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Food Basis
Everything Starts with Grain
Kingdom Size and Armies
Geriatrics, Sexual Roles and Agriculture
Matriarchal Societies: Women's Rights
Footnote
Monsters and Food
Sample Society Outline Based on Food
You can tell a lot about the way a culture will develop when you figure out what they eat. Since most fantasy-era RPG's are set in a quasi-medieval setting with established town centers, the important food factor is what sort of grain the people are eating. Agrarianism is a prerequisite for stable settlements, and once the locals are harvesting grain, you have the luxury to develop other ideas, and the necessity of a system of supervision and food distribution that doesn't exist in a hunter/gatherer setting where everyone's primary duty is to get enough food to feed themselves every day. In a very real sense, the actual base economic unit of the preindustrial society is not the coin, but the bushel of grain.
The first thing influenced by food is how many people can be supported given a certain amount of arable land, and how much of the population must be dedicated to farming. A primary crop of wheat can support a certain population per acre, barley a different number, oats different again, etc. Because game designers tend to be unimaginative, they tend to use wheat as the primary crop if they've even bothered to think that hard about it. A general, historically accurate figure is that each wheat farmer produces enough food for himself, his 3 non-farming dependents (who don't get as much food as the farmer), plus 10% surplus, taking into account the amount of grain you need in reserve for replanting. This means that for every non-farmer (adventurer, politician, soldier, etc.) in town, there must be 10 farmers raising wheat. This figure reflects the best technology available in a preindustrial society prior to the late 18th century, where advances in erosion control and fertilizers increased yields. The sort of technology we are talking about here is the kind you would expect to see in a fantasy quasi-medieval society: heavy plows and the wooden horse collar. Wheat farming has the considerable advantage of encouraging draft animals and horsemanship with increased hay and feed production, which in turn leads to cavalry. Each farmer generally works about 7 acres of wheat, and assuming your society is using a three-field system, each farmer would require about 10 acres, including the land that is left fallow that year (generally used for grazing while the land replenishes itself). Using a rough conversion of acreage to square miles (640 to 1), each square mile of wheat will thus support 64 farmers and their families plus 6.4 non-farmers. A typical farming village in old England of about 180 people thus requires 3 square miles of arable farmland, which is in keeping with the fact that such villages typically existed about 2-3 miles apart.
However, if you are trying to design a civilization that has relatively tight borders and supports a gigantic number of people, you have to either say they trade for their food from less populated farm regions (raising the cost of living for everyone in the city) or say there is a very high-yield crop/farming method that allows for large population support on smaller acreages. Corn is an extremely high-yield per acre crop, and can be used as your primary food source, although you have to get around the fact that corn is very susceptible to blights and such in an early farm culture. The middle american cultures subsisted almost entirely on corn, and its efficiency allowed them a spectacular amount of leisure time to develop technology, but every few years they had to contend with massive starvation because a crop went poorly. Rice can also support a tremendous number of excess people above the number of workers required, but rice is a bizarre crop that allows for a virtually unlimited number of workers in a small area, each of whom produces just slightly more than what he needs to survive himself, working throughout the year in several harvesting cycles. This makes it attractive to small landmass communities like those of feudal Japan, but creates a whole new set of social implications. This will be discussed later.
Rice does not encourage the domestication of horses, hence extensive, specialized cavalry is not a natural outgrowth of rice communities. (This can be convenient for a game designer who doesn't want to be bothered with horses.) Horses were used in a few non-wheat based cultures, notably the Mongols and the Japanese, but they fed on available scrub, and they never reached the level of universal application or breeding as a wheat culture's horses. For instance, neither the Mongols nor the Japanese bred specialized draft horses as did the Europeans, thus they never got heavy warhorses, thus no close formation lance-using heavy cavalry.
It's conceivable that corn could encourage horse domestication, but there is no historical reference for this, since horses were not available in the new world until introduced by the Europeans. However, the use of horses is quickly learned when they become available. The Sioux people almost immediately became a culture based entirely on horses when they were introduced.
Supplementary food sources also have an effect on your maximum population per acre of arable land. Generally, the typical inland European diet of the middle ages was very light on meat, at least for the peasantry. Upper classes would demand more meat, but you don't have to get too deeply into detail here. The thing to keep in mind is that herding animals that require grain to feed are roughly 1/10 as efficient as the raw crops in terms of pastureland. Therefore, if you want to have the typical fantasy idea of a roasted haunch in every tavern, you need to allocate even more land to pastures. However, to make up for this there are some land-efficient methods of getting meat into the food chain. Pigs are typically left to run in contained forest areas to forage for themselves, effectively harvesting nuts and roots (and garbage in the form of slops) and converting it to ham and bacon. Game can be taken, of course, but if you go too heavily on the idea of game you deplete the forest and run out of game in subsequent years, thus hunting cannot be relied on as a major source of nutrition. Cattle and the like can graze on the town commons, saving a little bit of pasture area.
Fishing can be incredibly efficient in areas that can support it, taking up no land at all and returning large amounts of protein, especially if your civilization has advanced fishing technologies in the form of nets, boats, and possibly even fish traps. A fishing village can generate up to a 150% surplus, and fishing industries helped to fuel the prosperity of the early Normans, and the rise of a better-fed and richer middle class. North american tribes along the Delaware river were able to harvest as much as 20 million tons of fish annualy, raising their standard of living considerably. However, people tend to get sick of fish very quickly, and there should be an alternate food source. In modern-day African fishing villages, dogs and cats are cosidered edible and desirable as food, and can be traded for goods and services.
If all else fails, you can use black box devices like "magical weather control and soil refreshment" which allows for more than one crop of wheat to be harvested per year, and negating the necessity of a two or three field system, i.e. no farmland is ever fallow. However, an unrealistically superior food source which is easy to harvest, i.e. massive amounts of fruit on every tree, tends to lead to a sedentary and primitive society due to a lack of need for innovation and industry. Jungle communities that subsist heavily on readily-available fruit tend to stay in the stone age while the rest of the world is forced by necessity to move forward.
Once you have your food sources determined and a supportable population figure, you can tell a lot about local political systems from what your crops consist of. In the case of wheat, barley, and other annual grain crops, this contributes to the feudal system of "Lords of the Land." When you have food and land to grow it on, someone is going to inevitably try to take it away from you. This results in the creation of a warrior class, dedicated primarily to holding onto the farms, and maybe taking the next guy's fields as well. These warriors are excess people, and don't produce food themselves, taking it instead from the farmers. Now your army becomes somewhat organized under some form of leadership, and because they have the power to keep the peasants breathing, they naturally assume a leadership role, sometimes going so far as to bar the peasants from owning proper war gear out of a sense of job security. The farmers keeps the warrior class from starving, the warrior class protects them from invaders and wild predators. Historically speaking, wheat farmers and the like stayed in their appointed social station, only rebelling against the lord when they were taxed so heavily that they began starving to death. The lord of the land, for his part, typically taxed the peasants as heavily as he could possibly get away with, but woe was the lord who starved his farmers to death. (Example: Wat Tyler's rebellion, 1381.)
Rice and the methods required to grow it bring about a different social system. Because rice is a relatively low-margin food source (i.e. very little is produced in excess of what the peasant requires to live), you need a phenomenal number of people working relatively small rice fields if you want to support a warrior class to keep your people safe. This requires a very advanced and strict management system in which everyone must obey the taskmaster, or the whole village will starve. This is likely the origin of the strict disciplinary tradition of the early Japanese people, which continues to influence the culture even today.
