How can you feed this many people?

[teh bunneh]

If you've got a city of roughly Bronze Age technology...

 

With a population of between 3,000 and 12,000 people...

 

And magic exists (D&Desque high-magic system) but it isn't a substitute for solid engineering principles (no teleportation gates and the like, but it can help you build roads)...

 

And you've got a large temperate ocean nearby...

 

And you've got a large temperate forest teeming with wildlife nearby...

 

Is there a way to feed the people without large-scale agriculture or animal husbandry?

 

A few other caveats:

 

The people do farm a little, but huge labor-intensive plots are out of the question...

 

But, the people are happy to plant orchards and vinyards of any sort...

 

(IOW, plant-and-harvest-plant-and-harvest holds little interest to these people, but long-term nurturing of trees is, to them, a good investment of time).

[Curufea]

Re: How can you feed this many people?

 

Look at Rome-

 

Continuous transport of food from Ostia, a large port. Grain constantly imported from Egypt. Aqueducts for water.

 

The concept of mercantile transport organised for night, really sped the process of getting food in to the city (less traffic congestion). However all citizens would have to get used to heavy traffic noises at night.

 

The Falco books and the McCullough books are good on this (amongst other things).

 

As to forest - forget it. It isn't a re-usable resource. There isn't a standard yield, you can't tell how much food is left in it, and it varies randomly. The teeming wildilfe of a forest would be depopulated within 10 years. Chop it down and graze cattle.

 

Fishing, certainly - but the major food will still be some form of grain.

 

The short answer is-

You need large scale agriculture. Moreso than animal husbandry. Either nearby or within easy transport.

[tkdguy]

Re: How can you feed this many people?

 

The Soylent Green approach would work for both feeding the populace and checking population growth. Sounds gross, but it helps get rid of the "undesirables." Your players won't be too happy when they find out what's going on, but they can start a quest to change things.

[keithcurtis]

Re: How can you feed this many people?

 

Perhaps they have a valuable natural resource (Gold or silver mine?) which is:

A. Near inexhausitble (So they can depend upon it long-term)

B. Easily defensilble (So a bigger city desn't take it from them)

C. Easily exploited (So they can lay about and not do an honest day's work)

Then they can just export the natural resource and import food.

It sounds from your description that you are talking about elvish-type people. In which case, maybe they are 90% artisans, who export beautiful finished crafts in return for mundane things like food. (ie Thranduil's folk in LotR).

 

Keith "Or maybe they subsist off of quadro-triticale" Curtis

[Outsider]

Re: How can you feed this many people?

 

Use magic to prevent spoilage of what food is collected.

 

Use magic to prevent pests/competitors from despoiling stored (or growing) foods.

 

Use magic to regulate the local environment for maximum presence of preferred plants & animals (food ones) and minimum presence of competition for those plants and animals. (ie every deer that gets killed and eaten is killed and eaten by the city population, not by wolves)

 

Farther afield :

Use magic to multiply the amount of food available. Ie collect a bushel basket of berries, cast "3 levels Growth, usable against objects, 0 END, Persistent, Inherent" on it and you have a 16 bushel basket full of very big berries... feeds 16x what the unmagiced (unmagicked?) basket would have)

 

Use magic to make things that were previously inedible edible.

 

Use magic to reduce the amount of food that people need to eat.

[Barwickian]

Re: How can you feed this many people?

 

It sounds a little like you're creating some kind of elfin city...

 

The short answer is that Curufea's right and you probably do need nearby agriculture, or the ability to trade for agricultural produce, to maintain the city if you're going for a strictly realistic approach. Hunter-gatherer societies tend to be nomadic rather than city-based.

 

My speciality is medieval agriculture, rather than pre-historic, but let me briefly run through some of the salient points of a bronze age economy, then think of some ways to tweak it to get you what you want.

 

First off, you have no heavy ploughs, instead relying on ard or scratch ploughs. These can only work light soils, which means you probably can have your large tracts of woodland, while agriculture is confined to the uplands rather than the clay valleys. Fields, if any, will probably be square and about an acre in size (that's about as much as can be ploughed in a day - fields are square because with a scratch plough you have to plough criss-cross to break the soil up). A scratch plough can be pulled by a single horse or ox - or a person if necessary - so there's no need for large centralised villages as there is in the medieval period.

 

The most common settlement type in this kind of agriculture is the hamlet of up to a dozen houses. If the medieval pattern holds (and I can't swear it does), each household of five people will probably need around 15 arable acres to support it.

 

Ordinarily, I'd say you need around 30,000 people working in agriculture to support a city of 3,000, giving a total of 140 square miles under the plough.

 

However, that's at a medieval level where almost the entire population relied on field grains to survive.

 

Let's say that with the bountiful wildlife in your forests, people need only half as much land under the plough - you still have 30,000 people, but now you only need 70 square miles under the plough. That isn't very much - seven miles by 10 miles will do it.

 

You can reduce it still further if (given your high fantasy setting) you come up with some kind of bless crops spell. Doubling the yield will more than halve the land you need because not only does the land yield twice as much, you need correspondingly fewer people in agriculture to support your city.

 

You now have a city of 3,000, with some 15,000 people in about 300 hamlets farming about 30 square miles of ploughed land - though the scatter of hamlets will be much wider than this, with much woodland between them to allow sustainable hunting - at a pure guess, say about five square miles of wildwood for every square mile of ploughed land.

 

In this landscape, agriculture is definitely going on, but you really won't notice it much - not compared to modern farming, or even medieval farming, where as much as 94% or the land in the counties closest to London were under the plough.

[Cantriped]

Re: How can you feed this many people?

 

AndyStaples ideas sound best so far. you could probably also cut down the Arable land needed with Fishing as well. As to using magic for everything, which is Outsider's idea, I personally don't think that would work all that well, for one thing even in High-Magic campaigns magic is never quite That common, it takes all the magic out of it. thus though that might be done on a small scale, perhaps a tract of land owned by a mage, its unlikely that that kind of magical tinkering could be maintained on a large scale for any appreciable length of time.

[Inu]

Re: How can you feed this many people?

 

Best. Site. Ever.

 

Medieval Demographics Made Easy

 

According to this, urban population will be between 1 and 8 percent of the total population. So applying this to small scale (which may be a mistake, as I'm not sure how well these rules scale), this points to at least 30,000 farmers to support the city of 3000, much as AndyStaples was saying. I think the site mostly agrees with his numbers, so cool.

 

The above probably isn't a great authoritative site (Andy's numbers are prolly your best bet here, not for any empirical reason, just because he sounds like he knows what he's talking about), but I find it very, very handy for rule-of-thumbing fantasy societies. It certainly altered my view of fantasy terrain, from the isolated villages you'll find in most supplements to almost continuous farming land with villages dotted all OVER the joint.

 

Your civilisation being bronze age... certainly does depend on certain knowledge advances. They may be just as advanced, agriculture-wise, as medieval farmers. They may not be as advanced. They may be more primitive skills-wise, but have local fertility-god priests who bless the fields. That would certainly cut down on the required farmers to support the city.

[OddHat]

Re: How can you feed this many people?

 

Andy and Curufea have already given great answers. The only things I'd emphasize are:

 

1) Don't underestimate the power of roads and rivers. You can move a fair amount of staples in from quite a distance with a good netwrk of roads and rivers, and keeping the roads clear of bandits and the rivers safe from "tolls" erected by local strong men can be a mini-campaign in and of itself.

 

2) A big fishing fleet is actually fairly labor intensive, but it can pump a significant amount of protein into a population's diet.

 

3) If a good portion of those forests are orchards and small plots of cultivated land, that's another source of food for the city. Wild animals are not; they'd be hunted out fast.

 

4) Graneries and smoke houses, lots of them. Bad weather, a heavy witer or a siege could starve a city like this very quicly without good food stores.

