Making the world feel huge and wild / Points of Light

[Yora]

I am always a fan of fantasy books and movies that create the feeling that the world in which they take place is huge and the people who live in it small and widely scattered. I would also like to run a campaign that feels that way, but all the games I played in and settings that I've read don't really feel like that to me. It always feels very cluttered and crowded with everything being wel mapped and charted and all the settlements connected.

Could possibly be just my personal perception, but I think it could have something to do with how games are usually run and settings presented. Any ideas why that might be and what could be done about it?

[Comet]

I would probably set it up so that the players only ever interact with a very small portion of the world, say a single village and its environs. Everything else would be rumours, sporadic visitors from afar and incomplete political maps that give context to what's happening right here and now. I think that would give the players a sense of isolation and claustrophobia, which is one way of making your world feel big and scary.

[ExLibrisMortis]

There has to be more to the world than the plot of your characters. You have to suggest more information than you can provide. However, I think it's hard to do in a game format, because it will slow down the game. It's more practical to write that sort of stuff into the setting background, and get people to read it at their leisure.

For example, you can tell a story: "This port city A has an ore harbour, where mithral from City B and adamantine from City C are shipped across the channel (guarded by city D) to the forges of cities E, F and G. No, the capital is city Z, we're not there yet. Now, tax from the ore harbour is taken to City H and I across land, on account of the Treaty of City J, (which is actually an elven city), and there are many in City B and I who want to send all taxation through I, and C and H the same for H, but Cities K, L and M, who provide most of the food for the whole F-N region, do not want to provide too much power to either of them. Oh, and the vowels are a different clan".

But this story has to be somewhat relevant, and I don't really see much of a place to insert it in a running game, unless this exact thing is your plot (in which case, it's not suggesting a huge world, as per the first sentence of this post). Maybe you can tell it as start of session zero, and keep referring to city politics by preparing town crier messages and tavern gossip.

[Garimeth]

I've actually spent some time thinking about that myself. here are some of my thoughts:

- Travel must be difficult and/or dangerous, to the extent that it just isn't worth it for most people. Everybody settling in an area tends to congregate to the most secure and built up area. There could be some type of "easier" travel by sea or magic perhaps, but the easier overland travel is, the less threatening the setting is, and therefore easier to tame and settle.

- City-states. Most villages are too small to be entirely self sufficient, which means they need to trade with others to get what they want. City-states might have this problem a little less. The city state provides for the common defense of whatever farms surround it to feed its population.

- Village coalitions: small villages all band together, kind of like the towns in the north in The Halfling's Gem.


For this to be the natural way things develop, you have to have a solid explanation of the first point, I.E. "why" travel is so long or difficult. The obvious reason is that there are monsters or whatever. So why don't the monsters conquer these nice areas that the humans are living in? Well, maybe they don't like the terrain or environment, or perhaps they are opportunity predators and not intelligent. Maybe the human societies ARE constantly fighting against these things.

So for example we could have rampaging orcs that for some reason can't stand the salinity of being near the ocean. So they let the humans live near the ocean because they don't want that land anyway, and its too much work to try and siege a city they don't even want, but they mercilessly crush any human attempt to expand inland. Now I'd ask: how did the humans get built up enough to have cities in the first place? We can have the whole divine creation thing, or maybe they settled here from somewhere else. Perhaps the orcs are the new comers and they have driven humanity back to the coast, and the countryside is full of the wreckage of a great human kingdom. This happened everywhere though and now humanity is not quite on its last rope, but only because the orcs are content to let them have their corner.

Now you could substitute orcs with a lot of things, and you could change the preferred terrain to whatever to create the setting and culture you want, but the big key is that travel has to be hard, their has to be a reason why its impossible/difficult to expand, and it has to be mostly consistent across the setting.

[Vegan Squirrel]

Another option is to set up a world with very difficult terrain that takes up large amounts of space and is not really settled. I'm talking hot deserts and high mountains, or swamps that aren't worth trying to live on, jungles in difficult climates. Not so much forests you can simply cut down, but maybe forests with enchanted/fey elements that people tend to avoid.

