Single-village world

[Rusvul]

Arkwillow sits in an endless swamp, surrounded by lethality, with only its walls and its great willow to protect it.

That is the basis for a game I plan to run soon. The idea is that the PCs are militia in Arkwillow, defending it when necessary and rooting out threats to it before they arrive. I'm having some trouble, though, when it comes to designing the setting (more specifically, having it make sense).

The biggest problem? Metal. Town of 200-ish in the middle of a swamp. How do they get metal? They don't have enough people to really mine effectively, especially in a swamp. Metal objects are of course rare regardless, but I'm having a hard time figuring how they have it at all.

Given that the setting is kind of weird, dark fantasy... Idk. I feel like there could be a cool (perhaps uncomfortable) source, but I'm kind of blanking. Any thoughts (mundane or strange) would be helpful.

[Aedilred]

Arkwillow sits in an endless swamp, surrounded by lethality, with only its walls and its great willow to protect it.

That is the basis for a game I plan to run soon. The idea is that the PCs are militia in Arkwillow, defending it when necessary and rooting out threats to it before they arrive. I'm having some trouble, though, when it comes to designing the setting (more specifically, having it make sense).

The biggest problem? Metal. Town of 200-ish in the middle of a swamp. How do they get metal? They don't have enough people to really mine effectively, especially in a swamp. Metal objects are of course rare regardless, but I'm having a hard time figuring how they have it at all.

Given that the setting is kind of weird, dark fantasy... Idk. I feel like there could be a cool (perhaps uncomfortable) source, but I'm kind of blanking. Any thoughts (mundane or strange) would be helpful.

This could of course be a reason for people to leave the village, if there are rocky outcrops nearby where ore could be found. Otherwise, I imagine the principal sources would be scavenged from outsiders who bring them to the village (and maybe reworked) or from meteors or similar extraterrestrial or magical occurrences. Which would be vanishingly rare, of course, but it's a fantasy world so you could up the occurrence if you wanted. And, again, going on a quest to retrieve the metal from that meteor a few miles away before any of the nasties reach it could be another plot hook to get the PCs moving if necessary.

[kopout]

Try bog iron (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bog_iron).

[Digitalfruitz]

Maybe you could say that all of the towns blacksmiths/carpenters have some training in odd transmutation magic, allowing them to transform the wood from the swamp into metal tools.

[Rockphed]

So you have a world whose entire population is in a single place? And there are only 200 of them? Isn't the long-term survival capacity of a species about 500 individuals? Then either there are more people out there, or the population is going to get so inbred as to be useless in a few generations.

[Friv]

So you have a world whose entire population is in a single place? And there are only 200 of them? Isn't the long-term survival capacity of a species about 500 individuals? Then either there are more people out there, or the population is going to get so inbred as to be useless in a few generations.

People argue about this a lot.

Some scientists have pegged the minimum viable human population as low as 160; others say it's more like 200-300, and some go as high as 600-1000.

If the first people in Arkwillow had some kind of tree magic to help have good children, 200 could conceivably do it.

[Rusvul]

Lots of tree-magic. Wilgwitches are taught by the Willow to cast beneficial spells- blessings and the like. But yes, the population is quite small... One disaster could finish them, really. In the past, people have risen to the occasion and kept the people safe... Hope the PCs are up to it!

@Aedilred: I had considered meteors, but it didn't really make sense for them to happen in any great quantity. Perhaps if a ritual could be performed at a certain alignment of the heavens to call meteors..? Who knows. It's worth considering, I think.

@kopout: Thanks for the link. I had been toying around with the idea of a big mountain, that's another reason for me to put one there.

@digitalfruitz: I like that a lot, actually. The woodcarvers make something of wood (perhaps it must be of willow, if I'm portraying willow as particularly magical) and then have it transmuted to iron... Maybe a sacrifice ought to be involved, a goat or something.

[Belac93]

Scary brain thought.

What if everyone in the world knows a ritual. It takes an hour to perform, and transmutes any amount of sentient being flesh into the equivalent amount of metal (sort of like a flesh to stone spell, but metal). That is why the population is so low. Because they sacrificed themselves for metal, and nasty creatures are also turning them to metal. Everyone else? Melted into slag, and sank beneath the swamp.

