History Main / PointsOfLightSetting

* ''TabletopGame/Warhammer40000'': The Imperium rules about a million star systems, which amounts to 0.00001% of the galaxy; while it spreads over most of the Milky Way, it does so in a very spread-out fashion, with vast gulfs of uncontrolled and often unexplored space between its clusters of worlds. Besides it, a few Eldar Cratfworlds and surviving colonies also shine here and there, while the Tau Empire maintains another small pocket of civilization on the galaxy's rim. Between these far-flung worlds there is space for roving hordes of Orks, high-tech ruins millions of years old, hostile alien empires, Chaos abominations, bizarre cosmic phenomena, and any threat or adventure you could care to imagine. This is particularly the case for the Imperium Nihilus, the half of the galaxy left cut off from the psychic lighthouse of the Astronomican by the formation of the Great Rift, which has made faster-than-light travel and communications difficult and unreliable and thus cut off many Imperial worlds and sectors from one another.

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 harder 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 and lore you also run into a risk of tearing away all the mystery of the setting.

* ''TabletopGame/Warhammer40000'': The Imperium rules about a million star systems, which amounts to 0.00001% of the galaxy; besides it, a few Eldar Cratfworlds and surviving colonies also shine here and there, while the Tau Empire maintains another small pocket of civilization on the galaxy's rim. Between these far-flung worlds there is space for roving hordes of Orks, high-tech ruins millions of years old, hostile alien empires, Chaos abominations, bizarre cosmic phenomena, and any threat or adventure you could care to imagine. This is particularly the case for the Imperium Nihilus, the half of the galaxy left cut off from the psychic lighthouse of the Astronomican by the formation of the Great Rift, which has made faster-than-light travel and communications difficult and unreliable and thus cut off many Imperial worlds and sectors from one another.

Points of Light Setting is a world that is designed precisely to avoid these kinds of issues. It is a world that makes it easy to fit all kinds of adventures and threats as it is deliberately made to be dangerous and not well-defined. Common traits of such a world include:

* Between these "points of light" the world is filled with dangers and there is no safe way to travel from one place to another. The exact nature of the threats may vary from roving bands of thugs to a DeathWorld where literally everything wants you dead.

* ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaBreathOfTheWild'': The game's version of Hyrule is set in the wake of a fantasy apocalypse that almost completely destroyed it a hundred years in the past. The extensive ruins found throughout it show that it was fairly densely populated before this, but in modern Hyrule civilization is limited to seven isolated villages -- three effectively human ones and the four other species' base towns -- and a handful of roadside stables. Outside of these, the world consist entirely of vast stretches of wilderness littered with the broken shells of villages and sites of ancient magic, and travel between the surviving towns is difficult and dangerous -- numerous monsters live in the ruins of Hyrule, often making their encampments in the remnants of towns, along major roads or even right outside the surviving settlements, while central Hyrule is so infested with the powerful, deadly Guardians -- {{Magitek}} robots that were the ones to destroy Hyrule to begin with -- that nobody lives or goes there anymore. Link, of course, is going to spend his quest hoofing it through this wilderness, fighting monsters, living off the land and uncovering a great many wondrous and secret things.