History Main / PointsOfLightSetting

If you ever tried your hand at worldbuilding for any sort of adventure-focused story or game, you likely know it is hard to make an AdventureFriendlyWorld. The more details, history, and character you add to your world, the hard and harder it is to justify why exactly does it need your heroes at all and why various organizations, countries, or powerful and capable characters in your world haven't deal with the problem your heroes face. Moreover, the more you develop and establish your world, the harder it is to fit all kinds of stories you may have ideas for into it. As you develop the history lore you also run into a risk of tearing away all the mystery of the setting.

* In ''WesternAnimation/AvatarTheLegendOfKorra'', during the story of Avatar Wan, there were four civilizations, watched over by four lion turtles, who would grant the power to bend elements to those who wished to journey out into the wilds between each civilization. It was only when bending was granted to humans full-time and the spirits left for their separate world that humanity was able to expand their civilization beyond these four separated cities.

** ''TabletopGame/ForgottenRealms'' uses this in locations isolated from major civilizations, most famous of those being probably Icewind Dale -- a snow-covered area cut off by mountains where main centers of civilization are literally called the Ten Towns because there is only ten of them and communication between them is limited due to extremely dangerous environment.

** ''TabletopGame/NentirVale'', the default 4th edition setting, was specifically intended to be this sort of setting, and was indeed often explicitly described as a metaphorical sea of darkness with civilizations existing as scattered points of light. The majority of the setting's great civilizations all collapsed in the not-too-distant past, leaving the world filled mostly with wilderness and ruins and haunted by monsters and barbarian tribes, while civilized nations are almost all small, scattered, and often little more than city-states. The world was left under-defined so that [=GMs=] could fill it out as they chose.

* ''Webcomic/GirlGenius'': Most of Europa (an AlternateHistory early 18th century Europe) is a wilderness where travel is made deadly dangerous by MadScience-generated biological and mechanical abominations left to roam on their own after fleeing from their creators or their falls, bandits and army deserters still equipped with powerful weaponry and vehicles, and more mysterious beings. Civilized life is confined to a number of fortified cities and strongholds ruled by [[MadScientist Sparks]].

* Anime/AttackOnTitan: Turned UpTo11, there is only one point of Light: The inside of the Walls, everything outside has been consumed by the Titans. [[spoiler:And then completely [[Main/SubvertedTrope subverted]], the above is only true of the single island the protagonists inhabit. The rest of the world is quite well off, and in fact, the largest nation in the outside world was sending Titans to the island out of FantasticRacism. Additionally, this trope was [[Main/InvokedTrope Invoked]] on the part of the royal family of the walls, who manipulated the memories of the wall’s first inhabitants to make them believe the world was this trope.]]

* ''WebAnimation/{{RWBY}}'': The [[AnimalisticAbomination Creatures of Grimm]] are found everywhere throughout Remnant, seeking to destroy humanity and their creations. In the countless years that humanity had roamed the planet there have only been four locations that have survived throughout the centuries. Those being the four Kingdoms, Vale, Vacuo, Mistral and Atlas, only surviving due to humanities tenacity and the natural barriers, such as mountains and frigid temperatures, keeping Grimm away. Although small villages have been built, they do not last long thanks to the Grimm. There is also the island Menagerie, a safe haven for the faunus, though two-thirds of the island is covered in desert and there is deadly wildlife keeping people from expanding, there have yet to be any Grimm seen in the show itself.

* In ''Webcomic/GirlGenius'', most of Europa (an AlternateHistory early 18th century Europe) is a wilderness where travel is made deadly dangerous by MadScience-generated biological and mechanical abominations and more mysterious beings. Civilized life is confined to a number of fortified cities and strongholds ruled by [[MadScientist Sparks]].

* If different species inhabit the same world they are likely to treat each other with distrust. FantasticRacism, as well as regular one and xenophobia, can be very common. However, the isolation of communities means it will be very rare for the world to go into detail how different societies or species interact on any level above small and localized to a specific settlement. While AlwaysChaoticEvil races can still exist they will be treated no differently from human bandits who are just evil out of greed, cruelty or desperation, rather than due to some diety making them evil or EvilOverlord creating them as his servants.

