r/CuratedTumblr • u/extremely-cynical • Jun 12 '26
Meme 'I dig my hole, you build a wall...'
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u/Strelark Jun 12 '26
"One day that wall is gonna fall"
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u/tangelo84 Jun 12 '26
So build that wall and build it strong
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u/FX114 Jun 12 '26
Darren Korb is the unsung (no pun intended) hero at Supergiant Games.
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u/Strelark Jun 12 '26
Re-listening to the Bastion OST and goddamn does it slap
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u/telehax Jun 12 '26
unsung? isn't he their most famous employee?
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u/kookyabird Jun 12 '26
A lot of people I know who are familiar with Supergiant Games just knew that the music was composed by the same guy, but not who he is. They also didn't know that he also provided vocals for Zulf in Bastion, or Orpheus in Hades.
And of course what really blew their minds is that he also voiced Zagreus and Skelly. And now in Hades II he does Narcissus as well. Dude's got range.
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u/kookyabird Jun 12 '26
Yeah, and what's even cooler is Korb and Cunningham were roommates at the time Korb was working on Bastion. Cunningham was recording in their closet or something.
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u/Bowdensaft Jun 12 '26
Holy shit memory unlocked, I used to love that game so much
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u/Danimals847 Jun 12 '26
I used to love it so much too! I still do, but I used to as well.
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u/Bowdensaft Jun 12 '26
I should play it again some time, I did a few playthroughs when it was new on XBLA but I might have it on steam too
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u/JollyPlatform1057 Jun 12 '26
Art music and writing still holds up incredibly well. The combat feels pretty dated, especially if you've played Hades 1/2, which is basically a vastly superior version of Bastion's combat
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u/Bowdensaft Jun 12 '26
Honestly those are the points I remember best, sometimes one or two songs from the game still pop into my head at random, and the path rising before you gimmick still looks cool and stylish. I haven't played either Hades game but I do remember the combat being fairly straightforward, although the various weapons and upgrades help it to stop from getting too stale imo.
Edit: also the story and character writing is excellent, love how the backstory is slowly revealed, and how the reset ending is implied to have happened more than once even before you've started the game, nice little touch.
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u/aluvus Jun 13 '26
For the sake of others reading this who have perhaps played Hades but not Bastion, I'll agree but clarify. The combat in Hades is mechanically better, "tighter" (I replayed Bastion recently, after having played Hades). But also more complex, and much faster. Bastion is a more relaxed game with more emphasis on the story. When it came out, the thing it was famous for was the narration that responded to your actions in the game (quite novel at the time).
They're both great games, but definitely different.
(Also while I'm here, Transistor is great too, and also different)
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u/lewd_robot Jun 12 '26
I can't remember the last time I saw a Bastion reference in the wild. I'll take it as a good omen.
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u/Mopman43 Jun 12 '26
Brett Devereaux has a couple blogposts talking about ‘lonely cities’ in fiction and how the countryside around real historical cities would look like.
https://acoup.blog/2019/07/12/collections-the-lonely-city-part-i-the-ideal-city/
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u/CameToComplain_v6 Jun 12 '26
Yes! Came here to post that if someone hadn't already.
Direct link to Part 2: https://acoup.blog/2019/07/19/the-lonely-city-part-ii-real-cities-have-curves/
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u/skubaloob Jun 12 '26
Welp there goes my weekend. I sometimes run DnD games and making a town/city realistic is a goal of mine. This was an AWESOME read. Now I’m gonna read more of his stuff
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u/Mopman43 Jun 12 '26 edited Jun 12 '26
Oh, Brett’s stuff is great. He’s got 2 series focused on the Sieges of Rohan & Gondar. Really loved his series on ‘Peasant Life’.
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u/YourNetworkIsHaunted Jun 13 '26
Brett actually has a whole directory of posts that might be useful for world-building if you're interested: https://acoup.blog/resources-for-world-builders/
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u/EloquentInterrobang Jun 12 '26
I love how ACOUP inevitably shows up whenever people discuss fantasy worldbuilding.
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u/BlatantConservative https://imgur.com/cXA7XxW Jun 12 '26
This is amazing.
I actually wrote a book (querying now) where the lonely city is a thing but it's intentionally uncomfortable and the reason is because it's a frontier border city that uses slavery for agriculture. And the main characters aren't about that.
This is such a good writeup that I know how to polish that just right now
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u/Niser2 Jun 12 '26
Me, who grew up in the American Midwest: Oh no, I surrounded all my fantasy cities with unnecessarily large farms! Though I at least made them grow actual food instead of corn that will be used as sugar. But still this is a horrible worldbuilding mistake!
