hole. Going through unknown lands isn't a guaranteed death sentence like you describe, just inherently dangerous. You're also forgetting that nomadic societies tend to have higher ratios of combat capable people to non-coms. What may be an unthinkable journey for the village of Thorn Hollow, population 200, with no one really trained to do more than farm or herd, is routine for the Hawk Brothers Band, population 50, of whom all but the very young children are trained in using bows and spears and how to ride horses.

Heck, the 50 person nomadic group could likely conquer the 200 person village without losing anyone.

Don't forget that the monsters have to survive the wilderness, too. Goblins and kobolds are, by default, wimpier than commoners. How is a goblin or kobold clan supposed to survive at all if the wilderness is unerringly lethal? Answer: the wilderness isn't unerringly lethal. It's just unexplored and therefore dangerous.

Another key factor of a Points of Light campaign is population density (amazingly, what this topic is all about!). PoL, by its very nature, requires a very very low population density. If there are too many people per unit of measure, they don't have much to fear. A city of 100,000+ people could probably even repel a dragon attack. Points of Light is characterized by handfuls of very small, very isolated settlements separated by vast amounts of unknown lands. Those are the two key things. The unknown lands don't have to be Toxic Jungles ala Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind to support a Points of Light framework. Just being unknown is scary enough. People are most frightened by what they don't know. When you were a kid, was it the darkness itself that scared you, or was it that you couldn't see anything, so you could easily imagine scary monsters that only came out at night?

It's the same principle in a Points of Light campaign. Fear of the unknown, punctuated by the occasional goblin raid or rabid dire owlbear, are more than enough to keep populaces isolated and afraid. You don't have to have a monster population density rivalling that of ants in the Amazon - in fact, that's counter-productive because it removes suspension of disbelief. If the monsters in the wilderness outnumber the humans huddled in the villages by huge numbers, and they're stronger and bigger, why do humans even exist? The monsters would have long ago removed them. There needs to be a relative equilibrium, with the monster side weighted slightly heavier than the civilized side so that there's work for PC heroes.

Now, to tie that all back into nomads: Nomadic peoples are generally organized in smaller groups than settled peoples (by necessity). Small groups that move constantly through dangerous but not lethal lands have existed throughout the entirety of human history up until the modern age, and on every continent save Antarctica (and Australia? I don't know much of the native history of the land down under). They survive by having a higher ratio of combat-capable citizens and by actively scouting to avoid or, if necessary, eliminate dangers before they are encountered by the non-combat portion of the band. Those exact same principles work fine in a Points of Light setting. Instead of the majority of the populace being pure-class Commoners or Experts, they're Commoners or Experts with a level or two of Warrior, and they act in an organized manner using scouts and professional warriors rather than relying on passive defenses and half-trained militias.

I'm not debating that a nomadic society would have it easier than a sedentary one. Quite the opposite, in fact; historically, nomadic populations were much smaller than sedentary ones, in large part because the way of life was inherently dangerous. I just contest that it's impossible for a nomadic society to exist in a Points of Light campaign. They should be rare and have a small population - but, conveniently, that happens to fit both the Tolkeinesque AND Sidhe elves perfectly.