Now that we know magic and monsters come from... Umm... 'places of power' and wizards camp on these to make Towers, and then make Dungeons or Dragons (or armies) to defend their Towers...
We have the makings of a simple world meta game that could be used to construct believable balances of power. Err... We do, right? So can we?
If you come with the basic premise of these places of power gives rise to the reason why most big bad guys don't wander around the world, but we still need reasons for why this is important.
Well:
A person (any race, some level) can make a farm.
Some number of farms can support a town.
Some amount of 'town' can support a castle.
A castle can support an army.
An army can defend against simple challenges.
A tower could also support a town. (via magic)
The tower can also support monsters or a dungeon.
A dungeon works like an inverted castle. It could also have an army.
It's very similar, but actually simpler since the 'power' is supplanting the need for 'goods'.
A farm could be anything from an inn, some fields and a house, a dryad's circle, a ranch or barn, etc. It supports 'a family unit' and produces 'goods'. Livestock or turnips or logs or whatever are goods.
A town contains more of these people - it might even be mobile, people don't always have to live in the same place - and they produce 'technology'. This is magic, armor, carts, advanced buildings, weapons, ale, etc. Markets.
A castle or dungeon is basically a place where these people store their more portable sources of power, technology, and history. It allows them to train soldiers, clerics, and connect various sources - be they towers or farms - into a network. It will be either strategically located nowhere near a place of power (stability) or exactly upon a place of power (defense). Like Helm's Deep.
Beyond this, it's pretty simple to extrapolate a 'unit' as a collection of level-appropriate challenges for the PCs. The PCs are a collection of 'elite unit' because, well, they're PCs. So a unit - no matter its level, really - still can only cart off so much of a farm or town back to their own farm or town... And should be classes as a group (the summon template) or a single (level match challenge) or 'elite' unit (elites are capable of taking on twice as much, say geometrically). These are glommed together until you have the least number of these units - a whole army could be a 'unit' if it was near equal to the other 'army'.
But that still should give a leverage for someone to go in 'the top guy is y level, that means his influence should spread out through z number of levels and units around him'
So I'm thinking sometimes you need to say a town needs x number of farms... What's the x here? What's the z units to get y BBEG?
-Crissa
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