Famine in the world

[Samloyal23]

A magical soup kitchen would be a great idea. Still, assuming a planet with at least 1/2 a billion people, there is going to be a lot of berks starving to death. That is going to lead to plagues as corpses start to rot and cannot be disposed of fast enough. The population is going to shrink very quickly, increasing the price of labour. Everything is going to change...

 

[Greenfield]

I see where you're going, Rumbletiger, and I'm way ahead of you.

First, as noted, there aren't that many high level casters.

Second, who do you think is behind all this mess?

Yeah, we've decided that an Illumian cabal is behind the mess. The actual means of getting volcanoes to erupt all over the place hasn't been settled. We've actually seen a couple of different techniques, from imprisoning fire elementals inside them to magic rituals.

And their goal is, in the long term, to rule the world.

To FranktheDM: The world isn't pitch black, just perennially overcast. Crop yields are down, but not to the point of all plant life dying.

But you're on the right track in other ways. Enrichment will increase potential yield by a third, but that's only "potential" yield. With the lack of direct sunlight, field production is down by about 50%. Add a third of that to the total and you're getting 66% of normal yield.

Also, a lot of the ideas here are being presented as if magic wasn't already a factor in current food production.

Prior to modern land management techniques, including motor driven tractors and harvesters, weed control chemicals and insecticides, irrigation, fertilized and high yield hybrid seeds, starvation was a real factor for a lot of the world. It still is in many places.

(I read an article tracking the spread of the potato against the pattern of city growth and nation building. The correlation was amazing. The potato is the plant with the highest food value per acre of any cultivated crop, and it isn't native to Europe. Any pre-Columbian setting will be with it. The number 2 in terms of food value per acre? Corn! Another product of the Americas.)

Now the presence of magic will have alleviated that, but magical aid in agriculture should already be factored into the system, pre-catastrophe. An annual "Blessing of the Fields" would be an accepted part of life in any well developed area. Use of magic to produce high end foods will already be a relatively common practice among the wealthy.

So the question isn't, "How much food can magic produce", but "How much *more* food can magic produce."

Think about it from a DM's perspective: How many times have you had to remind adrenaline-junkie players that they aren't the first person to ever think about using Teleport to advance trade profits, or Major Creation to produce counterfeit gold?

So now let's remind ourselves that this kind of magic has been around for quite a while, in one form or another, in our game worlds. Its use is already built in to the setting.

One trick of the bad guys, by the way, has been to remove Druids who can help alleviate the problems with things like Plant Growth.

 

[RUMBLETiGER]

I'm imagining a few small, well developed, well defended city states that thrive, while anarchy and Road Warrior-style living erupts outside these areas, scavenging and occasionally trying to assault the Fortress Cities.

You know, like Power Rangers RPM. You know you were thinkin it too.

 

[Greenfield]

Sounds like you're describing the fall of the Roman Empire.

Guess what our game world is based on?

And that is the stage that the adventurers are trying to prevent.

 

[Loonook]

Now the presence of magic will have alleviated that, but magical aid in agriculture should already be factored into the system, pre-catastrophe. An annual "Blessing of the Fields" would be an accepted part of life in any well developed area. Use of magic to produce high end foods will already be a relatively common practice among the wealthy.

Using Plant Growth on food crops is economically untenable. See my previous notes? In a perfect situation of India with their super-crops, automobiles and extremely reduced caloric intake you're looking at a cost/person of 2 GP (an unskilled month's salary per year) to get a Druid to bless their crops. If the settlement uses grain for their animals of the same effect... Trust me, a horse can eat, and you might as well go 2 horse/man share... And that's being silly for the numbers.

So a farm family with 2 plow animals, 4 children, 2 adults is going to be paying 10 GP for this spell just to be able to thrive in the economy (I'll assume Children to eat half). That is almost a half year's wages to support growth.

Plant Growth at cost from the local Sage is great for indigo, cardamon, low-yield high-price crops. It is a money-loss situation for most...

Also, flesh created through Stone to Flesh is edible... The Vital statement is there just to prevent you from forging Flesh Golems from statues. The spell has been used for years for this purpose... I don't understand the hate.

Also... These people are going around and actively assassinating Druids... That is just silly and seems like an out.

If there's no magic available I'm finding a Cockatrice or offering a Medusa all the wealth we find in the homes we offer our unique services to... And running through Rome saving people from famine (with a definitely possibility that at some point they will be turned back to flesh. Definitely.)

Slainte,

-Loonook.