** ''TabletopGame/{{Dragonlance}}'' started as an attempt to combine influences from ''The Lord of the Rings'' and Gygax's worldbuilding. As such, it tried to tell a HighFantasy narrative in a world that was only beginning to raise up from an apocalypse, with few remaining kingdoms distrustful of one another and unprepared to defend against world-conquering armies of evil and other races like Elves or Dwarves isolating at large from rest of the world. As with the previous two this aspect had vanished with the release of a large number of other adventures and novels adding more and more to the world until it firmly moved closer to a standard high fantasy territory. The moment the series moved from Age of Despair to Age of Mortals is often seen as when the transition kicked off for good and even later attempts to roll back many of the changes did not manage to shake it off.
** ''TabletopGame/ForgottenRealms'' uses this in locations isolated from major civilizations, most famous of those being probably Icewind Dale -- a cut off by mountains, snow-covered area where main centers of civilization are literally called the Ten Towns because there is only ten of them and communication between them is limited due to extremely dangerous environment.
** ''TabletopGame/{{Greyhawk}}'' was intentionally defined very vaguely with a lot of uncharted wilderness and abandoned, monster-filled locations for heroes to explore before Gary Gygax filled it with kingdoms and history connecting it all. And even then he stuck skimming the details to preserve the "easy to place adventures in" aspect of the world.
** ''TabletopGame/{{Mystara}}'' started as a bunch of standalone or loosely connected adventures usually providing a location and danger presented in it. It was only when these adventures were made into one comprehensible world with its own politics, mortal and immortal alike, that points of light aspect have been lost.

* ''TabletopGame/{{Ironsworn}}'': The humans of the Ironlands live in isolated settlements, and most Ironlanders stay away from the dangerous, mysterious wilderness. There are no united kingdoms, contrasting with an Old World which is either [[TheMigration inaccessible]] or [[AfterTheEnd destroyed]]. The Ironlanders live apart from the Ironland's original inhabitants, the firstborn--if the firstborn even exist. These setting assumptions work together to uphold one of the principles of ''Ironsworn'', that the player's responsibility is to "portray a heroic character in a harsh land."

** ''TabletopGame/{{Dragonlance}}'' started as an attempt to combine influences from ''Lord of the Rings'' and Gaygax's worldbuilding. As such, it tried to tell a HighFantasy narrative in a world that was only beginning to raise up from an apocalypse, with few remaining kingdoms distrustful of one another and unprepared to defend against world-conquering armies of evil and other races like Elves or Dwarves isolating at large from rest of the world. As with the previous two this aspect had vanished with the release of a large number of other adventures and novels adding more and more to the world until it firmly moved closer to a standard high fantasy territory. The moment the series moved from Age of Despair to Age of Mortals is often seen as when the transition kicked off for good and even later attempts to roll back many of the changes did not manage to shake it off.

* Common people view those who traverse this world in search of adventure with a mix of reverence, distrust, and scorn, seeing them as extremely brave at best and having ulterior motives or outright out of their mind at worst. Due to this and limited ways to spread information, the world lacks many individuals of legendary renown and status, if it has them at all. Only the greatest and most accomplished of people, usually, some sort of HopeBringer, can manage to gain widespread fame in such a world.

* Due to all these circumstances the world verges more on fantastic as each settlement can be its own PlanetOfHats. Even if one village is a place of a FantasyCounterpartCulture realistically reflecting the real-world society that inspired it, the next one may be something different altogether. two nearby towns may also exist on a different technological level due to lacking contact or means to share their technology. The determining factor what a traveler will find in the next town over is not realism in how various cultures develop, spread, or interact over time but a simple question in which settlements managed to survive up to this point.

* ''TabletopGame/{{Numenera}}'': The game is set in the wake of a billion years' worth of godlike civilizations emerging, ruling the Earth and vanishing or collapsing, and this has deeply affected the nature of the world. Human civilization -- and likely the human species -- has only recently reemerged, and is both very fragmentary and constantly in the shadow of the ruins of the prior worlds and the plethora of technologies, entities and creatures left over from their reigns. Even in civilized lands such as the Steadfast, Lostrei or Augur-Kala, settlements are often very isolated and separated by vast stretches of wilderness home to ferocious predators, incomprehensible and usually dangerous machines, vicious abhuman raiders, and good old-fashioned bandits; it's very common for distinct towns to have very unusual quirks not shared by others or to even be unaware of their nation's nominal capital. In the wildernesses of the Beyond, villages and cities are often tiny islands of civilization in vast seas of dangerous, uncharted land, and having arisen in complete isolation tend to be wildly different from one another -- one town might be home to peaceful farmers, the next one over to insane cannibals, the next to exotic people riding strange machines, and the next one still not even home to humans.

* ''WebAnimation/{{RWBY}}'': The [[AnimalisticAbomination Creatures of Grimm]] are found everywhere throughout Remnant, seeking to destroy humanity and their creations. In the countless years that humanity had roamed the planet there have only been four locations that have survived throughout the centuries. Those being the four Kingdoms, Vale, Vacuo, Mistral and Atlas, only surviving due to humanities tenacity and the natural barriers, such as mountains and frigid temperatures, keeping Grimm away And though small villages have been built, they do not last long thanks to the Grimm.
** There is also the island Menagerie, a safe haven for the faunus, though two-thirds of the island is covered in desert and there is deadly wildlife keeping people from expanding, there have yet to be any Grimm seen in the show itself.

