PoL & population density

[Hairfoot]

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.

It often seems that way, because their are many large cities and the sourcebooks tend to focus on them to the exclusion of wilderness ecologies. In fact, FR is very much a points-of-light setting.

Take a look at the main map. On the trails represented by dotted lines, a day's travel by horse & wagon covers (by my calculation) only two dots. Most of the vast distance in Faerun is unpatrolled and uncontrolled by any civilised force, especially in areas like the Western Heartlands.

 

[Irda Ranger]

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.

It doesn't have to mean equilibrium. Races & Classes presents the history of the world as a periodic rise and fall of Empires. The most recent empire to collapse was the human empire of Nerath. The current PoL setting exists in the detritus of said Empire. The PC's are expected to build a new one. There is definitely a cycle of Empire and collapse.

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.

You certainly could. After going levels 1-30 in "Empire building" mode I might be in the mood for a change though, and set the next campaign in the Empire created by the first set of PC's, but hundreds of years later when the decadent nobility has forgotten of the struggle and sacrifice that went into its making, and of the threat growing in its former ally, Angmaar.

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.

Quite the contrary, I think Ahglock has it right. PoL isn't about "absense of information". It's about the fact that the roads are impassable because they're teaming with monsters. Random Encounter Tables are really tough on the nomadic lifestyle.

I expect that goblins and kobolds survive the same way humans and dwarves do: build fortified settlements. Small tunnels made of rock will keep out the Dire Bears and anything else that can't burrow through stone. It's not a guarantee, but nothing is.

Where we agree is that very little is know about the next valley. We don't know because the passes through the mountains are infested with Ogres, and no one goes through, but you're right that it may be another human/dwarven/etc. settlement that "our" settlement just knows nothing about. Maybe they're perfectly nice people. Maybe they're all were-rats. Who knows?

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

As pointed out above, real world examples are of limited use in this respect. Since the Neanderthals died out our nomadic groups have not had to deal with competing species of similar intelligence.

Also, the high turnover rate in the nomadic warrior classes (low life expectancy) is at odds with the elven lifecycle.

 

[Terramotus]

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.

I don't think it's that easy. To me, Points of Light is absence of information deep enough and long enough to make people superstitious about the things that are outside of their sphere of influence and to cause their collective knowledge to shrink down to mostly their own experiences. It's not enough just to be cut off.

For example, if a massive disaster strikes the US, wrecking civilization and isolating me here in Texas, I'm still a modern American. I know about physics and chemistry and psychology and history, and I believe in an objective reality that can be understood with rationality and logic. My isolation isn't automatically going to make me start calling that volcanic fissure the home of the Magma God (although the stress of an apocalypse might, but that's a different story). I may not be able to contact people in Louisiana or Connecticut, or Washington, but I still have a reasonable idea of what people who live there are like, and possibly some knowledge of how they're making out after the apocalypse, depending on how fast communications went down. They're not the alien "other" to me.

And I'm going to teach my kids what I can too. So it'll probably take a few generations before we start getting to that point. I mean, look at the Roman Empire's fall. It took hundreds of years for central authority to disappear altogether, and it took successive waves of barbarian invasion, civil wars, plagues, a ruinous reconquest of Italy by Justinian that bled the country white, and finally the closing off of the Mediterranean to Western trade by an alien culture to bring things to the place they were in the 8th century.

Even if we count from the death of Romulus Augustulus, last Emperor in the West in 476 to the Battle of Tours in 732, a decent candidate for the lowest point in the West, that's a long time for things to get that bad. And in two more generations we've got Charlemagne, and a Western empire again. That's a really short-lived Points of Light situation.

And then we have to consider the fantastic aspects. If Eladrin live 300 years, Elves 200, and Dwarves somewhere longer than Humans, there are going to be potentially a large number of beings around who actually remember when things were a heck of a lot better. If enough of them are around, it's not such a dark age. Even small things like the the Mending cantrip change things significantly - those old manuscripts may be unreadable now, but when things get better enough to start thinking about rediscovering old knowledge, it might be extremely easy old unreadable documents and make them readable again. If nothing else, that speeds up the recovery time.

We can't even throw out the idea of a fallen Empire to make things easier on ourselves if we're playing traditional D&D. Otherwise where did those abandoned keeps, trap-filled tombs, and magical goodies come from? That means the fall is probably long and hard.

So, I guess I'm saying that PoL is either a very specific confluence of circumstances that results in a temporary downturn in civilization (and your campaign story is probably about stopping the free-fall), OR it's a PoL setting in equilibrium, where the forces dragging civilization civilization down are roughly balanced with the forces bringing it up for a good period of time. In the first case, it's difficult to discuss demographics, because that's going to depend heavily on what the original campaign world looked like. In the second, things start to get interesting.

 

[Mr Jack]

So if you want to know population sizes, just ask where the food comes from and how much there is. That's your answer.

While true as a realistic indicator of size; I strongly get the impression that the designers of prior versions of D&D have taken an altogether different approach: namely, how big do we want our cities, towns and villages to be for the kind of stories we want to tell and the kind of games we want to run.

It's not as realistic an approach, sure, but I would argue it's just as valid a one when you're designing a roleplaying game.

