After a discussion on fantasy economics on a message board. I spent some time doing a little research into economics, particularly food. And I'd thought I would share my discoveries.
Firstly why bother with economics in a fantasy world. Can’t we just fantasise a bit more and remove the need for economics. Or its a magical world, magic solves everything.
Well if you want a very superficial world, then don’t read on. However if you want to create a living breathing world for your players to play in. Then this essay could help you.
With any fantasy game , your dealing with a different world. However if it’s too different, it becomes difficult for the players to understand or comprehend what's going on. With D&D a Christian western morality dominates the game, because that is what most of the players understand. Imagine if the Catholic Church controlled all the supermarkets, or Islamic fundamentalists controlled all the hospitals. Then your life, and the way society works would be very different. So why do you expect a fantasy world to be so different. If you depend on clerics to create your food and heal the sick. Then the way your fantasy worlds society works would be very different to the society you are used too. Whereas what we want to do, is keep the society workings with normal boundaries, so that the players understand the world they are playing in. And its a lot easier to change a fantasy world, than try and figure out how a new social order.
The hard stuff.
The hard facts of population, economics and food are as follows. I don’t pretend to be an expert, but the following is approximately true.
A pre-farming society, one where hunting provide most of the food. Has a maximum population density of 3 people per square mile. And bearing in mind, we are probably talking about nomadic people, a more realistic density is a lot less. Otherwise tribes will clash as they travel, following their food herds.
A pre agricultural revolution society, such as roman. Can support 16 people per square mile. Bare in mind, the actual amount of arable land is small, while most of the land is used for pasture.
A post agricultural revolution society can manage more than 300 people per square mile, or more. Medieval japan is a good example, of how productive land can be. However there comes a point where it become irrelevant whether the land can support them or not, and more important on how you get the food to the consumers. At this point what is more relevant is how far will the farmer take his crop & how much can he transport. Without modern day transportation methods, particularly the steam trains. Food transport is limited to wagons and water. Usually farmers are willing to travel up to to a day to get to a market, and a maximum of half a week. This brings about a naturally occurring tree structure. With farms at the end of the branches and a market place at every off shoot. With the root of the trunk being the cities, as the main consumer. The more branches the food has to travel through, the more the price will get hiked up, as merchants take their percentage cut. Also bare in mind even if you import food by sea, at its port of origin, it has still had to pass through the tree structure, to get from the farm to the port.
If we look at 14th century England, an area of 55000 square miles , supported a population of 5 million. However the biggest city, London, only had a population of 50000 people. And the country was described as a village every two to three miles. This is typical of what we should see. In a pre agricultural revolution society, big cities don’t occur, and large towns only do at the center of agricultural area, usually along waterways or coasts. All becasue it to far to get the food to the city. Once we have the agricultual revolution, cities can occur, but in between the cities and the farms, we have a network of villages and market places, through which the food travels.
Ok, what does all the wonderful information tell you? Well if you know two of the following three pieces of information, you can make a calculated estimate of the third.
Population, technology level, land area.
I’m going to use some examples of faerun, because I have more information about the continent.
The overall are of faerun is in the region of 5 million square miles. and has a population of 90 million.
Now from the above figures, we can tell faerun has to be a post agricultural revolution society.
A hunting society would only support 15 million; a pre agricultural revolution society can manage 80 million.
Looking at a detailed area of faerun, waterdeep. The waterdeep region is approximately the same size as England, and had a population of 5 million, the same as England during the 14th century. However waterdeep city center has a population of 120000, more than double London's.
Now assuming post agricultural revolution society, plus magical help for crop yields. It is possible to feed all those people and use only 6% of the available land for farming. However in and around Waterdeep would be a vast array of farms, farming villages, and market places, plus a network of roads, linking them all to Waterdeep, in a tree structure. A bigger % of land use is more likely.
Other areas of Faerun have different problems. Evermeet has a population density of over 50 people per square mile, and is made up of 90% woodland. So farmland would be at a premium. All the coastal areas would have to be farmed intensely, assuming a large fishing industry and a portion of the woodland are orchards. The area can sustain the population
Some of the dwarven citadels are difficult as they import all their food. Each one would have to be looked at separately to see where their food was coming from, and how far etc.
I hope this gives you an idea of all you need to do to make your world more realistic. Or what more realistic looks like.
