D&D General A Question about Waterdeep - Where does the Drinking Water come from?

[X13Phantom]

They just need a reinforced area and cast tidal wave into it as needed

 

[AnotherGuy]

Cool thread topic. I like threads like this. Plus I learnt something - Battagliola.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

To address Waterdeep specifically, one thing unusual about that city it is it is built upon a major connection to the Underdark. The Underdark has plentiful fresh water and is below sea level. Indeed it extends for hundreds or thousands of miles under the ocean.

So the proper question we should be asking is "why doesn't the ocean drain into the Underdark?"

 

[Hussar]

Cool thread topic. I like threads like this. Plus I learnt something - Battagliola.

The Arma is absolutely one of my favourite resources for gaming.

 

[Hussar]

A lot of large cities don't have visible rivers, because they have been built over long ago.

Well now yes. Middle Ages? Not so much.

 

[Demetrios1453]

You realize that Seattle is on a massive freshwater lake right? And has numerous rivers running through it? This is kinda my point. You generally never have large cities that don't have ANY rivers.

I mean, never minding drinking water and whatnot. How do you move goods throught the city? All that stuff that is traded - this IS a major trading point after all, must then travel overland? How can you be a major trading point with no water ways?

You're underestimating how much water can be gathered and stored in cisterns just from normal weather. As a kid I lived on a farm, and just rainwater that was captured from the roof of the house was enough to supply the five of us with outside water only rarely needed. With a bigger cistern, we could have stored more, and that extra water would have been unnecessary. A second cistern stored water for the farm animals. And this is in an area that is somewhat dryer than Seattle/Waterdeep. More rain, larger roof surface areas, and larger cisterns (check out the gigantic cisterns of Istanbul if you want to see how a city that wasn't on a freshwater river managed to store its water in the Middle Ages) can result in a massive amount of retained water.

The Desserin River flows into the sea a few miles to the south, in a swampy area with no good harbor (at least not as spectacularly good as Waterdeep's) which is why there's no port city there. There's a lot of trade all the way up to Silverymoon that comes down the river and makes the last few miles via the sea.

But now that you mention it, it is odd that there aren't aqueducts from the river to the city. Perhaps it's piped in, or just magicked over.

Edit: I see that @pukunui has linked what Ed has said about it from the Candlekeep forum, and basically, it's really wet weather and Underdark connections. No need for piping it in from the Desserin.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Well now yes. Middle Ages? Not so much.

Waterdeep is clearly a renascence city, not medieval. By which time most of London's rivers had been built over. The Great Fire of London (1666) would have been easily extinguished had the water been exposed. The Thames doesn't count, since it has always been used for transportation, not fresh water (during the Great Fire water was taken from the Thames, but it was too far to do much good). Even before the pollution it was slightly salt where the city was founded.

 

[DEFCON 1]

In a world of 20,000 years of magic... in addition to the 'gnomish desalination plant' idea there would be 'underground reservoirs linked via permanent portal to the Elemental Plane of Water'.

With planar magic in existence for all those millenia, this is exactly how cities of this size would expand-- by using the magic they have access to to create new technologies for humanoid survival.

 

[Bacon Bits]

Same place as the populations' food. The author forgot.

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

Well, there's the problem that the population of Waterdeep exploded in-between editions. So the food/water production that kinda made sense back then does not make much sense when the population is now so large.

Anyways, here's a ''simple'' solution:

You have ships gathering pieces of ice from the Sea of Moving Ice (or people gathering it from the Crags and other mountains), then melting it in huge cisterns.

That, plus rain water, should give you a good amount of water. I mean, if Vegas can do it, Waterdeep should be able to. Seriously, you could look at some videos on Vegas underground rainwater collectors, it could be a nice inspiration.

Then, as mentioned, people drink other things: milk, mead, ale, wine. For the kids (if you dont want to give them alcohol), you can have the parents or shops boil the wine/mead with spice or fruits to remove alcohol and make a beverage for kids.