D&D 5E What Do Dwarves Eat?

[Evenglare]

Isn't there cleric spells that give you food and water and the like? It seems so easy to overlook magic and yet take a rather stern approach to economics and quality of life. If someone can make a fireball or horde of minions, then that seems like the first place to start asking questions. The food is the easy part if you have magic. The real question here is why are they not making KFC double down, or big macs.

 

[Dausuul]

Isn't there cleric spells that give you food and water and the like? It seems so easy to overlook magic and yet take a rather stern approach to economics and quality of life. If someone can make a fireball or horde of minions, then that seems like the first place to start asking questions. The food is the easy part if you have magic. The real question here is why are they not making KFC double down, or big macs.

Clerical magic is unlikely to be enough to sustain an entire civilization. Create food and water is a 3rd-level spell which can feed 15 people per casting. So you need one 5th-level cleric per 30 citizens, and you need those clerics devoting both their 3rd-level slots to food production. Unless you're playing in the Forgotten Realms where you can't throw a brick without hitting an epic-level cleric, that seems unlikely.

Druidic magic, on the other hand... goodberry is only a 1st-level spell, and feeds 10 people per casting. A 1st-level druid, or a 2nd-level ranger, can feed 20 people. That's much less of an ask than a comparable number of 5th-level clerics. And if you have a few 5th-level druids on hand, each one can feed close to a hundred!

Suddenly I'm envisioning a dwarven society fed by berry-conjuring rangers, waging an endless struggle against the wicked drow druids...

 

[Herr der Qual]

I've dealt with the Dwarven races this way:

Mountain Dwarves: Large cities are built the same way as citadel cities, instead of a walled city they build the city inside a mountain the farm and pasture lands are outside the gates to the mountain keep. They have large areas underneath the city in the mines that have been stripped of all minerals that have been converted to makeshift temporary pastures for times of war. The pastures are stocked with goats, sheep, pigs and other ovines. The lowest class of dwarves live outside the the gates of the city and tend the livestock and fields. They actively patrol the areas outside of their mountain home, and the patrols bring back game frequently. In rich Mountain Dwarf cities, they have magnificent large crystals perfectly shaped into spheres and imbued with daylight spells that mimic the day night cycle of the surface, in these magically lit areas they've planted pastures of grass and trees making subterranean parks that can serve as pastureland in emergencies, in a magnificently wealthy city they would have a similar system that contains subterranean fields where they grow crops and rear livestock. In poorer communities, they have animals of the underdark that have been domesticated for consumption, kept deep below the city in pens in abandoned mines (I have a few homebrew creatures that I made that serve as common fodder in the underdark), they keep patrols on watch to keep at bay the predators of the underdark.

The Hill Dwarves in my settings actually live in communities very much like the Shire in Peter Jackson's LoTR and Hobbit movies, but they fortify their settlements with impossibly well built and beautifully decorated and deviously deadly stone walls, they eat larger livestock like cows and aurochs. They utilize aqueducts (as do the Mountain Dwarves) to bring their water from nearby freshwater sources. They take a note from the Mountain Dwarves and keep a large stockpile under the community.

So, their diets vary a little bit, but the crux of it, in my setting they utilize everything in their environment to ensure they have the kind of foods they have come to live by. Hearty meats and vegetables are the staples of the dwarven diet through my understanding.

The Duergar survive in their most wealthy settlements the way the poorest mountain dwarves do, the poorest duergar scrounge and survive like gully dwarves, whose way of life is well explained in some other materials.

Both the Mountain and Hill Dwarves both happily trade some of their well crafted materials (but never their best, those are hoarded and passed down across generations) for exotic or rare meats.

 

[Parmandur]

This ties into the larger question of just where the Underdark ecosystem gets its energy. In the real world, life in deep cave systems is sparse and small, because it has to rely on whatever scraps of food find their way in from the outside. "Fungi" are a popular handwavy solution in D&D, probably because fungi look like plants but don't need sunlight, so people figure you could grow them in caves and solve your food problems that way. Doesn't work, though; the reason fungi don't need sunlight is that they get their energy from whatever organic matter they're growing on. They don't add energy to the system, they subtract it. Mushrooms gotta eat, too.

The simplest solution is to invoke magic. In AD&D, the Underdark had some kind of mystical "radiation" that was responsible for, among other things, the special properties of drow equipment. Drow gear eventually stopped working when you took it out of the Underdark, even if it was never exposed to the sun; you had to make periodic trips back to the Underdark to renew it. I like this idea--the mystical radiations of the Underdark are an energy source distinct from sunlight, with a whole separate ecosystem built on top of it. Or perhaps the deep Underdark is full of rifts to other planes, and plant life from those planes is the source of its energy.

Another possibility is that there's a lot more volcanic activity in a typical D&D world than there is on Earth. (Let's see a show of hands: How many DMs here have never used lava as a terrain hazard? Anyone? Bueller?) The real world has small, isolated ecosystems that thrive around deep-sea volcanic vents, using sulfur compounds released from those vents as an energy source. Conceivably, something like that on a much larger scale could drive the ecosystem of the Underdark.