Taking our example of fantasy supercorn, we have here a crop which is exceptionally high-yield, and relatively few farmers can support a large number of excess people (say, the population is merely 60% peasantry, as opposed to a more realistic 90%). The social implications for a supercorn farmer are significant. On the one hand, this production of excess crops can mean the farmer has more freedom of choice and status, especially if supercorn is hard to cultivate properly. If this is the case, the farmer who can get maximum yields out of his supercorn has been elevated from unskilled laborer to desirable artisan. The growers of supercorn may even have enough clout to form a guild, but this is unlikely; food is such a basic requirement of society that any attempt to "strike" or price-gouge by supercorn farmers would probably lead to the warrior class beating them down. If hedge-wizards are required to get a faster crop rotation, then these specialists may have political power and influence, although they would almost certainly be civil servants and not player characters. However, the political intricacies of supercorn farming NPC peasants are not really important to the player usually: it's just something to keep in mind when creating a believable social system.
A badly designed fantasy campaign typically includes completely off-the-cuff sprawling empires and holdings of the local king. "Well, this here kingdom is 500 miles by 500 miles, about, and like it's divided into 250-square mile quarters which are governed by dukes..." Unless the army rides around on motorcycles and Lear jets, this is not going to be the case.
In the preindustrial community, the area that a "monarch" can claim is effectively about 15 or 20 miles from the capital, or wherever the primary military base is. This is about as far as his soldiers, tax collectors, sherriffs, and what have you can maintain his authority, yet still be under his control. This is because of two factors: one, how far his men can ride comfortably on a daily basis, and two, the size of the army he can support with his excess food production.
Another consideration is how far the peasants have to travel to get their goods to market. This is considerably less, since the peasantry don't have access to stables full of high quality horses and changing stations, and must often carry their goods in by foot, or ox/draft horse wagon. Markets should be no further than one-third of a day's travel from the furthermost farmer to be practical (this concept is known as the "rural edge"). This depends on the quality of roads and how convoluted the terrain is, but assuming you have reasonable terrain and metalled (paved) roads, figure that farmers would not be functional further than 5 miles or so from the market. Wagons are slow. There also has to be a provision for getting required food into the urban center, which is typically in the middle of a county. Considering that you don't have good refrigeration or preservatives, the food should ideally get to the city as fast as possible. Therefore, if you look at markets as an extension of a kingdom's central power, you cannot have a gigantic metropolis supported by dozens of layers of markets. The food would rot by the time it made it through the gates.
Getting back to the consideration about soldiers for land defense and control, one has to discard immediately the nonsense about armies of 100,000 men clashing in huge slaughterfests on the battlefield. You simply cannot support an army that is larger than your peasant population. If you assume that your society is heavily militaristic, with a need for a big deterrent to invasion, maybe 4% of your total population might be members of a standing army (40% of nonfarmers), with the possibility of raising 6% of your total population as peasant levies (7% of total peasants, or about 20% of working peasants) in times of crisis. It should be noted that if your kingdom enters a full-scale conflict, most of the front line is going to consist of these peasant levies; the standing army will be spread to a number of positions in case of surprise attack, and to function as reserves. This is a good reason to avoid war, as you can only lose so much of your peasant population before you start running the risk of starvation.
Using the supercorn example and supplementary nutrition like fishing from the preceding section about food, the entire size of a king's holdings can be compacted even further. This gives the military a great defensive advantage, since they have less farmland to defend. This could be a very important consideration in a fantasy campaign, where the supercorn farms are occasionally raided by giants, requiring a more concentrated defense force to drive them away. In addition, if supercorn is less labor-intensive than wheat as well as less land-intensive, you free up more of your population, and thus your standing army can be larger. You also have more people with free time to think up interesting ideas like calendars, a church, arts and sciences, and magic.
Geriatrics, Sexual Roles, and Agriculture
Modern conventions that have been placed into most role playing environments include unrealistically good geriatric care and sexual equality, at least for a preindustrial culture. Without getting into a detailed and fervent history of attitudes toward the elderly and women's suffrage, a game designer with an eye towards immersive believability could stand to benefit from understanding the reasoning behind the history of these causes, and the implications of introducing them into a setting which historically could not support them.
