Simulationist Question on PoL

[Jack of Tales]

Note: This is really a sometimes simulationist's perspective. I intend no offense to anyone and request not to be hailed with numerous responses of 'Just ignore it, it's a game' answers. Thank you!

So first of all let me say I love the darker look of official D&D campaign fluff with the whole PoL ideas. However, I read many many great ideas but have one major problem with them. Many revolve around the fact that travel is very difficult between areas even within small ranges. My problem with that lies around how a town, even a small one of say 750 people needs a consistent food source.

That means putting them near a river/fertile lands or some fantastic creation (wizard operated greenhouse system with fake sun?). Well okay, they have food. How do they build/repair houses? They'd need wood, sod or stone. I suppose sod/wood are likely to be found with fertile land. What about stone for other things or metal? Is every PoL a place located within a day of supplies of wood, food, iron and not to mention copper, silver and gold for currency?

How are you taking this into account in your setting, if you are?

On another note, I'm a big fan of consolidation and really like having multiple play groups in a single game setting. Are there any simulationist-ish Dm/Gm's out there that would like to collaborate on a 4E Game setting? I have a general idea about the size of rhode-island for a country to begin the games. The PoL would be the city, Spirit, in the center of the country with the scatterred towns/villages fighting off various beasts every few years or less.

 

[Vymair]

The big key here is food. Every local municipality will require a food source. I think any city or township that relied on food from distant source will be a ghost town for the players to find and wonder about....

Iron is important for building weapons, but not necessary that you have a supply nearby. My default idea right now is that the calamities that led to the breakdown of the last empire claimed many many lives and there's probably an excess of weapons floating around in the short-term.

Additionally, POL doesn't preclude well-guarded merchants from taking risks to go to areas where critical resources could be found. This is pretty much what happened when the Roman empire fell apart in the west. Some merchants were willing to take their chances on those dangerous roads in hopes of wealth. The same should be true in the POL setting. Those merchants won't be great sources of information since they will hoard that knowledge as a competitive advantage.

 

[FadedC]

My thoughts on this....

Have you ever played in a D&D game where the players have to guard a merchant caravan? Where if a group of heroes had not been there the caravan would never have made it to the destination? And have you ever wondered why those caravans even bother leaving home if it's so incredibly dangerous that they apparently have to worry about being overwhelmed and slaughtered even if they have hero level bodyguards along (let alone with standard grunts)?

The problems you descirbe give you the answer to that. Trade goods like food and building materials are so precious that people are willing to take high risks for high profits to get them to their destination. The POL setting really isn't anything new, it's just a logical justification for what the world must be like if wandering monsters are attacking caravans and unexplored ruins full of monsters are within easy traveling distance of the city.

 

[Jack of Tales]

Vymair--on weapons/armor. With the need for iron I was worried less about the PC's wantign weapons and more with the need for regular implements. Horseshoes, spades, axes, saws and not to mention pots, pans and other such are all needed daily. I know nothing about farming or cutting lumber but I could assume that such implements would be needed at a fairly regular rate (say an axe for one man per six months or so..).

I like the idea of merchants as carrying information. Will definately have to consider this and make it an element to my game.

Faded--I don't know about the PoL being nothing new. Perhaps for some, even many people its not but it is a different perspective for me and why I'm excited about world building with it in mind. Typically my worlds are large with large countries that have fairly concrete control over a majority of their region. This of course establishes an area that is far from dark, overly dangerous or otherwise. Typically there are no 'random' monsters or yearly, maybe even monthly, dangers to every village, small or large. PC's play as the explorers for out of the way ruins, where monsters dwell. Or as members on a specific mission, say as mercenaries agaisnt a band of rebels in a town or an invading army.

 

[Irda Ranger]

Here is a post by me on the subject of food production in a POL context.

Trade: Trade is light, but not non-existent. The D&D world in Worlds & Monsters has vagrant Halflings tribes (on rivers, coastal waterways, etc.) and Dragonborn mercenary troops that merchants can hitch a ride with. I get the feeling that the woods and paths are dangerous to lone travelers and small groups, but it would take a pretty serious monster to take one 50+ Dragonborn fighters. Most of the results on the Wandering Monster Table would steer clear of that and look for an easier mark.

Wood, Stone, Etc.: These are all local materials. They're subject to the same rules as the food source discussion.

The really hard part of any POL setting is any type of material which requires a great deal of trade to make itself (not something that can be made locally and then traded). Complicated structures such as castles and mills need a lot of parts and specialized materials - it's unlikely you'd be able to get them all locally. Most locals would probably adapt their defenses and structures to use as many local materials as possible.

Lastly, there's nothing wrong with a greenhouse growing veggies under a mage-sun. It's a magical world. The real simulationist would expect the locals to use every resource at their disposal, including magic. He would find it odd if they didn't.