A third possibility is that the Underdark doesn't have an ecosystem, and relies entirely on food brought down from the surface--either by trade (the dwarven solution) or by raids (the drow solution).

Of course, if you don't want to worry about all this, you can just wave your hands, say "Fungi," and leave it at that. Personally, I like thinking through questions like this. It makes the world feel more engaging and interesting to me, and sparks ideas for adventures.

Solid analysis here. The missing question is, do the Laws of Thermodynamics function in a D&D world?

The mere existence of the Underdark suggests that entropy need not apply; Medieval worldviews believed in a steady state, so why not have a balance enforced by the Elemenatal planes interacting?

 

[Sunseeker]

Clerical magic is unlikely to be enough to sustain an entire civilization. Create food and water is a 3rd-level spell which can feed 15 people per casting. So you need one 5th-level cleric per 30 citizens, and you need those clerics devoting both their 3rd-level slots to food production. Unless you're playing in the Forgotten Realms where you can't throw a brick without hitting an epic-level cleric, that seems unlikely.

Druidic magic, on the other hand... goodberry is only a 1st-level spell, and feeds 10 people per casting. A 1st-level druid, or a 2nd-level ranger, can feed 20 people. That's much less of an ask than a comparable number of 5th-level clerics. And if you have a few 5th-level druids on hand, each one can feed close to a hundred!

Suddenly I'm envisioning a dwarven society fed by berry-conjuring rangers, waging an endless struggle against the wicked drow druids...

It'd be an interesting set-up for a very politics oriented setting. You could set one group up as your usual hippe-commune druids who want to use their magic to feed everyone for free because love and nature and unicorns. You could set another group up as your usual technocratic ultra-capitalists who think magic is a special right reserved for the rich and that casters are rightfully entitled to be well paid for their production.

You could throw a twist into this by setting up the capitalist society as to be heavily reliant upon casters, because the society exists in a location where normal farming is very hard (desert, tundra, etc...). Their entire economy revolves on a sort of trickle-down economics through magical production of foodstuffs. So druids giving things away is literally destroying their society's ability to financially maintain itsself. Flip that on the druids and you find out that they're actually giving away this food precisely to do that, then once the people have become dependent on the druids for sustenance they are then basically tricked into servitude fey-food style to the druid's fey overlords who are secretly backing the druids with additional naturey magic in an attempt to undermine the human/dwarven kingdoms of the world and spread their control.

 

[Hand of Evil]

• Guinea pig - chickens of the Inca.
• Hydroponics would not be hard to build ponds and to raise crops in center isles and have fish in the water between.
• Spiders and scorpions - ate the world over.
• Purple worm and their grubs.
• Fungi - Gas spores, Shrieker, Violet Fungus maybe dangerous to harvest but provides food and dyes.
• Grick - rubbery meat but will do in a pinch.
• Piercer - uneatable as a roper
• Rust Monster - high in minerals and a rare delicacy

 

[Mercule]

Folks seem to assume that "real" dwarves must be 100% underground. Humans have no problem digging mines, then going home above ground. Maybe dwarves farm in something of the reverse manner. Ideally, they'd find hollows that are mostly inaccessible from on overland approach and grow their crops there, in addition to copious mushrooms, eyeless fish, etc. Unfortunately, those same isolated, hard to reach areas are where red dragons like to nest, which can lead to some interesting events.

 

[delericho]

I picture Dwarf cuisine to be very much like modern Scottish cuisine.

To be fair, modern Scottish cuisine is pretty much the same as modern "anywhere else" cuisine. With chicken tikka masala now our favourite takeaway meal, and chicken pakora rapidly gaining on the fish supper (that's "fish & chips" in English).

Folks seem to assume that "real" dwarves must be 100% underground.

The iconic images of dwarven citadels are the likes of Erebor, Mithral Hall, or Thorbardin (Dragonlance). I didn't see any significant evidence of faming outside of Erebor in any of the Hobbit movies (though trade would be a possibility), while both Mithral Hall and Thorbardin suffered extensive seiges or other times when they were cut off from the surface. So they'd need some internal means of feeding their populace.

(Indeed, Dragonlance made some play on the racial tensions between the Hill and Mountain Dwarves in that setting, where the former were essentially farmers for the latter, but when the Cataclysm fell the Mountain Dwarves locked themselves away underground, leaving their Hill kin to suffer. Though I'm not sure that the benefits were the right way around, given that the Mountain Dwarves had thus cut off their food supply just as they also lost access to divine magic... )

Edit: On reading that back, it comes across as being rather snarkier than I'd intended. Sorry. You're actually right, of course - 'realistically', the dwarves would likely farm on the surface. And Erebor, Mithral Hall, and Thorbardin aren't exactly realistic settings.

 

[Bluenose]

Humans have no idea, but it comes in cans and when people have had to eat it the experience has been... unpleasant.

 

[delericho]

Humans have no idea, but it comes in cans and when people have had to eat it the experience has been... unpleasant.

Spammity Spam, wonderful Spam!