Consequently, cities will be scattered to the coasts and favorable land. Powerful nations might have distant colonies, as Europe colonized parts of other continents, but those colonies are distant and exotic.

Another version of that is a large area that is uninhabitable due to recent wars.. nuclear/arcane winter, minefields, that sort of thing. I'm using the lingering undead from an undead apocalypse to cover half of a continent in my campaign world.

Another possibility: a continent that doesn't have very much landmass at its center, but has a large number of large peninsulas that are settled. Almost like a pinwheel shape, but of course it should be made to look more natural. Mountain ridges rose up these long peninsulas with arcs of islands.

Just a few scattered thoughts.

Also, technology level is important here.

[sktarq]

Very incomplete maps. Sure your players know that a great mountain range exists far to the west and can see it on the butcher paper map but when their weeks march through 3 different biomes and several challenging encounters only moves them a couple inches on that map they will gain a respect for the scale of the "here be dragons" white spaces on the map.

Have events that are bigger than what the party could have access to be visable. Not that they need too be part of the event but the sense that the world is operating on a grander scale than them. Ex1: find the path/road they were following through the mountains cut off by a rockslide where the roocks are 30' boulders and the edge is 60-7' higher that the paths. As a sight of an encounter with the agitated rock and mountain spirits it becomes important. EX2: the PC's find the remains of a battlefield - it quickly becomes obvious that each armies losses are larger than most city-states entire population.

Compare things to. Their home village a lot. A building that is the size of a villager's whole property (including veg garden, fence, yard, etc) gives the player a sense of norm vs this and thus puts the idea of playing differently in their heads.

Pplay up the logistic challenges of space and time. Have players miss festivals, family events, harvests, etc to enforce the idea of how much of their lives must be spent on the phrase "we visit the oracle for information" or the like. And if each PC is two assistants and five mules just to carry enough food to get to their destination (as finding other people to buy from could be unreliable and the trip may need to re-up even with such a large provision tank) gives PC's a sense of travel is not easy and world is larger than what they handle alone no matter how great a sword swinger they are. For extra fun give them a quick NPC sheet for each porter-with name, dreams, family history etc on it so they don't forget about them and can see what effect their actions are having on the lives of others (the sheets also help in when they are part of the pile to enforce the NPC's personhood and of course don't have to be complete as the DM has the master copies (the ones with the secrets)) Also makes the lone traveler with only an oversized purse (a-la Dr Jones) seem like the mysterious badass that he is.

[VoxRationis]

Keep a "DM map," showing what is actually in what spaces, separate from a "player map," showing what the "viewpoint culture" knows about geography. That way you can have all the information you need about the world without making the world seem cluttered.

[Yora]

I think it's probably best to keep adventures local, with the PCs and NPCs being limited to whatever allies and resources they have nearby. NPCs should have very limited "power projection". They can only control what is directly outside their stronghold or camp. Multinational organizations with a centralized headquarter make the world feel closer together. Time of travel is not really a factor in a campaign or in fiction as you can always skip ahead days or months until something important happens again. When no side can call backup from another region each locale feels more isolated. Travelling to another major town means moving on to a different adventure and whatever unfinished business you left behind won't be waiting for you if you come back later.

[Garimeth]

I think it's probably best to keep adventures local, with the PCs and NPCs being limited to whatever allies and resources they have nearby. NPCs should have very limited "power projection". They can only control what is directly outside their stronghold or camp. Multinational organizations with a centralized headquarter make the world feel closer together. Time of travel is not really a factor in a campaign or in fiction as you can always skip ahead days or months until something important happens again. When no side can call backup from another region each locale feels more isolated. Travelling to another major town means moving on to a different adventure and whatever unfinished business you left behind won't be waiting for you if you come back later.

So I both agree and disagree. Travel time may not matter to the PLAYERS, but it certainly matters to the NPCs. Travel time can absolutely make a region isolated. The EVIL attacks in a fortnight, but it will take three months to get a messenger to the nearest kingdom and request aid. Or that the king's champion going to help the party means that his champion is going to be gone for years, means the king will deny the request. Combine the distance, with difficult terrain (as mentioned by sktarq and Vegan Squirrel), and then add in a monster/disease/life threat, and now you have a plausible reason for WHY its a points of light setting.