[gojira]

Re: How can you feed this many people?

 

You might also wish to check out Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army. Ancient and medieval armies were about 2 to 15 thousand people in size (or more, but not often), and they did not farm on the march. This book has a wealth of information, including about how much a human eats and how much many pack animals eat too.

 

Basically, it's done two ways: steal/loot/buy food on the march (but not forage, this slows you down), or resupply from ships. You can't resupply overland with medieval or ancient technology because your pack animals will eat more than they can transport. Carts and roads do not help much, afaik.

 

 

The other suggestion I've not seen yet is just to assume that your population eats less than modern humans. If we're talking elves here, then maybe elves are powered partially by magic, and a full grown elf only needs 300 Calories per day instead of 3000 that laboring human needs. Maybe that's why they're all thin and angsty too.

[Barwickian]

Re: How can you feed this many people?

 

So applying this to small scale (which may be a mistake' date=' as I'm not sure how well these rules scale), this points to at least 30,000 farmers to support the city of 3000, much as AndyStaples was saying. I think the site mostly agrees with his numbers, so cool.[/quote']

 

SJohn and I swapped a few notes on Usenet, way back when he was writing that article. Despite the fact that I draw my info from medieval England of the 11th-13th centuries, and he from medieval France of the 14th century, the technology and techniques are close enough that our figures match very well.

 

SJohn's far better on towns than I am. I'm stronger on villages - but then, I have the advantage of living in a landscape dominated by villages founded c. the 10th-11th century, and SJohn's in Texas.

 

The above probably isn't a great authoritative site (Andy's numbers are prolly your best bet here, not for any empirical reason, just because he sounds like he knows what he's talking about), but I find it very, very handy for rule-of-thumbing fantasy societies. It certainly altered my view of fantasy terrain, from the isolated villages you'll find in most supplements to almost continuous farming land with villages dotted all OVER the joint.

 

I think it's something that really tends to surprise Americans. Even back in the middle ages, lowland England had a village every mile or so.

 

Where then the great tracts of woods for outlaws to hide in? They weren't there. Even Sherwood never had more than two or three miles of woodland across at any one point.

 

Here's a CC2 map Chris Golden and I (mostly Chris - I added the woodlands) made of medieval Nottinghamshire, just to demonstrate the point:

 

http://www.minarsas.demon.co.uk/harn/scenarios/mednotts.PNG (warning - this is a 730kb PNG file)

 

Sources for this map were (1) modern maps (2) Domesday Book (3) HC Derby's Domesday Geography of Northern England and (4) a little local history pamphlet we picked up in Nottinghamshire's county archives, which had the advantage of including woodland from an 1120s survey of the manor of Mansfield, which were not included in Domesday.

 

The map's part of a as-yet-unfinished Robin of Sherwood scenario I ran for Gencon UK five years ago and still haven't got round to completing - the rest's in my head.

 

But what is there includes some of the real history of Sherwood, some of the mythic history of Sherwood, and HarnMaster stats for Robin and his Merry Men.

 

May make a useful addition for those old enough to remember the ICE Hero/Rolemaster Robin Hood supplement, which was also based heavily on Robin of Sherwood (and remains IMO one of the best roleplaying supplements ever written).

 

Unfinished scenario is at: http://www.minarsas.demon.co.uk/harn/scenarios/allhallow.htm

 

For those who don't know what Robin of Sherwood is, my rpg.net review can be found here:

http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/9/9649.phtml

 

For those, who don't remember Staplehurst's Robin Hood, read this and weep:

http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/9/9649.phtml

[Lanith]

Re: How can you feed this many people?

 

I'm not sure, but I think everyone is over looking the obvious, magic. Poof! I create some food. "Look I have created the Never Ending Picnic Basket. If you want some food, reach in and pull it out. I'm a genius!"

[Barwickian]

Re: How can you feed this many people?

 

I'm not sure' date=' but I think everyone is over looking the obvious, magic. Poof! I create some food. "Look I have created the Never Ending Picnic Basket. If you want some food, reach in and pull it out. I'm a genius!"[/quote']

 

Ah, but if Bill had wanted magic to explain everything, he wouldn't have asked for people's input...

 

What he's looking for is verisimilitude, not a 30-foot dragon in a 10-foot by 10-foot room with a ery small door.

[Outsider]

Re: How can you feed this many people?

 

I dunno.. his original post does mention that magic is about, why would he do that if he wasnt open to magic having some effect on the problem? Some of the input here has been completely non-magic, which is just as bad as a 30 foot dragon in a 10x10 room. So I threw in some ways (other than "poof! food from nowhere!" that magic could help. Also... if magic is D&D-esque, it isnt all that uncommon, at least in my experience.

 

A high level magician ijn D&D might be able to cast 2 dozen spells a day, a mid level one a dozen, and low level ones an average of 3. If there are 2 master magicians, 4 journeyman ones, and 6 apprentices in the city, that's 1 caster per 1000 people (in a 12,000 person city) and a total of (potentially) 114 magical occurrances every day (or 41,610 in a year, or 4,161,000 in a century!) It isnt all that unreasonable to suppose that some of these 4 million historical magical occurrances might have been used to do things that benefit the city, or might even be what made it possible for the city-without-agriculture to develop at all.

 

As an aside, this has made me think of a nice situation to throw my (alas, non-existent) players up against... An evil religious sect that can summon great quantities of food who have built a city in inhospitable terrain, then suppressed all knowledge of agriculture (which wouldnt work well around there anyway) in order to keep the population dependent on them. The population hates them for their arrogance, cruelth and all the human sacrifices, but knows that if they revolt everyone starves to death...

[Curufea]

Re: How can you feed this many people?

 

Personally (and in my campaign) I don't like magical creation. I like magic just to influence or use energy/forces. Investing crops with energy would give bigger yeilds and make them more fertile.

 

Also - the village per mile thing. It is odd - I do think that Australians and Americans do not instinctively understand the idea, as we come from countries that had fronteirs withing living memory. The wild areas were explored into, and there were great distances between settlements.

 

Wheras Europe had been settled for thousands of years already, we've only been civilised for a couple hundred.

[Inu]

Re: How can you feed this many people?

 

SJohn and I swapped a few notes on Usenet, way back when he was writing that article. Despite the fact that I draw my info from medieval England of the 11th-13th centuries, and he from medieval France of the 14th century, the technology and techniques are close enough that our figures match very well.

 

SJohn's far better on towns than I am. I'm stronger on villages - but then, I have the advantage of living in a landscape dominated by villages founded c. the 10th-11th century, and SJohn's in Texas.

Heh, brilliant. I've been using that article for a while, I was hoping it wasn't just hot air.

I think it's something that really tends to surprise Americans. Even back in the middle ages, lowland England had a village every mile or so.

 

Where then the great tracts of woods for outlaws to hide in? They weren't there. Even Sherwood never had more than two or three miles of woodland across at any one point.

Yeah, it's a bit of culture shock. We're so used to population ballooning that we assume medieval England (for instance) should have had, say, four people in the entire country. Populations in the millions certainly surprised me. But it makes a whole lot more sense. (Thanks for the resources, too, they'll be useful.)

 

To the original article: yes, magic certainly should play a role. I advised fertility magic and the like. Magic may also aid the centralised bureaucracy necessary to feed a big city (by speeding communication, providing long distance 'enforcement'), or may aid a decentralised power structure (by providing stronger points of defence on the landscape, or allowing for increased communication and cooperation). I think you can go either way there, magic doesn't dictate a particular direction of governmental evolution.

 

Hey, if you're talking a D&D level of magic, how dangerous is the countryside? If there are wandering monsters, that may increase the desire for a centralised system that can maintain a standing army and send them where needed. (Or it may result in lots of local fortified villages/towns who can resist strong central power.)

 

Anyone else have ideas on how magic might change things, or make things easier/harder?

