D&D General Need wheat. Too dangerous. (worldbuilding)

[Guang]

I've been having a suspension of belief recently over a commodity that is buyable just about anywhere - bread.

Here's what got me stuck:

1. Bread is a cheap, freely available staple food.
2. You need huge fields outside the walls to make lots of bread.
3. Huge fields outside the walls will inevitably be attacked and overrun.
4. No more bread.

Assuming 1-3 to be true, how do you fix this problem while keeping bread generally cheap and plentiful?

Long distance trade from a fabled land of wheat where there are no monsters? Dwarven underdark wheat, grown in deep basements, if there is such a thing?
I'm just drawing a blank, since every town should be surrounded by acres and acres of wheat fields, and so many places in many different settings, that just isn't possible. 1 cup of flour would need maybe three square feet of wheat plants. That's an awful lot of land to protect.

ideas pls?

 

[Charlaquin]

Adventurers

 

[Ancalagon]

I've been having a suspension of belief recently over a commodity that is buyable just about anywhere - bread.

Here's what got me stuck:

1. Bread is a cheap, freely available staple food.
2. You need huge fields outside the walls to make lots of bread.
3. Huge fields outside the walls will inevitably be attacked and overrun.
4. No more bread.

Assuming 1-3 to be true, how do you fix this problem while keeping bread generally cheap and plentiful?

Long distance trade from a fabled land of wheat where there are no monsters? Dwarven underdark wheat, grown in deep basements, if there is such a thing?
I'm just drawing a blank, since every town should be surrounded by acres and acres of wheat fields, and so many places in many different settings, that just isn't possible. 1 cup of flour would need maybe three square feet of wheat plants. That's an awful lot of land to protect.

ideas pls?

So, you are talking about wheat, but really, what you are concerned about is agriculture. It doesn't matter if you are growing wheat, rice, barley, turnips, or you have sheep grazing, agriculture need lots of land.

Agriculture cannot co-exists with large quantities of rampaging monsters. You are completely right about this. This means that there has to be "civilized" areas where agriculture is possible. Areas with lots of monsters simply don't have a lot of humans living there. It's "the wilderness".

The best solution is to have "wild" areas and "agricultural" areas. I will note that there is a LOT of bad world design out there.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Functional high magic that let's Fantasy be Fantastic instead of 'special'.. Raise magical stone walls.

 

[humble minion]

The firstborn of every farmer is taught that on the winter solstice, a human sacrifice must be given in each small town to He Who Walks Between The Rows, to ensure the fields and harvest are protected from the monsters that stalk the wild. The chief minister of nearby cities know this, and quietly make condemned prisoners available. But some years there aren't enough prisoners, or some prisoners escape en route, and then the harvestmen don their mouthless masks and wheatsheaf crowns, and with sharpened scythes seek out travellers whose blood can feed the soil for the coming year.

Or else, more prosaically, what @Ancalagon said...

 

[Enevhar Aldarion]

Remember that in the real world, or at least in Europe, the vast majority of war and battles happened between Spring planting and Fall harvesting. Maybe your fantasy kingdom maintains that same large army during that time of year and no one is foolish enough to attack while the crops are growing. Or in a fantasy world, maybe the monsters are only active when the weather turns cold, and in the hotter part of the year, they stay inside their deep, dark tunnel systems.

It was also not vast fields of crops, like in modern times. The individual farmer, with a small section of planted land, or maybe a local lord with a decent, but still relatively small area, that their serfs farmed for them. So a village or two, or some small farms, getting pillaged and burned will not have an effect on the bigger cities.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Everyone else has made great points, but I’ll add some fantasy ideas that don’t require blood sacrifice (as much as I like the harvestmen with their mouthless masks).

• Urban farming is a real thing and the only modern tech it requires is plumbing, and even that can be arranged in a high precipitation area. Lots of flat roofs with earth and crops, hanging “gardens” full of produce, fruit trees in every street, etc.
• Walled farms. Corrugated brick walls can be quite strong with fewer bricks by not being as thick as a strait wall has to be, and intelligent birds can be trained to keep watch and summon help.
• Standing armies that protect the land as their primary gig.
• Greenseers (civilized druids) that command beasts to protect the farms.
  
  

 

[Ancalagon]

Another element of answer - one that is very 5e:

Large number of humans are scary as heck. A hundred archers will murderize most monsters with ease. So it is conceivable that a portion of the wilderness has been cleared by humans for agricultural use.

Who cleared it? Maybe by those archer levies. Maybe there is an empire with legions. Witchhunters, monster slayers, adventurers.

In some cases perhaps there are alliances, or compromises, between monsters and humans. There IS a troll under the bridge, and you better pay the toll - that's his job. In Warhammer you can hire ogre mercenaries. Feys fed with offering of milk and cookies by peasants, keeping other monsters at bays. Goblins given free reign of the sewers who naturally defend them from other monsters. A dragon, who demands a yearly tribute but defends the valley. A vampire who has a blood tax.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Little known fact: most monsters have gluten intolerance.

Your fields are safe.

 

[Charlaquin]

To give a more serious answer, 3 is just not compatible with 1 and 2. If you feel this discrepancy needs addressing, you need to change at least one of those three world building assumptions. Either bread must not be a cheap staple food, the wheat fields must be built within well-defended walls, or attacks on wheat fields that overrun them must not be inevitable.

There are many ways you could go about this. Maybe bread is actually very expensive, and its role as a staple food is replaced by something else that can be grown more safely, or produced magically. Maybe developed cities make defense of their wheat fields a priority, protecting them with sturdy walls, well armed and trained militias, and/or magic. Or, maybe attacks on wheat fields just aren’t very common.

EDIT: Or you can just, you know, handwave it away. I’ve never seen a player even pay attention world building details like this, let alone care about them.