PoL & population density

[Piratecat]

I think population will be pretty sparse; most towns will have around 100 people, maybe one or two big cities (capitals et al) with over 2.000. At least, this is how I picture a PoL setting; no City of Greyhawk, no Ankh-Morpokh.

I'm not so sure. The defining characteristic is that there's no vast empire with safe, interconnected roads. You can have big cities, but they're much more likely to be city-states.

Of course, I'm prejudiced. I love city adventures, so I'm going to make sure they fit in my world.

 

[I'm A Banana]

This is why I think that, in order to make sense in a world populated by giants, owlbear and wights, a PoL setting works best if it is literaly point of light : you need some common MacGuffin (eg : sacred fires) to explain why certain spots are protected from the worse dangers (aka high level monsters).

So, the Darkness must be a tangible thing, and the Points of light should be to. Plus, if the fate of a town rely upon the vigilance of a vestales order, it sounds cooler than if it's just "well, every other cities has been destroyed, but the behirs seem to not have spoted us, yet".

I was pretty impressed with how Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles used this idea. A dark poison mist covers much of the world, and a precious crystal keeps it at bay. The bigger the crystal, the bigger the radius of protection, so the big cities and towns all have big crystals at their center. But the light of the crystal fades gradually with time, and it needs a precious drop of liquid from a rare tree (the myrrh tree) to renew it. These trees are very rare, and grow only in highly dangerous areas, protected by hideous monsters and evil beings of all stripes. Their myrrh can only be harvested once every few years, as well. The job of the adventurers is to go to these places, make it to the myrrh tree, and collect a drop, and return home to renew the crystal's protection. To do this, they need to go into places thick with dark mist, so they carry a small shard of the crystal with them in a vase, which protects a small area around them, ensuring the party isn't affected by the poison mist.

It's surprisingly dark for a game with such childlike characters, but then, that game was surprisingly dark in a lot of ways.

 

[ajanders]

Which actually was something I was wondering about when reading the recent elf fluff. They're described as nomads who live in teepees and stuff. How do they defend themselves from orc raids and such? That seems like a very dangerous way to live; walls are much safer.
(Deleted)

I disagree.
Orc raids can be stopped by a log stockade or a motte-and-bailey. But what kind of wall keeps out rasts, dire bears, or dragons?
The average community -- elven, human, dwarven, or halfling -- can't stop a dire bear in a fight. It sounds as though they've developed other defense mechanisms.

Dwarves live underground, sheltered behind thick rock.
Elves are nomadic, they run away.
Halflings seem to either hide or run downriver.
Humans developed adventurers, a strange breed of creature that actually goes looking for dire bears to kill them before the dire bear invades the community.

Elves might well believe you can build a wall, but that means you only have to carry carpentry tools when you flee from the monster that knocked the wall down and tried to kill you.

 

[ajanders]

(Deleted)

Crandonford (Human town)
- Crandonford controls an area of land stretching one mile from its city center in all directions. This means that once you're more than a 15-minute brisk walk from the Mayor's house, you're in The Wild.
- A one-mile-radius circle gives us 3.14 square miles, or ~2010 acres. Between the town itself, the river, a rocky meadow or two, and some road, assume that only 40% of the land is farmed. 804 acres of farmland.
- Crandonford doesn't have any John Deer powered tractors, but it does have a Cleric of Chauntea. It grows 5000 lbs (~15 koku) of "food" per acre. Multiply that by 804 and you find out that Crandonford can feed 12,185 people.

But that's a max population assuming all food is consumed locally. It's probably safe to assume that half of that food or more is traded to the Dwarven mining town down-river in exchange for metal goods; and some to the elves in exchange for magicy stuff. It's still conceivable though that Crandonford will have a population of about ~5,000 souls (most of whom are probably farmers).

(Deleted)

No edition of D&D has ever aggressively focused on economics or demographics: I think they've assumed that since teleport and polymorph self have chopped biology and physics into hash, there's no reason to treat the social sciences any differently.
Sometimes this is a little frustrating.

This is one of the best reasons to embrace a points-of-light setting: there is no foreign trade.
There's no food-for metal trade route to the dwarves because hippogriffs eat all the horses pulling the wagons. Then the chokers pick off the survivors.
Nobody can find the elves -- they cleared out when the basilisks came through four months ago. You can leave a note on one of the statues and if they ever come back, they'll come swap knives.

The arrival of foreign goods becomes much easier to justify as a narrative event, as opposed to setting detail.

 

[HeinorNY]

If you're lazy and don't have time to calculate kokus, like me, enter here.
Have fun!

