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

[NotAYakk]

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?

Magic. Ley lines and nodes fuel ritual msgiv thst enables high intensity agriculture. Like beyond today.

These are geographically limited by natural resources (the ley lines and nodes). So we get small areas of farming with high yields, and dangerous wilderness nearby. This also prevents the strategy from covering the land in farms.

Urban areas and homes are also warded against dangers. The protection is limited, more like sanctuary (makes you less noticed/ignored) than a forcefield, but being inside your home at night is a real boon.

Other ways of dealing with it exist, like monster herding (dinos), low intensity hunter-gathering, etc.

 

[Hussar]

I wonder if Monster World is a good depiction of what a D&D world would actually look like.

 

[Chaosmancer]

We Polynesians are just natural badass and all start at level 3
(seriously I have uncles that use to swim with the local sharks, unfortunately they’re a lot rarer these days (both sharks and uncles)

that said Sharks need to be respected but generally Human isnt on their menu - thats different in DnD where some monster entries clearly state that their preferred food is humanoid

If I understand correctly, I am sorry for your loss. But yes, I agree with your second paragraph. Most animals aren't "man-eaters" by nature. Human's taste bad and we are generally more trouble than we are worth.

And yet quite a few monsters and foes in DnD consider people to be delicacies, which changes how they would interact with human populations.

 

[Chaosmancer]

I suggested it because naturalism can get us into the "Is it okay to kill babies?" line of questioning.

Not having monsters be natural is only one solution. Just one that doesn't seem to be proposed much.

It does come up as a solution, but generally it involves a retcon, because for certain monsters that question never really comes up. No one really questions the morality of killing Kruthik, because they are basically super-ants that eat everything and wreck the ecosystem.

 

[Hussar]

If I understand correctly, I am sorry for your loss. But yes, I agree with your second paragraph. Most animals aren't "man-eaters" by nature. Human's taste bad and we are generally more trouble than we are worth.

And yet quite a few monsters and foes in DnD consider people to be delicacies, which changes how they would interact with human populations.

By the same token though, we can't really point to how monsters see D&D people as food but, then ignore the other side where various monsters and whatnot would probably have no real problems getting along with people and would likely see the benefit of it.

Like I said, most D&D worlds don't really delve too deep into this. I was being a bit facetious mentioning Monster Hunter, but, really, I do think that that world is probably far closer to what an actual D&D world would look like. Far more that than Middle Earth. No offense to Tolkien, but, when it came to building an actual world, he didn't do a very good job of it. And, since he's often held up as the sort of default standard for fantasy, most of the fantasy worlds that have proceeded from there haven't really been terribly well grounded in actually trying to make a functioning world.

IOW, far too many English majors and nowhere near enough biology majors. It's kind of like how fantasy world maps are often completely borked. Again, far too many English majors and nowhere near enough geology majors.

 

[Ancalagon]

I note that deep dragon increase fertility in a 6 mile radius...

 

[Hussar]

I was thinking about this thread while looking at some maps on Reddit and a thought did hit me. So many of the villages and whatnot in D&D would never really look like they are shown. Take Phandalin. Fantastic module. Great intro module to D&D and probably one of the better written modules of all time.

Now, look at the map:

Here we have a fair sized town, with no other major settlements nearby. What's missing from this picture? The wall, such as it is, is broken and largely abandoned, from the looks of it. No fort of any kind, not even a simple motte and bailey arrangement. No defenses whatsoever. In a town in the middle of Sword Coast.

Now, look at this:

That's Castelifollit de la Roca in Spain. THAT'S what a fantasy town would look like. You could hold back an army in this location with a few dozen troops. Ok, sure, maybe this is an extreme example, but, still, things like palisade walls, motte and bailey castles, that sort of thing, should be pretty much the standard for any D&D settlement. Everyone lives inside the walls and works during the daytime outside in the farms.

 

[Ixal]

I was thinking about this thread while looking at some maps on Reddit and a thought did hit me. So many of the villages and whatnot in D&D would never really look like they are shown. Take Phandalin. Fantastic module. Great intro module to D&D and probably one of the better written modules of all time.

Now, look at the map:

Here we have a fair sized town, with no other major settlements nearby. What's missing from this picture? The wall, such as it is, is broken and largely abandoned, from the looks of it. No fort of any kind, not even a simple motte and bailey arrangement. No defenses whatsoever. In a town in the middle of Sword Coast.

Now, look at this:

That's Castelifollit de la Roca in Spain. THAT'S what a fantasy town would look like. You could hold back an army in this location with a few dozen troops. Ok, sure, maybe this is an extreme example, but, still, things like palisade walls, motte and bailey castles, that sort of thing, should be pretty much the standard for any D&D settlement. Everyone lives inside the walls and works during the daytime outside in the farms.

Both Phandalin and Castelifollit have the same problem from a D&D perspective.
No enough farms.

Using Phandalin as example you need a lot of farmland to sustain it, far more than those few specks of farmland on the map. Even when you have to support a larger number of non-farmers.
Having a wall was also something villages did not have but were reserved to towns. In fact, having a church and a wall is what defined being a town in the first place. Although in D&D that can be different.

As for Castelifollit, that is not as defensible as you think. Part of one side has a cliff, but the other three sides are open and as you can see from the small trail to the right you can also get up from the bottom of the cliff to the village on a slope.

 

[Chaosmancer]

I was thinking about this thread while looking at some maps on Reddit and a thought did hit me. So many of the villages and whatnot in D&D would never really look like they are shown. Take Phandalin. Fantastic module. Great intro module to D&D and probably one of the better written modules of all time.

Now, look at the map:

Here we have a fair sized town, with no other major settlements nearby. What's missing from this picture? The wall, such as it is, is broken and largely abandoned, from the looks of it. No fort of any kind, not even a simple motte and bailey arrangement. No defenses whatsoever. In a town in the middle of Sword Coast.

Now, look at this:

That's Castelifollit de la Roca in Spain. THAT'S what a fantasy town would look like. You could hold back an army in this location with a few dozen troops. Ok, sure, maybe this is an extreme example, but, still, things like palisade walls, motte and bailey castles, that sort of thing, should be pretty much the standard for any D&D settlement. Everyone lives inside the walls and works during the daytime outside in the farms.

Careful, pointing out that places out near dangerous enemy forces (there are literally orcs scouting Phandalin to destroy it for the SECOND TIME) might have walls to defend them gets you accused of making everything a Death World where civilization cannot thrive.

But yeah, I agree with you. DnD maps do not really take into account the actual facts of the world, instead just copying the medieval maps of places that were deep in uncontested territory.

 

[Hussar]

Well, of course you can get to the village. Would be a really strange one if you couldn't.

But, on the scale of that map for Phandalin, it's not surprising they wouldn't show the farmland. The map does end some 30 yards from the edge of town. I would presume that there would be significant farms surrounding the town that aren't being shown. That's not really a problem, IMO. The lack of wall, anything remotely resembling a defensive line or frankly any defenses whatsoever is a much larger issue.

As for your notion that walls were reserved for towns, I would point to the rather large amount of motte and bailey arrangements all over England. Doing a bit of googling for something that looks like this: