Simulationist Question on PoL

[VannATLC]

Mirtek:

Somewhere along the line, I think we've either mis-explained, or you've mis-understood, the Caravan principle.

Merchants are not hiring these people.
They are going, with or without merchants.

The dragonborn, which under the default setting suggestions, are homeless groups of heavily armoured mercenaries, appear to have been purpose built for this principle.

Basic economics will dictate that a merchant who wants to hitch on will pay.. but not exbortiantly, because he could just not go, or wait for another group.

 

[ironvyper]

Great explanation. But, you forgot to mention that Gnomes are monsters; Raaaar!

Their not monsters, they're constructs, in PoL they are used to guard lawns and fields from small vermin. Rats, weasels, kobolds, jermalaine they all fear the gnome golem. Plus the new and emerging merchant company "travelocity" heavily utilizes gnomes as spies and scouts for new markets for their goods.

The gnome has finnally found its place, as a hideous and disturbing lawn ornament and a creepy little spy.

 

[Wyrmshadows]

As has been said before, PoL is a design philosophy and not a setting. Its just an idea of a world lit only by torchlight where danger is everpresent and heroes are needed. A good example of a true PoL setting is Conan/Howard's Hyboria.

No whole setting should be PoL, portions of a setting should be civilized with kingdoms and stable nation-states. Portions of the setting should be completely savage and full of danger and others should be PoL where there is a thinning of civilization and a thickening of wilderness/isolation/danger/ignorance/xenophobia and fear.

All published settings have PoL elements but most well developed settings aren't entirely PoL because no setting is an utterly static dark-age/late iron-age wilderness without regions of high civilization. In a believable setting there is a mix of levels of civilization and trade that gives the setting a veneer of believability.

And who would really want a whole world that is PoL as a rule? Where are the great cities, the wealthy merchants, noble kingdoms, depraved blood-soaked theocracies, warring nations, the castles with treasuries dripping with gold? All of these things require stability, trade, armies, large regions of controlled arable land, etc. to exist.

PoL is best used IMO as a descriptor fitting for the sense of a given region(s) within a setting (such as dangerous frontier regions, small nations bordered by dangerous tribes, etc.)or even a large portion of a setting after the fall of an empire or some other cataclysm such as Dragonlance after the Cataclysm.

PoL if taken too far becomes "town as dungeon" RPing setting. :\

As an entire setting PoL can be as retro (in the worst possible way) and lacking in internal consistancy as dungeons where creatures just hang out in stasis until PC get there just in time to kill them and where dragons find themselves trapped in underground chambers with doorways too small for them to exit and with no access to food besides the orcs that that all seem to live in the room next door. I'm assuming that this isn't what you are looking for, so don't take the PoL philosophy too much to heart as a requirement for your 4e setting.



Wyrmshadows

 

[loseth]

However this leaves the question: How do they pay for it?

You're absolutey right--that's a very important question, and an interesting one too.

Based on a real medieval model, the main method of payment for villages would be:

1) Grain and fish (fish can be salted to last for months)

2) Wool

3) Low-level home industry (particularly spinning, but there are other possibilities as well, e.g. the merchant drops off 200 lbs of clay in the late summer and when he returns in early spring will pay 2 cp for each pot the villagers have fashioned out of the clay according to his instructions).

Expanding a bit from the real medieval model:

1) Woodsmen, who might have lived in small homesteads in the real middle ages, would need to live in the security of villages in a PoL setting. They could sell valuable furs, hides and even monstrous trophies, such as a dire-wolf pelt or wyverns' teeth (presumably scavenged rather than taken from a kill, though if the woodsman is a PC-classed ranger, you never know...).

2) If you're going with a medieval model, most villages will be manors and will have a small cohort of men-at-arms. A good number of the wealthier peasants will also be trained militiamen (probably longbowmen or pikemen). They can offer their services as mercenaries, serving as caravan guards for a season and then returning to the village the next time the caravan stops there. A medieval man-at-arms, in particular, can command very good wages as a mercenary.

3) If the village has any spell casters/artificers/magewrights or similar, they can spend the winter crafting magical items that can be traded for food when the merchant caravan comes round in spring.

4) Depending on how dark you like your settings, villages will have lots of healthy young lasses and, well...you know about the oldest profession, right? Seasonal brothels could do a booming trade with the mercenary outfits guarding the caravans.

5) In a fantasy world, some PoLs will likely have access to magical assets (e.g. an enchanted forest that produces apples that restore 'second winds' when eaten). As such assets will often be unique, they could be very valuable.

6) Again depending on how dark you like things...slaves. If the village manages to capture an orc warrior or two when the Red Arrow tribe raids their village, then those orcs could probably be sold for a good price when the merchant caravan arrives.

That's just off the top of my head. I'm sure that with good brainstorming, we could come up with a lot of other ways that villages could pay for the caravans' wares.

