Interesting tidbit about Towns and Farmland
Someone has posted an interesting tidbit about towns and the size of farmland that is needed to support the town:
https://imgur.com/6Nuunuh
I wonder where this puts some of the larger D&D cities...
https://imgur.com/6Nuunuh
I wonder where this puts some of the larger D&D cities...
Comments
Coastal tows would be able to offset some of that with fishing though, and some hunting may take place as well (although large scale hunting tends to quickly cause extinction)
And since you mention D&D, it really makes me think about those more exotic settings (Such as Dark Sun). The more "standard" settings, like Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk do have large farming areas, although probably not nearly large enough, but some other settings packs large amount of people in a city with a desert-type terrain going on forever.
And ancient Egypt is an example of a land surrounded by desert with large cities, no t only along the Nile, but in various oases, notably the Siwa oasis; Petra in Jordan, cities along the Silk road. Sure, these latter imported food, but they became rich on trade.
Food also spoils, which limits the distance it can be imported from. Many food preservation techniques do exists, but not everything can be easily preserved.
In the real world, these "problematically placed" cities usually limited themselves in size through natural processes, i.e. starvation if the population became larger than what could be imported. Very few fantasy cities seems to take things like this into account, assuming imports can be scaled indefinitely.
Do we know where the person is getting their numbers from?
I also wonder how livestock would change this information.
As luck would have it, Quenten already opened a topic whose online links and sources deal with exactly this kind of topic elsewhere on the PF Forum. For anyone wishing to explore further, I found six topics on Reddit with a quick search that provide a lot more material to examine and contemplate, which specifically handle the topic from a gaming-world building perspective:
How much farmland is needed to support a city?,
How many farms does it take to support a small trading city?,
Dungeons & Dragons & Economics,
Mega-Tutorial on worldbuilding Medieval Towns, Cities, Population, Professions, Armies, Technology, Justice, and Trade!,
Question About Population Density and Required Farmland Needed to Maintain a Medieval Mega City, and
To feed a medieval european city with a population of ~10.000, how large would the agricultural land around it have to be?.
There'll be more elsewhere, I'm sure, as this wasn't an attempt to be comprehensive by any means on my part!
What's interesting to me about all this is none of it's new. As the early RPGs, especially the original, D&D, grew out of wargaming, there was already quite a strong emphasis on the historical realities behind the settings involved, drawing on the situation as established by the early to later 1970s for medieval Europe, and adapted, often with little alteration, into a fantasy setting. Mind you, how much of that was strictly adhered to is another matter! This blog posting, Agriculture in D&D, has some interesting, if brief, comments on the matter.
Of course, swapping real-world features into a fantasy setting isn't especially straightforward either. Few settings take much account of what adding widespread, if often low-level, magic use into the mix might have, for instance. So, for instance, effects such as magical food preservation techniques and magical transport can dramatically amend what size of areas, and where they need to be in relation to a settlement, are required to support what size of population.
I've been through those links and more, and still don't find lots of information regarding livestock and how they affect the relative areas.
Here is an interesting png I got from Reddit, showing the area of farmland needed if you need to show all the farmland needed to feed the settlement if you insist on putting all that is needed right beside the city. And NO settlement in the world was ever self-sufficient in resources, so what really is the problem.
Indeed the farmed livestock problem is particularly complex, because there are many gaps in the available information from real-world medieval settings, whether textual or archaeological. Aside from comments among the topics on Reddit I linked-to previously - which hint at something of the problems at least, although one or two do try to address the matter directly - I found a thread on StackExchange today that highlights the difficulties somewhat more clearly, sparked by a question regarding D&D world-building, Size of family-owned medieval farm?. Plus not all domesticated creatures are raised as food animals, such as draught oxen (ploughs, carts), riding and draught horses, yet still require feeding themselves. Pigs can thrive on relatively tiny land areas, including in areas of forest, and on "waste" food, whereas other domesticated quadrupeds (especially cattle and horses) are much "fussier" and need a lot more open grazing land to support themselves, aside from also needing winter fodder growing and storing, and shelter structures building. Again, such aspects merely increase how misleading the farmland area images are.
Then there is trade to consider. You could cover half that area in commercial forest if the land was more suited to growing trees than crops and trade with other cities via sea routes - exchanging timber for food produce. If you have metal ores or limestone you can quarry or mine the resources and trade using those.
Overall, while the food producing area required to feed a town or city is important, it is not the be-all and end-all. There are too many other factors not being considered here. So many real settlements have very few fields but rely entirely on some kind of resource they are processing and exporting to fund the food supply.
For a medieval context, I've seen as low as 3 acres per person to as high as 12 acres per person. I typically use a starting point of 5 acres per person when I creating a community. And that's the minimum farmland area for that community. It will always have much more, but not too much more as it takes time to plow and harvest.
Fortunately, the acre is more than a measure of surface area. It is also a measure of work. 1 acre is generally understood to be a single days work of a single person, both to plow (with an ox) and to harvest. So a 1200 acre land requires a 1200 man/days to work. So to harvest it within 10 days, you need to have 120 adults to perform the work. So it takes half the harvest to feed the working adults in the village while the other half can be sold for profit or store for lean times. That of course is using the 5 acre per person value explained above.
Inuit settlements are a good example of settlements that can thrive with no fields whatsoever.
