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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 5396853" data-attributes="member: 58197">At this point I'm going to concede the dragon argument to Alhazred. He's convinced me that dragons, and indeed any reasonably bright, moderately powerful flying monster, are beyond what a village militia can be expected to handle. A castle or fortified city could hold the beast at bay, but could not prevent the dragon laying siege if it so chose; a military force dispatched to hunt it down could only succeed by catching the beast napping in its lair. In general, to slay a dragon requires a high-level dragonslayer(s).However, the discussion of dragons has shifted the focus of the discussion toward the single, individual epic threat. The original question was whether humanity could survive in a world where there was a substantial number of pre-existing epic threats (enough to plausibly provide a reasonable series of challenges to a group of epic-level adventurers).I think the answer depends on a number of factors:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">What are the epic threats? Certain traits drastically increase a monster's "threat level" to a medieval military force: Intelligence, flight, and area attacks are three examples. The easiest foes to handle are the big dumb brutes that just hit really hard.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">How aggressive are the epic threats? Obviously, the more inclined they are to sit and lurk in their lairs instead of going out to wage war on humanity, the easier a time humanity will have.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">How organized are the humans? A decentralized "points of light" setting will have to rely on militia forces and will struggle with groups of epic foes. On the other hand, a powerful empire with a strong military could punish epic monsters for encroaching on its borders, or even wage a campaign of extermination.</li> </ul>This brings up a number of interesting possibilities. One relates to the "fallen empire" scenario, which is generally assumed to underlie the 4E points of light setting. If there was, up until recently, a powerful human empire controlling a wide swath of territory, the epic monsters may have learned to fear the empire and withdrawn before the might of its armies. Since epic monsters usually have long lifespans, their fear has been slow to fade; the villages of "points-of-light-land" are unknowingly shielded from destruction by the memory of their ancestors' strength*.Another option, suitable for a more stable setting, is to have the points of light be rather bigger--towns which follow the medieval "knight and castle" model that helped repel the Vikings. When monsters threaten, the townsfolk flee to the local strong place along with their livestock, and the knights are summoned to deal with the problem. Of course, being specialized to fight big monsters rather than Viking raiders, these "knights" would look rather different from their historical equivalents; they'd probably resemble Mongol horse archers rather than plate-armored heavy cavalry.And, of course, as Crazy Jerome points out, there's always the possibility that epic counters epic. Each region is dominated by a powerful epic creature or small group of epic creatures, and the locals have worked out some kind of living arrangement. Heroic and paragon-tier adventurers will have to work around these overlords, while epic-tier adventurers may confront them directly. (Dark Sun is a fair example of this.)[size=-2]*This does of course raise the question of how the empire ever got started; maybe it was founded by epic heroes, now long dead.[/size]</blockquote>

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