 

[Dausuul]

<deleted by author to reconsider some details>

 

[Nightchilde-2]

I plan to base my homebrew PoL setting on the early (probably romanticized) American Old West.

One section (analogous to the East) will have a fairly densely populated area, but once you hit a certain point, it's wide areas of more-or-less unclaimed, lawless land with smaller population centers (forts, boom towns) spread out.

In that setting, you have groups that are nomadic and semi-nomadic (various native tribes) as well as raiders (various other native tribes) and banditry. There can be conflict between the indiginous population and the newcomers as well. Toss in a few older, now in ruins, settlements and pepper with the occasional legend/classed character (say, like, Wyatt Earp or Jessie James for a real-world analogy) and the true reach of law is short, indeed.

Granted, the Old West didn't have dragons and such, but there's a wealth of legendry and myth of the cowboys and trailblazers (not to mention the native tribes) that can be used somewhat as a basis.

 

[HeavenShallBurn]

The key is figuring out what density of population supports the playstyle your group prefers. Beyond that it's all fine tuning.

When doing POL its important to remember the difference between overall population density and the density within a settlement. The style requires a low overall density because you need distance between settlements. More distance than has existed in Europe for thousands of years. Even during the worst of the Dark Ages it was still very heavily settled just disordered and this doesn't make for a good POL when there are flickers every mile or two, collectively they light things up too much. So you have to massively drop overall density to account for the needed dark areas surrounding them, otherwise you have patches of dark rather than light.

After that is done you move on to work on the Lights themselves. Here is where you get a lot of campaign flavor. Are the settlements tiny, larger, are they massive city-states. These all have a big impact on how the setting will feel to the players. Personally I prefer to chop off the bottom couple of settlement categories because they're a bit too small for a permanent settlement in a POL setting. Now that's purely my taste but it also depends on the danger factor which I tend to set high. One good mix is to have scattered but infrequent powerful city-states based around an important geographical feature. With the areas not under their control scattered with towns or middling size.

The danger factor, how you mess with this tweaks the shade of the darkness. There are three major styles.
*One is the "ignorance not danger" angle which focuses on the lack of information, trade, or economy due to the lack of knowledge within individual points of light. The setting is dark because they don't know other lights exist. Threats tend not to be extremely common or are generally of a low level so that the survival of these small poorly defended Lights is feasible. *Second is the "It's Not Peachy" group, The Darkness is dark because of threats common folk that stray out into the Dark generally run into Bad Things and don't come back. But despite raids and conflict settlements can mostly defend themselves unless a greater than normal threat is looming, which it generally is somewhere in the setting.
*Third is the "We Need Heroes" section. Here the danger gets more pronounced, threats are regular and perilous even to PCs as a natural feature rather than oddity. Monsters are not isolated incidents or rarities but common enough that communities are formed around the ability to fend off threats. In general communities will have some PC leveled characters as a defensive force but only enough to fend off the ordinary threats at acceptable casualty rates not to push into the darkness or get proactive with threats.
*An extreme subset of "We Need Heroes" is my personal preferred zone, what I like to call the "Goresoaked Monstercology." In this regime threats are continuous and a peril to basic existence at multiple levels even for the largest settlements. Monsters are as much a part of the ecology as squirrels or deer. There are no commoners or unleveled individuals other than young children because they're not survivable enough. Farmers work the fields in parties with weapons at torches at hand and lookouts ready, even so the creatures lurking just beyond the boundaries will snatch a few. Despite the protection of little gods the settlement most likely pays some sort of tribute to keep the greatest threats at bay. The settlements are built around protective structures and social arrangements are both defensive in nature and level heirarchic. Wandering monster tables should be used frequently and with no consideration as to the level of the PCs, it is a status-quo setting and the quo likes to step on things hard.

 

[Hairfoot]

To me, at its most basic, PoL means that humans and their civilised ally races are dominant, but only barely. An average settlment can see off a raiding party of humanoids, while a full-fledged city may have to deal with an army massed against it every decade or so.

In such a setting, merchants must be cunning and daring to make a living, and every peasant is a militiaman.

I deal mostly with FR, and whether through playing style or setting presentation, that sense of constant threat isn't there. That's what I hope 4E adventure material will remedy.

 

[Crashy75]

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.

This is exactly how I view it.

 

[Zurai]

Quite the contrary, I think Ahglock has it right. PoL isn't about "absense of information". It's about the fact that the roads are impassable because they're teaming with monsters. Random Encounter Tables are really tough on the nomadic lifestyle.

If the roads are teeming with monsters such that they're completely and totally impassable, as you state, the world is completely untenable. Trade cannot exist, which means each settlement has to survive on its own natural resources and knowledge. Bronze wouldn't exist because copper and tin don't generally co-exist, steel would be limited to a handful of settlements at best, and most settlements would be using copper or bone/stone weapons. Cities would be absolutely impossible due to lack of food (cities must import food to be viable - if the wilderness is too dangerous to travel through, it's much too dangerous to farm). Settlements without viable weapons and armor - bronze or steel - would be so much chaff to even a single powerful monster such as a troll or manticore, let alone the local tribe of orcs or goblins. We wouldn't have so much "Points of Light" as we would "near-total darkness with maybe one or two pinpricks of light".