Simulationist Question on PoL

[WayneLigon]

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?

No problem putting them near a river or fertile lands; everything was like that in pre-industrial times anyway. Infertile lands are where orcs and goblins and such live. They don't need stone or metal, especially for building; most homes would be log-cabin-types or daub-and-wattle (wooden slats with clay, mud or dung and straw rammed between them) with thatch or earthen roofs. Some places might even be built slightly into a hillside like halfling homes. Villagers in these small hamlets don't need silver, gold and copper; they don't use currency, they use barter. They might well have never seen hard coinage in their lives. Your blacksmith will have that large chunk of metal for his anvil and it's probably acquirred a quasi-mystical aura about it in some people's minds.

Your towns and such will have that. In a POL settings, good-sized towns are fairly rare and that's because they are near a good quarry, or a mine.

 

[Clawhound]

I assume a "sphere of influence" for any town or village large enough to sustain it. As most American frontier towns, I assume that they use as many local resources as possible. I assume that they produce something that they can trade with other locales. I assume that roads may be dangerous, but that organize efforts can move items reliably. When things grow unreliable, that's where heroes come in.

In addition, I also assume many magical skills among the populace. For tech, I have armor made from magically reinforced or special pottery, bone, seashells, wood, and so forth. Weapon include similar to koas (shark-tooth swords), such as dragon-tooth swords, pottery-shard swords, thorn-swords, etc.

My suggestion to you is this: when you run into a "box" problem, then you have a terrific opportunity for your location to develop a new solution to a problem.

Have no metal? Maybe they have a vein of magical clay that makes a metal-hard ceramic. Maybe they abandon swords for low-metal items such as spears and studded clubs, or no metal items such as clubs, staffs, and slings.

Need housing? Maybe they live differently. Maybe more people live in a single house, such as a lodge or a hall. Maybe people dig holes in the ground. Maybe they build tents from mammoth tusks, or dragon bones from the dragon graveyard nearby.

You do not need to solve all the problems of your community. You only need to solve the glaring problems. If a people are near water, there is no water problem to solve. In a desert, water is a problem to solve.

A town in a good agricultural area on a trade route does not have a problem. The same town with its trade route cut off does have a problem.

Where possible, think of problems that a location may have that can be solved by adventurers. Has the town's water supply been corrupted by a black dragon? Has the town's temple, located in the ancient ruins nearby, been overrun by orcs or goblins? Are strange creatures appearing in the mines?

In my opinion, when you identify problems in your location that can be solved by adventuring, then you have a wonderful genesis for game ideas.

 

[Cadfan]

Strictly speaking, "points of light" is more a design principle than a place. All it requires is provincialism, some isolationism, and local problems that have to be solved by local heroes.

You could make a "points of light" setting in a city, if you wanted. At low levels you deal with gang violence and problems in your own neighborhood or burrough. At medium levels you've branched out a bit, maybe getting into fights with a larger regional kingpin. At high levels you're looking to own the city itself- you're a major power broker.

 

[Derren]

The problem is that most of this systems start to break down when you take higher level monsters, those who can destroy a whole town and are generally evil enough to do so for fun into account.
Then the village simply needs some more advanced resources just to stay alive and those resources are hard to get.
This was especially problematic in 3E with spell components as many of them were rather exotic. Even getting paper and ink for wizards to scribe scrolls and spellbooks is hard to get for smaller communities.

In 4E this problems might not exist when material components are removed, but the general problem remains, especially with 4Es focus on "PCs are heroes and more powerful than everyone else" and "Monsters exists so that the PC can fight them". That means that while the heroic PCs can fight monsters, most nonheroic NPCs can not which means that every small community is at the mercy of the monsters which are around.
And without small communities most big communities can't exist as they rely on them for food, etc.

 

[Ydars]

I will post this in bits as it is too long otherwise..........

This is a nice thread; I love thinking up answers to these kinds of questions. I am uncomfortable with the idea of PoLs being either magically self-sufficient or armed camps for the simple reason that I want a gritty setting that "feels" real and I want to explore non-magical ways of solving all problems before resorting to magic. Yet I don't want stone-age technology.

There are, as people have pointed out, a number of challenges to any PoL trying to exist in a monster ravaged wilderness. These are Food, Water, Building materials, Metal, and Defence. The thing to remember is that no PoL is starting from stratch, as a world spanning empire once existed and this leaves a huge legacy of material wealth.

The first thing to consider is recycling; in a PoL type world, everything made of metal would be incredibly valuable and have a long history e.g, weapons. This would be like the Viking situation, where the lineage of even a normal sword was usually sung in songs as a roll of deeds. Also, metal would be recycled(melted down and reforged) many times and never discarded. Also, people would use simplier materials wherever they could to minimise the need for metal; e.g. people would not use nails but would instead use wooden joints to put things together, or axe-heads made of stone rather than wood.

Lastly, metal bearing rocks are very abundant in the earths crust, it is just that chemical methods of extraction don't work. For example, Aluminium and Titanium ores are EVERYWHERE but charcoal cannot extract (reduce) them. If you want to go down the magic route, how about supposing that magical fire can extract these metals from their ores. If this were the case then Al and Ti would be plentiful because bauxite (Al ore) is the most abundant ore on earth.