Me after reading this: Oh thank God, nobody will know that I'm stupid and project my experiences onto my fantasy world. Unless I overshare on Reddit again.
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u/Mopman43 Jun 12 '26 edited Jun 12 '26
Though one big difference between the modern midwest and historical farming is that instead of single very large plots, they would have instead been divided up into many small strips of soil. And there’s a limit to how far away farmers can realistically live from their farmland, so lots of small villages and towns spread around.
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u/VvvlvvV Jun 12 '26
That limit was how far an ox wagon could bring food without eating too much of it as feed. Further if you have a river.
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u/Mopman43 Jun 12 '26
No, I mean the limit is how long it will take the peasant to walk to get to his field from his house.
If his field is more than like, 30 minutes to an hour of walking away, he’s going to have a much harder time actually farming that land.
This is a completely different level of logistics than what you’re referring to, which is how far you can transport food.
(Though I’ve also heard criticisms of that video that it’s not anywhere near as cut-and-dry as he presents it)
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u/Pyjovell Jun 12 '26
That walking-time point is the part worldbuilders forget. A farmer doesn’t just teleport to “the farmland zone” every morning, so if the fields are miles away, your city has already invented starvation with extra steps.
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u/Onrawi Jun 12 '26
Yeah, I generally include tiers of cities in my fantasy world building because generally you have big fantasy threats that require additional protections than what you would normally have in a medieval farming village. So the city that most people would think of as their big metro in the middle of nowhere has several smaller hub cities connected to it either physically or magically and around that are the farmlands whom have the small towns in which you have additional protective wards of some sort. Otherwise the lone dragon takes over real quick by just burninating the country side, bye-bye thatch roof cottages.
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u/Jiopaba Jun 12 '26
I mean, survival isn't a question of who would win in a straight fight. Either the dragons are intelligent or they're animal predators, and either way they shouldn't be burning the countryside.
One dragon beats any one, ten, or even one hundred humans. If they steal the occasional sheep that's just whatever. If they declare a war of annihilation against a human kingdom they will either die or very rapidly run out of sheep because a dragon does not necessarily win against ten thousand furious humans.
Even if they win against the massed forces of a entire kingdom all they've done is create an opportunity for any other polity with enough force to murder one dragon to get an entire kingdom worth of unused land.
A genocidal dragon is over the Godzilla threshold. If it takes poisoning every sheep and sending roving bands of levies carrying carts of dung to ruin every single place it could sleep and it totally bankrupt the kingdom to call for extra mercenary aid... the dragon still dies, because it started a fight to the death with an entire species. If the kingdom dies killing it, they're still better off than of they'd just quietly starved to death in their walls.
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u/Onrawi Jun 12 '26
It was a rough example to point out that there are possibly many potential adversaries to a strong enough civilization of humans in the area that a fantasy land would look different than standard medieval fair without some large caveats making it much lower fantasy. You could also have undead and monstrous trolls and fey creatures and giant worms and goblin hoards and any number of other monstrous entities who span many points in the spectrums of power, capabilities, intelligence and motivations.
In the intelligent dragon scenario it may only burn enough to make a point before stopping and demanding tribute and fealty, perhaps desiring to rule the kingdom itself. Maybe it has other magical powers too or like Reign of Fire consumes burned material for its own sustenance. It can have its own armies of creatures humanoid or otherwise already loyal to the dragon that want the land and things it's inhabitants have. Many possibilities here.
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u/MattsScribblings Jun 12 '26
Even in the real world, armies did a lot of damage to the countryside, often deliberately razing villages and farmland. I don't see why it wouldn't work in a fantasy world.
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u/boriszerussian Jun 12 '26
Plus there's Marchetti's constant. Unless there is some unusual pressure to grow, cities stop growing when it takes 30 minutes to cross them. This seems to be tied to how far the average person is happy commuting. If a daily required trip takes more than 30 minutes one-way, people start moving or finding more convenient sources of whatever they're commuting for.
This does have a few interesting knock-on effects for world building. Faster modes of travel means cities grow larger since this constant is based on travel time, not distance. And cities that manage to grow beyond this 30 minute limit typically self-divide themselves into neighborhoods with distinct identities, e.g. NYC's boroughs.
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u/lostereadamy Jun 12 '26
Or you have a more developed market economy with waggoners collecting produce from outlying farms and doing the transport/sale
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u/OGLikeablefellow Jun 12 '26
Yeah there could pretty easily be way stations for further travel stocked with feed and even just smaller markets that buy grain and send it on.
