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Message: <blockquote data-quote="HeavenShallBurn" data-source="post: 3959709" data-attributes="member: 39593">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.</blockquote>

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