Dr. Strangemonkey
First Post
This is a thread for sharing what sorts of Point of Light models you're coming up with or have used in the past or can translate from media.
I'm not asking what PoL you'll use for your homebase, mind, just trying to get the highest variety of Light Sources possible.
To qualify your location/model must be both Light - does some good or is some good - and a Point - you gotta provide some justification for why it is golden while all else is darkness. Optionally you can also discuss some of the shadows that it creates/that surround it.
Here's Two:
The Isle of Janzrey
Point: Prior to the Fall Janzrey was the most convenient fording place on a very inconvenient part of the Great River. Via the Island local hunters could ford the torrent, enjoy some protection from predators, and occasionally establish a landing point for canoes. It wasn't much, not even the only gathering point in an only barely tracked wilderness, but it was there. Thus things were for some time.
Trade grew apace with the Great Northern Empire and eventually even the Southlands felt its touch. Tentative merchants on flatboats began making their way down the river. When they arrived at Janzrey they found a curious thing, a half generation before their arrival a great divine revelation had occured, and now an oracle dwelt upon the island. An oracle, a village of children orphaned by the slave traders who preceeded the merchants, and a temple of priests who protected them. All the local hunters, even those who guided the slavers and sold them goods, respected the oracle, or feared it, and the traders themselves felt stirrings of piety and charity. Pilgrims followed the traders, and though the oracle never grew large it did grow prosperous and well known.
Light: When the fall came shadows preceeded the darkness. First there were rumours of the empires death, then local villages and camps suddenly dissapeared, and finally there were refugees. Small bands lead by the former charges of the Oracle gathering friends or family about them and struggling by hidden trails, fierce struggle, or sheer will to the place that had once been their refuge. Families and peoples of all types found the haven and found it well prepared. You don't get to be an oracle without having some type of long range thinking.
Now the Island is a fortress-refuge. It's walls rise up from the river itself, and its towers dominate the ford. Carefully tended embankments hold the river in its course and allow for the cultivation of the land to either side. Swift, sturdy canoes launch from its harbor to seek out and offer aid to those few the scourges of these dark time still allow to roam free. The oracle is now a power of healing working tirelessly to ease the trauma of those few it can save, and to raise their children to bring hope to others.
This new generation is the hope of the oracle as well. Well it knows that the shadowy forest that hides the island from the scourge may someday rise up to swallow it. Or, worse yet, that it may hide them too little and that their light may eventually attract the attention of the scourges of the north. Carefully he trains and sponsors them, and hopes and prays that their powers, tied more to their own destinies than to that of the island, might be bulwark enough.
Noma - The King-City of the Pious Thief
Point - The Priest-Thief, in his early days, was not the brightest child of a god to grace the land between the roaring sea and the soaring stone, which was itself a fairly pleasant place, but he was an astutue student of the obvious. And it was obvious that his land was dangerously rich in heroes. Ten thousand heroes, ten thousand sons and ten thousand daughters of ten hundred gods, ten thousand times ten hundred monsters for them to slay, and ten thousand times ten thousand attendant troubles for all those thousands to inflict on the local populace. Who all lived in cities and desperately hoped that the next god-hero would be slightly better than whatever hundred monsters he had to slay to walk up their door and demand to rule them.
"Clearly," thought the Priest-Thief, "for an ambitious young man like myself the monster slaying god-hero route is overly competitive, a new route must be found." And he sat down near the latest monster he had bashed and thought while various heroes came to fight the monsters who had been attracted to his monsters corpse.
"Well, there are a lot of heroes, and they do have a lot of stuff, but they seem overly concerned with monsters. I will become a thief, avoid the monsters, and go straight to the stuff. Also," he mused as one of the arriving heroes suddenly became caught up in a fight between his mother and the goddess who's hair she had insulted last week, "there are other pitfalls I might avoid through a little less action and a little more diplomatic chanting."
And so he became the first Priest-Thief. Stealing from the rich, and giving to the temples of whatever diety really hated that particular rich jerk.
Finally, he came to his last conclusion, "Winning a city doesn't seem like its in my line of expertise anymore, but I might scavenge one."
Now when he went out into the country side he found that appart from monsters there were brigans and that they were nervois about congregating. Something about they're becoming the appetizer for a monster slaying hero buffet.
So he went to the very nastiest thieves, people so far below divine attention they only registered as heroic material when they were smeared across someone's armor. People who couldn't get into a city if they begged.
And made a proposition.
Thus the origin of the King-City of the Pious Thief. A city made of the worst materials, but with so many hands - read temples - in the design that it can't help but thrive because its the world's least sackable proposition. Faith is its sheild and poverty its armor.
Light: The city provides a home to the desperate, and a clearing house for the divine and the treasured. The people inside of it have souls as dark as charcoal, and capable of burning just as well in the right container. The King-City is such a hearth. A place where the ruined might find susbtance and edification. It redeems women and men alike.
It also finds creative solutions. Heroes abound but none want to defend the city, and its master is consumed with his reasearch. So it is that he organizes his citizens, trains them, trusts, and looks forward to a day when their small teams might threaten the Scions themselves.