What your above post addresses is the "what and how" what the other things address is the "why", you need both for compelling fiction, or a compelling setting.

[TheYell]

Have the party take ship for a short coastal hop to a known port. A great storm lasting three days blows the ship out to sea and rolls the masts out of her. She's leaking steadily. The crew abandons in the middle of the night with most of the food and water. On the fourteenth day of drifting she runs aground. Where the party is, how far to the nearest settlement, in what direction, how organized it is, what language it speaks, are things they have to find out.

[Jay R]

The best tools for creating a wild and dangerous world:

1. Get rid of huge cities.
2. There can be some civilized lands of farmers, but there should be large expanses of wilderness.
3. The borders of the wilderness should be places where people expect occasional orc raids or monster incursions.
4. Reduce the number of magic items, and magic item shops should be nearly non-existent (for the same reasons that you would get rid of high technology).


I prefer to assume a great civilization has been destroyed by natural disasters, long-term wars, and/or barbaric raids in the last century or two. This gives reason to believe that there will be unfound treasure in the ruins found in the wilderness.

[Hoosigander]

Keep a "DM map," showing what is actually in what spaces, separate from a "player map," showing what the "viewpoint culture" knows about geography. That way you can have all the information you need about the world without making the world seem cluttered.

I second this. Indeed, I would keep in mind that medieval maps are not as precise and accurate as modern ones. Depending on your world you might not even want to have maps and have the only source of geographical information be directions given by the locals (When I say no maps I don't mean quick sketches on a dry erase graph of the area the PCs can physically see, I mean world, regional, and city maps). Most Medieval travel writing takes the form of itineraries, e.g. it's 10 miles from A to B, from there its twenty miles to C. This sort of thing could facilitate a "points of light" feel, where only the settlements are detailed and the places in between are trackless wastes beyond the roads connecting the towns. I guess the general point is, instead of having any absolute point of reference for Geography the PCs should only know what the NPCs in the surrounding community could know (and whatever they've picked up in their travels).

Spoiler: Medieval Maps

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11th Century map from the Abbey of Saint-Sever in France.
Produced in the 12th century by Muhammad al-Idrisi for King Roger II of Sicily, this picture has the north on top, but the map is actually oriented towards the South.

14th century English map. Oriented East.
Matthew of Paris' map of Great Britain.

[thirdkingdom]

I second this. Indeed, I would keep in mind that medieval maps are not as precise and accurate as modern ones. Depending on your world you might not even want to have maps and have the only source of geographical information be directions given by the locals (When I say no maps I don't mean quick sketches on a dry erase graph of the area the PCs can physically see, I mean world, regional, and city maps). Most Medieval travel writing takes the form of itineraries, e.g. it's 10 miles from A to B, from there its twenty miles to C. This sort of thing could facilitate a "points of light" feel, where only the settlements are detailed and the places in between are trackless wastes beyond the roads connecting the towns. I guess the general point is, instead of having any absolute point of reference for Geography the PCs should only know what the NPCs in the surrounding community could know (and whatever they've picked up in their travels).

Spoiler: Medieval Maps

Show

11th Century map from the Abbey of Saint-Sever in France.
Produced in the 12th century by Muhammad al-Idrisi for King Roger II of Sicily, this picture has the north on top, but the map is actually oriented towards the South.

14th century English map. Oriented East.
Matthew of Paris' map of Great Britain.

Here's the map I gave my players at the start of our game:

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Each hex is 18 miles.

Here's what they've explored thus far:

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Each hex is 6 miles. The PCs have basically only explored on the east side of the river Sarn, down to the ruined Keep they wrested from a family of trolls, christened Wolf Keep and have been gradually repairing.

[5a Violista]

A handful of books I've read are points-of-light...I can't remember their names, but I liked them very much. One time, I made a setting based on them. The unifying theme between these stories seemed to be that nature itself was against the humans: there existed bloodthirsty versions of every wild animal with the power to control weak-minded animals and humans in one book and cruel feylike beings and magical monsters and caustic oceans in the other book. At least, that's what I remembered them to be like at the time.
I think if I search through the library catalogue, I'll find their names: oh, yes. One was called Fire by Kristin Cashore ("In the land of the Dells, there are 'monsters.' Impossibly beautiful animals of unnatural colors, that can entrance people with their appearance and control them with their minds.") and the "Monster blood Tattoo" series ("The book's action takes place entirely on the Half-Continent, a Dickensian world run by arcane science and alchemy, and plagued with deadly (and not-so-deadly) monsters.") ((so, not exactly what I remembered them as, but close enough))

Trying to follow this theme of "nature actively fights against civilization" and drawing inspiration from these books and others, this is what the setting I created was like:
One of the most useful sea route's waters were incredibly caustic and filled with mindless sea monsters (that could be led to cause destruction on land if led there) that could take out ships if not careful. More sea monsters appeared in other oceans, but weren't as cruel but just as deadly. A handful of deserts with very little water; a wasteland whose only water all have lead poisoning; a wasteland where mindless undead spontaneously are created and advance on bordering cities; areas that frequently are swamped by volcanoes; a virus that makes beasts go wild and attack everything; an entire forest filled with man-eating plants; an area with unnatural perpetual darkness; entire countries that can't be passed without extensive climbing gear and skill; volcanic areas with frequent eruptions; greedy fey beasts (and also magical pirates) that prey on traveling merchants; periodic astrology-related rituals that cause devastation; a practical inability to travel east-to-west around the world except by sea due to the placement of mountain ranges, legendary beasts, and wastelands; every sea voyage is extremely dangerous due to an unlimited number of reasons; etc; etc: these are some of the instances where nature itself was fighting against civilization. Obviously, that's probably too much. It was largely an exercise to see how dangerous I could make the wilderness. However, this list contains several things you can do to make nature fight against civilization.

If you can make it so the only groups who can survive travel are logistically sound armies, wandering survivalists ("adventurers"), and merchants accompanied by several mercenaries, then the setting begins to feel very point-of-light. If nature sometimes comes to attack the cities themselves, even better. It leaves a lot of adventure in the city itself as well as journeying between cities. Of note in "Monster Blood Tattoo", there are roadways between cities but even the roadways are dangerous (basically, an army of "Lamplighters" have to patrol the roadways to keep them safe from monsters especially) and sometimes to get from one city to another you have to take a detour through another larger city.

I guess, in conclusion, the way I would make a Points-of-Light setting would be by making nature hostile.

[Freelance GM]

I am always a fan of fantasy books and movies that create the feeling that the world in which they take place is huge and the people who live in it small and widely scattered. I would also like to run a campaign that feels that way, but all the games I played in and settings that I've read don't really feel like that to me. It always feels very cluttered and crowded with everything being wel mapped and charted and all the settlements connected.

Could possibly be just my personal perception, but I think it could have something to do with how games are usually run and settings presented. Any ideas why that might be and what could be done about it?

You've given me a ton of great advice, hopefully I can return the favor.

I'm going to try and keep this as concise as possible, and try not to rant... We'll see how it goes...

Spoiler: Keep the Players Ignorant

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Not about critical information, but leave them largely ignorant of any history or lore from outside the region the campaign is set in. It's D&D. There's no internet, public education, or anything really to inform the players about the rest of the world. This leaves you free to reference (or make up) stories or events the players (and their characters) have no knowledge of.

It doesn't have to be plot-relevant, in fact, it's almost best as throw-away lines.
"Ever read the Ballad of Berestan? No...? Well, it's a little hard to explain, but it's a bit like the part where he serenades a flock of harpies."

I find that the best and most grounding references are allusions to other D&D campaigns you've run in the same setting. If it's the same group of players, the fanservice makes the world feel larger and persistent. If it's a new group, then they feel like the world has history.

Spoiler: Random Encounters

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Random encounters, random encounters, random encounters. I can't stress random encounters enough.

