How can you feed this many people?

[Super Squirrel]

Re: How can you feed this many people?

 

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.

Funny story here. Some of my roleplaying buddies like to tell about the time they were using the 1st Edition AD&D Random map and monster generater to do a game. They are exploring room by room and open up a door. Inside the door is a 10x10 room with a Ancient Wyrm inside. His eye is pressed up against the door and his lips pressed up to the door frame. The dragon sees the party and says, "Pweese hwlp mw!"

 

The party shuts the door and walks away.

[Markdoc]

Re: How can you feed this many people?

 

As an aside' date=' 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...[/quote']

 

In my game there's a land called Pesh, which lies under a dark cloud (the last remnant of the bad ol' days ) and that's exactly how Pesh works. It's always dark outside so nothing much grows, except nasty giant mushrooms. All the people live in heavily-fortified city complexes (called Holdings) and depend on magical cornucopia for food. Outside are lots of nasty "Things", just slavering over the people inside. The problem is that Cornucopia cost a lot to make - if you have too many people, well, there's always Things outside that need killing ... (and as a bonus, some of them can be eaten). Fortunately, a culture where almost none of the population are involved in agriculture can spend proportionately more time on other activities - warfare and poliical intrigue, principally.

 

And yes, the rulers - caught between fear and hate of the Things, distrust of their own people and worry over feeding them all, and fear and envy of all the other holdings (after all, the easiest way to get new Cornucopia is to take someone else's - but then that's what they think too...) are cruel, capricious and arbitrary.

 

But I get the impression that's not exactly the atmosphere that was being looked for!

 

cheers,Mark

[Markdoc]

Re: How can you feed this many people?

 

Also to answer the original question, here's a couple of suggestions:

 

1. Andy's pretty much covered the mundane aspects. That would give you a small strip of cultivated land around the city, and perhaps small clearings in the woods around the city, each with a small village.

 

One thing that was not mentioned was the common ancient/medieval habit of "semi-domestic" animals. You can breed (for example) pigs and release them into the woods, where they get fat and happy over summer and autumn, more or less without supervision. Then you hunt them. Some you capture and keep for breeding - the rest you eat. The ones you don't catch escape to supplement the herds and grow old and wily to make future hunts more fun/dangerous.

 

Last of all think about crops or conditions that are higher-yielding than European grains - the cities of the fertile crescent and the nile valley seem to have actually gotten away with higher population densities relative to cropland simply because the soil was highly fertile (although it may have also been because of lower standards of living). The same is true of medieval asia as well, due to the fecundity of rice. The introduction of the potato to Europe caused a decease in the amount of arable land needed to feed a family. So you can massage the numbers a bit (based on the potato thing, double or triple would be conservative: it's been estimated that in Ireland, grain required 4-6 times as much land as potatoes to feed an equivalent number of people). Also root vegetables - unlike grain - do well in untilled soil, so you don't need to spend as much time on tillage: plant em, mulch 'em and come back at harvest time (OK, that's not quite true, but you get the idea).

 

2. You can boost the hunting (and thus decrease space/manpower need for agriculture in several ways) with magic without having to rely on "Poof! There's food!". Carve a big ol' stone with the rune of calling and animal pictures, so that wild animals are called into the area around it: thus hunting is always too good to be true. Drop another one into the harbour or in the nearby bay, so that the fishing is also always supernaturally good. Another runestone to make the climate permanently bountiful - rain and sun in perfect measure, no killing frosts, etc - or one to scare pests away (that has the advantage - no mosquitos on summer evenings!) and you could probably double the amount of available food quite easily. The locals might have to renew the rituals every year, or the stones could have been sitting there for a thousand years, pretty much forgotten and taken for granted, depending on the feel you want.

 

cheers, Mark

[teh bunneh]

Re: How can you feed this many people?

 

Thanks so much for all the replies -- especially Mark and Andy! Y'all are da bomb.

 

So:

1. They have crops which produce more food per acre than traditional medieval European crops.
   
2. They have very fertile soil and mild weather.
   
3. They use fertility spells to increase the yield and decrease pests.
   
4. Though they tend to be bronze-age in technology, agricultural tech has advanced more quickly, leading to the metal double-bladed plow, which (if I understand correctly) makes farming easier and more efficient.
   
5. Fishing adds protein to the diet.
   
6. They trade their valuable woods, crafts, fruits, and liquors with neighboring lands for grain.
   
7. That gives us a small strip of cultivated land around the cities, and small clearings in the woods around the cities, each with a small village.

Does that sound about right?

 

I really like Markdoc's idea about the herdstones and fishstones. I'm definitely stealing that one.

 

Just a few other notes:

• When I mentioned that magic is available, I did mean it more like "bless the crops and herds to increase fecundity" rather than "Poof -- food!"
  
• They are an elf-like people who live long lives and (culturally) have little patience for short-term endeavors like farming. However, they live among other people who are good at that sort of thing, so that sounds like a good way of stratifying the peoples socially.
  
• Magic is a learned skill. Assuming one has the intelligence, patience, aptitude, and dexterity, anyone could do it -- sort of like anyone could be a surgeon or a scientist in our world. Those who know magic are afforded a certain amount of respect, but they aren't automatically the ones in charge.

[Barwickian]

Re: How can you feed this many people?

 

I really like Markdoc's idea about the herdstones and fishstones. I'm definitely stealing that one.

 

Me too!

 

Another idea that occurs is honey. Bees are natural woodland creatures, and it's possible, given the plentiful woodland, that you could forage for wild hives, as was done in Poland in the last century.

 

Very useful stuff, honey. Hot only can you eat it, you can drink it (mead), and it's a good preservative and a fair antibiotic.

 

There's much more on honey collection, uses and folklore on the farming section of my website (link below).

[Vanguard00]

Re: How can you feed this many people?

 

Back in my D&D days I played briefly in a game where this village was built around a rune-carved stone (like a single monolith). Food and other 'gifts' (knives, trinkets, etc) regularly appeared by the stone. The village thought it was bounty by the gods. One of our players (a sage-like cleric) figured out the runestone was a magical transport. Somewhere else was a village that made offerings, did a bit of chanting, and thought the gods were pleased for taking their 'gifts'.

 

We didn't finish that campaign so I have no idea how it was going to end, but I do remember that the wrong chant pretty much screwed someone using it to travel, and no one could read the runes to figure out the right chant.

 

Still, it was a cool idea.

[Lethosos]

Re: How can you feed this many people?

 

Thread watched for later preusal once I get to a similar part for my Asian-themed world.

 

Just sayin'.

[McCoy]

Re: How can you feed this many people?

 

[*]Though they tend to be bronze-age in technology, agricultural tech has advanced more quickly, leading to the metal double-bladed plow, which (if I understand correctly) makes farming easier and more efficient.

 

[snip]

 

[*]They are an elf-like people who live long lives and (culturally) have little patience for short-term endeavors like farming. However, they live among other people who are good at that sort of thing, so that sounds like a good way of stratifying the peoples socially.

Forgot to mention this earlier, grain does not have to be an annual.

 

http://www.pioneer-net.com/psr/page10.htm

 

Imagine a grass-like plant with roots as deep as alfalfa, that spreads through rhizomes, forms a sod thick enough to choke out all competors, yet ever summer sends up vertical stems, blooms, and ripens to a full. tight. grain head.

 

Now imagine an anti-pest runestone, "There is no food here" Mental Illusions 3d6 (standard effect: 9 points) ( Animal class of minds), Reduced Endurance (0 END; +1/2), Persistent (+1/2), Area Of Effect (48" Radius (about 7 acres); +2); Independent (-2), IAF Bulky (-1), No Range (-1/2)

 

Put your anti-pest runestone on a pedestal in the middle of the field sometime in the spring. The sod keeps out weeds, the runestone keeps away bugs and browsing animals. Herbavores will eat any rhizomes that grow beyond the protection of the runestone, preventing the sod from spreading wild. You come back in high simmer, a wizard cast his "transform unripened grain into ripe grain" spell, and you cut the grain. After the grain is cut, remove the runestone and allow the quadropeds who did not recognize grain as food all summer to graze on the stems and fertalize the field.

 

This requires no plowing for the grain, and only visiting the field a couple times a year. Adinstinctive feature of this magical agriculture is that the fields will be round, rather than square as medeval scratch plowed fields.

[Michael Hopcroft]

Re: How can you feed this many people?

 

Forgot to mention this earlier, grain does not have to be an annual.

 

http://www.pioneer-net.com/psr/page10.htm

 

Imagine a grass-like plant with roots as deep as alfalfa, that spreads through rhizomes, forms a sod thick enough to choke out all competors, yet ever summer sends up vertical stems, blooms, and ripens to a full. tight. grain head.

