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Message: <blockquote data-quote="gizmo33" data-source="post: 4290401" data-attributes="member: 30001">Yes - The Ties that Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England.Barbara A. Hanawalt.  A book mentioned in the bibliography of the "Magical Medieval Society" mentioned above.  I haven't gotten that far into it, but I think it has some interesting things to say about peasant standards of living, in particular the "all gruel" diet that you suppose was the norm.  But the best part IMO are the morbidly humorous anecdotes from court records.Yes, but the 1 sp/day for labor costs, and the other commodity costs in the 3E PHB don't appear to be boomtown.Perhaps, but are you sure about this?  The book I cite above IIRC doesn't back this up.  In fact, it's not the only book that raises questions about this.  Protien is not an optional component in a human's diet - and in any case the statistics for livestock ownership of peasants is something that's been documented in several books I've seen - with numbers above '0' across the board.  (Remember, those wolves are after *something*)If the campaign setting that you're suggesting is really a series of isolated thorps, then I would think hunting would supplement the diet with a lot more meat than would even be historical.  Or perhaps the villagers just abstain from poaching based on the honor system, because a band of sworn foresters that would enforce such laws would also be adversaries for the PC bandits.20-80 adults worth of resources, of course. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":-)" title="Smile    :-)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":-)" />  How is the population of a single thorp relate to what we're talking about though?  There would be many, many such places within a single day's slow oxcart ride of a central fortified location.  I never meant to suggest the "absurd" notion that a school of magic be supported by a single thorp of people, but I'm not sure why that would have be relevant to the discussion anyway.  I suggested that if you looked at the population needed to support a knight's fee, and the resources that it represented, that you could determine the equivalent values for a company of rangers.Or look at it this way - say you've got 95% of the population able support the other 5%.  That means 100 commoners could feed 5 rangers.  Now maybe a ranger wants to live at 10 times the standard of living of a peasant.  That means 200 commoners support a ranger.  Could a band of rangers be 10 of them?  That's 2000 commoners.  In a 10-mile radius area (maybe a three-hour forced march/jog for the rangers) I think you can pretty easily fit 2000 commoners.I guess you could.  I thought the goal was to figure out what kind of loot you'd get from a peasant.First of all, side-stepping suggests something deliberate on my part.  I don't really know why you said that, it strikes me as being rude and presumptuous but maybe I've misunderstood what you wrote.  I've tried to address your points the best I can.What's "relatively isolated" mean.  My general notion is that agricultural settlements will mostly be within a few hours ride of the local market town, for the obvious reasons.  If it's a few hours for a farmer and his rickity cart full of produce, then it's a much quicker journey for a motivated patrol of rangers or wizards.The presence of something like a Kirin may have nothing to do with a imminent attack.  The amount of such monsters depends on your campaign, but angels, friendly fey, a wise Kirin don't confine themselves to war-torn areas in real world mythology, FWIW.And who said anything about "droves" of adventurer type NPCs?  I was just suggesting that such characters would be available at some level of defense.  "Hundreds and thousands of square miles" may be the area, but response time is a function of linear distance, not area.  Like I said, many thorps could fit within sight of a watchtower.That's cool.  I think that 5th-8th level adventurers would make reasonably successful bandits.</blockquote>

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