Carve up your region map into "zones," and make a random encounter table for each one. My last campaign had 10 tables for an area the size of Ohio. The important part is to build them based on what would logically be there, and not the party's level.

The backstory of my region said a Red, White, and Silver dragon once had a melee a trois in the region. The Silver and the White died, and the Red disappeared for a few hundred years. I had a pair of young white dragons (children of the dead White) on every random encounter table, because the whole campaign area is their hunting ground. They weren't really plot relevant, but they were there. As the players got closer to the northern mountains, the chances of the dragons appearing climbed from 5% to 15%. This was mostly a low-level campaign, and knowing that two dragons could swoop by at any moment kept the party on their toes.

It made the region feel dangerous, hostile, and unforgiving. The world was not made for their level, and they would inevitably get into fights they would have no choice but to flee from. So long as the players know out-of-character that it's an exploration game and they can wander into higher-level areas, it's not bad or evil GM'ing, and these random encounters can create some of the most memorable moments of the campaign.

"Hey, remember that time we took a long rest by that lake and got ambushed by a hydra?"
"Oh yeah. Next time we camp by a large body of water, I'm setting up my tent 35 feet from the water's edge."

[Mechalich]

I think in order to make points of light function, you have to stress the general hostility of the land between the points.

Your average pre-industrial world is going to have basically four land types: urban areas; settled farmland; un-settled but regularly utilized territory like forests, seasonal pastures, and fishing streams; and true wilderness. Generally roads and known paths of any kind whatsoever travel only between urban areas through settled farmland (with occasional diversions over mountain passes and the like, but even highly remote passes will often have a village every few days). People who leave the roads can end up in un-settled territory very rapidly, within a day or so of steady walking in most cases, even in major civilizations. Most early civilizations aren't really points of light, but more like a network of interconnected towns and recognized roads/rivers/trails surrounded by agricultural land that people and goods can use, but it's a very thin network surrounded primarily by empty space.

Travel should only be sedate along the roads - and roads don't go everywhere, like across borders or over mountains or deserts. Once characters leave the path, then they are engaged in wilderness adventuring. In the wilderness you have nothing to rely upon but what you brought with you. Resource management becomes critical. There may be no local forage, water shortages or non-potable water are major issues, a relatively minor injury such as a sprained ankle or pulled muscle becomes challenging.

Humans are actually shockingly well-adapted to long distance overland travel, quite possibly better than any other animal on Earth and can accomplish astounding feats (ever see the movie The Way Back) but such journeys come with a price, and being able to travel with combat gear and the expectation of actually fighting at any point makes matters exponentially harder. So characters who dare the wilderness either need to travel with great preparation and large, expensive caravans - which are vulnerable to banditry, monster attacks, and the like, or cut it down to the bone in a small party and face constant food insecurity, exhaustion, and peril.

In order to do this, I would stress significant numbers of travel encounters, probably one a day or more, but avoid making most of them monsters. The wilderness should instead primarily produce natural obstacles: storms, deadfalls, washed out bridges, locust swarms, etc. These slow progress and deplete resources, potentially forcing characters to make difficult choices about whether to turn around or risk starvation when they press on, and making getting lost a life-threatening danger.

The problem is, very simply, that natural dangers are only really problematic at low levels of magical power. And I mean really low. D&D bypasses many of them using 0-level spells. Purify Food and Water, Create Water, Mending, and others make travel so much easier (Dark Sun tries to cheat by just banning all the helpful spells and powers, but it's a very brute force solution that really hurts verisimilitude). In order to make the world huge and the people small the people actually have to be small in power and not just numbers.

[Vitruviansquid]

It strikes me that the settings I find to communicate "Points of Light"-ness do so not because of any actual largeness of the setting or the existence of dangerous elements. They exist because of the mystery in the settings.

The reason it is difficult to make such a setting in RPGs is because it is difficult to do the requisite amount of UNDER-explaining that such a setting requires. For example, Mad Max has an exciting setting, probably one of the most iconic ones in modern culture. But imagine if you had written this setting as a tabletop RPG's GM and you were trying to run Road Warrior.