I think we may be getting just a little bit to concerned about showing all the fields needed for a settlement in an RPG map. Its RPG. Maybe some of the food is produced by magic :P
I mean no disrespect to those players who want to see miles of farmland on their maps rather than the actual city that they'll be playing in, but this discussion made me giggle. My players would mock me to no end if I gave them a city map that was mostly farmland.
This is why we differentiate between regional and city maps. A regional map will likely show miles of farmland around a city. A city should show the city and a hint of where the farmland begins. Unless of course your adventure is all about chasing crows from the wheat fields and rats from the corn. LOL
Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find a reliable source of information about how much actual foodstuffs fishing actually supplied. I would love to have a good comparison where one fishing boat supplies the equivalent of x acres of farmland. That would be very useful when designing coastal communities, such as the town of Saltmarsh in D&D.
When I design towns or cities, I never bother with the actual farmland around the city as I would rather concentrate on the city itself and have it dominate the map. I only bother with fields when I design villages and small fiefs as in their case the fields does become part of their character.
While the accuracy of the data/representation can certainly be discussed, keeping things such as this in mind when designing cities helps to add a degree of realism. I never opt for perfect realism in my campaign, but I do try to make things seem somewhat realistic without having to resort to the "it's magic" explanation.
That desert city might be able to flourish in a hostile environment, but the food for it needs to come from somewhere. Where is that? And what valuable resources do they have to trade for that food? How much food is it realistic to bring in at all? How difficult is it to bring the food to the city? Limited local growth and limited opportunity for export means that the city wouldn't be able to grow large, while a city with ample local crops and/or food import opportunities can easily grow much larger.
Same is true for other resources. If no source for stone is nearby, where did that huge city wall come from?
This is why I love discussions like this and the demographics thread. They give me so many ideas for increasing that apparent realism in my campaign. It doesn't always show up on the maps, but the maps themselves are inspired by such things.
One of the rpg designers said he came up with a plant and animal unknown on Earth, and claimed it produced vast quantities of food when harvested. I think it was something like double or triple 'known' animals and plants on Earth could produce. He suggested similar for other people's game worlds.
I decided to do that for some areas, and not for others. It really hasn't come up during game play.
Myself, I am more of the "keep as much the same as on earth as possible". Makes it easier for me to find inspiration, makes it easier for players to understand and reason within any given situation, and makes it possible to google to find real-world data to base things on. This also make the special things stand more out.
Of course, many people would call my approach "boring" and "sucking the soul out of fantasy", but I find it works well for me and my group. They call me stingy with the magical items every now and then, but it is never a major topic.
What always surprised me is the size of fields in Europe as compared to the US. Today, 1 US farm feeds 166 people, and the US has 11,000,000 farms. Average size of a US Farm is 446 acres today, as compared to a French Farm 135 acres. They of course would not have had the capability of today's farms.
Apparently by the time of Columbus, Europe was having a hard time raising its own food, was depleting its fishing stocks, had a rising population, and of course did not have the potato. Major villages were supposed to be less than a day's walk apart. Probably, most families had a small garden, a cow, a pig, and some chickens. Even then, the population did not subsist of hunting. France in medieval times has about 25% of the European population (13.7 million?). I can't easily find a listing of french city populations for the time, but Arras today has approximately 41000 people (https://www.citypopulation.de/php/france-pasdecalais.php?cityid=62041)thats about the same size as Alexander the Great's army, which had a total strength of about 65000 (counting camp followers). (My google-fu is weak today.) The army's daily grain consumption for would be 195,000 lb for people, for the 6100 cavalry horses, 61,000, for 1300 baggage animals 13,000, and for 1,200 animals carrying provisions 11,210 lbs, for a DAILY total of 280,210 lbs of grain. They probably didn't get that much. But it gives an idea of how much food is required for a similar population.
The two attachments are about the same scale. One is obviously a screenshot from Google Earth and the other of the same region at about the same scale from http://www.francetopo.fr/.
So, you could portray a map with a fairly rich landscape centered on a large town with lots of opportunities for interaction in it and the surrounding towns and villages without worrying about the true size of the resources needed to support the town. After all, it's an adventure game, not a farming game. Logistics games, while interesting are not the most entertaining genre.
They also provide me with a nice visual understanding of the amount of farmland needed to support a given population. I'd love to have additional information expressed in terms of the contributions to these numbers in terms of hunting,fishing and livestock(including poultry), but that's MORE information, not less.
These maps might not show the whole picture, but they're aimed in the right direction. Certainly "magic-ing" it away or continuing to state that "it's complicated" isn't bringing more of the picture into focus.
Many of my players also want this type of information to be reflected in the world I run. They ask questions about food shipment schedules, distances between towns, villages and cities, and all sorts of crazy stuff.
Such and such town is two days ride, or a weeks ride, etc. are some of the answers the locals would give them. Details as they want simply wouldn't be available.
And asking too many questions of the locals could arouse suspicions of the local constabulary, the local duke, etc. that they could be gathering information for an invasion by enemies of the locals.
Okay, I'll accept that it is GM Day.
It's much better than, roll 3d4 = 7, roll 1d100 = 97,roll 3d12 = 11, roll 3d4 = 3
"... Seven wagons full of ... " "...purple porcupines arrive at this outpost every..." " ... eleven days from the nearby city of Jonston which is about ... " "...three days away."
And even if all the characters wouldn't be asking these questions, many of my players are. Having wacky answers ruins the sense of consistency for some of my players.
They looked for 'what is the average travel time/distance to such and such adventure area'. They would get different answers which taught them to be more selective on whom they asked.