 

[Samloyal23]

So petrifying people as a form of suspended animation to preserve them until thing get better? I don't see that many people being willing to be turned into statues and trusting they won't be broken up and converted into paper weights and novelty art...

What I see is millions of people starving to death despite the best efforts of druids and wizards because there are never going to be enough spellcasters to compensate for the bad harvests. Anarchy, war, and disease follow fast on the heals of poverty and starvation...

 

[RUMBLETiGER]

I would very much enjoy playing in your campaign.

And for the fun of it, I'd try to play a non-caster. As difficult as that is for me to do.

 

[jefgorbach]

[MENTION=6669384]Greenfield[/MENTION]: I can see your point regarding form being important to Stone-to-flesh, however I suspect its more a question of whether the source of stone was already living or not, thus an animated stone golem becomes an animated flesh golem and an inanimate statue becomes inanimate flesh (ie corpse). Thus a solid stone block of xyz dimensions becomes a solid meat block of xyz dimensions.

[MENTION=1164]frankthedm[/MENTION]: true, making Overgrowth the better option. Enrichment provides the POTENTIAL to increase the normal harvest by 33% NEXT year whereas Overgrowth specificly triggers ultra-fast-growth on grasses (like grain), bushes (berries), and vines (peas, tomatoes, melons) thereby dramatically shorten the time between harvests THIS year.

I think Greenfield indicated the twilight conditions will reduce crop yields by 50%, so double-harvesting via Overgrowth SHOULD negate the issue ... provided there are sufficient druids available to accomplish the task; which he indicated is also a problem.

 

[James the Newbie]

What about the fishing industry, while pollution kills a lot of sea life, that is over longer spans of time, so imagine those who can catch enough to feed more than themselves, they will find themselves getting more and more money, and some aristocrat will notice (I presume) This would lead to a fishing boom by the ocean and river towns, and of the few plants that grow under water, well there lack of nutrition is notable, but not too much of a worry for those who are starved. (I would imagine if they could, a particularly thriving ocean town would invest in a teleportation circle to the capitol, which may include an interesting defence element to traders.)

I don't know if I brought up the idea of using a different plain and opening a gate/portal to one to grow mass amounts of food? But it seems like something the clerics or tinkering arcanists might try?

And back to magic (As everyone defaults to some how, I do understand they are in hiding)

__________

Polymorph any object

Changed Subject Is: Increase to Duration Factor1
Add all that apply. Look up the total on the next table.
Same kingdom (animal, vegetable, mineral) +5
Same class (mammals, fungi, metals, etc.) +2
Same size +2
Related (twig is to tree, wolf fur is to wolf, etc.) +2
Same or lower Intelligence +2

So we need to get 9+ here and we need to @#!? conservation of mass
Lets pick a piece of steak
If we transmute it to a larger steak that's +5 for kingdom +2 for related and +2 for same or lower intelligence

_______________________
At 100 cu foot per level, a level 16 could make 1600 cu feet of meat per casting doing it 3 times is 4800 cu feet of meat

At one cubic foot of meat per person, that feeds 57600 people

So I do agree feeding a city of 1,000,000 is nigh on impossible as you would need 18 of these level 16 (pretty high, especialy with lack of casters) but still, that is a lot of fed people eating what is going to be fairly good meat.

(This could be done with fruit or veg too)

Now lets go to one level 20 caster an even more bizzare twist of fate, thats 12 castings of this a day so four times the produce so 230400 people fed, that may be hoping for too much, but that would certainly solve 1/5 of the issue.


... then a similar evil wizard comes along and transmutes something highly toxic into meat, makes it last one week before reverting, and kills an entire city, would be possible, and the impact absoluty devastating beyond measure - Really dont know what to think of a bad guy who would do that. A necromancer looking for corpses and a new base though...

 

[Samloyal23]

What about the fishing industry, while pollution kills a lot of sea life, that is over longer spans of time, so imagine those who can catch enough to feed more than themselves, they will find themselves getting more and more money, and some aristocrat will notice (I presume) This would lead to a fishing boom by the ocean and river towns, and of the few plants that grow under water, well there lack of nutrition is notable, but not too much of a worry for those who are starved. (I would imagine if they could, a particularly thriving ocean town would invest in a teleportation circle to the capitol, which may include an interesting defence element to traders.)

The ocean needs sunlight, too. Phytoplanktons need light to grow, and they make up the base of the aquatic ecology, being eaten by many of the fish that people would rely on. So it may take longer but eventually fishing production would drop just like farm production...