Your players would be all "where do the bandits get food? Wouldn't the few remaining places where agriculture is possible also be full of wealthy and powerful dudes and their underlings so that it's impossible to take food from them? Wouldn't all the pre-apocalyptic canned dog food have been eaten by now?"

In a Points of Light setting where there's hugeness and wildness, the answer would be something like "oh, they can still find food here and there and get by, from a combination of robbing people, hunting, and scavenging." The idea that you don't know where your else meal comes from, but you'll somehow make do is what lends the wildness to the setting. Wildness is composed of danger and not knowing. But players are often not satisfied with that answer. They believe that just because getting food as a bandit would be difficult, it must therefore be impossible. They also believe that just because getting food as a bandit is difficult, nobody would want to be a bandit, and thus nobody would be a bandit. There is an attitude among RPG players (particularly players of 3.5/PF, I feel) that wants everything explained, de-mystified, and thus made tame. In trying to create a good setting of your description, the real battle is getting the players to buy it.

[Yora]

I think food and water are probably bad examples. They are the most basic things around which society revolves (along with energy, usually in the form of fuel) and you immediately run into major trouble if there is a shortage of every kind. If these things don't work, the community immediately collapses. Since this is both something that can happen to PCs and their allies, and something the PCs can do to their enemies, I think this is one aspect that really needs to be solid and work. Everything else you can handwave, but food, water, and fuel are probably the three major things that can easily collapse the believability of the setting.
Other than that, I agree. It's neither necessary nor desirable to go into too much detail with the economy and technology of the setting.

I second this. Indeed, I would keep in mind that medieval maps are not as precise and accurate as modern ones. Depending on your world you might not even want to have maps and have the only source of geographical information be directions given by the locals (When I say no maps I don't mean quick sketches on a dry erase graph of the area the PCs can physically see, I mean world, regional, and city maps). Most Medieval travel writing takes the form of itineraries, e.g. it's 10 miles from A to B, from there its twenty miles to C. This sort of thing could facilitate a "points of light" feel, where only the settlements are detailed and the places in between are trackless wastes beyond the roads connecting the towns. I guess the general point is, instead of having any absolute point of reference for Geography the PCs should only know what the NPCs in the surrounding community could know (and whatever they've picked up in their travels).

I once saw a huge map of the Roman road system and it looked pretty much like a bus or subway map. Distances and directions where completely off to make it fit on a long scroll and you simply had the information which roads connect which cities.

I very much prefer point maps over hex maps. These much more reflect how things look at the ground and how they are known to the PCs. Even with a 30 mile resolution, the detail and accuracy of a hex map would require very elaborate and extremely labor intensive work and precision surveying equipment that probably didn't exist until the 19th century. Something like the original Lord of the Rings maps are probably the best kind of player maps to get the players into the mindset of their characters when it comes to geography.

I also don't like grid maps for dungeons for the very same reason. They look like architectual blueprints and once you start to think about it you generally find that there is no plumbing and ventilation and that a castle has no pantries or whatever. I prefer to go with zones instead of grids, as all the toilets and so on can just be assumed to be somewhere, you just don't mention them specifically.

The problem is, very simply, that natural dangers are only really problematic at low levels of magical power. And I mean really low. D&D bypasses many of them using 0-level spells. Purify Food and Water, Create Water, Mending, and others make travel so much easier (Dark Sun tries to cheat by just banning all the helpful spells and powers, but it's a very brute force solution that really hurts verisimilitude)

It's not cheating. It's adapting the rules to fit the setting. And a very good policy. There are few perfect out of the box systems for settings, unless you have the rules made specifically to fit the setting like The One Ring, or the setting made to match the system like Eberron. If you want to play in other settings you have to customize the rules to match. It's a very elegant solution that makes the world feel much more believable.

