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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ydars" data-source="post: 4142309" data-attributes="member: 62992">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.</blockquote>

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