My D&D group is making the switch over to Pathfinder soon, and I’m using the switch as an excuse to develop my own fantasy setting. Back when I played D&D 4e I started building my own setting but the campaign never lasted long enough to get very far with it. Somehow I still have the decade-old hand-drawn maps so I’ve been able to recreate things with Inkarnate and have slowly been building out from the starting town. I’m sticking with something from the 4e DMG for my setting, which is the Points of Light concept. Cities, towns and forts are beacons of civilization among an ever encroaching wilderness. What I’ve been spending some brain power on lately is the justification of why that is.

I’ve seen a handful of posts on social media about geopolitics in a setting like the Forgotten Realms and my thoughts on it tie into a discussion I see frequently pop up in the Fallout community.

Regarding Fallout, people often question the realism of the post apocalyptic nature of the setting after the 200+ years that have passed since the bombs dropped. It seems ridiculous to people that after all this time people haven’t developed anything past disorganized and scattered settlements; there’s few organized governments and the world is largely a lawless wasteland, yet in the real world European settlers were able to control the entirety of North America in that time. An important detail that I think is often overlooked or ignored in these discussions is what seems like an obvious fact to me. The Europeans didn’t have to deal with Deathclaws and Super Mutants. In my mind, it seems very realistic that the people of the Fallout wasteland would have enormous difficulty gaining any kind of strong foothold when their world is full of dangerous and territorial monsters.

With that in mind, I think the same applies to the Forgotten Realms. A critique I see is that the Sword Coast lacks any far reaching kingdoms. It seems to be entirely comprised of city states who don’t project any of their power very far beyond their walls. To me, the same logic regarding Fallout applies here too. It’s hard to maintain a projection of power when you’re constantly beset by dragons, necromancers, trolls and whatever other dangerous creatures make their homes in the forests and mountains just outside your cities.

So I’ve been applying the same logic to my setting. The starting town, Corran Pass, is surrounded by threats. Their people used to be spread all around the region before all manner of fantastical threats, dragons, giants and a zombie plague, have pushed them back to this one remaining location. The town is well fortified; safe from threats for now. But how long will that safety last?