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Message: <blockquote data-quote="NotAYakk" data-source="post: 8104891" data-attributes="member: 72555">So I like cities and villages, but I don't want them surrounded with oceans of farmland.  I want to be able to walk to the wilderness pretty quick.So my D&D default is that ritual magic can and is used to boost food production.  Not "create food and water" or magic items that mass produce food, but blessing fields, plant growth spells, animal fertility rituals, preservation charms, etc.These in turn are fed by some resource that is geographically limited; ley lines, for example.  Intense agriculture, up to a limit, becomes possible at spots where ley lines cross; there cities are built, fed by a shockingly (for the middle ages) low number of farmers and farmland.This high density in turn permits the military to guard the area against monsters.Small holds are also warded with the magic of hearth and home, which makes monsters less likely to attack.Go more than a day's travel away, and you reach the limits of patrols, and you are in the wilderness.  Roads are partly protected by shrines and the magic worked into roads by the feet of travellers.---Under this model, the settlement is self sustaining (mostly), even though it is arctic.  The eternal winter hurts, but isn't fatal, because they where not on the  edge of survival before.  Their farm-magic works in the winter.The wilderness is similarly a magical ecology.  D&D has far, far to  many preditors for it to make sense otherwise.  So there is significant ecological damage, but not collapse, in the eternal winter.</blockquote>

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