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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lonely Tylenol" data-source="post: 3192517" data-attributes="member: 18549">Oddly enough, magic works better as a hand-wave for the Underdark than it does for the surface because the Underdark monsters are so weird.  When you start asking what all those dire bears and assassin vines are eating, the answer is probably not magic.  Still, I tend to think that a realistic ecology is possible so long as the really big predators are sufficiently rare.  I mean, once upon a time, there were many extremely large carnivores and herbivores living on the earth under essentially the same light conditions that we're living under now.  If there's enough energy to keep Albertosaurus in meat, there's probably enough energy to keep a bulette alive.  There are so many factors involved in the stability of food webs that I can, from an ecological perspective, use those instead of magic as my hand-waving factor to explain the generally predator-heavy environment in a D&D world.  Of course, it helps if you have large tracts of uninhabited land.  It's easiest to maintain believability if I set up the geography of the world myself.That's demonstrably false, although I don't want to derail the thread to prove it.That might actually work if we throw magic into the equation.  There's a ton of energy in neutrinos, but there's this problem that they don't interact with matter, so you can't use the energy.  If you had a magical "neutrino trap", it might provide energy on an order similar to that of visible light, although I don't have the numbers with which to calculate the neutrino energy flux at the earth compared to the photon energy flux at that distance.</blockquote>

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