[Lanith]

Re: How can you feed this many people?

 

I'll just answer en mass, I can see the points for why bill would have asked this question. The only reason I bring up the magic handwave is because it is specifically mentioned this is a high-magic game.

 

My assumptions of high-magic are; there is a large and diverse population of casters (some friendly some not, some players some not), magic is very common and not a "suprise" tactic, magic is quite often used as a substitute for technology. I'll explain my reasoning.

 

High-magic in my mind brings up the ideas that nearly everyone you come across, while not a caster, has some magical item or trinket they use. Wallets that always give you the correct change if you have put at least that much inside, glasses (magical not technical) to fix eyesight, the backpack that holds almost anything, etc.

 

That leads directly to the idea that if everyone has magic, who's going to be suprised by it? "I've got The Sword of Dancing." "Well I've got the Armor of Singing. HA!"

 

If there is a large population of magic users around the city is going to organize or hire some of them to help with civic projects. Not every caster is going to be Elminster. More than likely quite a few will have a more practical slant to their magic. "Look our lamps never go out." "We haven't had rain in 30 days... hey Wizard can you summon us a storm?" Why would a society ever learn to build skyscrapers when there is someone around who can chant some words and make a building from a pile of rocks?

 

I might be thinking a little too "HIGH" in my high-magic thoughts, but that's something that only bill can answer.

[McCoy]

Re: How can you feed this many people?

 

But, the people are happy to plant orchards and vinyards of any sort...

 

(IOW, plant-and-harvest-plant-and-harvest holds little interest to these people, but long-term nurturing of trees is, to them, a good investment of time).

 

Perhaps they have a valuable natural resource (Gold or silver mine?) which is:

A. Near inexhausitble (So they can depend upon it long-term)

B. Easily defensilble (So a bigger city desn't take it from them)

C. Easily exploited (So they can lay about and not do an honest day's work)

Then they can just export the natural resource and import food.

It sounds from your description that you are talking about elvish-type people. In which case, maybe they are 90% artisans, who export beautiful finished crafts in return for mundane things like food. (ie Thranduil's folk in LotR).

 

Keith "Or maybe they subsist off of quadro-triticale" Curtis

 

Am I the only one who though of wine and/or brandy?

 

If the ocean is close enough that they have a harbor, they may have a shipyard. I'm thinking a merchant ship might take two years to build, a fishing boat a year.

 

The fishing fleet is crewed about 2/3 men too young to go on the merchant ships, learning seamanship while not getting too far from land, and older sailors who didn't rise to command levels in the merchant fleet.

 

The largest profession is coopers, people who make barrels of every size. from a tiny cask suitable to be worn on a st. benard's collar to the huge fermentation vats, twice as wide as a man is tall, and everything in between.

 

The forrest provides wood for ships and barrels, cutting is very selective so that future generations have enough of the correct types of wood.

 

As the grapes and fruit ripen, each in their season, they are harvested, pressed, the juice fermented, (if we are talking brandy then distilled by magic or anacronistic technology) and loaded into all those barrels.

 

The defensable part comes from only a dozen or so people knowing a small but crucial step in the process. If an invading enemy accidently kills off those few, the process is lost to everyone forever. They are sure all their neighbors know this.

 

Now, once in the kegs, the wine/brandy is not perishible. It can be loaded onto the merchant ships at any time, like carefully timed to arrive at the height of the grain harvest, when grain is cheap, but this is the only brandy you're going to see until we come back next year, yes I consider you a friend but business is business and your neighbor is outbidding you right now and high bid takes the whole cargo.

 

In other words, create an artificial shortage of a renewable (and mildly addictive) resource, use that to get all the food you need to supplement the local fish & fruit, without them having to do the plough & plant every year they find distasteful.

[Cantriped]

Re: How can you feed this many people?