In a preindustrial agrarian society, everything is based on how good your harvest is, and therefore on how many able-bodied peasants you have at your disposal. Able-bodied peasants generally referred to males between the ages of 16 and 40 or so. These were the people who kept everyone from starvation and allowed for more leisure time among the aristocracy and artisan classes, so they could develop technology. As outlined earlier, the peasantry typically comprised at least 90% of the total population, if not more. However, out of everyone that lived on a farm, only able bodied laborers were immediately important to the harvest and therefore the tax base. This excluded three major groups of "peasant dependents":
The very old in a peasant house are doubly penalized. The first consideration is the same as for children in that they cannot work, but they will never become strong farmers again. In effect, all they do is eat. This makes them a liability to the farmer, who now has to support more mouths and still pay his rent and taxes, and also to the lord of the land, who sees the elderly as a useless food sink that cheapens his tax base while returning nothing. (The concept of gratitude for services rendered is another modern ethical consideration that can only exist when technologically feasable.) As if this weren't bad enough, medical care was understandably extremely limited, and one reason the elderly were not such a problem for the population was that a peasant was usually dead by the time he became unable to work. Old people are more susceptible to injuries, as the body stops regenerating as efficiently once the capablity to propogate the species is gone; he is as useless to the gene pool as he is to the lord of the land. A fall resulting in a broken bone was usually fatal.
Women had a number of things working against them from the standpoint of food gathering in the European system. The first is the difference in bodily functions with men, particularly the lack of explosive upper body strength, which is important for hard manual labor (or killing something with an axe) unless it's something relatively easy like rice sprouting, and rice-based cultures often did have women working the fields alongside the men unless they were having children. Secondly, the advantage of human females in metabolism works against them: since women can survive longer without food and water than men (except during pregnancy), they tended to get less nourishment. The primary role of women in this sort of society, where the survival of the species was actually something to worry about, was childbearing. This was a full time job in many cases, since you took it for granted that a certain number of your children were going to die before they reached maturity. Having lots of kids was both a societal and genetic imperative. Coupled with the incredibly high rate of death during childbirth, this meant that women in the European theatre generally led short, miserable lives that consisted of little more than light hand industry and birthing. Without the technology to improve their lot, and the lot of the society, it was an unfortunate inevitability.
Concerns about the elderly only really apply in a fantasy campaign where time is important, as it is in any really good campaign. The elderly members of the peasantry are still effectively useless in the agrarian power structure, though. They cannot farm, and eat the food that others bring in. The archetypical fantasy mage often tends to be old, but one can assume that a mage is by all rights a member of the aristocracy or the nobility, with access to better healthcare and nutrition than anyone else, and historically only the upper classes lived to advanced age. If you want to present a more compassionate face for your society, you can say that the excess food production from your fantasy supercrop allows the elderly to be supported, in effect a technological advance that permits a new ethic to flourish. You must be careful, though, to avoid a situation where longevity is the norm for every member of society, or the elderly will be eating food they haven't grown for many many years, draining the economy past self-sufficiency very quickly. For this reason, magic should not be allowed to act as an advanced anti-agathic agent, and the old ex-farmer will still die at what would be consdered a very young age today. The same rationale can be applied to the survival of young children, simply by lessening the risk of famine. However, a situation where magically created food can sustain everyone infinitely should be avoided, as such a situation creates entirely new sets of social problems that are outside the scope of a comprehensible fantasy game for a modern player.
