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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TwinBahamut" data-source="post: 4141698" data-attributes="member: 32536">Well, I don't think this is too much of an issue...Certainly, every village needs its own sources of food, water, and shelter, but these requirements are extremely broad and flexible. Certainly things like wood and iron (at least not both at the same time) are not absolutely required for civilization to function. A culture that is isolated away from sources of wood in a PoL-style will simply not build houses out of wood, they would build them from stone or mud-brick. Iron is a very common element in the world, so I doubt too many cultures would be completely separated from it, but even if it is rare it is not needed in a lot of ways that it is used in the modern day. For example, most medieval pitchforks and other farming implements were 100% wood, and did not use metal. If iron is rare, people simply use substitutes (they cook in earthware pots or gourds rather than iron pots), and treat iron things as valuable objects.There are countless cultures in the history of the real world that thrived for millennia without access to some of the things listed by the original poster. If you don't know how people would survive without something, a good examination of various historical societies and indigenous cultures could be very enlightening.I would note that the original poster's idea that PoL somehow forces societies to live in "fertile land" is rather silly. If there isn't a food source there, then unless there is an ultramodern system of food distribution, it would be silly for any civilization, PoL or not, to build communities there. People build towns around food, it is as simple as that. People are going to build cities close to large sources of food in fertile areas regardless of PoL or not.Now, how I would handle such a setting myself...I am building my own PoL setting based on the idea of "clusters". Points of Light tend to come in the form of a cluster of smaller communities, each at most a day's travel from any other in the cluster, which form a stable and self-sufficient community. Travel within such a cluster is safe, but travel between such clusters can take a few days or more, and is very dangerous, even along well-known routes (so much so that just about the only travelers a PC may run across would be a merchant caravan guarded by mercenaries). Travel away from established routes is suicidal for anyone except the PCs (and is dangerous even for them). Because of the difficulty, different clusters may feature very different cultures, simply because of the limitations on travel and trade.</blockquote>

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