I'm not asking what PoL you'll use for your homebase, mind, just trying to get the highest variety of Light Sources possible.
To qualify your location/model must be both Light - does some good or is some good - and a Point - you gotta provide some justification for why it is golden while all else is darkness. Optionally you can also discuss some of the shadows that it creates/that surround it.
Here's Two:
The Isle of Janzrey
Point: Prior to the Fall Janzrey was the most convenient fording place on a very inconvenient part of the Great River. Via the Island local hunters could ford the torrent, enjoy some protection from predators, and occasionally establish a landing point for canoes. It wasn't much, not even the only gathering point in an only barely tracked wilderness, but it was there. Thus things were for some time.
Trade grew apace with the Great Northern Empire and eventually even the Southlands felt its touch. Tentative merchants on flatboats began making their way down the river. When they arrived at Janzrey they found a curious thing, a half generation before their arrival a great divine revelation had occured, and now an oracle dwelt upon the island. An oracle, a village of children orphaned by the slave traders who preceeded the merchants, and a temple of priests who protected them. All the local hunters, even those who guided the slavers and sold them goods, respected the oracle, or feared it, and the traders themselves felt stirrings of piety and charity. Pilgrims followed the traders, and though the oracle never grew large it did grow prosperous and well known.
Light: When the fall came shadows preceeded the darkness. First there were rumours of the empires death, then local villages and camps suddenly dissapeared, and finally there were refugees. Small bands lead by the former charges of the Oracle gathering friends or family about them and struggling by hidden trails, fierce struggle, or sheer will to the place that had once been their refuge. Families and peoples of all types found the haven and found it well prepared. You don't get to be an oracle without having some type of long range thinking.
Now the Island is a fortress-refuge. It's walls rise up from the river itself, and its towers dominate the ford. Carefully tended embankments hold the river in its course and allow for the cultivation of the land to either side. Swift, sturdy canoes launch from its harbor to seek out and offer aid to those few the scourges of these dark time still allow to roam free. The oracle is now a power of healing working tirelessly to ease the trauma of those few it can save, and to raise their children to bring hope to others.
This new generation is the hope of the oracle as well. Well it knows that the shadowy forest that hides the island from the scourge may someday rise up to swallow it. Or, worse yet, that it may hide them too little and that their light may eventually attract the attention of the scourges of the north. Carefully he trains and sponsors them, and hopes and prays that their powers, tied more to their own destinies than to that of the island, might be bulwark enough.
Noma - The King-City of the Pious Thief
Point - The Priest-Thief, in his early days, was not the brightest child of a god to grace the land between the roaring sea and the soaring stone, which was itself a fairly pleasant place, but he was an astutue student of the obvious. And it was obvious that his land was dangerously rich in heroes. Ten thousand heroes, ten thousand sons and ten thousand daughters of ten hundred gods, ten thousand times ten hundred monsters for them to slay, and ten thousand times ten thousand attendant troubles for all those thousands to inflict on the local populace. Who all lived in cities and desperately hoped that the next god-hero would be slightly better than whatever hundred monsters he had to slay to walk up their door and demand to rule them.
"Clearly," thought the Priest-Thief, "for an ambitious young man like myself the monster slaying god-hero route is overly competitive, a new route must be found." And he sat down near the latest monster he had bashed and thought while various heroes came to fight the monsters who had been attracted to his monsters corpse.
"Well, there are a lot of heroes, and they do have a lot of stuff, but they seem overly concerned with monsters. I will become a thief, avoid the monsters, and go straight to the stuff. Also," he mused as one of the arriving heroes suddenly became caught up in a fight between his mother and the goddess who's hair she had insulted last week, "there are other pitfalls I might avoid through a little less action and a little more diplomatic chanting."
And so he became the first Priest-Thief. Stealing from the rich, and giving to the temples of whatever diety really hated that particular rich jerk.
Finally, he came to his last conclusion, "Winning a city doesn't seem like its in my line of expertise anymore, but I might scavenge one."
Now when he went out into the country side he found that appart from monsters there were brigans and that they were nervois about congregating. Something about they're becoming the appetizer for a monster slaying hero buffet.
So he went to the very nastiest thieves, people so far below divine attention they only registered as heroic material when they were smeared across someone's armor. People who couldn't get into a city if they begged.
And made a proposition.
Thus the origin of the King-City of the Pious Thief. A city made of the worst materials, but with so many hands - read temples - in the design that it can't help but thrive because its the world's least sackable proposition. Faith is its sheild and poverty its armor.
Light: The city provides a home to the desperate, and a clearing house for the divine and the treasured. The people inside of it have souls as dark as charcoal, and capable of burning just as well in the right container. The King-City is such a hearth. A place where the ruined might find susbtance and edification. It redeems women and men alike.
It also finds creative solutions. Heroes abound but none want to defend the city, and its master is consumed with his reasearch. So it is that he organizes his citizens, trains them, trusts, and looks forward to a day when their small teams might threaten the Scions themselves.
) found the magical nature of the place. The wizards offered the citizens their protection in exchange for food and living and under the protection of the wizards the settlement bloomed into a city in short time.