[Xalyz]

what if the town was once a mining town and the reason that it is so walled in and it seems to be the last holdout. People hid in the frontier town once the world started turning dark

[Sam113097]

What about swamp creatures with iron/bronze scales? In the book The Name of the Wind, a dragon-like lizard called a Francis has valuable iron scales. Your world could have hunters who use magic or special weapons to pierce the metal hides of giant lizards or crack the shells of steel turtles.

[igordragonian]

Maybe.. metal items are remains from other world which everyone has forgotten?
Also,at least at Ad&d there were "Iron Wood'- a mgical tree hard as metal.

[MrZJunior]

They could trade for it with some of the creatures from the swamp.

[Xuc Xac]

The question isn't "how do they have metal?" It's "how do they have anything?" If they are the only village in the world, where did they come from? If they are the only group of people to exist, they probably don't have metal. There isn't enough infrastructure to support mining and smithing. If the entire population of the world is only 200 people, then you have 199 farmers/hunters/gatherers and a chieftain/priest who styles himself as a God-King. If the swamp is really fertile and supplies a lot of easy food, that will free up some people to do jobs outside of food production. If it takes 99 farmers to feed 100 people, you won't have much in the way of fancy metal tools and leather boots and stuff. If 7 or 8 people can get enough food to feed 10 people, that gives you some spare people to work as craftsmen, scholars, full-time military, etc.

If there is a world full of people outside of the swamp and the inhabitants of Arkwillow (cool name, by the way) moved from there, then they could have brought metal and other things with them. Or maybe there used to be more people in the world but there was an apocalyptic event that wiped out everyone else. Either way, Arkwillow was founded with a supply of metal and other goods and that's all they have now. because no more is being imported.

The good thing about metal is that it's easy to recycle. With a limited supply, people would still be careful with it because recycling isn't 100% efficient. Having a rusty tool or weapon would be shameful because metal that rusts doesn't ever come back. Any tool or weapon carried anywhere near the water would have a lanyard on it to prevent it from being dropped and lost in the swamp. Don't use tools recklessly. Don't do anything to dull a blade unnecessarily because you lose a little metal every time you have to sharpen it. Don't break a tool or reforge something unless absolutely necessary because you lose a little of the material to slag every time you reforge it. Don't beat your sword into a plowshare if you can just trade it to someone who already has a plowshare and needs a sword.

[DuctTapeKatar]

Why not make this Willow grow large lumps of iron in the shape of fruit? This would make this tree more sacred, because it is what literally built the town. Another alternative is to look at how the Samurai made the steel for their swords, since there is very little iron ore in Japan.

[WantLearn]

Another question is where do they get the fuel to smelt and work the metal they do have? Swamps don't really produce much coal, and willow doesn't make good charcoal. Do they have magical means to heat their metal? If that's the case, someone's probably pointed it at village threats, making warriors less critical(though still very good to have)

[ThePurple]

Another question is where do they get the fuel to smelt and work the metal they do have? Swamps don't really produce much coal, and willow doesn't make good charcoal.

My gut reaction would be to say that they would use peat, assuming that the swamp turns into a bog somewhere nearby (swamps are constantly flooded areas defined by their ability to support large, free standing trees; bogs are constantly flooded areas without the ability to support large plant life). Peat is used for heating all over the world, but I *would* question whether it's possible to get a hot enough fire with peat fuel in order to reforge metal (not that it's necessary to use heat to reforge iron; cold forging is a thing; it just requires a *lot* of work).

If coal is required, I doubt that willow is the *only* large plant life that the swamp supports. Maple, oak, ash, and elm are all trees that can grow in swamps and are excellent, or at least serviceable, trees for making charcoal (for those that don't know, burning wood in an oxygen deprived environment produces charcoal; the people that did this professionally, and it's one of the oldest known, were called "charcoal burners"). I actually couldn't find anything online that says that willow is a bad tree for producing charcoal either (in fact, as a hardwood, it was actually recommended).

[Xuc Xac]

Peat can be burned for heat, but it's used to bring a house up to "room temperature". You can also cook with it or boil water with it (which is how it's used in power plants). You can't use it in a blast furnace. It doesn't get hot enough to forge metal.

