NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Melan" data-source="post: 3738253" data-attributes="member: 1713">This is probably the first thing I like about 4th edition, so you can guess what I think about the idea.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> In fact, it is a perfectly good old school philosophy, very much in keeping with early campaign worlds like Judges Guilds Wilderlands of High Fantasy and, yes, TSR's Greyhawk. After all, what is Greyhawk? Greyhawk is not just a thin folio. Greyhawk is the random encounter tables in the back of your DMG, the tables where you will meet giants and trolls in the wilderness and ankhegs on cultivated land, where cities at night are teeming with shady types - assassins, prostitutes, but also shadows and vampires. Just like City State of the Invincible Overlord, Greyhawk City strikes me as a Lankhmar-successor, even if the eventual 2e boxed set was white-washed of the grime that populated it. And it was pretty much a city-state without too much hinterland.Are empires impossible without such a model? Not really. Even in our world, empires didn't control most of their land until recently, probably the 17th or 18th century. Around the roads linking towns and villages, there was indeed wilderness - vast forests, where outlaws and wild animals dwelt. It is not hard to imagine fairies, or monsters, also being there. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> Added to this is that monarchs didn't really care about these areas so much - for their purposes, they were mostly useless, as they were uninhabited, offered no scarce resources, and would have been too expensive to care about. Well, of course, there were expeditions against bandits - but they were hard to root out completely. I think an adventurer would feel right at home in such a setting. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />City adventures impossible in such a millieu? Nonsense! In fact, there is more city adventuring... because if cities are more dangerous, there is more reason for adventurers to spend time there!  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> In my campaign, which is built on the "howling wilderness surrounding points of faint light" model, there are a lot of opportunities for adventuring in the city.Now there may be one element in danger: idyllic "Ye Olde Englande" style countryside. That's possibly not well supported here... although given The Village of Hommlet, I am not even sure of this.</blockquote>

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