Points of Light in a Big, Dark World
—Richard Baker, Wizards Presents Worlds and Monsters
One of the first things we tackled in the Scramjet team was the
creation of a set of “key conceits”—things we knew we wanted
to be true about the game world and the characters’ role in it.
During those discussions we found ourselves wandering
into a debate about campaign world design and the “typical”
D&D game. Many of the campaign settings we created in
previous editions look a lot like the map of the modern world—
neat borders are drawn around countries, implying that the
world is more or less carved up between a number of political
entities or civilizations. We weren’t very happy with that, to tell
the truth. It works against the sense of mystery, wonder, and
dread you’d like to see in most D&D settings.
In kicking around this particular key conceit, we hit
upon the idea of a different core assumption about the world:
Most of it is monster-haunted wilderness, and the centers
of civilization are few and far between. Common people
don’t venture into strange parts, and travel between towns
or kingdoms sticks to a small number of lightly used roads.
Commoners are scared of what’s in the old forest or beyond
the barren hills at the end of the valley, because anything
might be out there, and the vast majority of anything is probably
hungry or hostile. Venturing away from the “base town”
is something adventurers do.
I came up with the phrase “points of light in a dark world”
to capture this concept. A point of light might be a border
town, a remote village, a dwarf stronghold, the tribal lands of
human barbarians, or a powerful city-state. But if you’re more
than a few miles from that point of light, things get dark and
dangerous quickly. The city-state might keep monsters and
marauders at bay for a day’s ride in all directions, but at some
point the law doesn’t stretch any farther. And the darkness
might include brigands and bandits, orc tribes, goblin cities,
vampire-haunted ruins, a dragon’s hunting grounds—anything
you can imagine. Some “points of darkness” might not
be so dangerous, if you know what you’re doing; an eladrin
citadel hidden in a remote valley certainly isn’t a safe place
for common people of the nearby human lands to visit, and
therefore it’s a place of mystery to them. But it takes the steely
nerves of real adventurers to venture from the light into the
dark places of the world.