As a DM, that gives me a lot of flexibility, especially with potential new players. As they read through the books, they get a feel for the setting, without having to worry about if I am using or changing specific details. The world-as-places is a blank slate. The vibe of the world is something that, when we come to the table, we're on the same page about.
Using this default meta-setting, the Points of Light background, thus presents a strong advantage for me. It is designed to help support the core D&D trope of adventuring. It presumes a world that has seen the rise and fall of successive empires, each leaving their marks on the world. The most recent, the cosmopolitan human empire of Nerath, failed over a century ago. Civilization now exists as mostly isolated bastions: city-states, loose confederations of towns, individual communities with tenurous trade links. Most of the land, though, is wilderness. There are no great nation-states or other spanning organizations. Much of the land between these pockets of civilization is full of monsters and ruins and other such adventurer-attracting fodder.
Perhaps a way to think of this default PoL background is as a specific palette of colors. While many different paintings can be made with them, they'll still have a certain unity in feel. While one can certainly change out colors for others, changing the themes and nature of settings that result, I like the PoL and what it offers me, so I am going ahead with that.
With that decided, it's time to start applying those colors and make this world mine, so that I can then hand it over to the players. Of course, the key here is that while I am building a world, I'm doing so for a game. As such, I'm leaving most of it aside for now, and choosing one particular corner I can use as setting and background for the start of play, and likely most of the heroic tier, at least.
My intital thought, when I conceived of Operation ZEaGAuiOS, was a setting focused on the colder, more northern climes. I kicked that idea around a little bit, but ultimately rejected it, as it felt a little overdone to me. I still love the broader concept - I regard Frostfell as one of the best 3E books - but it wasn't working for me here. So why not take it down the other way? Something temperate, verging on sub-tropical; almost Mediterranean. That then melded with a bit of idea I had a while back reagrding "ancient fortresses floating over the southern coast."
And so it was that....some region I have yet to name, was born. Yes, I suck at names, which is part of what makes running a game so fun and exciting. Anyways, it is a stretch of southern coastline of the larger continent, separted from it by a fierce mountain range running roughly parallel to the coast. See the scanned sketch of it below:
Yes, it is a very rough sketch. No scale yet, the barest of terrain features. It exists, at this point, just to give me a view of the shape of the land, with plenty of open areas to fill in details.
This region represented the southern most outposts of Nerath. I imagine it wasn't heavily settled or exploited by Nerath, more of a military (likely mostly naval) presence to help secure the area, and plans to expand and colonize. When Nerath fell, an influx of refugees fled down to the area, as good land and relatively distant and secure from the decline and death of Nerath.
As part of the Points of Light, I imagine there are roughly a half-dozen major-city states. The only one I have strongly defined in my mind at the moment is Torrenvald, the City of Blades. It is dominated by the church of Bane, and is essentially a theocratic militocracy. It is the single strongest city-state in the region. It has been involved in skirmishes and small conflicts over different resources in the area, but there has been no major wars, and no attempts to conquer any of its neighbors (a constant fear of theirs).
The only other place that's gotten any solid though put into it is Briarridge (I hate that double "rr", maybe just Briaridge?), a mining town in the mountains. It serves a complex of very lucrativce iron mines in the area, which were one of the few things that Nerath had been exploiting, as well as empires before them. Yup, plenty of dungeon fodder there. The town, and all the mines, are indepenent, with many different interests operating different mines. Torrenvald would love to bring the whole area under its "protection", but realzies that while it may have the force of arm to do so, such an act would almost force the other city-states into some form of alliance against it. This is where I am planning to have at least my first adventure or two.
There are some other fragmentary ideas I have. There's the aforementioned floating fortresses, which are the legacy of a much older empire. They slowly drift about, seemingly sealed, though they occassionaly vanish and reappear else where along the coast. Basically, instant side dungeons. One of the city-states, as another relic, is built around bridges and streets of solid yet flowing water; one of the things I came up with to show off the elemental theme. A lot I am leaving undefined at this point, to give the players plenty of room to add their own elements to the setting. If someone says, "Hey, can I be from a place like X?", then I want to be able to tell them, "Sure! Tell me about X, and let's figure out where it would be." All while considering how I can use X in the game and spin some adventures out from it. One of my goals for heroic play is to have an adventure focusing on the background of each character, to really weave them in and make the setting matter to them. That will both help make the settings theirs, and make the later big threats to it all the more exciting.
Coming up next, how the first adventure started coming together.
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