 

Now imagine an anti-pest runestone, "There is no food here" Mental Illusions 3d6 (standard effect: 9 points) ( Animal class of minds), Reduced Endurance (0 END; +1/2), Persistent (+1/2), Area Of Effect (48" Radius (about 7 acres); +2); Independent (-2), IAF Bulky (-1), No Range (-1/2)

 

Put your anti-pest runestone on a pedestal in the middle of the field sometime in the spring. The sod keeps out weeds, the runestone keeps away bugs and browsing animals. Herbavores will eat any rhizomes that grow beyond the protection of the runestone, preventing the sod from spreading wild. You come back in high simmer, a wizard cast his "transform unripened grain into ripe grain" spell, and you cut the grain. After the grain is cut, remove the runestone and allow the quadropeds who did not recognize grain as food all summer to graze on the stems and fertalize the field.

 

This requires no plowing for the grain, and only visiting the field a couple times a year. Adinstinctive feature of this magical agriculture is that the fields will be round, rather than square as medeval scratch plowed fields.

 

There must be a flaw in the system somewhere, that a creative GM can exploit.

 

How much variety would their be in the diet of the inhaibatants of said village? Relying on essentially one foodstuff inevitably leads to problems.

 

And the miracle crop is essentially a single organism. Kill that organism and the village starves to death.

[McCoy]

Re: How can you feed this many people?

 

There must be a flaw in the system somewhere, that a creative GM can exploit.

 

How much variety would their be in the diet of the inhaibatants of said village? Relying on essentially one foodstuff inevitably leads to problems.

 

And the miracle crop is essentially a single organism. Kill that organism and the village starves to death.

I had assumed more than a single 7 acre field.

 

But the anti-pest runestones are left unguarded all summer.

[Doc Democracy]

Re: How can you feed this many people?

 

Interesting thread.

 

Keyes Bill had said that there was magic about and there has been some attentiont paid to that but I had my head around the elfin style stuff and the thoughts that a forest was no good as a food source.

 

Obviously a mundane forest is no good as a food source and a mundane forester would have no way to know how depleted the animals in there were. In a magical world both of those statements are no longer true.

 

I see foresters going to trees on a rotational basis and coaxing a harvest out of them. Thus you can predict how much the trees will yield and you rotate so that you do not exhaust them.

 

You can also draw animals to you. With magic you can ensure that you are taking surplus population and possibly those that are detrimental to the normal population in the forest.

 

Thus the forest would be a good place to draw your sustenance from without recourse to intensive agiculture or even the possibly magical monocultures suggested. Instead you look for a magically enhanced and magically managed resource.

 

 

Doc

[prestidigitator]

Re: How can you feed this many people?

 

An interesting thought experiment: let's say your average person eats 3 apples per meal and three meals per day (that's not a great amount, nor a great diet, but probably about the right order of magnitude). So that's about 10 apples per day, or 3,600 apples per year. If you have a village of 20,000 people, that comes to 72 million apples per year for the entire village.

 

Now, if an average apple tree produces on the order of 100 apples per year (a pretty healthy tree, but whatever), and you have an orchard in which trees are planted in a square grid 10 feet on a side--say 500 trees per mile--then one square mile of land will have 250,000 trees and produce 25 million apples per year.

 

So say it would take on the order of 3-5 square miles of orchard to feed a village of 20,000. I'm not saying this should be done. People would have the runs what awful.

 

Anyway, it is an interesting magnitude estimate as I said. I even used the English system for all you pansies.

[Dr. Anomaly]

Re: How can you feed this many people?

 

Hey, bill, how do your inhabitants feel about hunting? I'm referring to "sport" hunting, and not hunting for food. I ask because while I like the idea of "semi-domesticated" animals, you'd lose a lot of them to natural predators, unless something was done to keep the predators in check. If the hunting of predators was sort of a local "hobby" or "sport", it could give an interesting diversion to the people as well as helping safeguard that food source. And in worlds where there's magic, there's usually predators that are much more dangerous that real-world ones, and so might require group effort to take out. Just a thought.

 

Along the lines of higher-yield/denser foodstuffs: don't overlook the sorts of experiments being done today by NASA with hydroponics. They're doing all kinds of experiments with very high yield (VHY) set-ups and foodstuffs because of the realization that a long-term spaceflight, like one to Mars, is going to require the crew to grow their own food because there's no way to carry enough for the round trip. They've managed to get some truely ridiculous caloric yields from very small areas.

