And every 50 years or so thousands of Dwarves die in the latest Troll Uprising...Troll meat. Every family keeps a troll, and just carves off what they need.
Hydroponic and light spells, Guinea pigs and cave spiders (taste like crab when boiled), mushrooms and the race that looks like mushrooms (it is not cannibalism when it is a plant.)Can I raise a practical question at this point?
What do those 7.8 million Dwarves do for food?
Looking back over the last few responses about how particularly large cities are able to feed themselves in fantasy settings, I'm surprised that no one seems to mention magically-created food as an option.Underdark civilization food chains can require a bit of fantasy solutions.
I went with vast fungal vats and giant blind cave fish farms for an undermountain/underdark mountain dwarf kingdom in my game.
In my experience, if you're going to have high-fantasy conceits (such as giant medieval cities) that require a lot of magitech to function, your best bet is to show it off in the game and demonstrate that you've been thoughtful about its inclusion.While this does avail itself of the "background stuff is taken care of by magic" idea, which in my experience a lot of people seem to dislike (even though they quite often don't care about those background elements to begin with), this still helps to flesh out aspects of the city. For instance, the "bland" food that create food and water makes is unappetizing, so now you can characterize one of the major differences between socioeconomic brackets; who relies on the free food from those magic items, versus those who can afford to pay for tastier fare that's actually grown/slaughtered/prepared instead of magicked into existence.
I'm envisioning unadorned magical vending machines that (for 2 cp) squeeze out a tasteless grey soft-serve sludge (your choice of bowl or waffle cone), with cantrip buttons to add extra flavor (for 1cp), with options like "mutton", "potato", "cabbage", "salt", and "Goodberry Blast", which is very popular with the kids.Looking back over the last few responses about how particularly large cities are able to feed themselves in fantasy settings, I'm surprised that no one seems to mention magically-created food as an option.
To use 3.X as an example (since that's what the OP is based on), creating a magic item that continually casts create food and water wouldn't be expensive at all; only 15,000 gp. Presuming that it would be continuous-use (i.e. activated once per round) at caster level 5, that would be 14,400 castings per day, each one turning out enough food and water for 15 humans (which would presumably be enough for an equal number of elves or dwarves, and maybe two or three halflings), which means that a single such item could feed a population of 216,000. Build twenty or thirty of them, and you can sustain even the largest city no problem.
While this does avail itself of the "background stuff is taken care of by magic" idea, which in my experience a lot of people seem to dislike (even though they quite often don't care about those background elements to begin with), this still helps to flesh out aspects of the city. For instance, the "bland" food that create food and water makes is unappetizing, so now you can characterize one of the major differences between socioeconomic brackets; who relies on the free food from those magic items, versus those who can afford to pay for tastier fare that's actually grown/slaughtered/prepared instead of magicked into existence.
In my experience, if you're going to have high-fantasy conceits (such as giant medieval cities) that require a lot of magitech to function, your best bet is to show it off in the game and demonstrate that you've been thoughtful about its inclusion.
True, but generally neither are our players any of those things. It just has to be thoughtful enough to withstand casual scrutiny, not any sort of audit.Eh...
Most of us are not actually urban planners, logistics experts, or economists. And players are apt to take it that things we show off are intended to be paid attention to as plot points.
Which means that if we show off our (talking through our hats) magitech infrastructure, that infrastructure may become a target of scrutiny or attack that'll show how hand-wavey it all really is.
True, but generally neither are our players any of those things. It just has to be thoughtful enough to withstand casual scrutiny, not any sort of audit.