D&D 5E Setting up a hold

[NotAYakk]

1. An Acre is the amount of land a single man can plow with an ox in a year
   An Acre of land yeilds 2 - 6 bushels of crop
2. it requires around 20 bushels to feed someone per year.
3. A Medieval Household had around 5 people (so required around 100 crop bushels)
4. Most peasants had access to around 20-30 acres/year to support their household including animals (including an Ox to plough) and also the Rent/Taxc they paid to the Manor (ie your Stronghold).
5. (NB In England Manor would tax the Hide (120acres) or 4 households).

By "plow" do you mean "clear"? Because if it means "plow so you can plant a crop on it, and you have to do this every year", then by your math everyone starves and dies a horrible death.

 

[Tonguez]

By "plow" do you mean "clear"? Because if it means "plow so you can plant a crop on it, and you have to do this every year", then by your math everyone starves and dies a horrible death.

Opps yes sorry, that should be DAY not Year

but yes there were a whole lot of famines in the era where everyone did die horribly

 

[Horwath]

There's a few things to keep in mind for food. Chickens are probably some of your highest yields for actual space required to keep them alive. That is until we get into things like insects.

Humans can survive on protein from insects, and the mass of insects you can versus the caloric output is pretty astonishing. As a bonus, edibile insects haven't changed that much in the last few hundred thousand years so regardless of your chosen level of technology the bugs are there waiting to be munched.

Do not forget rabbits. They are very low maintenance, they grow fast, they breed like...well...rabbits, they need small space to dwell.

They are little too low on fat content so you might need to supplement that meat with pork meat, cheese or milk.

pigs are also great as you can feed them almost everything.

No need to waste all that meat from failed orc raiding atempts on your Dwarven stronghold

 

[Zardnaar]

You can produce a lot of food on a small amount of land if you grow grapes, carrots etc.

Fruit trees another option. Lots of food off a single tree.

We used to space lettuce at around 30cm iirc. Planted by machine thinned by hand it sucks.

 

[Jd Smith1]

Assume your city has a 1 mile radius and you can exploit land within 5 miles of the edge of the city.

If 50% of that land can be exploited at near modern rates (using magic to keep fertility up/grow animals faster/etc), each supporting 3 people for a year, that is 35,000 acres, and can maintain a population of 105,000 people in that city. Which is just ridiculously huge for a pre-modern city.

You might have a ring of watch towers a mile further out than the cultivated land.

You'd herd the animals into shelter during the dangerous night. And the cropland would have to be somehow resistant to being eaten or destroyed; possibly the cropland would be closer to the city, and somewhat defended even at night.

Smaller scale versions of that can work for even tiny settlements. So long as there is some way to have a holdfast that survives the night, a blessed ring of defence around your house that usually keeps the night monsters at bay.

Such smallholds might only work in relatively civilized lands, where the greater beasts don't roam. Nowhere is perfectly safe.

To defend your city, you'd fine a place where the ley lines are sufficient to power the runes and rings of protection, and fertility of the land is high enough. They'd start as small holds, exploiting the ley lines to survive. Over time they'd clear more and more land around them, always at a high price. Satellite holds would open up nearby at good spots and trade with the growing main hold, and eventually be swallowed up.

--

Now, why? I want a world with plenty of ruins and the like, but also with everything from cities down to hamlets and cottages. In the real world when huge cities appeared, there was little in the way of dangerous wilderness anywhere close, and no great beasts usually on the continent!

By forcing the cities to be small and tight, and using fertility-magic as the excuse to generate modern yields, we can have a great metropolis that is not that far from places to adventure.

The danger of this society keeps their population from exploding. Surplus peasants can be used at the dangerous job of clearing new land, from which only a small percentage survive. So you can avoid the "50 peasants for every non-peasant" population; that 100,000 person city doesn't need 5 million peasants covering all of the land to the horizon. Instead, the city has 10,000 farmer and herders, 40% dependents, and 50% tradesmen, priests, soldiers - city dwellers. A real metropolis.

(That is still a much higher percentage of food producers than modern western society has. And as I didn't assume cheap transport, the food production ends up being right near the cities.)

This also means that there is plenty of land for heroes to clear and settle, and that your skill with a blade and spell is as important as your macroeconomic backing to produce a functioning settlement. Which is awesome for D&D adventure hooks.