EDIT: I see that others have also come up with good lists of stuff villages can offer.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Don't think of "Dollar Economy", think of barter when thinking about how merchant caravans trade with villages.

Off course, many villages aren't the primary goal of the caravans - sometimes, caravans just visit them for shelter, and travel further, to one of the bigger points of lights, typically cities. That's where you can make money, since the southern cities can offer different products then the northern cities, and they'd prefer to have both.

 

[Pbartender]

I'm not sure that "poor villages" would even exist in a POL setting.

Settlements would HAVE to control some valuable resource that they could use to trade for whatever else they needed, otherwise they'd never survive. And there would have to be a pretty good (i.e. profitable) reason for the caravans to make the dangerous journey to visit the settlement, otherwise they wouldn't even bother to come.

And the settlements would also need to be strong enough and/or well defended enough to not only protect themselves from the surrounding darkness, but occasionally from other points of light who want their stuff.

Each settlement needs to have something pretty good going for it, otherwise it's point of light is quickly going to go out. The standard charming and peaceful little village with an inn and a plot of vegetables just isn't going to cut it.

At least not in MY version of a POL setting.

Pish posh.

Of course there would be small, "poor" settlements. These are the the settlements that literally have nothing worth taking. Farming villages that make just enough food and clothing for the inhabtants to subsist, but not enough for bandits to bother with.

Successful bandits want either something that can regularly provide a modest target (mid-sized towns with surplus production, but less protection than a big city), or occassion targets providing a big score (rich merchants ona caravan route). There's no point in raiding a 100 person hamlet from which you can only get a sack of bread and a two home spun tunics every year.

As others have said, while they might want expensive resources like metal or stone, they don't need them... Wattle and daub, or sod houses with thatch roofs, and wooden tools will suffice. The home is heated with deadfall wood collected inthe forest.

No one usually bothers them, because they have nothing worth bothering over. If trouble does show up... they run and hide in the woods until it goes away.

 

[Pbartender]

Don't think of "Dollar Economy", think of barter when thinking about how merchant caravans trade with villages.

Right... And with that consideration, and using 3.5 prices, trading two mudane shortbows in exchange for a ton of wheat with a mule and a cart to haul it off tossed in is a pretty even deal.

A winter blanket, or a pint of oil, or a bucket, or a hammer (the tool, not the weapon) are each worth a 50 pound sack of wheat all by themselves.

What's more, this is where the 50% resale comes in... If the villagers have no real way of making their own hunting bows, or buckets or hammers, then the merchant can get away with jacking up his prices to a degree -- especially since the villagers might not have any real concept of how much what the merchant is selling is worth.

Consider it just another way a point of light can be preyed upon, albeit in a non-violent fashion.

 

[Ydars]

The heavily armed merchant caravan doesn't have to pay the soldiers if they are a VITAL part of the surivival of a PoL and the way it connects with its hinterland (the area it draws resources from); merchants would be instruments of the state and paid by the PoL leader from taxes.

Let's be clear here; Raw materials are no longer something that can be taken for granted. Lumber, stone, salt, spices, fish, herbs, gems, even food are now MUCH more valuable than they might previously have been. Caravans would also be the SOLE means of cummunication between the large settlement and the small, outlying ones. Thus, caravans would take messages between settlements, might transport passengers in both directions, and would pick up valuable items such as salt, might repair roads along the way, might be mobile points of control for suppressing bandits, would carry legal authorities around (the judge travels around so the courts are only held every two moons), would collect taxes, would move experts around like tilers, and craftsmen who are too specialised to operate at village scale (knife sharpeners, tinkers, even blacksmiths). They would also help people get their goods to market and also to get home again. Thus the caravan becomes a mobile PoL and as such would probably be protected by the might of the PoL itself; trained soldiers.

Thus caravans would spend some of their time wending their way through the lands around the PoL to pick up cargoes and then would move out to deeper destinations and there might be several out at any one time.

I could also envisage that caravans could be centers of intrigue as the thieves guild uses it to spread its net and the state uses it to spy on rival PoLs and collect intelligence about their military and resource capability.

 

[Derren]

The problem is that caravans need to be quite big to fulfill those roles which also means they need a larger logistic. Where does the caravan get food, equipment for the guards, materials and workers for repairs (which in turn require more food) etc?.
Also such big caravans very very juicy targets for intelligent monsters and in 4E NPCs are inherently weaker than PCs (PCs are heroes focus) which in turn means that monsters used to challenge PCs have an easy time fighting against NPCs.

 

[Ydars]

Derren, part of the tax they exact from the settlements they visit is their food and fodder for the animals; they don't carry much food as it is wasted space.

Caravans might present a nice target but the power curve for monsters is pretty flat in 4E so even quite a powerful monster is going to have problems taking on 50 guards because I am envisaging a caravan of 30-50 covered carts pulled by horses. Of course a band of monsters will manage to overpower a caravan every now and then but this is part of the setting and what makes it so dangerous (and fun).