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

[Hussar]

Ahghairon was a powerful mage and the first Open Lord of Waterdeep. He created the

The… oh man what a cliffhanger.

 

[pukunui]

The… oh man what a cliffhanger.

Sorry. I accidentally hit 'post' too soon. I've gone back and edited my post to include the rest of what I was going to say.

 

[Hussar]

Ahghairon was a powerful mage and the first Open Lord of Waterdeep. He created the eponymous staff that enables its wielder to allow dragons to bypass the eponymous dragonward protecting Waterdeep. The staff features in Dragon Heist, so I'm a little surprised you don't already know about it and its creator.

Ahh. Right. Just blanked on the proper noun. There’s a lot of those.

Once you mentioned the staff it clicked.

 

[pukunui]

Ahh. Right. Just blanked on the proper noun. There’s a lot of those.

Yeah, fair enough. There are quite a few big names in Waterdeep (which is one of the issues I have with Dragon Heist, but I've gone on about that enough elsewhere).

 

[R_J_K75]

I’m likely losing all geek cred here but who is Aghairon?

First free leader of Waterdeep iirc

 

[R_J_K75]

There are quite a few big names in Waterdeep

Brian the Sword Master....He's a "Sword Master"

 

[pukunui]

Brian the Sword Master....He's a "Sword Master"

Now I'm the one who's at a loss.

 

[R_J_K75]

Now I'm the one who's at a loss.

I want to say hes at the end of "The Way of the Dragon" and market ward is where his shop is, pretty sure hes a lord of WD too. I could be wrong, its been years

 

[LordBP]

You don't necessarily need to walk to get to cisterns and rooftop tanks; presumably they are located around the city for people's convenience...

And the food for Waterdeep is grown locally - they have several thousand square miles of farmland around the city, from the Dessarin to the east, to the coast to the south and west, to the environs of Amphail to the north. On top of that, Goldenfields provides a lot of food that's sent by wagon daily to the city (one book, SKT maybe, talks about the lines of wagons that make the trip). There would have to be grain silos for storage somewhere, probably scattered throughout the countryside, but close enough to ship in when grain stored in them is needed. Or maybe in some area just off the maps in a huge silo complex.

Some quick calculations: it's an approximately 75 mi x 75 mi area here (Amphail is "three days ride" from Waterdeep, and a day's ride is usually around 24 miles) , or 5625 square miles. There are 640 acres in a square mile, so 3,600,000 acres. In medieval times, an acre of land in England produced 7 to 15 bushels of wheat per acre ( Agriculture in the Middle Ages - Wikipedia ), so let's go with 10 as an approximate average. That's a potential of 36 million bushels of wheat per year. Each bushel will be 60 lbs of wheat (so 2,160,000,000 lbs of wheat). We'll turn those pounds of wheat into pounds of bread (although the addition of water and other ingredients means that it's not an exact equivalent) - each pound of bread contains approximate 1000 calories, and an adult needs around 2000 calories, or approximately 2 loaves of bread per day, or 730 per year. 2,160,000,000/730 = 2,958,904 adults that can be fed if the entire area is used for farmland. That's enough to feed the city and the population around to actually grow the crops. Presumably due to magic, yields, especially from Goldenfields, will likely be much higher than this. Conversely, obviously some of the land will not be arable, or would be used for other purposes, probably even a substantial percentage. But it definitely looks like the city can easily feed itself just from its environs. As a side note, aren't Imperial units fun lol.

I would think the grain silos/granaries would be located in towns/Waterdeep, so they could be defended. You would definitely want a lot of grain in Waterdeep itself in case of siege. Goldenfields is an interesting subject as it was around 20-30 sq miles (12,800-19,200 acres). If you go with the what you have for wheat (around 1 million calories per acre or 600 lbs per acre) and assume the entire acreage can be used for crops, then it could support 12,800-19,200 people. Now if you say that it could produce the same as the average we can today (around 15 million calories per acre (for corn/potatoes) or 9,000 lbs per acre ), then it could support 192,000-288,000 people for an entire year. Since Goldenfields is right by the river, it should be using it for the transport of the grain/food downstream to either Zundbridge (which doesn't have the dock space at all) or Waterdeep directly as it would be much faster and much cheaper than sending it via wagon (especially since most wagons would only take 1-2 tons at a time, so you would need around 33,398 to 66,795 wagon trips to supply the 366,000 average for Waterdeep's population).

Yeah, I actually started down the path of doing the numbers. The biggest issue is if we go with the Middle Ages as the standard, all the land around the village wasn't used for fields. A very small amount was actually used for fields and usually 1/4 to 1/3 was laying fallow at any given time. A village would need a large amount of forest for firewood, building materials, tool materials, etc. Also, they would have a large common meadow where all the villagers could graze their animals (house cows, pigs, sheep, goats, etc). The picture below even has a water mill that would be used to grind the wheat/rye into flour for use inn baking (water power is the way you want to go as hand grinding is possible, but very time consuming especially if you are baking for an entire village). From the below picture, you are probably going to have less than 1/8 of the total acreage assigned to the village actually plowed under for row crops.

For the calories in wheat, a pound of wheat contains around 1,551 calories which would be about half of what an average person would need in the Middle Ages (need at least 3,000 calories if you are doing manual labor which most if not all people of the time period would be doing). I only used the grain/bread as half of the calories per day as that was pretty normal for the Middle Ages (other half was usually root vegetables, meat (pork mainly), eggs, milk, cheese, butter).

 

[LordBP]

There are other factors that affect precipitation, such as prevailing wind direction and ocean currents. There is no reason to suppose Waterdeep has the exact same climate as Seattle. It might be more comparable to the west coast of Ireland, Glasgow, or Bergan.

Nor do you need huge mountains to trigger precipitation, the land just needs to be rising. In Lancashire, precipitation tends to pass over Blackpool*, which is flat and at sea level, to fall on the hills around 20 miles inland. Those hills are only around 1800 ft above sea level.


*It's wet enough compared to say California though!

The Seattle comment was something that I believe Greenwood said about the city, so that was my basis for the comparasion.

Don't disagree on the hills, but if you look at the maps of Waterdeep, the mountain which rises around 700-800 feet above the city is between it and the ocean, so the city would be more in the rain shadow of the mountain assuming the wind was coming straight in from the ocean.