[bulbaquil]

1. Play a system that doesn't have nice and easy "No food/water? There's a low-level spell for that" solutions.
2. Even if there is a spell for that, it's only an option for mages and those who travel with them. And there simply aren't enough mages for everyone who wants to travel to go with them. (And even if there are, would all mages really want to drop everything and travel with some random stranger at a moment's notice, even if getting paid appropriately? Even at levels where they have teleport, they'd have to spend another teleport to get back home.)
3. Roads, even when they do exist, are not made of nice paved asphalt that makes travel smooth. They're gravel or even dirt, and are prone to being washed out, flooded over, etc.
4. Keep the scale in mind. 24 miles is a day's travel in medieval times; it could be a daily commute today. And for armies - such as the king's army trying to flush out the bandits - it's more like 3 days' travel becaues of logistics issues.
5. Those environmental and survival rules? Use and enforce them, even if they're tedious. Track encumbrance. Count arrows and waterskins.
6. DON'T answer your players' "But how?" questions, at least not directly. By this I mean things like "where are the bandits getting their food?", "why has the local king not sent his forces to dispatch the bandits?", "why hasn't such and such technology been invented?". If they're really interested, make them investigate in-character.

[Satinavian]

The best way is to skip the idea of a pseudomedieval setting.

The European middle ages had most of the continent densely settled and you coudn't walk 4 hours on any road or track without finding a village. The whole concept of feudality and society organization revolves aroud land ownership which means land is a big deal and a very limited ressourse.

If you want societies of relatively small groups of humans and vast untamed wilderness, it would be better far to look at central eurasian steppe cultures or go really far back to stone age cultures.

Overall :

- Land ownership is either no big deal or even not existing in a modern sense. There may be ownership of certain sites and there may be tribal territories, but no more

- There should be no roads that are build and maintained. That would need far to much manpower when there are so few travellers anyway. There might be people who regularly travel to certain other settlements and know the way, but there should be no roads or channels.

- national states should not exist


Maybe you want to combine this with getting rid of the "humans are the dominant species pretty much everywhere" assumption that D&D still makes.

[Yora]

It could help with establishing the fact that there are no nations. Elven tree towns or dwarf mountain cities are much more readily perceived as being truly independent. When you have your standard human farm village it tends to come with the unspoken assumption that it also has the standard fantasy human infrastructure.

If communities are fully autonomous they also have to feel that way. I think most settlements would have to have some kind of central stronghold where the local military commander rules. A village of all farmers couldn't really survive in a world of raiders and monsters.

To go really fully Points of Light, I think every settlement should actually have some kinds of fortifications.

[Traziremus]

Maps make people think they know the place whom's map they have and it seams small to them. Not showing them a real and correct map makes they believe the world is big. Make a map consisted of landmarks, and make NPC's tell directions in those landmarks. Once they get to the landmark they should find the place they are looking for with a good roll on Navigation check, if they fail make some random encounter rolls and tell them they found what they where looking for after hours of walking and searching.

[Hoosigander]

Here's the map I gave my players at the start of our game:

Spoiler

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Each hex is 18 miles.

Here's what they've explored thus far:

Spoiler

Show

Each hex is 6 miles. The PCs have basically only explored on the east side of the river Sarn, down to the ruined Keep they wrested from a family of trolls, christened Wolf Keep and have been gradually repairing.

Very Cool.

I once saw a huge map of the Roman road system and it looked pretty much like a bus or subway map. Distances and directions where completely off to make it fit on a long scroll and you simply had the information which roads connect which cities.

Sounds like the Tabula Peutingeriana,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabula_Peutingeriana.

The best way is to skip the idea of a pseudomedieval setting.

The European middle ages had most of the continent densely settled and you coudn't walk 4 hours on any road or track without finding a village. The whole concept of feudality and society organization revolves aroud land ownership which means land is a big deal and a very limited ressourse..

I agree with Satinavian, in order to have a wilderness feel you would have to go back before ancient and medieval times in Europe. Even forests in the Middle Ages were heavily exploited; e.g. coppiced, hunted, and used to fatten up pigs.

[Yora]

It depends. In the period of 500 to 1500 there are many regions which would have been effectively wild. But for the places and period most people think of when hearing Middle Ages (England, France, Germany 1300ish) it's indeed a very different picture. And indeed, even Bronze Age farmers can clear a lot of forest pretty quickly.

[Max_Killjoy]

The best way is to skip the idea of a pseudomedieval setting.

