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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ajanders" data-source="post: 457679" data-attributes="member: 3271">Speaking of urban sprawlsI'm sitting here considering why Urbis works...sort of a chicken and egg question.Did the nexus towers encourage wizards to gather people together into cities, or did the cities inspire the creation of nexus towers?I could make an argument either way.  A spellcaster of any sort capable of building a nexus tower can create some pretty spectacular reasons to come settle there: street-lights, running water, interesting biological resources like trees with buttered toast for leaves, or decent sewer systems.  If that doesn't attract people, go out with the mass charm spell and recruit that way.  (Or buy people as slaves, if you prefer.)Alternately, the "natural" ecology of the world might be so supernaturally vicious that humans/elves/dwarves/whatever were forced to gather together for defense and support more quickly than in the history of our world.  If the average caveman had to deal with krenshar and displacer beasts as predators rather than the relatively simple lion and tiger, he might well have decided to give the whole hunter-gatherer lifestyle a miss and go straight to urbanization.As an aside, this may not matter.  A world like Urbis is so urbanized that, like in North America, there is nothing entirely natural left...so depending on when in the timelines of Urbis a campaign is set, the point may be moot.  But this in its turn raises some interesting questions about druids.  Are there any?  Perhaps all druids do now is try to reconstruct what they thought nature was before civilization messed it up.Or perhaps they've been bought off by urban spellcasters: if they control the weather and increase the fertility of forty acres, for example, the rest of the section can be left wild and free.That concentrates the population near the nexus towers, enhancing the soul drain, and keeps wild parts of the country very wild, securing your mundane flanks and discouraging people from moving out of town because of an unreasonable attachment to their life-force.</blockquote>

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