NOW LIVE! -- ZEITGEIST: Death of the Author for D&D 5E on Kickstarter! Murder. Conspiracy. Secrets. A remote manor. An adventure for D&D 5E.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="overgeeked" data-source="post: 8269118" data-attributes="member: 86653">The Masque of the Red Death stuff might be right up your alley. It mostly takes the Ravenloft tropes and uses them in "historical" London circa 1890. The books might have relevant info.London had a population of 5.567 million in 1891. Depending on the time and the technology, you'd need between 1/2 and 1 acre of land to feed one person for a year. So that's between 2.7835 million acres and 5.567 million acres of farmland, or between 4350 square miles and 8700 square miles. Probably on the lower end due to industrialization. The smaller end is a patch of land 66 miles by 66 miles; the larger end is a patch 94 miles by 94 miles. The map of the Valley of Barovia from Curse of Strahd covers about 17 miles wide by about 11 miles tall, or 187 square miles...or about 120,000 acres. So if every inch of it were farmland, you could feed between 120,000 and 240,000 people. To feed London, you'd need every inch of about 24 Barovias. The entire valley, not just the town. London worked because of trade, travel, and colonialism.The only way you could pull that off in Ravenloft is magic. Lots and lots of magic. Goodberry and create food & water. Despite what the text of create food & water says, according to the PHB on food and water, a person needs one pound of food and one gallon of water per day. So cf&w feeds 45 people for a day and waters 30 people for a day. Goodberry feeds up to ten creatures, regardless of size. So you'd be smart to feed bigger creatures goodberry and give the by the pound food to medium-sized creatures. But that's a 1st-level slot (goodberry) and a 3rd-level slot (cf&w).As long as the misty borders stay open, it could work just fine...as long as the mists didn't eat the travelers. Or the Vistani were the traveling merchants keeping things working. As long as they're guaranteed safe passage by the mists. And that would radically alter their nature in the setting. And wildly alter the setting itself.Magic. Going underground, though I'm not sure how much cavern space you need to grow food. You could have magical sunlight. Something like a permanent daylight spell. You could have monsters and animals play a much larger role in food. Especially regenerating monsters like trolls. You could turn them into the primary source of meat.Trolls are large in 5E, which is unhelpful, but they're listed as 9' tall in 2E. A 9' tall person with the low end of average BMI should weigh about 310 lbs. Depending on where you draw the line on what's edible, you could get as much as 80% of that weight in food. For the average troll that's 248 pounds of food. As long as you don't use acid or fire, it'll always grow back. The average troll has 84 hit points and regenerates 10 hp per round, or about 12% of itself every six seconds. Convert that to weight and it's 29.76 pounds every six second round of regeneration, or 4.96 pounds every second. There are 86,400 seconds in a day...so there are 428,544 pounds of troll meat in a day...So you could feed London on 13 trolls a day.</blockquote>

Verification