* Taken to an extreme in ''Literature/TheNightLand'', where AfterTheEnd there exists (as far as everybody knows) only a single refuge of humanity, a giant fortress called the Last Redoubt. The world outside is inhospitable to the extreme, filled with monsters, {{Eldritch Abomination}}s, air that ranges from hard-to-breathe to poisonous, and toxic vegetation and water. There used to be a Lesser Redoubt, but it was overrun by monsters.

* ''Series/{{Andromeda}}'': After the [[ProudWarriorRace Nietzschean]] Rebellion and the failure to establish a Nietzschean Empire, the post-Commonwealth reality is full of largely isolated worlds, some of which are under the boot of this or that Nietzschean pride or a MegaCorp. The protagonists are a Commonwealth High Guard captain and his SapientShip who got trapped on the edge of a black hole for 300 years, and the salvage crew who pulled them out and were recruited into the captain's self-given mission to rebuild the Commonwealth through a combination of diplomacy and LostTechnology weapons.

* ''Series/{{Andromeda}}'' is similarly set in such a universe, which may be justified, since both could have been based on the same source material. After the Nietzschean Rebellion and the failure to establish a Nietzschean Empire, the post-Commonwealth reality is full of largely isolated worlds, some of which are under the boot of this or that Nietzschean pride or a MegaCorp. It's the main characters' self-appointed job to get the disparate worlds to agree to re-establish the Commonwealth. A key difference is that the ''Discovery'' is an obsolete ship after 930 years, although with a unique form of FTL. But the ''Andromeda'' is still pretty top-of-the-line despite being 300 years old.

* ''Series/{{Andromeda}}'' is similarly set in such a universe, which may be justified, since both could have been based on the same source material. After the Nietzschean Rebellion and the failure to establish a Nietzschean Empire, the post-Commonwealth reality is full of largely isolated worlds, some of which are under the boot of this or that Nietzschean pride or a MegaCorp. It's the main characters' self-appointed job to get the disparate worlds to agree to re-establish the Commonwealth.

* ''[[Literature/TheThreeBodyProblem The Dark Forest]]'' uses this as the basis for a [[CosmicHorrorStory very bleak]] answer to the UsefulNotes/FermiParadox. Because of the immense distances between the stars, alien civilizations cannot communicate with each other in any meaningful way, and inevitably annihilate one another out of paranoia via {{Starkilling}}. Those civilizations who are lucky enough to figure this out in time will hide themselves from the rest of the universe however they can.

* ''Series/StarTrekDiscovery'''s third season, set in 3188, turns the ''Star Trek'' universe into one of these. Apparently, a century or two prior, much of the galaxy's dilithium exploded for no apparent reason in an event called the Burn. With little of it left to fuel warp-capable starships, TheFederation largely collapsed in the following decades, and now exists as a VestigialEmpire that almost no one takes seriously. While interstellar travel ''is'' still possible, the rarity of dilithium means that it is no longer commonplace, and most star systems are left to govern their own affairs.

* ''WebAnimation/{{RWBY}}'': The [[AnimalisticAbomination Creatures of Grimm]] are found everywhere throughout Remnant, seeking to destroy humanity and their creations. In the countless years that humanity had roamed the planet there have only been four locations that have survived throughout the centuries. Those being the four Kingdoms, Vale, Vacuo, Beacon and Atlas, only surviving due to humanities tenacity and the natural barriers, such as mountains and frigid temperatures, keeping Grimm away And though small villages have been built, they do not last long thanks to the Grimm.

It should be noted that a Points of Light Setting is not the same as CrapsackWorld. The two may overlap but none of the traits of Points of Light Setting in themselves make it a Crapsack World and it can still have an overall hopeful and optimistic tone. In fact, the setting may be designed with the purpose of being fixed by the heroes. On the other hand a Crapsack World doesn't need any of the elements that define Points Of Light Setting to still deliver on its overall grim and gloom tone. Similarly, while this trope can easily overlap with AdventureFriendlyWorld, the purpose of one can be accomplished without it turning into the other -- a world that eschews all traits of Points of Light Setting may still be adventure friendly, while a setting following them may not focus on adventuring at all.

** Living among this DeathWorld are the Grik (an [[TheEmpire empire]] of LizardFolk, heavily implied to be descended from {{raptor|Attack}}s), scattered populations of Lemurians (CatFolk who evolved on Madagascar but had to pull an [[HomeworldEvacuation Homeland Evacuation]] when the Grik invaded), and the occasional community of humans who got stranded in this world after getting pulled through a [[NegativeSpaceWedgie Squall]]. Not all of those humans are [[TheMultiverse from the same universe]], either.

* ''TabletopGame/GURPSSteampunkSettingTheBrokenClockworkWorld'': The “Broken World” used to be a reasonably orderly, peaceful world of steampunk city states. Then something tore it apart and put it back together wrong. Many of the old cities are still standing, but the points of light are flickering at best.