Now let's assume that because you don't want your fantasy game to be picketed by the Women's Liberation Movement, you have a caveat that women are equal to men in all ways. Actually, this is not true: what you are really saying is that player character adventurer women are equal in all ways to their male counterparts. The peasant woman is still probably dying while having her third baby, but the peasantry is pleasantly invisible to the players. However, there are some interesting implications. If women have the same physical potential as men, this means that the peasant wife can now be very productive during the planting and harvest... not as productive as the man, since some of her time will still be spent trying to deliver babies, but say about 80% or so. Ths raises the female peasant from the role of "dependent breeder" to an important part of the agrarian community. This means that there is less waste and overhead for the peasantry, resulting in a higher surplus yield, which means you have more people with free time.
Women are still valuable as the mothers of the next generation, though, so how can you reconcile this with the idea of female adventurers risking life and limb without restriction? You must assume that magic allows for safer delivery, and that the midwife is the magical equivalent of a primitive but functional maternity ward. Magic can also act as a blackbox form of pediatric care, and so less peasant children die before maturity. If this is the case, then the people have less of a problem with women getting killed on the battlefield, since the next generation is more safely assured.
Matriarchal Societies: Women's Rights Footnote
A point raised by Penelope Baker (Jin Lee) while I was looking for nitpicky points was that there were societies where women were not treated as breeding chattel, but were actually in higher social positions than the men. Examples of this are the matriarchal priestesshood societies like some of the early Celts. Females were considered to be closer to the Earth Mother, or what have you, and had appropriate status and authority. Civilizations that encouraged a feminist military ethic, like some of the splinter Greek cultures, tended to die out fairly quickly due to a lack of offspring.
A female warrior tradition is more prevalent in pre-iron cultures, notably the early Celts. In a hunter/gatherer or very early agricultural society, you have a far more limited population, and therefore everyone has to act in the defense of the community. The religious importance of the goddesses Macha and Morrigan among the early Celts reflects this, especially in the case of Morrigan, a brutal warrior goddess. Cuchulainn was trained by a female warrior from Britain, and there are surviving accounts of warrior queens, Melb, Cartamundu and Boudeccea. Eventually, the Celts were attacked by civilizations that had stratified into a more complex, stable agronomy, allowing them to use iron more effectively, but placing their women into a more traditional noncombat role. Celtic legends seem to reflect that the female warrior castes did not favor very well against the male-dominated aggressors (whether this was a result of iron vs. bronze, or this in combination with a lack of explosive upper body power, is not clear), and the roles of Macha and Morrigan were subtly changed in reaction to this. Women still played a role in the defense of the community, but their role was now more supportive than front-line. Morrigan ceased to be associated with traditional weapons, instead leaning more heavily towards magic, shapeshifting, deception, and treachery. The female warriors of the Celts were more heavily involved with planning, training, fortification defense, espionage, and the like.
The dominance of male-ruled society in the British Isles relegated the Celtic goddesses to even lower status, sometimes even reflected in legends involving the rape of goddesses, followed by death during childbirth. The Irish, who were less consumed by war, also reflected this trend, but their goddess figures took on a more egalitarian role as wife and mother. This did not change the fact that as the iron age progresses, women were removed almost completely from the battlefield except in extremis.
The first Queen of England, Queen Maud (1102-1167), daughter of King Henry I, was somewhat famous for her 19 year war against her cousin Stephen, who had the backing of the nobles who disliked the idea of a female monarch. Their cat and mouse game with the throne continued until Stephen's son and heir died, at which point Maud reached a compromise with Stephen: Stephen would be king, and upon his death the crown would go to Maud's son by Geoffrey of Anjou, Henry II. However, 12th century England was already somewhat civilized, and the division of labor between men and women was set, so the actual fighting was done by the men, so regardless of Maud's technical leadership of her forces, she did not go out herself and hack at the enemy. (Irrelevant note: Interestingly, Henry II also had a sort of power struggle with his queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, but Eleanor did not lead a rebellion herself, rather setting their sons against Henry II. The son who wound up winning the throne was Richard the Lion-Heart.) In any case, by the time cultures develop into settled iron age systems, the women are more rigidly segregated into home care roles. Examples of females of the noble class are almost universally in behind-the-lines leadership roles, and the oddities of the nobility are never universally applicable to the population at large, as "surplus people" always fall under different rules.