The European middle ages had most of the continent densely settled and you coudn't walk 4 hours on any road or track without finding a village. The whole concept of feudality and society organization revolves aroud land ownership which means land is a big deal and a very limited ressourse.

If you want societies of relatively small groups of humans and vast untamed wilderness, it would be better far to look at central eurasian steppe cultures or go really far back to stone age cultures.

Overall :

- Land ownership is either no big deal or even not existing in a modern sense. There may be ownership of certain sites and there may be tribal territories, but no more

- There should be no roads that are build and maintained. That would need far to much manpower when there are so few travellers anyway. There might be people who regularly travel to certain other settlements and know the way, but there should be no roads or channels.

- national states should not exist


Maybe you want to combine this with getting rid of the "humans are the dominant species pretty much everywhere" assumption that D&D still makes.

This is part of why the setting I'm working on is based on something more like city-states, in a more "iron-agey" setting.

There's more open space between settlements. Hamlets, villages, and towns tend to form a network within a few days travel of each major city. Roads are maintained but exist mainly for the farmland to feed the city, with only a few "trade roads" maintained.

Remote areas and hinterlands are the habitation of often-hostile "barbarian" human tribes, "Wilder" (vaguely sorta kinda wild elves, the only "elves" in the setting), "beast-people", "reptile-people", "the faceless", and worse...

[LibraryOgre]

Don't give them a map except for one they make themselves or one that has a lot of blank space in it.

Limit roads... there will be some between important settlements, of course, but make sure they're more "trails" and less part of a network of roads.

[VoxRationis]

I think food and water are probably bad examples. They are the most basic things around which society revolves (along with energy, usually in the form of fuel) and you immediately run into major trouble if there is a shortage of every kind. If these things don't work, the community immediately collapses. Since this is both something that can happen to PCs and their allies, and something the PCs can do to their enemies, I think this is one aspect that really needs to be solid and work. Everything else you can handwave, but food, water, and fuel are probably the three major things that can easily collapse the believability of the setting.
Other than that, I agree. It's neither necessary nor desirable to go into too much detail with the economy and technology of the setting.




I also don't like grid maps for dungeons for the very same reason. They look like architectual blueprints and once you start to think about it you generally find that there is no plumbing and ventilation and that a castle has no pantries or whatever. I prefer to go with zones instead of grids, as all the toilets and so on can just be assumed to be somewhere, you just don't mention them specifically.

You don't put toilets, pantries, and kitchens in your dungeons? I think your monsters should file claims against you—you're an awful landlord.

It's not cheating. It's adapting the rules to fit the setting. And a very good policy. There are few perfect out of the box systems for settings, unless you have the rules made specifically to fit the setting like The One Ring, or the setting made to match the system like Eberron. If you want to play in other settings you have to customize the rules to match. It's a very elegant solution that makes the world feel much more believable.

I'm glad you see it that way. I was wondering about whether I should alter magic systems (in particular spell lists) for a particular setting I'm developing. It's nice to know there's support for that kind of editing.

[2D8HP]

You don't put toilets, pantries, and kitchens in your dungeons? I think your monsters should file claims against you—you're an awful land.

I'm surely not the only one who thought of

this, and

this.

[Yora]

There's more open space between settlements. Hamlets, villages, and towns tend to form a network within a few days travel of each major city. Roads are maintained but exist mainly for the farmland to feed the city, with only a few "trade roads" maintained.

I like to use water travel a lot. Not only is it historically accurate (all old major cities have sea or river access), it also mirrors space opera where it generally takes space travel to get from one place to another.

[VoxRationis]

I like to use water travel a lot. Not only is it historically accurate (all old major cities have sea or river access), it also mirrors space opera where it generally takes space travel to get from one place to another.

In addition to forcing vehicular travel, having societies that spread via water travel (like the Phoenicians or the early colonial periods of the settling of North America) also helps establish a hostile wilderness. If other "civilized" locales are reached by ship, then by land you must be heading into someplace wild and rugged. I'm developing a 2e setting right now where the main culture exists wholly along major rivers in a tropical rainforest, and a major concept in it is that people are terrified of travel inland.