Or you can simply decide that on your world, metals exist that are so inert that they do not need extraction for ores; they exist as raw metal like gold does. As long as the metal has the property of hardness, it could be easily used. Thus panning in rivers for this metal could litterally bring the metal to the PoL.

We invent monsters for our games, so why not resources as well.

 

[Ydars]

How do PoL get building materials.....................

Here, we must remember the "legacy" of the Empire; The ruins of old civilisations would be a very valuable source of stone; almost every church here in England has stones robbed out from Roman or even earlier fortifications. So if the "Empire" postulated by the PoL concept fell in the last thousand years, you can bet people are recycling stone. This might impact where PoLs grow up; many early Saxon settlements were actually inside the ruins of crumbling Roman cities, taking advantage of the protection afforded by the city walls.

So the answer to this depends upon how long after your Empire fell you set you world.

 

[Ydars]

Food problems come in two parts; getting it and storing it. The problem of finding food is caught up in the problem of defence against monsters (see later).

Since wildlife would return in abundance to a post-Imperial wilderness setting, hunting might be the method of choice for small settlements, but would be difficult without some safety from monsters. Similarly, large herds of animals would probably attract monsters, even though, to live on animals alone is the only way in some arid areas. Growing food also means controlling a comparatively large area.

Food itself should not be hard to find. There was an excellent thread about rice, although this doesn't address the fact that food storage is not perfect (a lot spoils) and so slightly more is needed. Also, without salt or pickling spices, meat storage would be very problematic. Dry air can do a good job as I recently saw when I visited Mongolia, as long as the meat is cut into thin strips and hung. Yet this doesn't keep the meat that long. There is also the issue of winter grazing for cattle; if you don't have enough fodder, then most of the herd gets slaughtered before winter sets in. This suggests to me that a large PoL cannot really exist with populations of more than 10,000 without extensive trade bringing in food from hinterlands, because they would not be able to store enough food over the winter to feed everyone.

 

[VannATLC]

Confit.

Keeping meat under a layer of rendered fat, in a cool/dry place, allows storage for a few months.

EDIT: Ooops, you said without salt. NM.

 

[Ydars]

Monsters are the real challenge to the PoL concept. It is totally possible for people to live in the harshest areas of the world, as long as they can move and are safe; I saw families of 5 raising hundreds of horses and thousands of sheep on the Mongolian steppe last Sept and the grass there is SO thin that you would think NOTHING could live there. The soil is like sand. But if you can't move and are under even occasional threat, you have a problem because you cannot put walls around whole fields. This is where we have to start to invoke magic.

There are many ways of solving this problem;

1) Many PoLs are on small islands in lakes or just off the shore on the sea or have another type of natural barrier that prevents monster attacks. This does mean that the PoL has to leave all land unguarded at night and there would also be a problem with animals. This would only work for a small settlement, and they would have an animal barn as the ground floor of the house whilst the people lived above. The cattle have to be ferried across to the island every morning/evening on flat raft/skiffs. This actually happened in England in the north because of constant war with the Scots. This type of stategy works only when the major food source is animal as any crops would get destroyed.

2) PoLs have some sort of passive protection; I have suggested on other threads that various meta stories can explain protection of PoLs. Suppose the imperial race (whoever they were in your world) placed a magical repulsion on the stones of their buildings to keep monsters away. Now the PoLs have robbed this stone to build their hovels etc, they have clothed themselves in the same protection, sometimes without realising. The protection is not foolproof and monsters can get around this if they have some good reason to (starving or very angry) but it gives some vermisilitude to the idea that a small PoL could exist for a century or so in an isolated location. The protection radiates out to a distance and intensity that is proportional to how much stone there is in the PoL, so larger PoLs control more land. Stones could also line important trade routes, protecting a limited amount of trade.

This could also lead to some interesting adventures as PCs are sent out to look for more ruins with this kind of stone. My idea is that the stone needs light to power it, so that underground stone can form dungeons containing monsters but then when it is brought to the surface, it begins to repel again.............

3) Monsters are part of the enviroment. What do they do when they are not attacking PoLs? Humanoids would probably be hunter-gatherers (they have to eat as well) and humans are no longer abundant enough to be a food source. How about Goblins that follow the migration of the Elk? Similar Ecology could be invented for other monsters.

Just my two penny worth

 

[DeusExMachina]

Although you make some good points, I don't think a PoL setting absolutely has to have an ancient empire that can be cannibalized for its values.
Of course that makes it easier for quests and all that, but it's not going to be everywhere. Most of my PoL setting will be on a new continent that the players races are exploring after a large flood drove them to build ships and take to the seas looking for a new place to call home. They will find remnants of an ancient civilization at some point, but large areas of the continent have never been civilized or it's been so long that nothing remains in clear view...

Anyway, another solution for building materials is brick, people. There is hardly an actual rock to be found in the west of the Netherlands (where I live), but more than enough clay that has been brought in by the rivers. Making bricks out of clay is easy, all you need is an oven and lacking that, a lot of sun (although that makes them weaker)...