A more "realistic" clearing situation basically makes such clearing be a capital project funded by some king, where they burn a pile of money and resources to slowly increase their kingdom's wealth over a generation or more. A unit of farmland might have a surplus production of 0.5%-5% of what it cost to feed the animals and humans who cleared it for a year depending on how "lucky" you got (otherwise, it would have been cleared long ago). So now you are talking about investing 100 tonnes of food to get back 1 tonne of food produced per year; as you cannot store food long-term, that is better than letting it rot or letting peasants starve and revolt. But again, that isn't a fun D&D game of conquest!

With the ability to expand settlements limited by valor instead of the effort to clear the land, the PCs are in a great place to become kings.

The rule of warfare is that static defense is seldom is a winning strategy.

 

[Horwath]

You can produce a lot of food on a small amount of land if you grow grapes, carrots etc.

Fruit trees another option. Lots of food off a single tree.

We used to space lettuce at around 30cm iirc. Planted by machine thinned by hand it sucks.

sure, but those are next to nothing in calories comparing to others

Potatoes are by far No.1 in calories per area, and pork is No.1 in meat

 

[Zardnaar]

sure, but those are next to nothing in calories comparing to others

Potatoes are by far No.1 in calories per area, and pork is No.1 in meat

Fruits easier to pick than potatoes. I've harvested both. Worked on a market garden as a teenager.

Potatoes may not be available either ymmv they came from the new world. Depends on your D&D world.

Harvesting enough for yourself us easy or even a surplus.bits when you supply in bulk it's hard work.

 

[NotAYakk]

The rule of warfare is that static defense is seldom is a winning strategy.

Yes! But dominant humans (or other humanoid) means there are basically no monsters (they where hunted for body parts in prehistory), the dwarven hold is either indefensible/unviable or already owned by some human (how many functioning abandoned keeps with fertile land nearby in human history?), and non-dominant intelligent beings are limited to niches thst humans cannot live in.

A humanity on the edge, barely able to hold back the night using every ounce of their magical might, provides adventures for bands of valorous humans against the monsters. A dominant humanity means the era of monsters must be over, and humans are everywhere already. There is only a blink of an eye between those two; in our world, it happened in the stone age (except in some places like the pacific, where advanced outriggers where needed to settle). "empty lands" since then usually already had humans in them, you just had better tech so you killed them, and/or (NA/SA) disease spread ahead of you and you expanded into a post-apocalyptic area.

But I guess we can pretend that aggressive dominant humans and wildernesses full of dangerous monsters and opportunity are compatible.

 

[Jd Smith1]

Yes! But dominant humans (or other humanoid) means there are basically no monsters (they where hunted for body parts in prehistory), the dwarven hold is either indefensible/unviable or already owned by some human (how many functioning abandoned keeps with fertile land nearby in human history?), and non-dominant intelligent beings are limited to niches thst humans cannot live in.

A humanity on the edge, barely able to hold back the night using every ounce of their magical might, provides adventures for bands of valorous humans against the monsters. A dominant humanity means the era of monsters must be over, and humans are everywhere already. There is only a blink of an eye between those two; in our world, it happened in the stone age (except in some places like the pacific, where advanced outriggers where needed to settle). "empty lands" since then usually already had humans in them, you just had better tech so you killed them, and/or (NA/SA) disease spread ahead of you and you expanded into a post-apocalyptic area.

But I guess we can pretend that aggressive dominant humans and wildernesses full of dangerous monsters and opportunity are compatible.

The simple fact is that a military force that remains upon the defensive will be defeated in time. You are also confusing population density with 'empty lands'.

The most valid form of a setting is that of Humans & demi-Humans with superior arcane and manufacturing skills in conflict with non-Human races who possess much greater birth rates and dynamic warrior cultures.

Such a situation will produce an ebb and flow of power projection that will result in plentiful ruins and constant danger.

There are countless historical examples; to name just a few, the Spanish projection into Texjas in the 1600-1700s, central Texas in the 1830s-40s, the northern United States immediately after the Civil War, just to name a few. A better depiction could be the history of central/south England from the withdrawal of Rome to the Norman invasion.

 

[jasper]

....Surplus peasants can be used at the dangerous job of clearing new land, from which only a small percentage survive...
Jasper, "but but I don't want to go into the woods to chop wood.
Crowd, "Go on. Go on. Think of the delicious walnuts. and the good wooden table.
Jasper, chop chop."Oh my gawd it is Treant!"
Ellen, "That going to hurt in the morning."