 

[Irda Ranger]

I agree, that was unhelpful and insulting, not to mention almost certainly false.

It was a guess, based on often substantiated prior experience. But I have removed the comments since people didn't like it.

And even if Irda Ranger has an advanced degree in population biology, who cares? Fantasy. Roleplaying. Game. 4e has deliberately chosen a 'gamist' approach rather than (IMO) mind-numbing 'simulationsim', and I couldn't be happier.

Which is exactly why their numbers are always wrong. Most players don't care, so they don't care eithr, and spend their time thinking about whether classes are balanced, not whether the population figures make any sense. I'm fine with that too; I prefer they make a good game, because I can "fix" the sociology later if I care to.

In 3E anyone who took even one minute to figure out if NPC wages and PHB prices matched up at all quickly realized that anyone below the level or "advanced artisan" couldn't even buy enough food to feed himself, let alone a family. KarinsDad pointed out (correctly) that you had to multiply all wages by five just to reach subsistence. If WotC had taken the five minutes it took him to figure that out, the prices listed in the book would have "made sense." Which was the only point of my last comment. WotC has a pretty well-established record of giving very little thought to these things.

That's not a value judgment or an insult. It's just an observation.

 

[Rabelais]

I'd also like to know from ENworld's historians which era of real-world history is most analogous with a points-of-light setting.

When I hear about PoL, I imagine England after the Roman withdrawl. Cold, wet, hungry peasants worried about the Viking Raiders. Somehow I also imagine lots of Dry Ice fog.

In Europe, I'd say the default would be around 8th Century. The Western Roman Empire has been gone for a couple hundred years, Charlemagne becomes King of the Franks in 771.

The Battle of Tours limits Moorish expansion into Europe.

The Eastern Roman Empire is hard at it fighting the Persians. Lots of stuff for people to do.

 

[Terramotus]

When I hear about PoL, I imagine England after the Roman withdrawl. Cold, wet, hungry peasants worried about the Viking Raiders. Somehow I also imagine lots of Dry Ice fog.

In Europe, I'd say the default would be around 8th Century. The Western Roman Empire has been gone for a couple hundred years, Charlemagne becomes King of the Franks in 771.

The Battle of Tours limits Moorish expansion into Europe.

The Eastern Roman Empire is hard at it fighting the Persians. Lots of stuff for people to do.

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.

 

[Cyronax]

I was pretty impressed with how Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles used this idea. A dark poison mist covers much of the world, and a precious crystal keeps it at bay. The bigger the crystal, the bigger the radius of protection, so the big cities and towns all have big crystals at their center. But the light of the crystal fades gradually with time, and it needs a precious drop of liquid from a rare tree (the myrrh tree) to renew it. These trees are very rare, and grow only in highly dangerous areas, protected by hideous monsters and evil beings of all stripes. Their myrrh can only be harvested once every few years, as well. The job of the adventurers is to go to these places, make it to the myrrh tree, and collect a drop, and return home to renew the crystal's protection. To do this, they need to go into places thick with dark mist, so they carry a small shard of the crystal with them in a vase, which protects a small area around them, ensuring the party isn't affected by the poison mist.

It's surprisingly dark for a game with such childlike characters, but then, that game was surprisingly dark in a lot of ways.

This is a really cool thread. Irda Ranger's koku post was very worth keeping for later.

As for this Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles idea ... I think it has a ready made home in a 4e POL setting due to Zehir, a new god in the PHB. I believe Zehir means 'venom' in Turkish, and this new god is probably slated to be the god of yuan-tis (am I mistaken as to the second part?)

That Zehir created a veritable wasteland across vast expanses of a POL setting creates several possible plots for a DM to play with. Just a cool connection.

See, 4e is beholden to video games and anime

C.I.D.

 

[Primitive Screwhead]

Very interesting thread..

To me the PoL setting has more to do with lack of knowledge and the 'here be dwagons' scrawl on the map than it does population numbers, political detail, or trade capability.

As long as most folks are ignorant, and scared of, of what happens just over the next hill, you can have a PoL setting.

You could have two city-states existing within a couple days journey, but the intervening territory is rife with danger and no-one dares the journey... which for the commonfolk basically means the other city-state does not even exist.

As mentioned upthread, you can have PoL within a city-state, safe havens surrounded by crime and violence where all the doors are locked at night and babies are rocked to sleep with the hope that the real boogymen don't come to destroy that night.

I think as long as you have a setting reason why adventurers can walk into a population and have an adventure seed waiting for them to protect [some of] the huddled masses..you have a PoL game.