 

I realize this requires both (a) a lot of technical expertise (hydroponics, etc.) as well as being ( fairly labor-intensive. But! A lot of the technical end of things is needed for the water & air reclaimation/recycling set-ups, which wouldn't be necessary in this case. Magic could substitute nicely for the technological stuff, and probably for a good deal of the "labor" part as well. Once it was created / set-up / running, it would probably need very little except for someone to come through and harvest the food stocks. A number of the foodstuffs that NASA has experimented with produces an edible crop every 2 weeks to 1 month, so the yield rate is simply fantastic. With magic to supply the water and nutrients, you can do what NASA does and have the plants raised in tight clusters in trays, with the trays stacked in racks to give you a use of your vertical space as well as your horizontal space. And you could use either standard greenhouses or out-and-out magic to maintain a controlled environment, which is of course necessary.

 

A city-block-sized "greenhouse" like this could produce a huge amount of foodstuffs on a regular basis, and with magic to provide the sunlight, heat, water, fertilizer and so on, all you'd need was a group to go through and harvest. Perhaps everyone has to do a term of "community service" (a month a year or whatever) that consists of harvest duty, or perhaps they hire people (humans?) from other areas to be their labor force in the greenhouses. Depending on the general standard of living in the world, the imported laborers might not even get paid...their "pay" would be comfortable living conditions as well as regular and good-quality meals.

 

A big "greenhouse" like this would probably be a government-owned operation, a sort of "public works." On the other hand, there could be, say, a half-dozen of these things, one in each district of the city, with each owned/run by one of the more powerful families in the city. Perhaps the families don't charge for the foodstuffs, or charge only a pittance. Instead, they get paid in power...everyone knows they're one of the main sources of food, and if they decide to cut that off...

 

It could work well to combine these "magical greenhouses" with a number of the other suggestions listed above. Perhaps the fields (as McCoy suggested) provide the "bulk" foodstuffs, but the high-intensity "greenhouses" provide all the "luxury" foodstuffs: fruits, spices, sought-after vegetables, and so on.

 

Even if you just go with the "basic food stocks" (McCoy's fields, the fishing fleet suggestion, and so on) I think you'd have a problem, but I don't mean with adequate food supplies. I think the problem would be that the diet would be pretty stable, meaning bland and having a real "sameness" from one meal to the next. I could be wrong, but the kind of people you're describing probably wouldn't like that any too well.

 

Fortunately, with magic, there's an answer. Either use Cosmetic Transform to change the look and flavor of the food (while leaving the nutritional content unchanged) or something like this:

 

Wand of Epicurean Delights: Life Support (No Need to Eat), Variable SFX (Any desired foodstuff, +1/4); OAF Wand (-1), Requires a Magic Skill Check (-1/2), Requires Appropriate Amount of Foodstuffs (-1/4; similar to the "expendable" add-on for Focus) Active Cost: 4, Real Cost: 1

 

In essence, the "wand" above is really a sort of Transform that turns the food into other food, so it may be better to go with a Cosmetic Transform instead. The idea, though, is that everyone in the city gets food, more or less for free. What they pay for, though, is the ability to turn it into more desirable or tasty food. The lower classes might have basic "wands" while the more wealthy could have wands created by master magician-chefs that produce food that is not only what you want, but a marvel of flavor and presentation as well.

[OddHat]

Re: How can you feed this many people?

 

I like the hydroponics. I'd also suggest, from Tuff Voyaging and real world Island living, roof gardens, fruit bearing climbing vines, and basement mushroom gardens.

 

In the real world none of these can provide enough calories to sustain a community by themselves, but they can all help add variety and harder to find nutrients to a diet. Also, they're not labor intensive, and they add a nice "Green City with Perfumed Air" affect that's very appropriate to a fantasy city.

 

You can also go the fantasy/sci-fi route of having some of these fruits be very highly nutritious and perhaps sligtly addictive. "The sacred Illium vines, whose sweet fruit feeds the body and whose scented flowers lift the spirit".

[Vanguard00]

Re: How can you feed this many people?

 

Perhaps the sweet fruit of the Illium vines are small apple-like fruits that are as filling as if one had eaten a full meal, and the scented flowers (from which certain ungeants and potions may be distilled for medicinal purposes) can provide one with the feeling that one had rested well for many hours. Used sparingly they can provide sustenance through lean winters, and they are often used to supplement travel rations for the military, but overuse of either fruit or flower has short-term addictive properties and long-term debilitating effects on the body and mind.

 

Yeah...I like it...

[Curufea]

Re: How can you feed this many people?