 

I heavily believe that Magic should influence all aspects of a campaign world, I see it as largely foolish that many DnD world's Magic seems to have had little practical impact on how life actually works in those worlds. face it though, Most mages are adept at best, and sometimes only barely, so the kind of projects many of you are talking about are impractible at the very least, and in many cased impossible. especially for a DnD based spellcasting system. lower level slots just don't work on the scale required to facilitate those things. Now, in an Ebberon Campaign its much more reasonable, but as keys outlined it magic isn't quite that common.

Another problem I have is that many people misunderstand the Term "High Magic" in High magic magic is much more common then say in a Swords & Sorcery like Conan, and it usually has a definitly DnD-esk feel. but even so unless specifically mentioned that its an extremeist High-Fantasy magic still istn' so common that it replaces technology entirely, and likely never would. For one thing Magic is far easier to mess up then Technology is, you snap a rope on a Balista it can be replaced, where as a Magical Cannon can be Dispelled, Supressed by an Antimagic Field or Broken (thus losing its magical capabilities, usually permanantly), and in the latter the first and last cased it would require a trained Enchanter giving up a portion of his very essence just to repair.

As for a truely High-Magic senerio take a look at the book "The Elvenbane" by Mercedes Lackey (forgive the inevitible spell mistakes). In it the Elves, who are protrayed as haughty Oppressers, all have magic in varying degrees, and generally cause more problems then they fix using magic, largely cuz they pile spell untop of spell til the whole thing falls apart.

Hmm... I think I got on a tangent...*steps quietly off of soapbox*

[Mutant for Hire]

Re: How can you feed this many people?

 

Actually, the society that seems best adjusted in D&D to the existance of wizards and clerics is the Drow. They have a society where the Clerics and the Wizards are more or less the aristocracy, with a layer of warriors between them and the masses.

 

In general, I tend to think that in a world with magic, there will be a natural tendency for those with mystic talents to rise to the top of society. The main issue is how hereditary magic is.

[OddHat]

Re: How can you feed this many people?

 

Am I the only one who though of wine and/or brandy?

 

Good thinking, and repped.

[AnotherSkip]

Re: How can you feed this many people?

 

Though the tech is wrong, read Mercedes Lackey (&?)'s The Outstretched Shadow and To Light a Candle. Magic influences on food in all the stages are scattered throughout the books.

[AnotherSkip]

Re: How can you feed this many people?

 

High-Fantasy magic still istn' so common that it replaces technology entirely' date=' and likely never would. For one thing Magic is far easier to mess up then Technology is, you snap a rope on a Balista it can be replaced. [/quote']

Unless the rope snapping kills the entire crew which is possible in some circumstances, and the crew is pretty darn irreplaceable. And you do need just as much skill to probably fix the thing as a magical item of the same level.

Just a bit of a quibble....

 

just because the D&D maroons place such levels of problems on stuff to keep it under "they must dungeon in a limited fashion" header doesnt mean people should agree with it. This IS the system of SFX is the ultimate difference, not power.

[Dale A. Ward]

Re: How can you feed this many people?

 

Greetings!

 

In this situation, I look to literature for inspiration. In particular, I look to Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern. In that series of novels, you have a group of people (very much in the minority) that provide a valuable service for the rest of the world. This service takes up so much of their lives that the rest of the world contributes to the survival of this group.

 

Perhaps, the population of your small coastal town provides a similar service. Maybe, they are a monastic society that protect a great artifact, or they're all wizards that maintain a magical sleep spell over a world-devouring creature that lies at the bottom of the ocean just off the coast.

 

Whatcha think?

[Outsider]

Re: How can you feed this many people?

 

Sounds rife with potential for adventure...

 

Some people won't believe that there is a devourer, and will instead think it is all a lie told by the wizards so they dont have to actually work for a living.

 

Some people will believe it, and think that the non-believers are total ingrates and shirkers if they refuse to help keep the wizards up.

 

Then there will probably be some other wizards out there who are running the same story, but there really isnt a monster... they are just lazy bums.

 

Or the Wizards maintain the rituals, but themselves dont actually know if there is anything out there...