 

[FadedC]

Faded--I don't know about the PoL being nothing new. Perhaps for some, even many people its not but it is a different perspective for me and why I'm excited about world building with it in mind. Typically my worlds are large with large countries that have fairly concrete control over a majority of their region. This of course establishes an area that is far from dark, overly dangerous or otherwise. Typically there are no 'random' monsters or yearly, maybe even monthly, dangers to every village, small or large. PC's play as the explorers for out of the way ruins, where monsters dwell. Or as members on a specific mission, say as mercenaries agaisnt a band of rebels in a town or an invading army.

Well perhaps it's not entirely accurate to say it's absolutely nothing new. But I find a lot of campaigns take place in well ordered kingdoms, but yet still somehow have random encounters during the trip from city A to city B. POL is just kind of an imagining of what life would be like if you had a chance (even something "small" like 10%) of dying to random monsters every time you took a trip. People just wouldn't travel unless they absolutely had to, and lines of communication would be limited.

 

[GnomeWorks]

Lastly, there's nothing wrong with a greenhouse growing veggies under a mage-sun. It's a magical world. The real simulationist would expect the locals to use every resource at their disposal, including magic. He would find it odd if they didn't.

This.

 

[baberg]

It all depends on when (in after-the-fall time) in the PoL you set your campaign. If you set it for immediately after the fall, villages will have to be 100% self-sufficient. This means fresh water, plentiful food (via foraging and hunting, most likely), wood from a forest, access to stone and metal from a nearby mountain or outcropping, and probably some sort of natural defense against the wilderness. In other words, villages right after the fall will need to be in near-perfect locations just to survive. Life in this time will be very hard, lots of animal and monster attacks, no contact with other settlements, and little in the way of free time. Expect lots of bartering and little coinage.

If you set the campaign a few hundred years after the fall, these villages will have evolved into towns and sprouted "suburbs" for want of a better term. These suburb villages will probably specialize in one aspect of survival or another - a mining village close to the mountains, a farm village in the fertile lowlands, etc - and get the rest of their necessities of survival from trading with the town. The town will have grown into a nexus of trade, likely with some law enforcement to keep the peace and accommodations for travelers. Monsters stay away from the town but will still attack the outlying villages. This is the "normal" time that most people will pick for the PoL setting, I'd think, with plenty for the PCs to do - keep villages safe from marauders, clear out the undead haunting the ruined bridge, escort caravans, etc.

 

[TwinBahamut]

Well, I don't think this is too much of an issue...

Certainly, every village needs its own sources of food, water, and shelter, but these requirements are extremely broad and flexible. Certainly things like wood and iron (at least not both at the same time) are not absolutely required for civilization to function. A culture that is isolated away from sources of wood in a PoL-style will simply not build houses out of wood, they would build them from stone or mud-brick. Iron is a very common element in the world, so I doubt too many cultures would be completely separated from it, but even if it is rare it is not needed in a lot of ways that it is used in the modern day. For example, most medieval pitchforks and other farming implements were 100% wood, and did not use metal. If iron is rare, people simply use substitutes (they cook in earthware pots or gourds rather than iron pots), and treat iron things as valuable objects.

There are countless cultures in the history of the real world that thrived for millennia without access to some of the things listed by the original poster. If you don't know how people would survive without something, a good examination of various historical societies and indigenous cultures could be very enlightening.

I would note that the original poster's idea that PoL somehow forces societies to live in "fertile land" is rather silly. If there isn't a food source there, then unless there is an ultramodern system of food distribution, it would be silly for any civilization, PoL or not, to build communities there. People build towns around food, it is as simple as that. People are going to build cities close to large sources of food in fertile areas regardless of PoL or not.

Now, how I would handle such a setting myself...

I am building my own PoL setting based on the idea of "clusters". Points of Light tend to come in the form of a cluster of smaller communities, each at most a day's travel from any other in the cluster, which form a stable and self-sufficient community. Travel within such a cluster is safe, but travel between such clusters can take a few days or more, and is very dangerous, even along well-known routes (so much so that just about the only travelers a PC may run across would be a merchant caravan guarded by mercenaries). Travel away from established routes is suicidal for anyone except the PCs (and is dangerous even for them). Because of the difficulty, different clusters may feature very different cultures, simply because of the limitations on travel and trade.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

The amount of land required for subsistence really depends on what crops. On potatos, families have managed to live on a half acre, but the medevial three field system seems to be predicated on 15 acres per family (including the fallow strips) plus a share of commanage for cattle and pigs. Cattle here would be one or two milk cows for milk and cheese, and oxen (or a share in oxen) for pulling the plough. So factor 20 acres per family (say 10 people)

So 300 people per sq mile. So village need only farm for about a half mile around. Of course small towns would be surrounded by a scattering of villages.

Soil type and weather also have an effect, better land, giving higher yields and the opposite in worse. Some places are warn eough to support two crops in a year.

Horses were only used in relatively recent times for ploughing with the invention of all iron ploughs and the horse collar.

THe most frequently used transport routes would have fortified village at about a days travel.