 

Hey' date=' bill, how do your inhabitants feel about hunting? I'm referring to "sport" hunting, and not hunting for food. I ask because while I like the idea of "semi-domesticated" animals, you'd lose a lot of them to natural predators, unless something was done to keep the predators in check. If the hunting of predators was sort of a local "hobby" or "sport", it could give an interesting diversion to the people as well as helping safeguard that food source.[/quote']

 

Historically, hunting for sport was always a luxury. In general most people don't have the leisure time to do things other than work. Only nobility had the necessary spare time that they could do these things. Most other folk would have much less leisure time, and could only afford to do things that didn't take hours.

[Old Man]

Re: How can you feed this many people?

 

Vast Underground Fungi Forests.

[Curufea]

Re: How can you feed this many people?

 

Actually, that sounds like a good idea - fungi are saprophytes. They could be used as a recycling system for garbage, and corpses (instead of a cemetary).

[Dr. Anomaly]

Re: How can you feed this many people?

 

Historically' date=' hunting for sport was always a luxury. In general most people don't have the leisure time to do things other than work. Only nobility had the necessary spare time that they could do these things. Most other folk would have much less leisure time, and could only afford to do things that didn't take hours.[/quote']

Yes, I know this. But I got the impression (possibly wrong) that this people (the city inhabitants) might be a bit more on the arts & other leisures side of things, given their reluctance to indulge in basic life-supporting neccesities like food production. So I was thinking with a cultural mindset like that -- especially if the basic bulk food production could be taken care of by one of the time & labor efficient means discussed -- things like hunting might very well be something akin to a "national pastime."

[teh bunneh]

Re: How can you feed this many people?

 

Great ideas all, guys. Keep 'em coming!

[Vanguard00]

Re: How can you feed this many people?

 

Actually' date=' that sounds like a good idea - fungi are saprophytes. They could be used as a recycling system for garbage, and corpses (instead of a cemetary).[/quote']

Which would also be very interesting if, having begun germination in these underground areas of garbage and decomposition, the 'fungi' grew upwards and out of the ground into Illium vines. I could see those vines being saprophytic, as well, which would help to explain their interesting properties.

 

Man, imagine a visitor's surprise when he learns of the underground cemetary directly below the vinyards of those wonderful fruit...

[prestidigitator]

Re: How can you feed this many people?

 

In general most people don't have the leisure time to do things other than work. Only nobility had the necessary spare time that they could do these things. Most other folk would have much less leisure time' date=' and could only afford to do things that didn't take hours.[/quote']

The funny thing is that before it was discovered that the masses could be controlled by putting lock and key on the food stockpiles, people generally did not have to work nearly so much (if you look at small hunter-gatherer societies, for example, you find that they in fact got by doing hard work only a few hours a day). While agriculture helped tremendously in providing the centralization necessary for large cities in which great cultural and technological development were possible, it also provided a very effective means of control, allowing those in power to become vastly rich while others developed into a poor lower class.

 

So it may be that through a more enlightened society and governance your city may thrive with far less work than you would imagine. Not very likely given human greed, but perhaps we are talking about a more virtuous race. That is what fantasy is for.

[Curufea]

Re: How can you feed this many people?

 

In general - cities gathered skills, and skilled people together to survive. Rather than raising foodstuffs, they would manufacture goods to trade for foodstuffs.

[teh bunneh]

Re: How can you feed this many people?

 

These are all great ideas, thanks to everyone! I especially like the mildly narcotic vine/flower/fruit -- the people of this area are known for occasional recreational drug use.

 

Bill.

[Cancer]

Re: How can you feed this many people?

 

I'm near the end of a very interesting book, The Little Ice Age. Lots of stray data that would be relevant for this thread.

 

Two pounds of bread a day seems to have been the standard for peasant Europe, France in particular.

 

In a big fantasy city, the greatest concern would be crowd control. If food fails, you get bread riots. The larger the discrepancy between rich and poor (i.e. the closer the poor are to literal starvation) the greater the threat of said riots, both in terms of severity and scale. When the revolutionaries cried out "Peace, land, and bread", they meant that last very literally.

 

That leads me to suspect that the bread depots in a big fantasy city would be the most important (and most thankless) government post. The heart of those depots could be just a minor mage with one spell: mass duplication of a single inanimate object. Once a week, each depot gets a fresh new 2-pound loaf of bread. The mage's task is to mass-duplicate this loaf, and the other depot staff sees to it that every person with a valid bread chit who claims it gets their one loaf. That way you could support a very large, and very squalid, urban population with minimal resources and one spell. The limitation is just on how many depots you have, which is probably limited by how fast you can get the peasants and and out the storefront.