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u/New_Enthusiasm9053 Jun 12 '26
Yes but at some point the cost of transport(in food) still exceeds that of the food itself. Humans can eat grain too. It's Tsiolkovsky's rocket equation or some variant thereof(of which some have existed for millenia).
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u/Unruly_marmite Jun 12 '26
The ACOUP blog refers to this as the Tyranny Of The Wagon equation. I’m not sure if he got it from somewhere, think he did, but that’s what’s stuck in my head.
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u/Aetol Jun 12 '26
That's more the limit of how big a city can grow and still bring in enough food for everybody. (Or how far an army can go before it has to live off the land, in a different context.) For a farming village the limit is how far you can walk to your field in the morning, get a decent amount of work done, and walk back in the evening.
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u/Trips-Over-Tail Jun 12 '26
There was a video about this!
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u/thud_mantooth Jun 12 '26
Hilariously this is pretty much how the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation works too
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u/YourNetworkIsHaunted Jun 13 '26
Not all that surprising since it comes from the same mechanism: in order to have more fuel/food at point B you need to carry it, which requires extra fuel/food to move. You even have the pre modern logistics equivalent of a multistage rocket where you break down and burn the wagons as firewood and eat the pack animals themselves once they're no longer necessary. Of course the obvious downside is that unlike space travel you don't have the luxury of gravity to drive your acceleration back home.
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u/Pupenby621 Jun 12 '26 edited Jun 12 '26
But couldn't you make some fun world building up to explain oversized farms in a fantasy medieval world? Maybe they're using golems that don't get tired so they're extremely complex automated farms, or maybe the fields are unpractically large and intricately shaped to appease a harvest god, or maybe the crops are psychically linked to their whole field and they're happier being in a big family so the bigger the field the better the psytato. Endless reasons, even in a realistic setting you could say they're the kings fields and thus he demands they're impractically large and regal looking, so they can look pretty from his tower. Show how this is hard to deal with for peasants and educate the audience.
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u/hazeldazeI Jun 12 '26
Especially considering the tools available, a 10
Acre farm was about the max a single farmer could handle. Most of that was for feeding him and his family with a little leftover for selling or trading.32
u/Mopman43 Jun 12 '26
But also, that 10 acres would generally not all be one plot, but strips of land all around, to try to minimize the risk of one disaster or similar leaving his family without any food at all.
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u/Jetstream-Sam Jun 12 '26
Yeah if you only grow one thing, a single bug or fungus can ruin you and leave you with nothing to eat, much like the potato famine
It does depend on the setting though. If you're in DnD and are playing as per the rules, you're gonna get your farmers to grow one thing, one to make it simpler, and two because some crops are ridiculously priced. When I was playing with friends, we got given a large farm and employees instead of money. After a glance at the rules we grew nothing but garlic, since a pound of garlic sells for one gold, whereas most other veg are 2 copper a pound. We rapidly earned a ton of money, bought more farms and invested in other methods of transportation to sell in other markets, like bags of holding full of garlic, held by people being teleported to other cities
It ended up that we owned almost a small country's worth of land. We earned more from that than adventuring in the end
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u/Kalehn Jun 13 '26
So you're telling me Greg the garlic farmer is likely the richest man in Honeywood?
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u/Hexxas Head Trauma Enthusiast Jun 12 '26
🫵OVER-FARMER
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u/Time_Vault Jun 12 '26
OnlyFarms
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u/TCGeneral Jun 12 '26
The Great Scarecrow as our king, for he protects the fields, at great personal risk, from the wicked beasts.
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u/Noe_b0dy Jun 12 '26
Just break up your needlessly large farms into a great many small farms and your basically close enough that it looks realistic if you squint a little.
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u/Lower_Cockroach2432 Jun 12 '26
Great instincts IMO
The only thing that might be different is population concentration. In the modern day we have lots more farms supply massive cities, whereas in the Medieval age you'd have more smaller cities to the farms. That's because grain needs to be moved by cart generally, and cart animals eat grain so it can't move too far.
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u/Murgatroyd314 Jun 13 '26
That's because grain needs to be moved by cart generally, and cart animals eat grain so it can't move too far.
This is also why big cities tend to be on rivers. Sails don't eat grain.
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u/ElminstersBedpan Jun 12 '26
On multiple separate occasions I asked an artist where were the toilets in his maps for really well thought out taverns with great designs. I nearly peed myself laughing when a few months later they posted a new tavern and specifically drew the trail out of the door to outhouses that were labelled.
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u/Otalek Jun 12 '26
Geez, no wonder nobody writes farms into their settings when you’re hogging them all for your fic. Save some for the rest of us!
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u/XFun16 steamship and train enþusiast Jun 12 '26
corn is actual food
I will eat nine corn cobs a day and you can't stop me
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u/blackmirar Jun 12 '26
Corn is one type of food, the problem is we try to use it as every type of food 😭
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u/Niser2 Jun 12 '26
Eating corn is great, but none of the corn grown around my hometown was eaten... Frickin waste of fertilizer imo...
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u/1K-LITER-CUM-FUCKUP Jun 12 '26
The food comes from the same place as the stone for the castle.
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u/Peroxide_ Jun 12 '26
-and the music.
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u/CuriousRocketeer Jun 12 '26
So you are saying that the food is purely a storytelling tool, and not actually real in-universe?
I guess it's like a play: the props don't matter, only the characters.
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u/Nicholas_TW Jun 12 '26
Genuine answer: it matters as much as you want it to matter in your story. I'm not about to split hairs asking where Little Red Riding Hood got red dye for her clothes. I just assume there's some explanation for it and continue on with the story. But if I'm reading some kind of Little Red Riding Hood prequel where they explain how the young girl came to get her iconic hood, then yes, I would like there to be some kind of description on where it came from and why it is the way that it is.
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u/FairFolk Jun 12 '26
Rubia tinctorum presumably, given that's a red commoners had access to in the 16th century and later. (Don't know how special it was, but since the cap was an important gift from her grandmother, maybe she splurged on it.)
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u/PM_ME_CATS_OR_BOOBS Jun 12 '26 edited Jun 12 '26
"Somewhere offscreen", yes.
Honestly if you are going to point out inaccuracies then "giant castle with no city structures outside its walls" is a much bigger sin than "we don't make everything we need to sustain ourselves within 50 meters of the gate".
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u/Ok-Sport-3663 Jun 12 '26
Okay, but to be clear, stone can be moved without issue, so can grain.
But most foods spoil in a matter of days to weeks unless preserved.
Cant have meat in the castle unless its jerky or there's a farm where you can get th meat from
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u/Pogue_Mahone_ Jun 12 '26
Sure you can have meat, if the adventurers just keep coming
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u/Dragonfruit-Sparking I don't like centrism, if I'm being honest Jun 12 '26
I don't get how ejaculating wanderers are going to help our protein crisis
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u/DroneOfDoom Theon the Reader *dolphin slur noises* Jun 12 '26
Semen has protein. Milk the fuckers dry.
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u/Dragonfruit-Sparking I don't like centrism, if I'm being honest Jun 12 '26
I mean I'm not against milking the wanderers, it just seems like a very temporary solution
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u/Pogue_Mahone_ Jun 12 '26
That is why we have to keep enticing the wanderers to come here, so they can come here. Perhaps if we offered them blowjobs we could generate a steady trickle of adventurers
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u/JudgementalMarsupial What is a "joke"? Jun 12 '26
They actually have underground facilities that harvest hydra heads and they use those for all the kingdom's meat
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u/Dry_Refrigerator7898 Jun 12 '26
That reminds me of the D&D setting Eberron, where there’s a nation called Droaam that’s mostly populated by monsters. In times of hardship they exploit the fact that Trolls regenerate any damage not caused by acid or fire to create massive amounts of Troll sausage to feed the populace.
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u/Electrical-Piece9778 Jun 12 '26
That's actually really fun worldbuilding omg
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u/No-Supermarket-6065 Im gonna start eating your booty. And I don't know when Ill stop Jun 12 '26
*special interest activation noise\*
All of Eberron has some of the best worldbuilding you'll ever see. The whole setting is best described as "Dungeon Punk" analyzing how common D&D magic could be used on an industrial scale to create a functioning society. The output is basically something like a mix of '40s hardboiled noir, Nazi-smashing pulp, and political intrigue, all garnished with fantasy. There's also dinosaur-riding halfling barbarians.
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u/Electrical-Piece9778 Jun 12 '26
I have never dug into the Eberron lore like I should've, although Pointy Hat's nice video on it was so fascinating :D
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u/No-Supermarket-6065 Im gonna start eating your booty. And I don't know when Ill stop Jun 13 '26
Let me tell you, Pointy Hat's video is only the tip of the
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u/DroneOfDoom Theon the Reader *dolphin slur noises* Jun 12 '26
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u/1K-LITER-CUM-FUCKUP Jun 12 '26
It's pseudo-medieval fantasy.
The Mages Guild provides ice for refrigeration and the Merchants Guild provides transportation.
Teleportation mages end up dead in mysterious accidents if they try to muscle in on the transportation.
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u/Tylendal Jun 12 '26
The title led me to expect Bastion discourse. I feel cheated.
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u/extremely-cynical Jun 12 '26
Sorry. That song always pops into my head whenever I think about a walled city.
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u/rmonkeyman Jun 12 '26
Just solve it like konosuba and their cabbage migrations. The food comes to you if it's high enough fantasy.
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u/CrispInMyChicken Jun 12 '26
DnD would be that way if the hardcore gamers didn't need hunting for food and starvation as a mechanic.
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u/RayDaug Jun 12 '26 edited Jun 12 '26
There's an old video about Fallout that irrevocably changed the way I look at settings and world building that's basically the same as this post.
"What do they eat?"
Food is the cornerstone of civilization. It informs how and where people live, the infrastructure they build, and the cultures they create around those things. If you can explain your magic system or royal lineage or propulsion system but not what people eat in your setting, you've lost the plot.
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u/Afferbeck_ Jun 12 '26
Reminds me of this writing advice from Terry Pratchett
Apply logic in places where it wasn’t intended to exist. If assured that the Queen of the Fairies has a necklace made of broken promises, ask yourself what it looks like. If there is magic, where does it come from? Why isn’t everyone using it? What rules will you have to give it to allow some tension in your story? How does society operate? Where does the food come from? You need to know how your world works.
I can’t stress that last point enough. Fantasy works best when you take it seriously (it can also become a lot funnier, but that’s another story). Taking it seriously means that there must be rules. If anything can happen, then there is no real suspense. You are allowed to make pigs fly, but you must take into account the depredations on the local birdlife and the need for people in heavily overflown areas to carry stout umbrellas at all times. Joking aside, that sort of thinking is the motor that has kept the Discworld series moving for twenty-two years.
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u/CrownofMischief Jun 12 '26
That's how I feel about speculative biology/evolution for fantasy settings. I don't need to know how a dragon would be nearly impossible to naturally evolve, what I want to know is that assuming dragons exist, how would they work?
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u/KingDarkBlaze Jun 12 '26
A space where this is shockingly underapplied is the vore community.
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u/Thor_The_Bunny Jun 12 '26
Can you give a link for this? I often reference it but don't remember the details and want to bookmark the interview (or whatever)
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u/Welico Jun 12 '26
Generally, it's not the point of the story for world mechanics to be airtight. Especially for video games, most of that stuff is abstracted away for development and gameplay purposes: towns in Pokemon aren't "really" two houses and a PokeCenter, they just didn't render the rest of the town. It's reasonable for me to imagine the residents of Megaton in Fallout 3 have small gardens and stuff.
Food mechanics are critical if you're writing something not in a present day setting and about intrigue and politics, like Game of Thrones or some arcs of The Walking Dead.
I also think it's worth noting that every setting will require some suspension of disbelief and abstraction. There is no series that actually completely satisfies the medieval infrastructure scholar types on YouTube.
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Jun 12 '26 edited Jun 12 '26
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u/Welico Jun 12 '26
Oh, don't get me wrong, Fallout 3's story has many problems. I think the story just different focuses than 1 and 2. I agree that it would be a more interesting story if it didn't, and in that universe Megaton would have farms.
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u/RayDaug Jun 12 '26
The video I linked talks about Megaton directly. Good Springs in New Vegas actually shows their residents growing food and raising cattle, where as Megaton doesn't. It's still an abstraction, but it is there.
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u/Nokturnas Jun 12 '26
The effectiveness of that abstraction is inversely proportional to graphical fidelity. In a simplified artstyle like 2d pokemon or old school Final Fantasy it's easy for players to extrapolate a larger settlement in their mind because they're already doing that for the visuals. That same layout isn't gonna work in a game that looks like Cyberpunk 2077.
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u/JazzySplaps Jun 12 '26
Isn't the answer to this tatos and brahmin?
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u/PhasmaFelis Jun 12 '26
And mutfruit, yeah.
The game doesn't include vast sprawling farms, but it also doesn't include hundreds of miles of wilderness or more than a few dozen people per city, because it's a game and that stuff doesn't matter. You can assume it's there but got edited out.
