Simulationist Question on PoL

[Cyronax]

Here is a post by me on the subject of food production in a POL context.

Trade: Trade is light, but not non-existent. The D&D world in Worlds & Monsters has vagrant Halflings tribes (on rivers, coastal waterways, etc.) and Dragonborn mercenary troops that merchants can hitch a ride with. I get the feeling that the woods and paths are dangerous to lone travelers and small groups, but it would take a pretty serious monster to take one 50+ Dragonborn fighters. Most of the results on the Wandering Monster Table would steer clear of that and look for an easier mark.

Wood, Stone, Etc.: These are all local materials. They're subject to the same rules as the food source discussion.

The really hard part of any POL setting is any type of material which requires a great deal of trade to make itself (not something that can be made locally and then traded). Complicated structures such as castles and mills need a lot of parts and specialized materials - it's unlikely you'd be able to get them all locally. Most locals would probably adapt their defenses and structures to use as many local materials as possible.

Lastly, there's nothing wrong with a greenhouse growing veggies under a mage-sun. It's a magical world. The real simulationist would expect the locals to use every resource at their disposal, including magic. He would find it odd if they didn't.

Irda,

You are an ace poster on this subject. Also, might not your aside about Japanese 'koku' and other ideas be good for this thread. I alas do not remember when that thread was ... other than the Nov-Dec timeframe, but it was a great read.


To the rest of this thread. I actually have a concept of using 4e rules interspersed with a few tidbits from Star Wars SAGA to re-create a PoL setting that also has aging tech devices included. I will probably also have to come up with some technomancy/artificer mechanic, since I envision droids and warforged to be related. Perhaps the latter is the evolutionary culmination of the former? I still need to see the new rules in June ... can't wait for the crunch




C.I.D.

 

[Fallen Seraph]

I haven't read the other posters responses (shall read them after) just so I can put down specifically how I would do a ordinary PoL (I use ordinary since my PoL is quite a tad different).

Trade: I imagine the concept of highly protected trade will be a large part of PoL. You could see Halfling riverboats with armour platting and crossbow wielding Halflings be a common sight along the rivers and lakes of a PoL World.

Being opportunistic these Halflings would trade in about everything, they would be your common merchant. As such many towns, cities and villages would spring up along water-ways.

Another source of trade would come from armoured convoys, except to have hired or licensed men-at-arms perhaps even knights in-training performing protective duties over caravans of trade-goods.

Specific goods, such as magical items or money could be done using small carriages and highly trained Pinkerton style-men.

Iron: Iron would be a extremely valuable commodity in a PoL world, given the need for arms to protect themselves.

I could very well see, major fortified positions built up around iron-mines. This iron would then be shipped using Halfling riverboats or armoured convoys to all the various cities and towns.

At these places, there would be open-air markets where the iron-traders would showcase their goods for blacksmiths to examine and buy piece by piece, similar to fish markets today.

Wavering Borders: While there is a certain distance from which it is relatively safe to go, people and the lively-hood of these people extend beyond this. This is the wavering border, much of the farmland in a PoL world exists in this border.

Generally during the day the fields are tended, while guards patrol the perimeter. Occasionally there are incidents but most commonly things are peaceful. However at night, those that live in this Border reside within taverns, temples or other protective structures to wait out the night, listening to the hopping and hollering, yells and cries of the creatures in the night.

The next morning they return to work, repairing and replacing whatever has been lost.

Agreements: Sometimes hiding in a temple or behind a town's walls isn't enough. This is when agreements are made, perhaps the town's Warlock makes an agreement with the forest Fey. Or the town signs a deal with the Dragon that lives in the nearby hills.

These agreements while almost never satisfying to fulfil, do give safety to the inhabitants.

 

[Mal Malenkirk]

So first of all let me say I love the darker look of official D&D campaign fluff with the whole PoL ideas. However, I read many many great ideas but have one major problem with them. Many revolve around the fact that travel is very difficult between areas even within small ranges. My problem with that lies around how a town, even a small one of say 750 people needs a consistent food source.

That means putting them near a river/fertile lands or some fantastic creation (wizard operated greenhouse system with fake sun?). Well okay, they have food. How do they build/repair houses? They'd need wood, sod or stone. I suppose sod/wood are likely to be found with fertile land. What about stone for other things or metal? Is every PoL a place located within a day of supplies of wood, food, iron and not to mention copper, silver and gold for currency?

Where do you think civilization developped?

Always in area where all basic ressources were available.

If the immediate area can't support more than 1000, person... that's what you'll get. If it can't even sustain that much people reliably, you'll probably end up with a ghost town before long.

If the immediate area can support ten thousand, you'll end up with a city state. One big walled city and small communities within a range that the armed forces of the city state can protect easily.

Between those points, the commerce would not consist of foods and would include very little basic ressources. It would be mostly luxury goods. Any community depending on commerce for food in that context would always be one disaster away from extinction and in the long run, there's always a disaster. Ergo, they'd become a failed colony within a generation.

One day a city state could become large enough that it's able to sustain an army large enough to pacify a large area and secure trade routes to the point they become reliable. Once it reach that point you suddenly see very rapid expansion since virtually no one in the immediate environment will be able to compete. Then you got an empire.

It'd probably be a fun campaign to help a strong city state to take the steps toward empire and civilization on a PoL style world. The amusing thing is that it would be morally ambiguous. Typically, to achieve your goal you'd need to exterminate or subjugate quite a few cultures. They can't all be EVIL giants and blood thirsty orcs, can they? Yet if you don't have free access to the dwarven mines, how will you ever have the ressources to cleanse the land from gnolls, demon cultist and whatnot?

 

[keterys]

In the PoL setting I'd been thinking of, I figured when society began to disintegrate, powerful rituals were done to give people enough food to survive in the warded enclaves they were setting up. Everblooming apple trees, and what not.

I can see that potentially bothering people... for a more traditional PoL campaign, I'd just guess that you'd have small towns with outlying farms and a short distance from the town things get bad. But in the boundaries of the town, pretty decent. Why? I'm guessing that varies from campaign to campaign.

 

[mach1.9pants]

Also the mining and smelting of iron does not involve and large industry. It was mostly done by cottars (etc) in the real world middle ages. A small town could have a few outlying cottars who dig, smelt and sell their iron to the blacksmith, maybe as part of charcoal burning as well.
The real problem is the high skill level required for advanced armours and weapons but those high value items could be worth a merchants while to import or left overs from previous empires.

 

[mhacdebhandia]

Vymair--on weapons/armor. With the need for iron I was worried less about the PC's wantign weapons and more with the need for regular implements. Horseshoes, spades, axes, saws and not to mention pots, pans and other such are all needed daily. I know nothing about farming or cutting lumber but I could assume that such implements would be needed at a fairly regular rate (say an axe for one man per six months or so..).

I am being perfectly serious when I say that Deadwood will basically provide all the answers to your questions.

Two of the main characters, Seth Bullock and Sol Star, have come to the gold miners' camp of Deadwood in order to open a hardware store catering to the miners and other townspeople. Later in the series they become friends with Charlie Utter, who runs a mail and package service between Deadwood and the nearest established population center. When an outbreak of smallpox occurs, the bigshots in the camp send a rider to the nearest outpost of the U.S. Army, hoping they'll have a vaccine available. The fact that Deadwood exists on land technically ceded to the Sioux by the United States government is a major plot point in the second season, since everyone wants the town annexed into the U.S.A. without having the miners' gold claims voided.

The troubles and limitations of frontier existence in Deadwood are significant issues for the characters to deal with, and there's very little beyond things like telegraph lines and pistols which couldn't be replicated in a D&D setting. You'd have to handwave some things like the existence of mass-produced goods available to people like Bullock and Star - perhaps they simply import them from a distant city where they can afford to contract with individual blacksmiths to have tools and weapons made.

 

[Imban]

Lastly, there's nothing wrong with a greenhouse growing veggies under a mage-sun. It's a magical world. The real simulationist would expect the locals to use every resource at their disposal, including magic. He would find it odd if they didn't.

Heck yeah. This sort of detail, especially in a world where food-creating magic or magic to help crops grow is already in the rules, really appeals to us. (On the other side of the equation, we get annoyed when the rules and fluff describe entirely different situations. "So you're saying my 19th-level Cleric can, if he wants to, cure 72 or so people of this plague every day with Mass Heal, plus an additional 27 or so with Remove Disease? Okay, not bad, I can fix this plague in a few days." is fine and makes sense - but if they're also being treated by the 15th-level Cleric NPC in residence in that city, he should by all means have been curing his 19 or so people a day, with any lesser Clerics of 5th level or higher also all chipping in with their Remove Disease uses. If they're just walking around putting wet washcloths on the foreheads of the feverish, it gets under my skin.)

 

[Surgoshan]

I wouldn't picture the Points of light as being a small village surrounded by ravening hordes. A village of 100 people could live on as little as fifty square kilometers of farmland (unirrigated), that's a square roughly four and a half miles on a side. On open, level ground, a person can walk that far in a little over an hour. Since it's farmland, it mostly will be open and in some ways level. Unfortunately, unirrigated means that it's not a square, but instead is spread out over what good farmland is available. So it's more likely to be a squiggly line a few miles wide and maybe ten miles long, meaning that it takes a whopping two-three hours to get from one end of a PoL to another.

Irrigated farmland supports greater densities, so a village of 100 could live on as little as 8 square kilometers, or about 3 square miles. Thus the village, though necessarily located on a water supply would be much more compact and easily defended.

Note that in either case there will be a central nucleus of aristocracy (even if it's just a mayor) and specialized tradesmen supported by the farmers, while the farmers spend more time at the edge of civilization, more at risk. They'll also know the surrounding lands better because they'll be supplementing their food supply by hunting while the year's crop is growing. If they're smart, the villagers will have implemented crop rotation, too.

Now, how would they defend themselves? The nucleus of the village will be surrounded by an earthworks, which may be surmounted by a wooden palisade. The earthworks would be a manmade hill about ten feet tall and with a natural slope of about 30 degrees. It would take very little work to maintain. The palisade, which would have to be regularly repaired throughout the year and, basically, replaced every few years would be made from small tree trunks maybe 15-20 feet tall (but once placed in the ground, only 10-15 feet above the top of the berm).

The outlying farms would be at greater risk, but the farmers' homes would be very sturdily built and they'd have a means of signaling. A good signal (horn, banging on a kettle, etc) could carry for miles, and the neighbors would pick up the cry and the small local militia (which a village could support) would be able to come to their aid. The sturdily built home would hold out for the hour or so it would take the militia to get there. The crop would only be at risk when it was ripe, and the entire village would turn out to get it harvested as soon as humanly possible to protect it not just from wild animals and kobolds, but rain (which can destroy a ripe grain crop) and other nasty weather.

Human beings had to face a hostile world in our on non-magical past, though the only hostile enemy they faced was also human, and they survived well enough. The population of a medieval village would have been much denser than the farmlands of modern Kansas. Most nutrition would come from crops being treated mostly as a communal property, with meat being grown by individual families (yes, even the blacksmith in town would have a pig).

In the event of irrigated farmland it wouldn't make much sense to assume a small village. Population pressure would exert itself very rapidly and you'd end up with a small city in a few generations. It would have more serious defenses to make up for the fact that it's also a much more tempting target.

Potential enemies can never be right on a Point's doorstep; it just doesn't work from either a narrative or simulationist perspective. If a band of kobolds lived in a cave system right under the village, the villagers would never be able to sleep and one group would have killed the other long before the heroes got there... unless the kobolds arrived just before the heroes did. Something like a lich with an army of hobgoblins led by a goblin priest wearing a red cloak would have to be a constant burden rather than a threat; they've enslaved the humans and rule over them, but aren't likely to destroy them. A threat like that isn't going to be living in the next valley over, it's either in this valley or it's an army on the march.

If your human population is scattered and diminished then your monster population must be as well, otherwise none of it works. The reason travel is dangerous isn't because you take two steps and trip over a tribe of lizardmen, it's because walking 60 miles (two days travel to get to the next village) will take you through a whole crapload of uninhabited land that has, at most, a single permanent threat and a good chance of smaller roaming threats.

Edit: my numbers on population per area came from here. The rest comes from what I've seen of English, French, and New England farm villages that have survived into the modern era.

 

[VannATLC]

Heh.

Simulationism has never been a strong point of material sciences in the DND worlds.

For instance, for 5kgs of copper, you need about 100kgs of charcoal.

Huge swathes of european forest was destroyed in order to fuel the 16th century and onwards in iron industries, steel itself still being very rare until the late 17th century. The whole mechanisation of the world was based apon the Bessemer process, really. Anyway.

Steel swords were very hit and miss.. timings all based on prayers, etc, etc.
Wrought Iron materials, however, are fairly simple, as indicated above, as you can get iron soft enought for shaping from standard charcoal fires.

Introducing coal, and a blast furnace, is a whole different kettle of fish.

I tend to use dwarves for that, and the vast majority of real steel and quality ironwork comes from the dwarves, in my campaigns. Introducing large quantities of quality steel also means dwarves can build structures reinforced with steel, able to last centuries, and incomparibly strong to anything made with plain old iron.

Steel/Cement are the reasons dwarves and their craftmanship is prized everywhere, and death is usually the punishment for revealing the secrets to non-dwarves.

 

[Lanefan]

One important factor here that I don't think we know yet is just how big and-or significant a "Point of Light" is intended to be.

Is it a walled village in a forest?
A cluster of small villages with farmland between?
A small town with a few miles of farmland around it?
A small city controlling a peaceful realm about 20 miles across?
A full-blown city-state or small kingdom?

Me, I see the overall setting as including all of these, scattered about the landscape with lots of wild land between.

Lanefan