Cold forging (also known as "stamping shapes with a die") is mainly useful for soft metals like aluminum and copper. If you try it with iron, it will just break. Iron has to be heated to be forged. It also has to be heated to a high temperature for tempering if you want the finished object to be durable and sharp (which is everything made of metal that isn't just decorative and a metal-poor village won't waste any on purely decorative things). You might be able to cold forge a piece of iron or steel if someone else had already heated it to a high temperature and didn't temper it, but you wouldn't be able to make any useful tools or weapons out of it (except maybe tying a heavy lump of metal to the end of a stick to make a mace).

[WantLearn]

if I remember correctly, the reason willow doesn't make good charcoal is the way it grows. Willow puts out long thin branches, so to get branches thick enough to make decent charcoal it takes willow trees much, much older than other hardwoods. Well, that and if your goal is resources, you are better off harvesting its bark to make asprin and sell that.:smalltongue:

[WantLearn]

Actually, cold forging might be your answer. Your village is out in a swamp, so that means plenty of bog ore and lots of flowing water. Ignoring the fuel for smelting problem for the moment, a cleverly altered water mill could provide all the mechanical work to cold forge a basic amount of metal equipment. Normally bog ore hunting takes a lot of time and people, but you can just write in that there's a massive seam of bog ore just up or down stream from the village.

For the fuel problem, maybe if they added something to the peat to make it burn hotter? I'm sure we could think of (or make up) something found in swamps that if you mixed it in with peat you could get it to burn hot enough for smelting and forging. There's a thought: can you make charcoal out of peat?

[Mr.Moron]

Do they need to have metal. If you like the concept and metal is naturally super-duper hard or plain impossible to produce perhaps such objects don't exist to any extent. Is there a compelling reason to have metal in spite of how difficult/unlikely it would be?

[gtwucla]

What do you think about scrap metal? The bog could have spread across a vast battle plain with enough dead soldiers and abandoned weapons/armor that 200 villagers could use it as their primary source of metal. Hell, the US dropped enough ordinance on Laos that scrap metal is still the primary source of income for people there 50 years later. It would also lend itself to a grounded and very dark theme.

[sktarq]

How did they get to the swamp and how did they domesticate anything a that scale are real issues. Are they just isolated enough that "beyond the swamp" is basically another world and one that has passed the village by? Survivors of a colony system whose fall was long enough ago as to pass into myth?

As for metal-bog iron, ironwood trees, & rocky hills surrounded by bogland (like the tin mine on. The moor in Sherlock Holmes and the Hound of the Baskervilles) in various combinations should cover it.

[Rusvul]

They are simply there. There is no past, and there is nothing beyond the swamp. The darkness and mire stretch on and on and never end.

I've found this topic to be exceedingly helpful for general inspiration as well as answers to this question specifically. I'm considering a topic for more ideas and such concerning the setting... Would it be better for me to make a new thread to that end or modify this one?

[Ursus Spelaeus]

If you want to be really creepy, consider blood magic.
Blood is ferrous, it's just that a single human being only contains enough iron in their body to make one coin (if you had some way to filter it all out.)
However, if they've 'always' been there, then perhaps they've managed to accumulate enough blood iron over the span of always to forge a small number of ancestral arms and armors.

*edit*
Maybe combine this idea, and the bog iron idea with bog mummies:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bog_body
So, you could have like...
Iron mummies?

[Recherché]

One of the first problems I see is simple population size and inbreeding. You need a minimum number of people to maintain a steady population without them all marrying too closely and killing themselves via inbreeding.

There are some estimates that humans could have a minimum viable population of only 160 with genetic testing and arranged breeding in order to keep the genetic pool clean and diverse. And in that situation you'd still lose 80% of your genetic diversity within 300 years.

At 500 people couples can be monogamous but all marriages still have to be approved by a genetics board. The estimated number of people you'd need to have a stable population without a geneticist helping out is around 5000. Arkwillow needs to be a lot bigger than 200 people. And that's not even thinking about how many people you need for tech higher than stone age.

[YossarianLives]

It's clichéd but:

What about having a number of "relics", ancient magical weapons, tools, and armour that are immune to rust and very difficult to break. They would be rare, but the village would have enough to supply the PCs. No-one would know exactly where the relics came from, but they could be gifts from some great deity, the tree, or forged long ago before the secrets of metalworking were lost.

[WantLearn]

Another remedy for the inbreeding problem is if you pick a race with a long lifespan and slow reproduction rate like the elves. They could be there for maybe 3 generations, which in elven times is long enough that no one can remember anything about the world outside the village, but not so many generations that inbreeding has become a problem.