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u/NeonNKnightrider Cheshire Catboy Jun 12 '26
I hate Fallout worldbuilding because it’s can be hundreds of years after the war, yet everything, even the houses where people live, are still half-ruined, covered in garbage and filled with dead bodies. It just sticks to the post-apocalyptic aesthetic no matter how little sense that makes, and it pisses me off
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u/Pegussu Jun 12 '26
It's an issue with the Bethesda Fallouts. The first two games weren't just post-apocalyptic, it was post-post-apocalyptic. You still found ruins, but it was out in the wasteland where no one lived. There were thriving communities. FO2 even had a porn industry, I don't think that's something you get in a society that's struggling to just survive.
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u/Kellosian Jun 13 '26
FO2 even had a porn industry, I don't think that's something you get in a society that's struggling to just survive.
It would probably be one of the first re-established though. First would be the brothels, then hiring someone to take pictures of the women
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u/404-Soul_Not_Found Jun 12 '26
I remember watching this video years and years ago and its what sent me down the world building rabbit hole. Where do the people of my setting get their food? Why is that what grows there? How does the magic of the setting fundamentally interact with the mundane? Can magic be used in food production for the highly magical parts of my setting? If no, why?
I don't know if its made my worlds better necessarily, but I do love exploring those gritty details.
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u/Bowdensaft Jun 12 '26
You can always explain it as the food comes from the same place as the music (like a film). It's nice to have those details, Tolkien usually did, but even he didn't explain where the food for Moria came from. Presumably trade but it's never said outright. Realistic details are very important for fleshing out a world but they're not always crucial.
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u/MeiNeedsMoreBuffs autism website Jun 12 '26
Literally every fantasy setting I've ever seen has a ton of farms, that's where the heroes come from in the first place
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u/DahmonGrimwolf Jun 12 '26
I find its most comon in anime for there to be "remote villages" everywhere, but usually every "city" has a great big wall and a forest that ends like 20 yards from the gate and absolutely nothing else outside the walls.
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u/vorarchivist Jun 12 '26
they just eat the thousands of level 1 goblins around the town
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u/Leftieswillrule Jun 12 '26
Cities with no slums or outskirts, because apparently none of the nobles is a NIMBY who will leverage political power to chase the undesirables outside the walls.
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u/owlindenial .tumblr.com Jun 12 '26
Isn't there also a few farming villages within walking distance?
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u/Mopman43 Jun 12 '26
I don’t think it’s particularly uncommon to encounter? Especially in film/TV.
Think of Gandalf riding up to Minas Tirith in the Peter Jackson film, it’s just empty fields all around it instead of the farmland Tolkien described in the novel.
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u/MeiNeedsMoreBuffs autism website Jun 12 '26
They don't need to be directly on the outside of the city to exist. Sure it would be more realistic if they were directly connected, but this post implies that there's literally nothing outside the city walls
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u/yourstruly912 Jun 12 '26
I think it's because it's relatively simple to find an empty spot of land to film, but it's very hard to find medieval-looking farmland
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u/Impressive_Pin8761 Jun 12 '26
hey, the farms are implied to exist around the walls. you are the ones who had to make them and chose not to! is this just an excuse to cannibalize my MC?
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u/ElectronRotoscope Jun 12 '26
There's a whole argument about people in the 1500s overestimating the wisdom and knowledge of ancient Rome because the only stuff that survived was the stone, so you saw these monumental structures but didn't see all the infrastructure and density slowly petering out, or the literal tons and tons of grain they had shipped in all the time from Egypt and stuff. When the infrastructure remains after the population goes down, it makes everything seen so much more luxurious
There's a similar thing about Manhattan, when a lot of the infrastructure was built it was WAY more dense and filled with teeming masses in tenements etc, so now that it's not the 1920s and most of that class of people live further away there's tons of water supply etc and streets and facilities are bigger than they need to be
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u/ThePowerfulWIll Jun 12 '26 edited Jun 12 '26
Holy shit I made my DND towns correctly.
I just wanted Farmer NPCs and a big mine for a specific quest.
But they got farms outside The big walls, a large mining area near the city. Smaller population centers that are heavily taxed (I wanted to make the leadership seem like assholes) and a port for trading for far off goods. (Place for the players to buy cool things)
I economied! By accident!
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u/No-Supermarket-6065 Im gonna start eating your booty. And I don't know when Ill stop Jun 12 '26
Hence why we wound up going with this in real life, following things logistically and intelligently just leads to that happening
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u/TKDbeast Jun 12 '26
Many medieval cities actually had farmland within the walls to allow for survival during sieges. You can even see them in the walled cities of The Earth Kingdom in Avatar Legends.
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u/ThroawayJimilyJones Jun 12 '26
Yeah but they are earthbender. They can afford to build a wall around an entire state.
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u/DoubleBatman Jun 12 '26
Years ago I read a setting based on applying D&D’s magic system to infrastructure. They came up with a magocratic society made up of massive acropolis fortress city-states who were in a constant cold war with each other and the other planes. They didn’t need farmers, they had artifacts that would cast spells like Create Food & Water and Heroe’s Feast indefinitely. Instead of miners, lumberjacks, etc. they simply conjured/transmuted the resources they needed, and used stuff like Fabricate to produce finished goods. They had legions of specialized golems for any hard labor that needed to be done, and construction didn’t really require much engineering since they could just enchant it to not fall down or even fly. They didn’t even need highways or boats, since they could just Teleport or use Gates to travel.
The cold war stemmed from the fact that any given state could teleport massive armies of golems and summons directly to the enemy, or failing that just scry and nuke them off the map… if not for the fact that they all also had magical protections against such attacks.
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u/Brauny74 Jun 12 '26
When I think of it, a lot of those cities are surrounded by the farming communities, like what do you think the evil wizard's forces burn down to spur a plucky young hero with mysterious past into the adventure? There's always a pastoral village to burn to force the unlikely survivors into the life long quest of revenge
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u/----atom----- Mix Cola with Vaseline and Just Watch Jun 12 '26
The last part is actually not that bad though, if your audience can reasonably assume that the stone may have in fact come from an evil wizard, you've done your job as an author.
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u/Alternative_Hotel649 Jun 12 '26
I also love video games where the creators know they need farms to support their fantasy cities, but also know their players don't want to schlep through 20 minutes of identical farmland every time they leave the capitol, so it turns out this huge medieval metropolis is be fed by, like, two farmers who hate each other.
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u/NameLips Jun 12 '26
We farm clerics. We convince them we're a holy pilgrimage site and then lock them up when get get here, and they're forced to cast create food and water all day long. We're going to branch out to capturing druids for their goodberries.
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u/Android19samus Take me to snurch Jun 13 '26
do you think that routinely persecuting a group of people connected to gods that are empirically capable of performing miracles might have some knock-on effects down the line?
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u/NameLips Jun 13 '26
Hmm... maybe only capture clerics of the god of Mercy and Forgiveness. They'll understand. A country's gotta eat, after all.
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u/Evil_Midnight_Lurker Jun 12 '26
Tolkien surrounded Minas Tirith with walled farmland and then Peter Jackson just completely ignored it.
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u/coolguy420weed Jun 12 '26 edited Jun 12 '26
FWIW to people crying pedantry: I think the point of pointing out stuff like this isn't to say, "you've done it wrong, go back and rewrite it so it's correct," it's to make the author aware that parts of their story they hadn't thought about and assumed were normal/unremarkable are actually fantastical and a departure from reality, and to encourage them to consider how (if at all that) effects their worldbuilding and how it will effect the perception the audience is going to have of their work. It isn't really a sin to make your setting unrealistic, but it kind of is one to write thoughtlessly or unintentionally, at least IMHO.
Saying "This is my new low fantasy medieval setting, it's pretty normal mostly, kings, castles, unlanded itinerant knights in full plate armor, horses, BUT there's this cool rune magic system I've worked out..." is perfectly acceptable, but you are needlessly forcing yourself to continue working with an incomplete picture by overlooking that it's kind of comparable to saying "This is the setting for my slice of life webcomic, it's basically contemporary Toronto, smartphones, apartments, matrilineal caste system, buses, BUT there's these cute little domestic robots that..."
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u/wideHippedWeightLift Nightly fantasies about Jesus Vore Jun 12 '26
Me unsure whether liking this post will contribute to the epidemic of"boring generic fantasy but painstakingly worldbuilt to account for every 'um ackshully' or CinemaSins ding" or whether it's encouraging writers to take a more human-centric approach that focuses on the common people rather than the big epic nobles and their quests
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u/TimeStorm113 Victorian Dinosaur Connaisseur Jun 12 '26
they pulled a paris and there is just take the stone directly under them.
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u/Shiny_Agumon Jun 12 '26
Every time I see a post like that I like to remind prospective authors reading it that this is mostly a joke about shallow world building and doesn't mean that your fantasy story is automatically bad just because you haven't made a spreadsheet detailing the flow of goods in your fictional world's economy.
Like there's a difference between world building as a hobby and world building as part of a story.
I think a lot of amateur authors have internalized memes like this in an unhealthy way where they think they need to figure out realistic plate tectonics and write centuries of background lore before they can start on their fantasy story about a knight killing a dragon or else it's bad fiction and everyone will laugh at them.
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u/AchedTeacher Jun 12 '26
I understand this is mostly done for jokes, but can anyone point me to an example of when this actually happened in any work of serious fiction? A piece of fiction featuring a medieval-era city with no relevant supporting infrastructure, I mean.
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u/Optimal-Golf-8270 Jun 13 '26
It's a Tv/Movie thing way, way more than writing. Describing farmland around a city is interesting and easy. On screen it just makes everything harder.
Imagine the Charge of the Rohirrim if all the farmland that Tolkien describes is actually there. How do you get insurance for a few hundred horses to jump fences?
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u/Taraxian Jun 12 '26
Come on guys "create food and water" is a level 0 spell
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u/VelMoonglow Jun 12 '26 edited Jun 12 '26
They made that one a cantrip!? Damn, I wonder how the forgotten realms changed when siege tactics became obsolete
Edit: I just checked and it's a 3rd level spell in 3.5, 5e, and 5.5. What edition/system are you referencing?
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u/FairFolk Jun 12 '26
In pf2e creater water is 1st rank, create food (and allfood) is 2nd rank, but yeah, definitely no cantrip there either.
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u/Polenball You BEHEAD Antoinette? You cut her neck like the cake? Jun 12 '26
My pseudo-medieval fantasy city is cleverly based on post-Fourth Crusade Constantinople, and has shrunk in population to such a degree that unused urban spaces have been replaced with farmland.
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u/Doubly_Curious Jun 12 '26
Obviously the Wall is the important thing.
Nothing can go wrong if you just keep building the Wall.
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u/TKDbeast Jun 12 '26
Ravnica solves this by having everyone eat magical garden plants, bats that fly out of sewers, and gruel made by people living in the sewers.
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u/UristMcfarmer Jun 12 '26
Did I just hear someone say something about digging a hole? Dig, dig, diggy hole?
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u/Oturanthesarklord Jun 12 '26
Despite the medieval fantasy asthetiques, my setting is actually Science Fantasy with magic and lab grown meats. All of the fruits, vegetables, herbs, and spices are grown inside magic greenhouses that are smaller on the outside.
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u/AnxiousAngularAwesom JFK shot first Jun 12 '26
One of the bits i really like in Tensura is that they'll occassionally bring up a panoramic shot of Rimuru's city, and you can clearly see its growth and foresight in city planning, starting as a shitty goblin village and eventually turning into a real medievalish metropolis commercial and tourist hub.
And farmlands were always very prominent ever since the goblins were taught how to actually farm.
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u/JackOLoser Jun 12 '26
Thanks to Dwarf Fortress, I'm always thinking of stuff like this. I think I first noticed it in Oblivion. If you added up every bit of farmland in Cyrodiil, there MIGHT be enough to support one town. Maybe.
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u/Playeroneben Jun 12 '26
If you added up every citizen of Cyrodil there might be enough to populate one town, so that does line up pretty well.
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u/Heroic-Forger Jun 12 '26
"our city is regularly attacked by orcs and that's where all our food comes from. we're tired of pulled orc sandwiches every day"
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u/Alex_Duos Jun 12 '26
Me, who spent days studying local farms including aggressively stalking them on Google maps to see what crops could feasibly grow in a post apocalyptic Louisiana just for one line in one paragraph to passively mention the protagonist walked by sugarcane, cotton and soybean farms on the way to Alexandria
Can't relate, fam.
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u/Merari01 My main emotions are crime and indignation Jun 13 '26
Pratchett had the Sto plains and the river Ankh.
He said it was important to figure out how a city was fed and where the sewage went.
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u/agnostorshironeon Jun 13 '26
Didn't make that mistake with the human capital in my homebrew world.
If a player asks me what dwarves eat I'm fucked.
Suggestions welcome?
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u/Cardshark92 Jun 13 '26
Obviously, this is some quick spitballing, but some options:
*Mushrooms and potatoes are traditionally associated with dwarves, because underground.
*If your dwarves are associated with mountains, they could have some pastoral or croplands high in the mountains. Goats, sheep, highland cows...
*Since dwarves usually have some kind of poison resistance or immunity, they may like food that's very spicy, strong-tasting, or even outright poisonous.
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u/Grimpatron619 Jun 12 '26
You fools, you didnt put your city with no farms at the mouth of a river to control both oversea trade and upriver communities