Comments on: Sample Society Outline Based on Food

By: potatoking15

potatoking15 — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 03:20:51 +0000

while people might be a bit a squeamish about this being brought up, there were such things as slaver cultures, various desert cultures such as Egypt and Persia, I’m also fairly sure the mongols used to use slave labour.

By: drs

drs — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 01:59:37 +0000

Also, you don’t need to resort to magic, or much magic, for various improvements. One can get more productivity than medieval northern Europe by not being located in northern Europe. Southern latitude, no frozen winter, year-round growing season and possibly multiple staple harvests naturally. Higher levels of rainfall. River flood plains like the Nile. Some of these have offsets: warmer might be drier; tropical rainfall means eroded soils, until you get Amazonian terraforming via terra preta. Still, there are reasons India and Han China have traditionally housed 1/5 of the human race each in areas rather smaller than Europe, reasons like rainfall and rice and warmth.

I once saw a claim of taro cultivation supporting 80 people per acre, which sounds insane, but if anything could do that, tropical wetland tubers would probably be it. Don’t know how much labor it took.

Anyway, a warm well-watered valley with good soil can support a dense population with a lot of non-farm labor, while still being surrounded by nearby hills that support primitive raiders.

Magically low-effort permaculture like year-round fruits and nuts might be the result of innovation, rather than an inhibitor of it; good for old elven societies. No one wants to think of Tolkien elves as wheat farmers…

By: drs

drs — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 23:36:16 +0000

There\’s also stuff like irrigation (to increase food production, or increase reliability of food production) and public granaries (to fight rain and pest related famine by having a stabilized food supply.) Something people forget is that the medieval Dark Ages were called that for a reason. While small scale technology didn\’t regress that much or progressed (steel, mills, horse collar) you were in fact regressing socially relative to a centralized bureaucratic empire that could maintain roads and canals and granaries and such. You also have societies (Harappa) that lucked into sewers, if only because they didn\’t like the stink; magic or a higher golden age (many fantasy worlds are post-apocalyptic) might mean people know about germs.

Of course, a balkanized society with orcs and bandits lurking in the hills may be more gameable, but even so you can probably have a denser and nicer society due to infrastructure investment and higher cultural trust levels, and much of the infrastructure you need for civilization is Stone Age in material requirements.

By: Brett

Brett — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 16:04:14 +0000

On the other hand, it’s interesting to speculate on what Magic Disease Control would do in the society you created, Mu. I suspect you would get cycles of starvation, warfare, and natural habitat destruction until one of the societies figures out a form of industrialization.

By: Ian M

Ian M — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 19:52:21 +0000

Don’t leave out traditional and folk magic traditions as possible means of increasing production. There are numerous fertility and farming rites and rituals all over the world, so it’s just a a small leap a magical equivalent. This can reduce the amount of mages needed to ensure bountiful harvest by subsuming their roles into the villagers themselves.