Other matriarchal or relatively equitable societies also flourished, for example in early China, but there was still a strict division of sexual roles. Women's role in battle and labor-intensive occupations was still extremely limited, and much of their time was still spent having children.
In any case, a matriarchal society is undesirable in a modern RPG setting for a mass market. If women are inherently holier and more authoritative than men, then they must be designated as NPC's. Inherent governing authority by virtue of a sex selection box doesn't make for balance. Even if you balance this out with limitations placed on female player characters, you wind up with (at best) an unbalanced situation where sex is chosen based on what sort of profession the player wants to follow, or (at worst) a situation where one sex is unable to participate in the majority activities of the game, and is therefore undesirable.
A fantasy campaign traditionally (though not necessarily) includes monsters in its population. These monsters are of three basic types: humanoids, nonhumanoids, and fantastic beings.
Humanoids are the fodder of most worlds. Orcs, goblins, trolls, ogres, fuzzy cat people, whatever... these are the bread and butter of the adventurer on the line, and they come in sufficiently organized numbers so as to pose a threat of invasion, giving the humans an excuse to hate them. If you are concerned with realism in your game design, humanoid tribes will have much the same concerns as human civilizations, primarily food, terrain control, etc. Relations with the humans will typically be exasperated at the start of the campaign, explained by factors like an inability to communicate well, vastly different ethics, and plain old competition for resources. However, the humanoid monsters generally do not possess the potential for personal prowess that humans have, as evidenced by the fact that human adventurers tend to kill them in great numbers. We can thus infer that the typical humanoid lacks sufficient technology to allow him to progress, and is locked into a more or less nomadic hunter-gatherer tribal existence. They probably do not have a high degree of metallurgy and use bronze and stone for weapons, and hides, wood and bronze for armor. Their lack of agriculture makes them wander around in search of food, bringing them into conflict with territorial humans. Lack of agriculture also makes them less likely to have the leisure time humans have, and so they are slow to develop new technologies, including magic. Given all of these disadvantages, they have to have some sort of compensation to avoid being wiped out offhand by the humans. The simplest advantage is faster breeding, the single most important evolutionary trait there is. This also increases their need to take more land for foraging, putting them into increasing conflict with humans. Other advantages may take the form of military readiness: with no farmers, every humanoid is a hunter, and capable of fighting. Hunting societies tend to breed for warrior traits and establish warrior ethics as well. However, it still all comes down to food, and food is what will cause conflict between the player society and the roving packs of brutal humanoids.
Something to note about an organized group of hunter-gatherer humanoids is that they need really large amounts of land to support themselves. A realistic figure for human hunter-gatherers is no more than 2 per square mile, or else you run into environmental degradation problems. Obviously, having to run a mile to encounter 2 humanoids makes for a very dull game, and requires a gigantic landmass if you have 1000 player characters all running after them simultaneously. To some extent, you can make up for the implications of denser populations in the wilderness through explanations like raiding the fertile human territories for food, fishing, and the like, but ultimately you should have an accelerated food chain. Superwheat may not be the only hyperefficient crop available, and you could say that the humanoids are omnivorous, taking a good deal of sustenance from high-yield vegetation which is unpalatable to humans like swamp weeds, mosses, lichens, insects, grubs, etc. In turn, these nonhuman food sources can also support a larger number of edible herbivores, who can in turn support more carnivores and omnivores per square mile. It may require a bit of black boxing to bring a reasonable ecology up to the point where it becomes fun for players.
Nonhumanoids comprises monsters that are more akin to animals, like giant spiders, serpents, stirges, etc. In order to keep these believable, you obviously don't need a high degree of societal understanding, but the ecology does have to make sense. One forest with nothing but carnivorous wolf-things is not a viable situation. Dangerous carnivorous creatures cannot congregate successfully in small areas (unless the carnivores themselves are very small compared to their prey). They require a certain number of herbivores to harvest, while leaving enough herbivores to replenish the stock. The herbivores in turn feed on plants, including plants that are not normally edible by humans. Omnivores can exist in slightly greater numbers with the same supporting herbivore population, but their numbers will still be a tiny fraction of all the animal life in the area. Once again, you can accelerate the food chain to allow for more food sources for nonhuman monsters, just as you do for humanoids.
Fantastic creatures do not have to follow the rules of reality. These are the undead, dragons, daemons, miscellaneous energy beings, and what have you. It still behooves the world builder to figure out why these creatures are where they are, and what resources they might require. A Tolkienesque dragon is a gigantic carnivore, and a flying one to boot, increasing its calrie requirements. Logically, one decent-sized dragon would strip an area of all animals and people very quickly, then move on to the next area, which is a good reason to try to kill them, but it disallows the concept of the dragon hoard (which is fine if you want to go that route). All fantastic creatures are black boxes by default, and as such the designer can apply black box logic to them. A dragon is indeed huge and hungry, but maybe it has a 20-year sleep cycle unless prematurely awoken, and when it is awake it does eat everything it can before going back to sleep. Vampiric undead may also have long periods of torpor, reducing energy requirements, and have "extra-dimensional" sustenance as well, but they need to hang on the fringes of civilization so they can occasionally drink blood, which contains some element they have a deficiency in. A daemon may not be a native inhabitant of the world, appearing only when summoned or due to "dimensional rift/convergence," and they are very unhappy whenever this happens. As long as you even make an attempt to apply logic to these patently illogical creatures, it will be appreciated by the discerning player.
Sample Society Outline Based on Food
Let's say we want to build a small playing area in a fantasy/medieval setting. We have some basic assumptions we want to start with, based on the preceding sections:
This leads us to some other conclusions:
Thus, one square mile of superwheat requires about 90 peasant farmers, who produce a staggering 27% surplus, or enough to support roughly 24 nonfarmers. This is a fantastic advantage, almost on the level of corn production, but it allows for advanced horse domestication.
So now let's figure out how many of these nonfarmers we will need to establish all the trades and practices we want. We can fudge the mundane professions a bit (merchant, village blacksmith, farrier, etc.), but we want to have a reasonable figure that allows for the study of a systemized magical practice, which is crucial for food production. Let's assume that our system is aimed at a mage percentage of player character adventurers of about 10%. The percentage of mages in the overall PC/NPC population of non-peasants will be considerably smaller. If the standing army and levies combines comprises 10% of your total population, and you figure mages on the whole are about 1/4 as likely to show up in the overall population as they do as player characters, then your total number of mages is about 1/4 of 1% of your populace. Figure that you need roughly 5 NPC mages as instructors who maintain the tradition, and about 20 NPC working student-mages who travel around performing civic duties such as lie detection, criminal tracking, healing, and most importantly crop control. With a base figure of only 25 mages, your overall working population must therefore be no less than 10,000. Increase this to about 12,000 to allow for the large number of adventurers that will be running around, and multiply the peasants by 3 to reflect dependents. This is a very large city-state for this level of technology, but thanks to superwheat, it only requires about 110 square miles of arable farmland. This would be a circle of nothing but farmland in a radius of 6 miles from the capitol, but figure that you need a certain amount of living, industrial, grazing, and forested space... the holdings could more logically be said to extend for up to about 10 miles from the city center, with markets placed in strategic areas to facilitate food distribution and trade. The extra people who are freed from farming can increase the size of the dedicated standing army, but more people will want to use their leisure time for other pursuits, so let's say the army comprises about 30% of the nonfarmer populace.
So now we know the following about the makeup of our theoretical fantasy kingdom: