There’s one subclass you forgot. The humble nature cleric. Do you think a holy order of clerics with the soul responsibility of providing plant growth for their worshipers would be feasible?
More than feasible. Fun as heck! Itinerant nature clerics should be in almost every agricultural centre; specialising in divinations and fixing minor ailments too, while they're at it.
I feel like this is why we have the Nature Cleric. It's questionable whether a druid circle would help a bunch of farmers, but a group of clerics of the harvest god would definitely offer this.
@@JukeBoxHeadDruid’s circle most likely you support the local farms. Healthy local communities are essential to preserve their environment. The circle would provide a lot of support since this way they would have a workforce that would not only help preserve but also provide a workforce for the moments of need. It would be a simbiotic relationship. Druids still use a lot of manufactured goods. So I doubt Druid circle’s would be antagonistics to their neighbors. Unless theor policy is to exterminate every humanoid of their area.
@@CaioLGon Maybe there would be a kind of rivalry between the Druids and the nature clerics. Maybe there was a scandal in the local churches that made people mistrust nature clerics so they go for more of a artisanal style plant growth. Kind of like how we have organic food versus more processed food. I would think with such a large plant growth industry there would be some levels of corruption somewhere.
@@Grungeon_Master If you have the Itinerant or Local 5th level plus Nature Cleric who blesses the land with plant growth you might also have the Itinerant or local 1st level plus Nature Clerics to be(Acolytes) regularly checking the fields for Disease with the 1st level spell Detect Poison and Disease. You might have the same set up with druids as well. Diseased crops are devastating to farms and farmers to this day so being able to find it before it spreads and root it out might have as much a boon to agriculture as the Plant Growth Spell itself.
One use of Plant Growth that I love to think about is for desert trade routes. Every two or three miles, bring out a baobab seed, and sprout it with Druid Craft. Cast Plant Growth on a point, shall we say, 70 feet below the ground (you don’t have to be able to see the point you are casting on). You now have a 30-foot baobab owith roots running 130 feet deep. That will be pretty ample for reaching water in most deserts. If it is a Sahara-level desert, you can cast again at a point 230 feet down before you move on, or even a third time at 430 feet; that should send the roots deep enough to reach groundwater just about anywhere, at least if you are staying off of hills. It is going to take a good many castings, but in the end, you will have a line of trees, with edible fruit and leaves and water-storing trunks, stretching across the whole desert between cities, with the next one always in sight. Your deeds, perhaps even your name, will live on for 2,000 years.
And then there's Lv5+ Archfey Warlocks that can cast the overgrowth mode twice an hour, the fertility mode twice a day, and have access to Druidcraft to sprout seeds and the like.
Why wouldn't the warlock of a fucking *Archfey* not just curse the land one day and skip town for shiggles? Not the most reliable sort, those Archfey. Also where are the blood sacrifices? Oh wait, they're in the druid grove.
This concept begs for a campaign arc. Maybe a local made an Archfey pact after the normal casters stopped showing up. Maybe the Archfey is malevolent, or not... Or maybe it's complicated on both ends.
If you're interested in this sort of historical agrarianism check for a series of BBC documentaries that have been posted on TH-cam. They had names like the Edwardian Farm, Victorian Farm etc. -Reference nursery beds this is basically the rice paddy system used in Asia since 4000 BC. Rice is planted in a heavily fertilized nursery plot (usually in a particularly warm spot of land so it can be planted earlier in the growing season) then after 4 weeks it get's transplanted, traditionally by hand, into the main field. Depending on how warm the local climate was it wasn't unusual for two to three crops a year to be grown this way. If you were close enough to a city that peoples' "nightsoil" (feces) could be hauled to the farm for fertilizer that might be extra crops of rice or one of rice and then another of "green manure", nitrogen fixing, crops like beans or peas. -Reference the dead space between the circles it's important to remember that people needed wood for building and as fuel for cooking and heating. In order to support a village you'd often need even more land devoted to woods than to crop lands. They also could be used as a source of wild plants for food (an important source of vitamins in the spring and early summer back in the day), honey from wild bees and, in the case of acorns from oaks and mast from beech trees, fodder for fattening hogs in the fall. These could be the sides of hills or gullies where trying to plow cropland could lead to soil erosion and would also be a habitat where lesser monsters like goblins might infiltrate close to towns and need to be dealt with by novice adventurers. -Reference wide open fields, vs traditional ones with hedgerows or stone wall boundaries, it's important to remember that wind and water erosion are much worse where there aren't these barriers so, while it may seem more efficient, you have to remember Chesterton's Gate and not change something that was used historically until you understand why it was used in our world. -Reference planting "in the ground" the seed drill wasn't developed until the 1700s. Prior to that some crops were dibbled (a 2-3" deep hole poked in the ground and a few seeds dropped in) but that called for thousands of holes per acre of land so, for most of European history, grain crops weren't planted but their seeds were just scattered on the surface of the plowed field. This left them vulnerable to birds so, until the seeds took root, the fields would be guarded by dogs and young boys with slings or noise makers like a bull roarer. Again, a good starting quest for novice adventurers or a bit of backstory to explain why someone might use a sling with advantage if they have a peasant background.
This is really useful, thanks. I've only just started researching farming practices and this will be a very useful jumping off point for further reading. Cheers!
Another great video, showing that you put much more thought into the D&D spells than the people who wrote them. Another angle to consider though: what about fraud? If I want to be “fat as a traveling bard,” but I’m not 5th level yet, what stops me from coming to the village, being wined, dined and gifted, then waving my hands, chanting mumbo jumbo, and spilling useless components, telling the villagers their fields are blessed, and then going on my merry way? By the time the crops are ripe and the villagers realize they’ve been cheated, I’m long gone. Since *plant growth’s* duration is listed as “instantaneous,” that suggests to me that it leaves no enduring enchantment on the plants, so *detect magic* would come up negative, no matter whether the bard or druid had truly cast *plant growth* or not.
It used to be that a magical aura lingered for a minimum of 1d6 rounds... Or 6 to 36 seconds. But boy did 5e strip detect magic to be just as bare bones as possible, yessiree.
I think in a society like that, people wouldn't trust just any wandering rando who claims to be able to cast plant growth. I imagine you'd have something more like circuit-riding judges -- bards who travel around specific regions, whom the locals are familiar with. They might even be accredited by a central authority. In the event that a newcomer does show up, there's a simple way to test their capabilities. Just have them cast the 1-action version of plant growth (or really, any 3rd-level bard spell with visible effects) to prove themselves.
@@dontyodelsohard2456That'd still require someone with Detect Magic watching. And if 'someone with detect magic' is watching, they can make a spellcraft (3.X) or Arcana (5E) check to determine what (if any) spell is being cast.
@basedeltazero714 Yes... But in the above scenario they claimed it would be impossible to distinguish between a spell and no spell. In 3.5e you can at least tell of a spell was cast.
It might be normal to require the traveling bard to demonstrate his ability first, and cast the version that works instantly, and then after demonstrating he knows the spell, cast the version that actually helps crop yield. Frauds can still happen, if you know the bard that helped them last year, you could use disguise self, and a good deception roll to convince them you don't have to waste a spell slot demonstrating this year, after all they know you.
You can terrorize a city with this spell. To the point I had my DM end up upgrading one of my old characters to BBEG after I told him what was possible with my circle of spores druid when we were talking about old campaign. He had her and her cohorts "explode" a city with redwood seeds to create a new forest (think Mirkwood with taller trees, broken cobble paths, and ruined buildings). It was quite the surprise to me because he didn't tell me what he was doing, but it was definitely in line with her character seeing as how she was essentially an eco-terrorist so I was very happy with the reveal. Also love how vindicating this video is along with the comments. I've always hated how paper thin the world building is in DnD, and seeing people point out the exact same spells I've called out including cantrips as having major implications brings a tear to my eye.
Continual Flame would certainly not replace candles and other common lights. A hireling earns a measly 2 silver a day, there is no chance they'll afford to eat and buy the services of a mage for a second level spell with a pricey material component.
@@larstollefsen1236 A level 11 artificer can use a Spell-Storing Item to cast Continual Flame ten times per day with no material component cost. I'd expect one running a magic item shop to be creating them to sell in the store, as they'd be so fast to create and sell compared to the long-term investment in crafting magic items.
Remember, continual flame lasts FOREVER. Even if the spell costs 5000 times the price of a candle, it will pay for itself in a year or two, plus it's brighter, safer and saves many hours of labor. Totally worth the investment, especially since it will be in use by your great great grandkids.
The safety factor should not be underestimated. Some quarters of a city worried about fire may ban nonmagical candles. Likewise, unlike candles, once someone has paid the upfront cost of acquiring a continual flame item, there is no cost to using it, which would open up all hours of the day to use in a way that was not seen until the electrification of cities. This would drastically affect literacy rates among middle-class people if your world has paper and the printing press (or something close to it). As for cost, the permanence of the spell means the costs would constantly be dropping from the first invention of the spell as the number of such items would always be increasing. It could be that nearly every house could have one that stays with the building at all times, inherited from generation to generation and every working person who wanted one could at least manage to afford a cheap used one and while they are expensive, they are often given as wedding gifts. Keep in mind that while new swords were always pricy, by late period as D&D is set in, any soldier could afford to get used swords fairly cheaply due to the objects being semi-permanent. Continual flame items being actually permanent (especially if made from something that doesn't rust like brass or a simple river stone) would see that happen even more strongly despite the higher starting cost. The question you need to ask yourself in your world building to know how plentiful such items are is not a comparison between a new one and an average worker's wage, but simply "how long has this spell existed for?"
Earth wall provides affordable housing, frost storm, frost knight, and all ice spells provide cheap food preservation. Create water causes cities and civilization to survive literally anywhere
Or just build the entire town in a circle around one central field, with the towns being roughly rectangular frames around the circular field in the center.
@@midori_the_eldritch this would make it easier to share a well. I like the idea of towns shaped like hour glasses, triangles, and diamonds as an indicator of how many fertile fields they have.
@chameleonx9253 Worshippers of Sehanine could encourage this kind of settlement development by treating the area built around the field as a development phase like its analog moon phase. Likewise with the harvested and planted sections of the field.
A few things: 1. American (the continent) farming is much more land intensive than anywhere else as most other places are farming crops or animals made for the environment. (For example: a brazillian cow has ten times the carbon footprint of a scottish cow - C footprint representing land use, feed, etc). 2. The spell only takes 8 hrs for 1 years worth of effects, could it be coupled with 1 action cast of the spell to instantly grow the crops? 3. Half a mile is pretty big, like four big fields size 4. You are absolutely right any druid would probably be pretty willing to cast it on land - even if stopping expansion is their goal. Better use of available land means less need for new land. 5. Are you sure the long cast works on seeds and not the land itself? I always assumed it was the soil that held the effect.
Although the description starts with the spell enriching the land, its actual effects are placed upon all plants in the area. All of them specifically yield double the normal food. In my view, the warehouse/nursery is viable in a highly organised society.
Worldbuilding gets even more difficult if you think about it. In D&D 5E a Ranger needs to be level 9 to cast that spell. When it comes to normal threats, a level 9 Ranger can keep quite an area secure. That makes him ideal as the leader of a group of settlers going to the frontier and to develop new land. Put his combat ability and this spell together, he would be the foundation of the settlement. His family would of course be made up of Rangers all with the goal to be able to cast this spell. For the safety of the village and to keep the harvest double the usual size. Soon there would be multiple Rangers in the family able to cast that spell just for redundancy. Which would give them a high status in the village, even if they don't go for the feudal system. After all, the village stands because of them. And in really bad harvests they can support the village by hunting. The more civilized an area becomes, the more likely would it be that the family changes from being Rangers to being Bards. Bards need only be level 5 to cast that spell and with their abilities have an easy time to keep the peace in a settlement and deal with more civilized problems. I don't know D&D 5E to go into the subclasses, but I'm sure there are some that further help people with those classes to do what I mentioned above. On top of that, both can build defences in a short time, forcing an approaching enemy move through specific areas or have be slowed to a crawl. With Rangers sending arrows into them or Bards motivating their troops. Note that even in peacetime this That does change the development of a civilization and the classes chosen. And we don't even have to consider our age of industrialization. In Venice they were at a time able to build an entire War Galley in a day. We should consider what else could be produced in an alarming rate if there are enough people at hand. Also, if this spell works on trees that grow food, wood is more available than usual, allowing for more building material in the area and faster reforestation. The possibilities this opens up are huge. And it's getting better. Cast the spell where there is seaweed. Even if it isn't a food source, the wildlife that feeds on it can be. Or the wildlife that feeds on the wildlife that feeds on seaweed. The spell can also be used to control travel, making it even more difficult for travellers and merchants to find ways around your toll gates. Roads don't pay for themselves after all.
Vertical faming would likely be an early adoption too to make use of the space of the spell. Not the environmentally controlled sort of the modern world but hanging planters would probably be more common, concentrated, and multilayered. It may even fuel further irrigation development. I do feel that missing from D&D rules is communal magic though. This makes sense as it wouldn't be the role of adventures. But it does seem likely that there would be magic that can be performed by communities. The fertility festivals and rituals of a community may well be casting this spell in effect despite them not individually being casters who can, or, alternatively, their involvement with a caster who can may extend the range dramatically. But that's supposition beyond the rules given.
Our group has an entire homebrew setting more or less designed around this idea. The world was hit with a cataclysmic abyss born Blight and it evolved into the players propping up a kingdom and organizing a Great Circle of Druids to keep the peoples of the world fed and an Eldritch Knighthood dedicated to protecting the Heartland. Our group arranged a marriage between a powerful Druidess and a young noble EK and supported them as King & Queen to keep the alliance between the druids and the people. The political might rests with the druids because they hold the magic that keeps everyone fed and the martial might rests with the Knighthoods because they can fight the demonic fungal monsters.
Very interesting! I had played in similar situations too. This idea of allying with a group, not to mention with a widespread order/circle of druids is also very logical and likely, not only for protection/power reasons, but also as a solution to relying on sole casters or adventurers, which might not show up, as Tom had suggested. A group of druids (or whoever else would cast the spell) is very safe from defaulting.
@@MauroDraco Our characters started out learning about the demonic Blight's coming and realizing that we couldn't stop it, yet, we set about to preparing for it as best as possible. Winning over the various Druids of the region, rescuing the young prince and rooting out the Myconvoker Cultists. By creating a small nation that could actually feed the whole world we created a future superpower that in our second campaign is now the primary political power of the setting.
@@MauroDraco The world is called Ariden, the druidic kingdom is Valt. Valtish culture is loosely based on celtic mythology and arthurian legend. the land is rife with fae and spirits and the cities are ruled by wizard knights descended from the kings of old.
Along with Enlarge / Reduce, Plant Growth is one of my favorite spells in the game! So happy you made a video about it! Outside of something like Wish, I completely agree that its one of the most consequential spells for worldbuilding, and people don't talk about it enough! I can't imagine where we would be in our world if we could- on top of all our modern agricultural advances- **double** our crop yields. And I hadn't even considered the implications for trees!
The fantasy world doesn't have artificial nitrogen fertilizers, or international harvesting and shipping of potassium and phosphorus. This spell kind of takes the place of them. It's interesting that this spell noticeably reduces the need for trade.
@@llamatronian101Yeah! The other thing I thought about was that it makes normally very low-yield environments viable; If you're in an area that would otherwise be inhospitable, you might could survive anyway given enough Plant Growth!
I'd love to see the topic continued with "Create Food and Water" and/or "Purify Food and Drink" for the clerical perspective on this, which might, in turn, bring forth a discussion about how religion too could change... maybe into a third video? Specially if divine scrolls creation is considered. Pantheons and their followers might clash because of this and pull nations and their populations with them.
One thing many forget, and what could be the topic of an other video, is that the world of D&D and most other TTRPGs is filled with monsters. Every settlement would need fortifications, including against giant birds to protect the childrens, and every villager would have basic weapon training. All that would also effect the size of farmland, as it also need protection and surveillance. Smart monsters might only grab some plants and run, but the large ones could eat whole fields in a day, or devour a whole herd of livestock. So to protect enough land to feed everyone Plant Growth might be the only way for larger society to even exist.
7:40, you forgot to cut out the first take and the pause on "strange system". The idea of societies needing magic lords is interesting. It is used in the book series "Ascendance of a Bookworm" where their society is structured around their magical ruling class channeling mana into special chalice artifacts that are then given to their territory leaders, who pour mana from the chalices into the ground as part of a fertility ritual. Politics in the country revolve around each territory trying to secure as many high-mana aristocrats as possible so that they can power their society and keep their lands fertile. In fact it is shown that the commoners are almost completely dependent on the growth rituals, to the point where several territories that lost their ruling classes become famine-stricken wastelands as the land reverted back to it's pre-magic state. It would be interesting to see what happens to a landscape being repeatedly ravaged by highly concentrated short-term plant-growth out of greed. If you've ever seen what concentrated back to back cotton growth does to soil, you can imagine what could happen even with magic, if the user is using the short term spell instead of the long-term version, which seems more akin to magic fertilizer.
I'd imagine if farming grew to be centered around Plant Growth, there'd be a point in technological advancement where it'd be cost effective to develop circle farms into sphere farms. The spell doesn't say if it's a flat circle or a sphere, but it only says radius so potentially to maximize the usefulness, some method for compressing farmland and making is stackable, maybe like aquaculture and/or magic or even technology to create sunlight could both increase the effect of a single spell, and create a vary interesting landscape of half domes rising out of the earth, cut into slices with each layer bursting with life
Okay, I did some math and if you assume that a caster who can cast this spell does so every day for a month in early spring, right after the planting, following a carefully charted path laid out by the kingdom's cartographers to ensure a short 20-30 minute jaunt from one village to the next without ever needing to backtrack or otherwise waste a day traveling, and if we assume that between the buildings of each individual village, plus local water sources and any other land features that might impact efficiency, each casting is only really impacting the production levels of 250 acres worth of farmland, that still works out to doubling the production of 7500 acres per year per caster, producing enough food for ~15,000 people. That means you would need 83-84 such casters to address say, circa 1000 CE Kingdom of England.England has 48 counties, so that works out to about 2 casters per county, with some perhaps needing only just one, or having some redundancy built into the system just in case. That would bring up a rather interesting possibility of a master/apprentice system where each county has a more senior caster and a junior who is training to someday take their place, which might result in there being prestige involved in being a village tended to by the more senior spellcaster. This one month of duty might be their sole obligation to the kingdom, allowing them to pursue their own interests the rest of the year while enjoying the privilege and status of their rank without needing to pay any further tax or duty, which in turn might make expansion a difficult endeavor. Imagine, though, the repercussions in such a setting of monsters or bandits accosting and abducting or murdering a spellcaster before they had completed their route. That could spell doom for the region as the lack of spellcasting might cause a minor famine for literally thousands of people unless they were rescued or replaced. Imagine if there were a ticking clock in terms of the caster only being allowed to work during a certain month, so that an abducted caster would have to be rescued as quickly as possible, perhaps even at night or under other less than ideal conditions lest multiple villages simply miss out that year as only so many castings can be performed before the end of the month.
I'd initially put granaries and small town infrastructure in the area between a 4-square style setup. Then start an outer city protecting the farmland. After that, you can start out a hexagon formation surrounding it to make a system of concentric circles of a city, growing the city as required by population.
There's two scenarios i have in mind that could happend depending on the spell used 1. If the spell takes nutrients from the earth, farming doesn't change in the long run, as you are taking a finite amount of resources from the ground and must wait for them to recover 2. Gives new nutrients. Every single piece of land can be exploited simultaneously, no need to organize crop rotation or fallow. Asuming casting the spell is relarively costly it would be done by feudal lords or the comunity as a whole (rich individuals would come to dominate the towns agriculture and becoming lords of their own). Either way land doesn't become privatized and has to be worked by the whole comunity or every family workind whatever plot they could that year. The pattern of spells casted would follow a haxagonal model like a beehive for max efficiency
Look, I don't really livestream anymore, but I once had cultivated a large audience of folks who regularly would be excited to watch me build an excel spreadsheet based on an MMO economy. If I can build such an audience, all of us following your little mind worms like this is no surprise. I would love to sit down with you some day and hash out some numbers behind the concepts you bring up, seeing how it would actually apply to a D&D world. I don't expect it to happen, but it would make my intensely numbers nerdy heart happy.
I'd love to get your take on the usage of the 1st level ritual unseen servant. I've personally experimented recently on a mage that specialiEs in using this spell to maximize crafting efficiency for tasks that do not require an enhanced degree of knowledge or fine dexterity. For example, having unseen servants carry materials from one location to another in an assembly line, cleaning a butcher's table in between cuts of meat or tables at a restaurant, running most of the tasks in a laundry seems viable with just unseen servants. A skilled caster who is efficient at directing tasks and multitasking when giving orders could have up to 6 unseen servants operating at a time, since you can be engaged in the ritual casting of the next unseen servant while ordering the previous ones around since the spell does not require concentration. That and since they accept verbal commands, there is a link to the Magic Mouth Spell which might be able to issue commands for you to those servants on a repeated, scheduled cycle. Food for thought.
Another thing to consider is how much an optimal casting of plant growth actually increases yields. From Wikipedia, "average yields of grain crops in England from 1250 to 1450 were 7 to 15 bushels per acre." If we use 12 bushels as an average, and see that Plant Growth affects roughly 500 acres, each casting yields an additional 6,000 bushels. If we use wheat as an example, 6,000 bushels translates to 360,000 pounds, and as they are worth 2cp per pound, that's a tidy sum of 7,200gp. However, that's the price at the market, so the farm is selling it for cheaper than that for it to be profitable shipped into the city and sold to individual buyers, and the doubled yields also requires more harvesting effort, and the caster wouldn't be claiming the entire profit (or else the farm would get no profit from hiring the caster), so I'd expect in a perfectly optimized farm for the caster to walk away with around 1,000-2,000gp, or 125-250gp/hour. However, as it's a yearly task, I'd expect that there would be more casters willing to do that easy work for such a price than there are farms optimized to that service, and either competition drives the price down, or the druids and rangers form a colluding monopoly, with the bards being a wildcard.
We do need to consider how these faster growing plants affect the soil nutrients as well. Faster and larger growing plants are going to deplete that soil really fast, so we need to deal with that.
@@cadenvanvalkenburg6718 That depends on how the spell works. It states that it doubles crop productivity, but says nothing about soil depletion, so the growth could be fueled entirely by the magic, no additional consumption required.
@@derektom14 That's possible. The actual text is not really helpful "All plants in a half-mile radius centered on a point within range become enriched for 1 year. The plants yield twice the normal amount of food when harvested." Based on this, I would presume that it just doubles the amount of product grown without providing any magical support, so it needs more water and nutrients, but it's really up to the DM I suppose. I would probably rule that its not fully sustainable though, just because of the sheer population growth and society that has the spell would undergo, especially once you get the Haber process.
3:10 i can imagine a festival or yearly ritual were farmers pilgramage to a temple with their best seeds in a backpack to get them blessed, probably after the last fall big harvest
3rd level slot, once a year? I'm sure it's practical to have multiple sites do this on the same festival day around the kingdom (maybe even every small/medium+ sized city). 8 hours is a long time though - so definitely need to make a big deal of the event.
does raise the question of nutrient depletion though, land with depleted nutrients would produces lower yields (even under the spell, as it only doubles the yield), so given that nutrients are presumable being drained at twice the rate, spell make no mention of creating them, would that mean that more variety would need to be implemented in a rotation/polyculture or longer rest periods, or larger production of fertilizers. all three of which would necessitate more land being needed. which also raised the problem of population growth, if there is excess that means less malnutrition which subsequently means lower mortality rates. more population necessitates more food, being us back to the need for larger farms.
Interesting idea.. perhaps literally rotating farmed areas around a settlement is a solution, or playing with those 'dead zones' for subsequent plantings. Who knows, maybe move earth is enough of an effective plow to keep nutrients moving, and relatively free-roaming animals might serve in aiding that fertilisation. Or maybe the magic draws from magic instead?
Druids might be able to help with that too. If anywhere near the coast, encourage seabirds to nest in or around fallow fields and bring in tons of guano as fertilizer for example.
This is something I considered (though nowhere *near* this level of detail!) and ended up incorporating into my current campaign world. I reasoned that overuse of Plant Growth *would* leech nutrients from the soil, not to any catastrophic extent, just a slight but noticable difference in crop quality; bland tasting food, less durable textiles, brittle building materials, etc. This is reflected in my main kingdom's culture; the ambitious urban moiety concentrates on maximum crop yield, while the rural agronomists eschew such shortcuts. So using "Vona grown" (common appellation for the peasant class) materials carries a definite social cachet. Kind of like "dolphin-friendly" or "sustainable practice" in modern times. And this video encourages me to examine and build upon that foundation. Thank you!
@@Grungeon_Master Nutrient depletion was a problem during 1500-1900 in Europe until synthetic fertilizers. During the 1800s on poorer soils there was 10 times more pastureland that was used to fertilize small fields with arable crops, so those crops could grow without problems. Human fertilizer was spread on pastures, as food grown with human fertilizer is much more likely to pass on diseases. The animals as a middle step reduces this problem. But healing spells might make it viable to cut out a lot of animals near cities allow large population centers on larger scales. The mineral the rock was made up that became the soil is important. Rocks like feldspar and basalt contain some levels of the nutrients plants need to grow. Quartz doesn't contain those nutrients in it's chemical formula. Erosion on feldspar and basalt rocks would replenish nutrients slowly, while quartz once depleted can only be replenished with fertilizers. Volcanic area's would be very hard to deplete and could most likely farm on the same plot every year with different crops. River sediments can also bring in nutrients, so farms would still concentrate near rivers.
The mortality rates thing isn't really a problem for 2 reasons. First is that we typically imagine more and larger cities in D&D than were typical of the medieval period, so a larger population being able to be supported by farmers is actually good. Second is that D&D has monsters which could frequently wipe out entire settlements, so the additional population growth on top of that could flow into repopulating regions which have had tragedies happen to the former inhabitants. Nutrient depletion is something that should be thought about, though, whether as a limiting factor or a solved problem.
Of note: (If you take it as enriching the land, and thus the plants need to be planted) The limiting factor of the spell being the entire work day of a professional spell casters for one spell and the overall small size of the land mean you'd have to have people whose jobs are the magic that inhance agriculture. In general. An acre of farm land feeds between half a person and a person. But since we also grow non foods and animals our world has about 1.5 acres of farmland per person. An acre was defined originally by producing enough food to feed a single person At 320 acres per casting. Each casting will feed around 300 people with a day of effort at maximum efficiency. If one peasant farmed 4 acres of land had a family of 3 non workers and there were a single plant growth caster creating for every 300 farming families half the population would still need to farm to feed itself. Lower than medivial history, but larger than the modern day. It also contains a very generous assumption about the population of druids While plant growth might cause circular shaped farms for those aspects of civilization that do benefit from it , many communities aren't going to have plant growth , castings and and other magics would need to be used to improve the efficiency of farming before we get an impact of magic on the availability of food similar to modern day technology. In particular undead or construct workers EDIT: Farmland isn't yearr round, so neither is plant growth casters, which just makes thing's more difficult for plant growth economy since there's less magical enhancements per year per caster since you can only cast for about 3/4s of the year, but on the other hand, plant growth is more than 320 acres it's 502 acres so it kinda cancels out
But what if you have the ruling family made out of such spellcasters? Say you start with one Ranger able to cast that spell helping to start a new village. To keep their position, his entire family would become Rangers, not just for that spell, but also to keep the village save from other dangers. And to have enough casters should one of them die. And if the area becomes more civilized, they switch from Rangers to being Bards, because they can cast the spell with less training and can help to run a more civilized community than a frontier village better. And suddenly we have several families doing that. Either splitting from the first family or others following the same system. Not to mention that the spell has also defensive qualities.
@@highlorddarkstar A pointless um actually since The difference in numbers, ultimately almost evenly counteracts my original math not accounting for the fact that farm land isn't farmed year round for many crops, and thus druids bless less land per year per caster than i originally said as well
@@Mr_Maiq_The_Liar there is nothing stopping a caster from casting year round, just because there’s nothing growing doesn’t mean you can’t enrich the soil. A single full time caster could handle 500acres/working day*261 working days=130,500acres with double productivity. That is a sizable surplus. You free up a lot of people, even if your farmer is a family of five responsible for 10 acres. On its own it’s not the 2% we have but it is 25% at the high end (and farmers are more likely to run 40,80, or 100 acres on their own). Note, at 100 acres per family we’re well down to 2.5%. That isn’t medieval, that’s a cross between modern day farming and 1920s small farms.
Well, with the traveling Bard idea, you're looking at one Bard or Nature Cleric being able to easily service 50 communities of 300 families. The Priest Archetype has 3rd level spell slots, and an order of nature clerics with one priest for every 15,000 families doesn't seem too unrealistic. You're still only looking at a cutting the "farming peasants" from 90% of the population to 50% of the population, but when you add in pressures to develop more 5th level spellcasters, I think it's a obvious win for the mages. Reminder that a typical "knight" is an 8th level fighter archetype, so any organized push towards standardized magical education equivalent to the martial education granted to the nobility is sure to result in more than one caster for every 300 families. Hell, adding a tiny bit of organization, and one guy in a local manor could supply well over 2,000 families by just hitting the 7ish circles within 2 hours of his house.
The central distribution network for seedlings is not something I'd considered! It could create a variety of the old bronze age palatial cultures perhaps. That said, for my world, I'm now gonna have to specify that plant growth only holds on the plant if it is not replanted. In lore, I already have travelling nature priests (spellcasting priests are extremely rare, too) going from village to village enhancing crops.
Square plots that are a mile wide. The center circle is a farm. The corners are where settlements are. Thus, the settlements are all between 4 farmlands.
Was really expecting after the long list of farm staples at the beginning a “long ago the ancient grains lived in harmony, but then everything changed when the corn attacked”
A key thing to consider: irregular walled medieval fields were the result of private competition to ensure your own food. Im thinking in a magic scenario it would go like the industrial revolution were rich magical land owners and a few basic staff would generate vast amounts of crops and use wealth surplus to buy up the small subsistence plots, forcing the ordinary farmers to become urban artisans due to pressure from hugely efficient but inaccessible magic plantations. I mean if theyll just Wild Shape or Eldritch Blast you if you complain, would you stay and hope His Lordship throws you a bone or move to find work and your own food?
Well I'm not too sure if we'd even see small walled subsistence plots precisely due to the jealousy issue and space inefficiency in relation to plant growth! Might be worth reassessing if communitarian agriculture could work on a larger scale. Alternatively, yeah, I imagine a company being commissioned to administrate a city's farms is a reasonable beginning for an industrial revolution, decentralised wealth and power, and all the messy strong-arming that comes with it.
Nice video. A few comments: 1.) I'd rule that since the spell 'enriches the land', it is the land that the spell influences, and thus allowing the plants yield double the crop ON THAT LAND. This is a big difference, as it doesn't allow the whole province to get seedlings from a single casting. Still, 3.14 square miles of fields is a LOT. Typical peasant family needed around 12.5 acres to feed themselves, and 3.14 sqmi is about 2000 acres. So we'd talk about 160 peasant families. That is a full (biggish) village right there, and access to double the harvest, the population could double, too. 2.) Since the enriching is for the full year, it is possible to do it any time of the year. I would be very inclined to limit that it needs to happen around planting time, which obviously would limit the availability of the casters since they can't be everywhere at once. Without a time limit, a single 5h level caster can cast that spell in 365 villages per year, at which point we are talking about feeding almost 300k extra people. Granted, the local geography & soil might not allow for the use of the whole area of the spell, but even if we half it, call it 150k extra person-years of crops. Even a dozen of these guys can double carrying capacity of a medieval kingdom (such as the Anglo-Norman England around 1100). However, if the time is limited to just a couple of weeks around the planting season, especially as the caster would need to travel, too, we'd be talking about a dozen villages per caster. Depending how common 5th level casters are in your campaign, this might not move the needle too much, save for in some specific situations, where the local caster is strong enough and willing enough to do this. 3.) If the 'maintenance work' would stay the same (rather than be doubled as well), then the only extra need for work would be around the harvest time. There likely would be double the amount of mills and bakers and everything associated with a larger population. Except the number of full time farmers might be about the same. Although it depends. Assuming people still want to have meat and such, the need for livestock might increase, and hence the need for shepherds. But there probably would be a noticeable shift from farmers to craftsmen and the like. Maybe instead of a 90/10 split, it would be closer to 75/25 or even 67/33. 4.) Given that the fantasy kingdoms have to deal with various monsters and raiders, it actually would be more likely that there would be less fields and more concentrated villages (large enough to defend themselves and benefit from the Plant Growth) rather than small scattered hamlets and isolated farmsteads (easily overrun by even a small orc raiding party). So the population would be more centralized, leaving more area for the wilderness. Which is good, adventure-wise. More places for the monsters to lurk and the heroes to explore.
There are reasons why Plant Growth is one of my favorite spells in 5e, and you outlined it elegantly. It's a spell which functions as a tool. I have notes for a homebrew setting where cities are disconnected from eachother due to monsters becoming more common and trade becoming more perilous, leading to nature clerics and druids and bards and rangers becoming crucial in ensuring that at least food production happens on a level of full self-sufficiency. (other contenders for my favorite spells in 5e, not because they are "good" in combat but rather bc they are flavorful are Life Transference, Magic Mouth, Produce Flame, and Wall of Stone, with the last one also being a spell that just allows for greater self-sufficiency among communities if they have access to a caster who can cast it)
You could have the farmers make an agreement with the Fair Folk as part of some long term agreement/tradition. But what could the farmers offer for such magical assistance? (adventure hook: they're offering their first born or similar.)
My setting has a setup where there are 8 lords in the nation. Each of their domains has its own farming, but one of the larger territories is used for massice amounts of farming. That particular Lord is an Arch Druid, and his kids learn it, too. Their version of knights are high-level rangers, and when planting season begins, they're spread very thin across the territory, making sure they double their yields. Most of the other Lords do not use this spell for their lands, but can get it done in a pinch.
Finally someone else who notes fireball as a bad war time spell. Plant growth, move earth, wall spells. Far more useful on battlefield. As for pivit sprinklers, pair it with a decanter of endless water and you dont even need a well. Druids would love you. Maybe not global water levels after a few generations but nothing some gate spells cant fix. But its stuff like this. World building theory that I get the most out of for setting fabrication.
I've thought for years that if a nation got rich enough to fund educating soldiers with just enough magical knowledge to pick up magic initiate and the mold earth spell plus another damage cantrip like booming blade or fire bolt, that army would be terrifying. They'd be able to create earthen fortifications and trenches in an instant and structures within minutes.
I have seen a few of your videos now, and I have to say, you are an absolute delight! I love how in depht and well thought out they are! It gives you a whole new appreciation of life.
if the circles are actually a mile big then the gaps between them would likely be large enough for dozens of families to live there and take care of a 4th of the farm closest to them. Wouldn't be too much of a stretch to make entire villages/towns around the cities to maintain the farms. While this would open them up to more danger even with walls it would also further optimize the farming with them living next to their work instead of in an area away from the farms. Alternatively, it could make taking a city much harder if there are well-stocked forts spread out around it. Crossbows/ballistas and guns/canons make forts very interesting to attack even without magical plants blocking the road.
A lot of these discussions need to be prefaced with teo questions: how common are the PC classes, and what is the level range of non heroes? 3E D&D had really good systems for determining this.
As usual, well thought out and very logical. Sadly, I think you vastly underestimate the amount of food that could be gathered from a hyper productive forest. And if one area was just left un gathered, and the humanoids controlled the predators, the boon in prey animals would be ridiculous.
I think I have a kinda strange way of doing something similar. One of the main roles of a priesthood is to perform sacrifices and rituals so that a god or their avatar/servant will get off their divine butt to appear and do pretty much the same thing. I've been told I use a lot of active gods though since my setting is pretty much a mix of Eberron and Exalted.
I put something similar to this in my own world for the major city. This, combined with a guild of bakers with a lvl1 ritual spell, summon flour, that costs a small amount of money to cast, allows for some surprising possibilities, like far away outposts with no obvious food sources, mining towns in very barren places searching for very rare minerals, etc.
I had a wildfire druid who's backstory was that he comes from a druidic circle in the deserts of the world, where they perform holy pilgramiges to the various tribes of the deserts to bless their communities with this spell, so that their oasis' can support their communities. He was sent out to expant his sects influence outside the desert, and as such he would often track down the local farmers of the towns they passed through to welcome them into the protection of his circle. (By casting this spell) It got his party warm welcomes almost everywhere they traveled. And, soon they had a reputation for making places prosper wherever they traveled (for this vut also for all the problems they fixed along their way through hijinx)
In areas with more expensive land, and less limited water, you get sprinklers that can water square fields. You might just overlap the spell casts in more built up areas.
Although "thick and overgrown" is neither an objective nor a precise measurement, but considering that it works with any (size, density or kind) type of plant, for such a big area (100' or 30m) and blocks terrain so intensely it might be argued that the height/length and thickness may very well more than double. It might arguably, say, increase tenfold or more! Imagine a field of grassing growing to be such a movement hindrance, to get an idea of this... On any case, production of goods beyond basic nourishment... Not only wood production would greatly benefit, but any plant fiber derived product: clothes, rope, cinnamon, vanille (spices in general could be incredibly boosted - and might have even bigger worldbuilding implications, considering how expensive spices are), paper, (some) perfumes... Not only plant fiber stuff, but maybe flower and leaves derived materials should also factor into this. Then herbs, with their tees, medicines, glues and all sorts of important materials would by incredible abundant all of a sudden! World changing indeed
Having just read over the spell again, I'd rule that 1) It instills vitality in the plants themselves, and thus does not drain extra vitality from the earth/land itself. more than a normal crop would.. I would say that normal cycles of nitrogen-fixing crops/fallow fields are still required. 2) This says ALL PLANTS, which includes any weeds, so there would still be a need for at LEAST the normal number of folks pulling weeds and otherwise caring for crops. 3) It seems like seedlings grown in these areas could be transplanted 4) vertical farming makes perfect sense, at least as high as the farmers could build/reach. Assuming the farmers are also hoping to harvest seeds for their next crop. The normal number of bees or other pollinators could furnish the same number of seeds as "usual" but if they wanted twice the seed yield, ALSO, they'd need twice as many bees. (I'd put these hives in the diamonds between the circular farms.) On the good side, this could possibly result in 2x as much honey. (And mead as a growth industry.) On the other hand, farmers are going to need to contend with a larger number of "normal" animals who will go after the gardens (deer, rabbits, etc) AND a larger number of farm-raiding monsters. I can see ankhegs as a particular problem. I also agree that using this spell in wild areas will be a great boon to the animals who live there. Oak forests are especially good for this as it will feed abundant semi-wild and wild pigs/boar and deer. Woodcutters will also be in favor of this. Now what happens if you cast this spell in a swamp or a field of peat?
This is really interesting to think about! In my setting, magic users (apart from sorcerers and druids, it’s complicated) are almost always either wealthy themselves or sponsored by a wealthy person as most magic users require a diet containing a lot of red meats, which contain nutrients that increase resistance to magic’s natural toxicity. I think only the wealthiest nations in my setting could afford to have enough high enough level magic users to pull this off, but those nations would experience a huge population boom. I expect that there are isolated communities which contain a druid who may be able to do this outside of those nations, which may eventually become wealthy because of their ability to trade their excess food
Without plant domestication large-scale animal domestication becomes a pipe dream? CLEARLY you've never heard of Pastoralism- which actually predates settled plant-based farming in much of the world, and is the organized tending of hers of horses, cattle, yak, and sheep. Grain-fed herds are actually a much newer thing than large wandering grass-fed herds like this.
I'd always just accepted that Plant Growth was big circles for the longest time, but I was reminded recently that when it comes to spell AoEs, at least in D&D 5e, circles and AoE with radii are just squares, unlike the more complicated shapes of prior editions (or at least 3rd). So if it's a square, that would basically mean it's a square mile (or cube when going 3D).
I like the idea of a druid circle whose focus is helping rural settlements to be as productive and efficient/integrated with the natural world as possible. Plant growth and move earth to enrich and shape farmland; wall of stone (maybe modified to be longer and lower) to create boundaries and barriers to keep wild beasts out and domesticated beasts in; and control weather to ensure droughts and floods are avoided. All of these things to keep settlements thriving without unnecessary damage to nature.
Farming us basically just as you described wise ones sift through the data weather patterns soil health soil pest loads etc and determine when to plant the planters plant the crops water weed and harvest them and those with technical skills maintain all equipment needed to keep the operation running
I really enjoy these videos. You look at it from a very different angle and something that I never think about. In this case, it's helpful but costly and not world breaking. It's a magical fertilizer but they don't have the tractors and machines we do. They also have a lot more to worry about than just a bad harvest. Things like an orc raid, a fiendish plague, a fey curse, or a wrathful dragon razing the farms. The economy of the world is slightly better but not up to modern day abilities.
I am so glad I’m not the only one who thought about this. I am currently working on a somewhat ridiculous project, but it is very entertaining for me as a veteran world Builder. I am developing a campaign setting that is so absurdly detailed that no questions should ever arise while wandering through The landscape. My intent with this is mostly for my edification, but it’s also so people can have a sandbox world that is fully developed that they can jump into. Details like this are precisely the type of thing that I am focusing on. I have designed the agricultural system of a village in such great detail that you could quickly build it in the real world and still see great deals of production from the system that I designed. This spell determined the position of the local earth mother shrine.
My favorite spell is plant growth for this exact reason. I imagine the kings men have a hundred or so casters all with plant growth, that go to all the farms and helped out. First they go to the budding sprouts and druid craft them to flower. Then spend 8 hours enriching the lands.
I think it's also worth noting, that while you would need SOMEOME somewhere to be able to cast this spell, they more than likely wouldn't travel much. Scrolls would take the danger out if the spell caster traveling around a world full of monsters, and even better yet you could make a daily charge staff. If you take into account if you can make a staff do this, someone could own the staff, be a normal person or some sort of low level magic user and do this.
You could always just use both uses of the spell. First, use the 8 hour enrichment to double the harvest of all plants planted on the land for a year. Then, every day, use the instant overgrowth to grow a large doubled harvest of new plants. This should work as the first use specifically targets the land, and the second specifically targets the plants. Though, even if that weren't the case, it'd still likely work. This way, a single farm could supply food for an entire empire with only one spell caster.
The Fey races would prefer a more traditional or natural enviroment, also unconcerned by overlap of the spell. But Humans, Dwarves and Halflings, even Giff, Myrmidons and other industrialized races would definitely take advantage of such things. The farm fields would be circular but other than a well, possibly a pump, and irrigation systems, the only other structures on that land would be a comfortable spot for the caster to sit in the exact center. They would be laid out in a square or hex grid with roads between them. Housing (both people and livestock), produce storage, mills and secondary industries, would be built in the triangles and squares between the fields. The format used would be dependent upon natural terrain but given time both dwarves and humans have no problem reshaping that. Thinking of Myrmidons and dwarves how does the spell effect things underground, if the effect is spherical both theses races would take that into account.
Nature Clerics (who often have very different ideals from regular druids could absolutely perform the germification technique you mentioned. It fits well for a holy order to do it as well.
Talking about the dust bowl beinf flat got mw thinking. How can you flatten terrain? You can do it the hard way, with tools. Or tou can use another druid cantrip, Move Earth. Big flat areas are much easier to make
This frankly doesn't even scratch the surface, considering the possibility of magical plants. Infact, you could theoretically use magic to bioengineer new plants specialized to your needs and then empower them like this, if it can be done with fleshwarping people I'm sure plants are possible too.
I think this could be an interesting start to a campaign. A city is expanding into the forests surrounding it, there is a group of druids who don't like the deforestation involved in making the fields bigger. So as you suggested, they help the city by casting plant growth on the fields to increase the yield. This happens for about a decade, all while the city population gets bigger, and then there is a political shift, and the city leaders start expanding into the forests again and the druids withdraw their support. Now your party can start in a city with political problems, that's full of starving people where food is expensive, which is surrounded by pissed off forest creatures and druids.
A better option than a druid or a bard may be a fey warlock. That could also lead to story plots of trying to appease the local fey in exchange for good harvests
For druids, the "empty land" issue of non-overlapping circles becomes a feature, not a bug. It makes the 21.5% of the land that goes unenchanted comparably worthless (and therefore safe from development).
the spell daylight last 8 hours as well when places on an item could you set up a mobile sun for your nursery during winter? Could the walls you build be high and counter days of no sun with daylight? What about the potential for underground nurseries 🤔 sorry dm thoughts love your ideas they're brilliant and changed the way I think about farms in my world building
I love videos that dive into subjects like communication, banking, agriculture and economics of fantasy worlds. I often wonder how spells like sending, animate dead, plant growth and arcane lock would change the quasi medieval western fantasy worlds we are all used to. Would they even be medieval anymore with spells like that? And would these spells become so integral to society that those who could cast them would come to state resources?
I had thought about this and came at it from a different angle. The immortal sorcerer king who ruled the most powerful kingdom, and his wood elf druid wife, would once a year tour the kingdom with druids, clerics and bards, casting spells on the farmland to improve its yield, to refresh the soil, to purify the land. The king would take off all his fine clothes, smear dirt on his face and pretend to be a no one, and spend a few weeks sleeping on the ground to improve the lives of his subjects. and never ask for food in return, for he had plenty. No one went to war with this kingdom, because everyone nearby knew that when famine struck them, this kingdom would feed you, even if they hated you. Magical learning was widely shared education encouraged, because every farmer knew that one of their kids might learn the magic needed to bolster the community, druid groves were safe, because when threatened, an army of farmers would run through the woods to protect druid enclaves in return for their kindness. It sounds like a utopia, and it is. Which makes it the perfect target for the newly formed lord of famine and pestilence who was the main antagonist. What chaos is off the table when the well fed, trusting, compassionate folk of this kingdom suddenly know the gnawing if hunger? Become the lynchpin of plenty, and the forces of evil hold nothing back. For when you collapse, so does everyone else. ( This was also so all the players who chose peasant backgrounds could play spell casters. My favorite was the apple Alchemist and his moonshine flame sprayer, and 'extra sour apple' poison bombs )
Idea: the plant growth spell's second effect creates fertilizer using the nitrogen in the air, rather like with the Haber-Bosch process. Therefore, it's not blessing the plants that are within range during the casting of the spell, but blessing the dirt in which the plants will grow. Also, you forgot that Nature clerics can cast plant growth, too. And only the Lore bard can get it by level 6 (all other bards would need to wait until they hit level 10!).
Holo from spice and Wolf basically functioned to bless the land. Periodically, but not constantly, because of fear of draining the lands resources. The villagers were upset and called her fickle for season that didn't do as well but still better than their neighbors.
The thing I would immediately start with is looking to China. Rice farming both produces a lot of surplus and requires a lot more top-down management to do correctly (deciding which fields to flood when, terracing, etc). This would mean that we may not see feudalism in the European sense not evolve at all, favoring instead an imperial bureaucracy with casters under the employ (and extreme protection) of the state to make their rounds on a centrally-planned schedule. We would also see more, larger cities but may _not_ see an industrial revolution as human labor not involved in farming would be plentiful enough to not need to invest in more powerful industrial machinery beyond what could be powered by wind and water (much like we saw in our history with China developing a lot of technology but never truly industrializing. Such a focus on centralized power and absence of a warrior-aristocracy would also lend itself well to well-regulated national-scope adventurer guilds to deal with problems below the army scale (and to keep from having to awarding land and titles to those who are out killing monsters, thus keeping the power of the state centralized). Those at the top may still be called "kings" but the centralization of power we would see would be more like China than an early European feudal system (though late-period absolute monarchies would also be close to the mark).
I imagine that Protect Food and Drink would make this even more impactful. it might not get rid of all forms of decay that can affect food while in storage, but getting rid of diseases and poisons would cover a lot of the damage.
something you havent considered is the yield of different farming methods. your circular farm makes some sense but with the limitation on land use the spell causes might lend itself to the cultivation of food forests and other methods of agriculture much denser than traditional grain. the spell being provided primarily by druids would contribute even more. also dnd world necessarily being so hostile they need powerful adventurers making your food production as compact and defensible as possible would make sense. imagine instead of your circle farms of still rural populations you end up with circular towns densely populated but also densely forested filled to the brim with life and ringed with massive walls made from the abundant lumber the town supplies but also with a living barrier of huge trees grown packed in together and knitted together as they grow, just like permaculture food forests are done in drier climates.
and you could say it would be vulnerable to fire but large living trees do not burn easily. they need a lot of dry fallen fuel for the fire to get hot enough to burn them, detritus that would be collected and put to use by the town. also densely packed managed forests like permaculture makes retain an incredible amount of water in the air ground and biomass of the forest making it much harder for a fire to catch.
Wow this makes rice cultiation even more like rice cultivation once rice pull and replanting is inventing. It also makes potatoes more like rice politicaly.
This kind of shared power, tribal dynamic, Is incredibly rare. There’s a reason chieftains existed, tribal strongman, who gets advice from elders and religious leaders and the like but they lead the tribe
The comparison of a mage and an excavator in the video on Mold Earth and this one on Plant Growth has me thinking about whether there might be a way to reshape the earth into some kind of terraced farming arrangement to either maximize spell efficiency, prevent the AoE from going past desired boundaries and into neighbour's lands, or some other advantage.
There’s one subclass you forgot. The humble nature cleric. Do you think a holy order of clerics with the soul responsibility of providing plant growth for their worshipers would be feasible?
More than feasible. Fun as heck! Itinerant nature clerics should be in almost every agricultural centre; specialising in divinations and fixing minor ailments too, while they're at it.
I feel like this is why we have the Nature Cleric. It's questionable whether a druid circle would help a bunch of farmers, but a group of clerics of the harvest god would definitely offer this.
@@JukeBoxHeadDruid’s circle most likely you support the local farms. Healthy local communities are essential to preserve their environment. The circle would provide a lot of support since this way they would have a workforce that would not only help preserve but also provide a workforce for the moments of need. It would be a simbiotic relationship. Druids still use a lot of manufactured goods. So I doubt Druid circle’s would be antagonistics to their neighbors. Unless theor policy is to exterminate every humanoid of their area.
@@CaioLGon Maybe there would be a kind of rivalry between the Druids and the nature clerics. Maybe there was a scandal in the local churches that made people mistrust nature clerics so they go for more of a artisanal style plant growth. Kind of like how we have organic food versus more processed food. I would think with such a large plant growth industry there would be some levels of corruption somewhere.
@@Grungeon_Master If you have the Itinerant or Local 5th level plus Nature Cleric who blesses the land with plant growth you might also have the Itinerant or local 1st level plus Nature Clerics to be(Acolytes) regularly checking the fields for Disease with the 1st level spell Detect Poison and Disease. You might have the same set up with druids as well. Diseased crops are devastating to farms and farmers to this day so being able to find it before it spreads and root it out might have as much a boon to agriculture as the Plant Growth Spell itself.
One use of Plant Growth that I love to think about is for desert trade routes. Every two or three miles, bring out a baobab seed, and sprout it with Druid Craft. Cast Plant Growth on a point, shall we say, 70 feet below the ground (you don’t have to be able to see the point you are casting on). You now have a 30-foot baobab owith roots running 130 feet deep. That will be pretty ample for reaching water in most deserts. If it is a Sahara-level desert, you can cast again at a point 230 feet down before you move on, or even a third time at 430 feet; that should send the roots deep enough to reach groundwater just about anywhere, at least if you are staying off of hills. It is going to take a good many castings, but in the end, you will have a line of trees, with edible fruit and leaves and water-storing trunks, stretching across the whole desert between cities, with the next one always in sight. Your deeds, perhaps even your name, will live on for 2,000 years.
And then there's Lv5+ Archfey Warlocks that can cast the overgrowth mode twice an hour, the fertility mode twice a day, and have access to Druidcraft to sprout seeds and the like.
I'm wondering what the fantasy equivalent of dioxins are. Fae forever chemicals.
Why wouldn't the warlock of a fucking *Archfey* not just curse the land one day and skip town for shiggles? Not the most reliable sort, those Archfey. Also where are the blood sacrifices? Oh wait, they're in the druid grove.
This concept begs for a campaign arc. Maybe a local made an Archfey pact after the normal casters stopped showing up. Maybe the Archfey is malevolent, or not...
Or maybe it's complicated on both ends.
@@Pyre *Preferably* it's complicated at both ends!
If you're interested in this sort of historical agrarianism check for a series of BBC documentaries that have been posted on TH-cam. They had names like the Edwardian Farm, Victorian Farm etc.
-Reference nursery beds this is basically the rice paddy system used in Asia since 4000 BC. Rice is planted in a heavily fertilized nursery plot (usually in a particularly warm spot of land so it can be planted earlier in the growing season) then after 4 weeks it get's transplanted, traditionally by hand, into the main field. Depending on how warm the local climate was it wasn't unusual for two to three crops a year to be grown this way. If you were close enough to a city that peoples' "nightsoil" (feces) could be hauled to the farm for fertilizer that might be extra crops of rice or one of rice and then another of "green manure", nitrogen fixing, crops like beans or peas.
-Reference the dead space between the circles it's important to remember that people needed wood for building and as fuel for cooking and heating. In order to support a village you'd often need even more land devoted to woods than to crop lands. They also could be used as a source of wild plants for food (an important source of vitamins in the spring and early summer back in the day), honey from wild bees and, in the case of acorns from oaks and mast from beech trees, fodder for fattening hogs in the fall. These could be the sides of hills or gullies where trying to plow cropland could lead to soil erosion and would also be a habitat where lesser monsters like goblins might infiltrate close to towns and need to be dealt with by novice adventurers.
-Reference wide open fields, vs traditional ones with hedgerows or stone wall boundaries, it's important to remember that wind and water erosion are much worse where there aren't these barriers so, while it may seem more efficient, you have to remember Chesterton's Gate and not change something that was used historically until you understand why it was used in our world.
-Reference planting "in the ground" the seed drill wasn't developed until the 1700s. Prior to that some crops were dibbled (a 2-3" deep hole poked in the ground and a few seeds dropped in) but that called for thousands of holes per acre of land so, for most of European history, grain crops weren't planted but their seeds were just scattered on the surface of the plowed field. This left them vulnerable to birds so, until the seeds took root, the fields would be guarded by dogs and young boys with slings or noise makers like a bull roarer. Again, a good starting quest for novice adventurers or a bit of backstory to explain why someone might use a sling with advantage if they have a peasant background.
This is really useful, thanks. I've only just started researching farming practices and this will be a very useful jumping off point for further reading. Cheers!
I know this is 7 months old but the seed drill was in use in China since like 200BC.
Another great video, showing that you put much more thought into the D&D spells than the people who wrote them. Another angle to consider though: what about fraud? If I want to be “fat as a traveling bard,” but I’m not 5th level yet, what stops me from coming to the village, being wined, dined and gifted, then waving my hands, chanting mumbo jumbo, and spilling useless components, telling the villagers their fields are blessed, and then going on my merry way? By the time the crops are ripe and the villagers realize they’ve been cheated, I’m long gone. Since *plant growth’s* duration is listed as “instantaneous,” that suggests to me that it leaves no enduring enchantment on the plants, so *detect magic* would come up negative, no matter whether the bard or druid had truly cast *plant growth* or not.
It used to be that a magical aura lingered for a minimum of 1d6 rounds... Or 6 to 36 seconds.
But boy did 5e strip detect magic to be just as bare bones as possible, yessiree.
I think in a society like that, people wouldn't trust just any wandering rando who claims to be able to cast plant growth. I imagine you'd have something more like circuit-riding judges -- bards who travel around specific regions, whom the locals are familiar with. They might even be accredited by a central authority.
In the event that a newcomer does show up, there's a simple way to test their capabilities. Just have them cast the 1-action version of plant growth (or really, any 3rd-level bard spell with visible effects) to prove themselves.
@@dontyodelsohard2456That'd still require someone with Detect Magic watching.
And if 'someone with detect magic' is watching, they can make a spellcraft (3.X) or Arcana (5E) check to determine what (if any) spell is being cast.
@basedeltazero714 Yes... But in the above scenario they claimed it would be impossible to distinguish between a spell and no spell.
In 3.5e you can at least tell of a spell was cast.
It might be normal to require the traveling bard to demonstrate his ability first, and cast the version that works instantly, and then after demonstrating he knows the spell, cast the version that actually helps crop yield.
Frauds can still happen, if you know the bard that helped them last year, you could use disguise self, and a good deception roll to convince them you don't have to waste a spell slot demonstrating this year, after all they know you.
You can terrorize a city with this spell. To the point I had my DM end up upgrading one of my old characters to BBEG after I told him what was possible with my circle of spores druid when we were talking about old campaign.
He had her and her cohorts "explode" a city with redwood seeds to create a new forest (think Mirkwood with taller trees, broken cobble paths, and ruined buildings). It was quite the surprise to me because he didn't tell me what he was doing, but it was definitely in line with her character seeing as how she was essentially an eco-terrorist so I was very happy with the reveal.
Also love how vindicating this video is along with the comments. I've always hated how paper thin the world building is in DnD, and seeing people point out the exact same spells I've called out including cantrips as having major implications brings a tear to my eye.
This is why magic is rare in my games. Trying to maintain verisimilitude becomes impossible if you think about anything in depth.
Continual flame replaces almost all light sources. Prestidigitation and mending encourage use of high-quality , long-lasting goods.
Continual Flame would certainly not replace candles and other common lights.
A hireling earns a measly 2 silver a day, there is no chance they'll afford to eat and buy the services of a mage for a second level spell with a pricey material component.
@@larstollefsen1236 A level 11 artificer can use a Spell-Storing Item to cast Continual Flame ten times per day with no material component cost. I'd expect one running a magic item shop to be creating them to sell in the store, as they'd be so fast to create and sell compared to the long-term investment in crafting magic items.
Remember, continual flame lasts FOREVER. Even if the spell costs 5000 times the price of a candle, it will pay for itself in a year or two, plus it's brighter, safer and saves many hours of labor. Totally worth the investment, especially since it will be in use by your great great grandkids.
The safety factor should not be underestimated. Some quarters of a city worried about fire may ban nonmagical candles.
Likewise, unlike candles, once someone has paid the upfront cost of acquiring a continual flame item, there is no cost to using it, which would open up all hours of the day to use in a way that was not seen until the electrification of cities.
This would drastically affect literacy rates among middle-class people if your world has paper and the printing press (or something close to it).
As for cost, the permanence of the spell means the costs would constantly be dropping from the first invention of the spell as the number of such items would always be increasing.
It could be that nearly every house could have one that stays with the building at all times, inherited from generation to generation and every working person who wanted one could at least manage to afford a cheap used one and while they are expensive, they are often given as wedding gifts.
Keep in mind that while new swords were always pricy, by late period as D&D is set in, any soldier could afford to get used swords fairly cheaply due to the objects being semi-permanent. Continual flame items being actually permanent (especially if made from something that doesn't rust like brass or a simple river stone) would see that happen even more strongly despite the higher starting cost.
The question you need to ask yourself in your world building to know how plentiful such items are is not a comparison between a new one and an average worker's wage, but simply "how long has this spell existed for?"
Earth wall provides affordable housing, frost storm, frost knight, and all ice spells provide cheap food preservation. Create water causes cities and civilization to survive literally anywhere
The notion of concave diamond land plots becoming standard yards for farmers to fit into the meeting space of these crop circles inspires much joy.
Or just build the entire town in a circle around one central field, with the towns being roughly rectangular frames around the circular field in the center.
I personally prefer the curved triangle version. Farmhouses, transportation rituals, and small villages would be found there
@@midori_the_eldritch this would make it easier to share a well. I like the idea of towns shaped like hour glasses, triangles, and diamonds as an indicator of how many fertile fields they have.
@chameleonx9253 Worshippers of Sehanine could encourage this kind of settlement development by treating the area built around the field as a development phase like its analog moon phase. Likewise with the harvested and planted sections of the field.
It does! But perhaps that's where the livestock will be kept? Deninately where the roads should be-
A few things:
1. American (the continent) farming is much more land intensive than anywhere else as most other places are farming crops or animals made for the environment. (For example: a brazillian cow has ten times the carbon footprint of a scottish cow - C footprint representing land use, feed, etc).
2. The spell only takes 8 hrs for 1 years worth of effects, could it be coupled with 1 action cast of the spell to instantly grow the crops?
3. Half a mile is pretty big, like four big fields size
4. You are absolutely right any druid would probably be pretty willing to cast it on land - even if stopping expansion is their goal. Better use of available land means less need for new land.
5. Are you sure the long cast works on seeds and not the land itself? I always assumed it was the soil that held the effect.
Although the description starts with the spell enriching the land, its actual effects are placed upon all plants in the area. All of them specifically yield double the normal food. In my view, the warehouse/nursery is viable in a highly organised society.
Worldbuilding gets even more difficult if you think about it.
In D&D 5E a Ranger needs to be level 9 to cast that spell. When it comes to normal threats, a level 9 Ranger can keep quite an area secure. That makes him ideal as the leader of a group of settlers going to the frontier and to develop new land. Put his combat ability and this spell together, he would be the foundation of the settlement. His family would of course be made up of Rangers all with the goal to be able to cast this spell. For the safety of the village and to keep the harvest double the usual size. Soon there would be multiple Rangers in the family able to cast that spell just for redundancy. Which would give them a high status in the village, even if they don't go for the feudal system. After all, the village stands because of them. And in really bad harvests they can support the village by hunting.
The more civilized an area becomes, the more likely would it be that the family changes from being Rangers to being Bards. Bards need only be level 5 to cast that spell and with their abilities have an easy time to keep the peace in a settlement and deal with more civilized problems.
I don't know D&D 5E to go into the subclasses, but I'm sure there are some that further help people with those classes to do what I mentioned above.
On top of that, both can build defences in a short time, forcing an approaching enemy move through specific areas or have be slowed to a crawl. With Rangers sending arrows into them or Bards motivating their troops. Note that even in peacetime this
That does change the development of a civilization and the classes chosen.
And we don't even have to consider our age of industrialization. In Venice they were at a time able to build an entire War Galley in a day. We should consider what else could be produced in an alarming rate if there are enough people at hand. Also, if this spell works on trees that grow food, wood is more available than usual, allowing for more building material in the area and faster reforestation. The possibilities this opens up are huge.
And it's getting better. Cast the spell where there is seaweed. Even if it isn't a food source, the wildlife that feeds on it can be. Or the wildlife that feeds on the wildlife that feeds on seaweed.
The spell can also be used to control travel, making it even more difficult for travellers and merchants to find ways around your toll gates. Roads don't pay for themselves after all.
The ranger settler sounds like a perfect opportunity for a 7 samurai style story.
Vertical faming would likely be an early adoption too to make use of the space of the spell. Not the environmentally controlled sort of the modern world but hanging planters would probably be more common, concentrated, and multilayered. It may even fuel further irrigation development.
I do feel that missing from D&D rules is communal magic though. This makes sense as it wouldn't be the role of adventures. But it does seem likely that there would be magic that can be performed by communities. The fertility festivals and rituals of a community may well be casting this spell in effect despite them not individually being casters who can, or, alternatively, their involvement with a caster who can may extend the range dramatically. But that's supposition beyond the rules given.
Our group has an entire homebrew setting more or less designed around this idea. The world was hit with a cataclysmic abyss born Blight and it evolved into the players propping up a kingdom and organizing a Great Circle of Druids to keep the peoples of the world fed and an Eldritch Knighthood dedicated to protecting the Heartland. Our group arranged a marriage between a powerful Druidess and a young noble EK and supported them as King & Queen to keep the alliance between the druids and the people. The political might rests with the druids because they hold the magic that keeps everyone fed and the martial might rests with the Knighthoods because they can fight the demonic fungal monsters.
Very interesting! I had played in similar situations too.
This idea of allying with a group, not to mention with a widespread order/circle of druids is also very logical and likely, not only for protection/power reasons, but also as a solution to relying on sole casters or adventurers, which might not show up, as Tom had suggested. A group of druids (or whoever else would cast the spell) is very safe from defaulting.
@@MauroDraco Our characters started out learning about the demonic Blight's coming and realizing that we couldn't stop it, yet, we set about to preparing for it as best as possible. Winning over the various Druids of the region, rescuing the young prince and rooting out the Myconvoker Cultists. By creating a small nation that could actually feed the whole world we created a future superpower that in our second campaign is now the primary political power of the setting.
@@Balzaimon Very cool! What is it called?
@@MauroDraco The world is called Ariden, the druidic kingdom is Valt. Valtish culture is loosely based on celtic mythology and arthurian legend. the land is rife with fae and spirits and the cities are ruled by wizard knights descended from the kings of old.
Along with Enlarge / Reduce, Plant Growth is one of my favorite spells in the game! So happy you made a video about it! Outside of something like Wish, I completely agree that its one of the most consequential spells for worldbuilding, and people don't talk about it enough! I can't imagine where we would be in our world if we could- on top of all our modern agricultural advances- **double** our crop yields. And I hadn't even considered the implications for trees!
The fantasy world doesn't have artificial nitrogen fertilizers, or international harvesting and shipping of potassium and phosphorus. This spell kind of takes the place of them. It's interesting that this spell noticeably reduces the need for trade.
@@llamatronian101Yeah! The other thing I thought about was that it makes normally very low-yield environments viable; If you're in an area that would otherwise be inhospitable, you might could survive anyway given enough Plant Growth!
I'd love to see the topic continued with "Create Food and Water" and/or "Purify Food and Drink" for the clerical perspective on this, which might, in turn, bring forth a discussion about how religion too could change... maybe into a third video? Specially if divine scrolls creation is considered. Pantheons and their followers might clash because of this and pull nations and their populations with them.
One thing many forget, and what could be the topic of an other video, is that the world of D&D and most other TTRPGs is filled with monsters. Every settlement would need fortifications, including against giant birds to protect the childrens, and every villager would have basic weapon training.
All that would also effect the size of farmland, as it also need protection and surveillance. Smart monsters might only grab some plants and run, but the large ones could eat whole fields in a day, or devour a whole herd of livestock. So to protect enough land to feed everyone Plant Growth might be the only way for larger society to even exist.
7:40, you forgot to cut out the first take and the pause on "strange system".
The idea of societies needing magic lords is interesting. It is used in the book series "Ascendance of a Bookworm" where their society is structured around their magical ruling class channeling mana into special chalice artifacts that are then given to their territory leaders, who pour mana from the chalices into the ground as part of a fertility ritual. Politics in the country revolve around each territory trying to secure as many high-mana aristocrats as possible so that they can power their society and keep their lands fertile.
In fact it is shown that the commoners are almost completely dependent on the growth rituals, to the point where several territories that lost their ruling classes become famine-stricken wastelands as the land reverted back to it's pre-magic state.
It would be interesting to see what happens to a landscape being repeatedly ravaged by highly concentrated short-term plant-growth out of greed. If you've ever seen what concentrated back to back cotton growth does to soil, you can imagine what could happen even with magic, if the user is using the short term spell instead of the long-term version, which seems more akin to magic fertilizer.
I'd imagine if farming grew to be centered around Plant Growth, there'd be a point in technological advancement where it'd be cost effective to develop circle farms into sphere farms. The spell doesn't say if it's a flat circle or a sphere, but it only says radius so potentially to maximize the usefulness, some method for compressing farmland and making is stackable, maybe like aquaculture and/or magic or even technology to create sunlight could both increase the effect of a single spell, and create a vary interesting landscape of half domes rising out of the earth, cut into slices with each layer bursting with life
Underwater or in a calderra?
The spell doesn't say the caster can decide which plants in a given area will grow. The chaff will grow up with the wheat, but twice as fast.
Okay, I did some math and if you assume that a caster who can cast this spell does so every day for a month in early spring, right after the planting, following a carefully charted path laid out by the kingdom's cartographers to ensure a short 20-30 minute jaunt from one village to the next without ever needing to backtrack or otherwise waste a day traveling, and if we assume that between the buildings of each individual village, plus local water sources and any other land features that might impact efficiency, each casting is only really impacting the production levels of 250 acres worth of farmland, that still works out to doubling the production of 7500 acres per year per caster, producing enough food for ~15,000 people. That means you would need 83-84 such casters to address say, circa 1000 CE Kingdom of England.England has 48 counties, so that works out to about 2 casters per county, with some perhaps needing only just one, or having some redundancy built into the system just in case.
That would bring up a rather interesting possibility of a master/apprentice system where each county has a more senior caster and a junior who is training to someday take their place, which might result in there being prestige involved in being a village tended to by the more senior spellcaster. This one month of duty might be their sole obligation to the kingdom, allowing them to pursue their own interests the rest of the year while enjoying the privilege and status of their rank without needing to pay any further tax or duty, which in turn might make expansion a difficult endeavor.
Imagine, though, the repercussions in such a setting of monsters or bandits accosting and abducting or murdering a spellcaster before they had completed their route. That could spell doom for the region as the lack of spellcasting might cause a minor famine for literally thousands of people unless they were rescued or replaced. Imagine if there were a ticking clock in terms of the caster only being allowed to work during a certain month, so that an abducted caster would have to be rescued as quickly as possible, perhaps even at night or under other less than ideal conditions lest multiple villages simply miss out that year as only so many castings can be performed before the end of the month.
I never thought I’d get a magic lesson from Gale of Waterdeep.
I'd initially put granaries and small town infrastructure in the area between a 4-square style setup. Then start an outer city protecting the farmland. After that, you can start out a hexagon formation surrounding it to make a system of concentric circles of a city, growing the city as required by population.
There's two scenarios i have in mind that could happend depending on the spell used
1. If the spell takes nutrients from the earth, farming doesn't change in the long run, as you are taking a finite amount of resources from the ground and must wait for them to recover
2. Gives new nutrients. Every single piece of land can be exploited simultaneously, no need to organize crop rotation or fallow. Asuming casting the spell is relarively costly it would be done by feudal lords or the comunity as a whole (rich individuals would come to dominate the towns agriculture and becoming lords of their own). Either way land doesn't become privatized and has to be worked by the whole comunity or every family workind whatever plot they could that year. The pattern of spells casted would follow a haxagonal model like a beehive for max efficiency
Look, I don't really livestream anymore, but I once had cultivated a large audience of folks who regularly would be excited to watch me build an excel spreadsheet based on an MMO economy. If I can build such an audience, all of us following your little mind worms like this is no surprise.
I would love to sit down with you some day and hash out some numbers behind the concepts you bring up, seeing how it would actually apply to a D&D world. I don't expect it to happen, but it would make my intensely numbers nerdy heart happy.
I'd love to get your take on the usage of the 1st level ritual unseen servant. I've personally experimented recently on a mage that specialiEs in using this spell to maximize crafting efficiency for tasks that do not require an enhanced degree of knowledge or fine dexterity. For example, having unseen servants carry materials from one location to another in an assembly line, cleaning a butcher's table in between cuts of meat or tables at a restaurant, running most of the tasks in a laundry seems viable with just unseen servants. A skilled caster who is efficient at directing tasks and multitasking when giving orders could have up to 6 unseen servants operating at a time, since you can be engaged in the ritual casting of the next unseen servant while ordering the previous ones around since the spell does not require concentration. That and since they accept verbal commands, there is a link to the Magic Mouth Spell which might be able to issue commands for you to those servants on a repeated, scheduled cycle. Food for thought.
Another thing to consider is how much an optimal casting of plant growth actually increases yields. From Wikipedia, "average yields of grain crops in England from 1250 to 1450 were 7 to 15 bushels per acre." If we use 12 bushels as an average, and see that Plant Growth affects roughly 500 acres, each casting yields an additional 6,000 bushels. If we use wheat as an example, 6,000 bushels translates to 360,000 pounds, and as they are worth 2cp per pound, that's a tidy sum of 7,200gp. However, that's the price at the market, so the farm is selling it for cheaper than that for it to be profitable shipped into the city and sold to individual buyers, and the doubled yields also requires more harvesting effort, and the caster wouldn't be claiming the entire profit (or else the farm would get no profit from hiring the caster), so I'd expect in a perfectly optimized farm for the caster to walk away with around 1,000-2,000gp, or 125-250gp/hour. However, as it's a yearly task, I'd expect that there would be more casters willing to do that easy work for such a price than there are farms optimized to that service, and either competition drives the price down, or the druids and rangers form a colluding monopoly, with the bards being a wildcard.
We do need to consider how these faster growing plants affect the soil nutrients as well. Faster and larger growing plants are going to deplete that soil really fast, so we need to deal with that.
@@cadenvanvalkenburg6718 That depends on how the spell works. It states that it doubles crop productivity, but says nothing about soil depletion, so the growth could be fueled entirely by the magic, no additional consumption required.
@@derektom14 That's possible. The actual text is not really helpful
"All plants in a half-mile radius centered on a point within range become enriched for 1 year. The plants yield twice the normal amount of food when harvested."
Based on this, I would presume that it just doubles the amount of product grown without providing any magical support, so it needs more water and nutrients, but it's really up to the DM I suppose. I would probably rule that its not fully sustainable though, just because of the sheer population growth and society that has the spell would undergo, especially once you get the Haber process.
3:10 i can imagine a festival or yearly ritual were farmers pilgramage to a temple with their best seeds in a backpack to get them blessed, probably after the last fall big harvest
Was just about to make the same comment 😂 3:07
3rd level slot, once a year? I'm sure it's practical to have multiple sites do this on the same festival day around the kingdom (maybe even every small/medium+ sized city). 8 hours is a long time though - so definitely need to make a big deal of the event.
does raise the question of nutrient depletion though, land with depleted nutrients would produces lower yields (even under the spell, as it only doubles the yield), so given that nutrients are presumable being drained at twice the rate, spell make no mention of creating them, would that mean that more variety would need to be implemented in a rotation/polyculture or longer rest periods, or larger production of fertilizers. all three of which would necessitate more land being needed.
which also raised the problem of population growth, if there is excess that means less malnutrition which subsequently means lower mortality rates. more population necessitates more food, being us back to the need for larger farms.
Interesting idea.. perhaps literally rotating farmed areas around a settlement is a solution, or playing with those 'dead zones' for subsequent plantings. Who knows, maybe move earth is enough of an effective plow to keep nutrients moving, and relatively free-roaming animals might serve in aiding that fertilisation. Or maybe the magic draws from magic instead?
Druids might be able to help with that too. If anywhere near the coast, encourage seabirds to nest in or around fallow fields and bring in tons of guano as fertilizer for example.
This is something I considered (though nowhere *near* this level of detail!) and ended up incorporating into my current campaign world. I reasoned that overuse of Plant Growth *would* leech nutrients from the soil, not to any catastrophic extent, just a slight but noticable difference in crop quality; bland tasting food, less durable textiles, brittle building materials, etc.
This is reflected in my main kingdom's culture; the ambitious urban moiety concentrates on maximum crop yield, while the rural agronomists eschew such shortcuts. So using "Vona grown" (common appellation for the peasant class) materials carries a definite social cachet. Kind of like "dolphin-friendly" or "sustainable practice" in modern times.
And this video encourages me to examine and build upon that foundation. Thank you!
@@Grungeon_Master Nutrient depletion was a problem during 1500-1900 in Europe until synthetic fertilizers. During the 1800s on poorer soils there was 10 times more pastureland that was used to fertilize small fields with arable crops, so those crops could grow without problems. Human fertilizer was spread on pastures, as food grown with human fertilizer is much more likely to pass on diseases. The animals as a middle step reduces this problem. But healing spells might make it viable to cut out a lot of animals near cities allow large population centers on larger scales.
The mineral the rock was made up that became the soil is important. Rocks like feldspar and basalt contain some levels of the nutrients plants need to grow. Quartz doesn't contain those nutrients in it's chemical formula. Erosion on feldspar and basalt rocks would replenish nutrients slowly, while quartz once depleted can only be replenished with fertilizers. Volcanic area's would be very hard to deplete and could most likely farm on the same plot every year with different crops. River sediments can also bring in nutrients, so farms would still concentrate near rivers.
The mortality rates thing isn't really a problem for 2 reasons. First is that we typically imagine more and larger cities in D&D than were typical of the medieval period, so a larger population being able to be supported by farmers is actually good.
Second is that D&D has monsters which could frequently wipe out entire settlements, so the additional population growth on top of that could flow into repopulating regions which have had tragedies happen to the former inhabitants.
Nutrient depletion is something that should be thought about, though, whether as a limiting factor or a solved problem.
Of note:
(If you take it as enriching the land, and thus the plants need to be planted)
The limiting factor of the spell being the entire work day of a professional spell casters for one spell and the overall small size of the land mean you'd have to have people whose jobs are the magic that inhance agriculture.
In general. An acre of farm land feeds between half a person and a person. But since we also grow non foods and animals our world has about 1.5 acres of farmland per person. An acre was defined originally by producing enough food to feed a single person
At 320 acres per casting. Each casting will feed around 300 people with a day of effort at maximum efficiency.
If one peasant farmed 4 acres of land had a family of 3 non workers and there were a single plant growth caster creating for every 300 farming families half the population would still need to farm to feed itself. Lower than medivial history, but larger than the modern day. It also contains a very generous assumption about the population of druids
While plant growth might cause circular shaped farms for those aspects of civilization that do benefit from it , many communities aren't going to have plant growth , castings and and other magics would need to be used to improve the efficiency of farming before we get an impact of magic on the availability of food similar to modern day technology. In particular undead or construct workers
EDIT: Farmland isn't yearr round, so neither is plant growth casters, which just makes thing's more difficult for plant growth economy since there's less magical enhancements per year per caster since you can only cast for about 3/4s of the year, but on the other hand, plant growth is more than 320 acres it's 502 acres so it kinda cancels out
But what if you have the ruling family made out of such spellcasters?
Say you start with one Ranger able to cast that spell helping to start a new village. To keep their position, his entire family would become Rangers, not just for that spell, but also to keep the village save from other dangers. And to have enough casters should one of them die.
And if the area becomes more civilized, they switch from Rangers to being Bards, because they can cast the spell with less training and can help to run a more civilized community than a frontier village better.
And suddenly we have several families doing that. Either splitting from the first family or others following the same system.
Not to mention that the spell has also defensive qualities.
It’s not 320 acres, it’s 502.65. It’s not a 1/2 a square mile, it’s a radius ((1/2)^2*3.14159)*640) to get acres.
@@highlorddarkstar A pointless um actually since The difference in numbers, ultimately almost evenly counteracts my original math not accounting for the fact that farm land isn't farmed year round for many crops, and thus druids bless less land per year per caster than i originally said as well
@@Mr_Maiq_The_Liar there is nothing stopping a caster from casting year round, just because there’s nothing growing doesn’t mean you can’t enrich the soil. A single full time caster could handle 500acres/working day*261 working days=130,500acres with double productivity. That is a sizable surplus. You free up a lot of people, even if your farmer is a family of five responsible for 10 acres. On its own it’s not the 2% we have but it is 25% at the high end (and farmers are more likely to run 40,80, or 100 acres on their own). Note, at 100 acres per family we’re well down to 2.5%. That isn’t medieval, that’s a cross between modern day farming and 1920s small farms.
Well, with the traveling Bard idea, you're looking at one Bard or Nature Cleric being able to easily service 50 communities of 300 families.
The Priest Archetype has 3rd level spell slots, and an order of nature clerics with one priest for every 15,000 families doesn't seem too unrealistic.
You're still only looking at a cutting the "farming peasants" from 90% of the population to 50% of the population, but when you add in pressures to develop more 5th level spellcasters, I think it's a obvious win for the mages.
Reminder that a typical "knight" is an 8th level fighter archetype, so any organized push towards standardized magical education equivalent to the martial education granted to the nobility is sure to result in more than one caster for every 300 families.
Hell, adding a tiny bit of organization, and one guy in a local manor could supply well over 2,000 families by just hitting the 7ish circles within 2 hours of his house.
The central distribution network for seedlings is not something I'd considered! It could create a variety of the old bronze age palatial cultures perhaps.
That said, for my world, I'm now gonna have to specify that plant growth only holds on the plant if it is not replanted. In lore, I already have travelling nature priests (spellcasting priests are extremely rare, too) going from village to village enhancing crops.
I see you've brought idea of the iterant caster up! Mine is indeed a more communitarian world as well (at least in the more successful societies)
Square plots that are a mile wide. The center circle is a farm. The corners are where settlements are. Thus, the settlements are all between 4 farmlands.
Was really expecting after the long list of farm staples at the beginning a “long ago the ancient grains lived in harmony, but then everything changed when the corn attacked”
Provoked by a whisper-campaign orchestrated by the Machiavellian potatoes. 😉
A key thing to consider: irregular walled medieval fields were the result of private competition to ensure your own food.
Im thinking in a magic scenario it would go like the industrial revolution were rich magical land owners and a few basic staff would generate vast amounts of crops and use wealth surplus to buy up the small subsistence plots, forcing the ordinary farmers to become urban artisans due to pressure from hugely efficient but inaccessible magic plantations.
I mean if theyll just Wild Shape or Eldritch Blast you if you complain, would you stay and hope His Lordship throws you a bone or move to find work and your own food?
Well I'm not too sure if we'd even see small walled subsistence plots precisely due to the jealousy issue and space inefficiency in relation to plant growth! Might be worth reassessing if communitarian agriculture could work on a larger scale. Alternatively, yeah, I imagine a company being commissioned to administrate a city's farms is a reasonable beginning for an industrial revolution, decentralised wealth and power, and all the messy strong-arming that comes with it.
@@Grungeon_Master oooh thats a cool idea! A magic based industrial revolution straight out of the stone age. That would be pretty cool to see
Nice video. A few comments:
1.) I'd rule that since the spell 'enriches the land', it is the land that the spell influences, and thus allowing the plants yield double the crop ON THAT LAND. This is a big difference, as it doesn't allow the whole province to get seedlings from a single casting. Still, 3.14 square miles of fields is a LOT. Typical peasant family needed around 12.5 acres to feed themselves, and 3.14 sqmi is about 2000 acres. So we'd talk about 160 peasant families. That is a full (biggish) village right there, and access to double the harvest, the population could double, too.
2.) Since the enriching is for the full year, it is possible to do it any time of the year. I would be very inclined to limit that it needs to happen around planting time, which obviously would limit the availability of the casters since they can't be everywhere at once. Without a time limit, a single 5h level caster can cast that spell in 365 villages per year, at which point we are talking about feeding almost 300k extra people. Granted, the local geography & soil might not allow for the use of the whole area of the spell, but even if we half it, call it 150k extra person-years of crops. Even a dozen of these guys can double carrying capacity of a medieval kingdom (such as the Anglo-Norman England around 1100). However, if the time is limited to just a couple of weeks around the planting season, especially as the caster would need to travel, too, we'd be talking about a dozen villages per caster. Depending how common 5th level casters are in your campaign, this might not move the needle too much, save for in some specific situations, where the local caster is strong enough and willing enough to do this.
3.) If the 'maintenance work' would stay the same (rather than be doubled as well), then the only extra need for work would be around the harvest time. There likely would be double the amount of mills and bakers and everything associated with a larger population. Except the number of full time farmers might be about the same. Although it depends. Assuming people still want to have meat and such, the need for livestock might increase, and hence the need for shepherds. But there probably would be a noticeable shift from farmers to craftsmen and the like. Maybe instead of a 90/10 split, it would be closer to 75/25 or even 67/33.
4.) Given that the fantasy kingdoms have to deal with various monsters and raiders, it actually would be more likely that there would be less fields and more concentrated villages (large enough to defend themselves and benefit from the Plant Growth) rather than small scattered hamlets and isolated farmsteads (easily overrun by even a small orc raiding party). So the population would be more centralized, leaving more area for the wilderness. Which is good, adventure-wise. More places for the monsters to lurk and the heroes to explore.
There are reasons why Plant Growth is one of my favorite spells in 5e, and you outlined it elegantly. It's a spell which functions as a tool. I have notes for a homebrew setting where cities are disconnected from eachother due to monsters becoming more common and trade becoming more perilous, leading to nature clerics and druids and bards and rangers becoming crucial in ensuring that at least food production happens on a level of full self-sufficiency.
(other contenders for my favorite spells in 5e, not because they are "good" in combat but rather bc they are flavorful are Life Transference, Magic Mouth, Produce Flame, and Wall of Stone, with the last one also being a spell that just allows for greater self-sufficiency among communities if they have access to a caster who can cast it)
You could have the farmers make an agreement with the Fair Folk as part of some long term agreement/tradition. But what could the farmers offer for such magical assistance? (adventure hook: they're offering their first born or similar.)
Love this kind of thinking. Don't ever stop
My setting has a setup where there are 8 lords in the nation. Each of their domains has its own farming, but one of the larger territories is used for massice amounts of farming. That particular Lord is an Arch Druid, and his kids learn it, too. Their version of knights are high-level rangers, and when planting season begins, they're spread very thin across the territory, making sure they double their yields. Most of the other Lords do not use this spell for their lands, but can get it done in a pinch.
The account Druid ... "The same price as always, half the difference."
I love your videos!!! Such a lovely deep dive from every upload
That's a particularly exciting one. Great job again, Tom!
I enjoy all of The Grungeon Master videos
Finally someone else who notes fireball as a bad war time spell. Plant growth, move earth, wall spells. Far more useful on battlefield. As for pivit sprinklers, pair it with a decanter of endless water and you dont even need a well. Druids would love you. Maybe not global water levels after a few generations but nothing some gate spells cant fix. But its stuff like this. World building theory that I get the most out of for setting fabrication.
I've thought for years that if a nation got rich enough to fund educating soldiers with just enough magical knowledge to pick up magic initiate and the mold earth spell plus another damage cantrip like booming blade or fire bolt, that army would be terrifying. They'd be able to create earthen fortifications and trenches in an instant and structures within minutes.
I have seen a few of your videos now, and I have to say, you are an absolute delight!
I love how in depht and well thought out they are!
It gives you a whole new appreciation of life.
if the circles are actually a mile big then the gaps between them would likely be large enough for dozens of families to live there and take care of a 4th of the farm closest to them. Wouldn't be too much of a stretch to make entire villages/towns around the cities to maintain the farms. While this would open them up to more danger even with walls it would also further optimize the farming with them living next to their work instead of in an area away from the farms. Alternatively, it could make taking a city much harder if there are well-stocked forts spread out around it. Crossbows/ballistas and guns/canons make forts very interesting to attack even without magical plants blocking the road.
I love how thoroughly you think through these things and their implications.
A lot of these discussions need to be prefaced with teo questions: how common are the PC classes, and what is the level range of non heroes?
3E D&D had really good systems for determining this.
As usual, well thought out and very logical. Sadly, I think you vastly underestimate the amount of food that could be gathered from a hyper productive forest. And if one area was just left un gathered, and the humanoids controlled the predators, the boon in prey animals would be ridiculous.
I think I have a kinda strange way of doing something similar. One of the main roles of a priesthood is to perform sacrifices and rituals so that a god or their avatar/servant will get off their divine butt to appear and do pretty much the same thing. I've been told I use a lot of active gods though since my setting is pretty much a mix of Eberron and Exalted.
I put something similar to this in my own world for the major city. This, combined with a guild of bakers with a lvl1 ritual spell, summon flour, that costs a small amount of money to cast, allows for some surprising possibilities, like far away outposts with no obvious food sources, mining towns in very barren places searching for very rare minerals, etc.
I'm interested to hear your thoughts on how the decanter of endless Water Magic item would affect DnD Worlds.
I had a wildfire druid who's backstory was that he comes from a druidic circle in the deserts of the world, where they perform holy pilgramiges to the various tribes of the deserts to bless their communities with this spell, so that their oasis' can support their communities.
He was sent out to expant his sects influence outside the desert, and as such he would often track down the local farmers of the towns they passed through to welcome them into the protection of his circle. (By casting this spell) It got his party warm welcomes almost everywhere they traveled. And, soon they had a reputation for making places prosper wherever they traveled (for this vut also for all the problems they fixed along their way through hijinx)
I'd love to hear his thoughts about underdark farming.
Ascendance of a bookworm nobles supplying the land with mana each year at spring prayer
Jokes on you, d&d and agricultural history is exactly what this audience wants.
In areas with more expensive land, and less limited water, you get sprinklers that can water square fields. You might just overlap the spell casts in more built up areas.
"And when ye reap the harvest of your land, thou shalt not rid cleanly the corners of thy field when thou reapest"
In the intro you basically invented fantasy Monsanto/Nestlé
Although "thick and overgrown" is neither an objective nor a precise measurement, but considering that it works with any (size, density or kind) type of plant, for such a big area (100' or 30m) and blocks terrain so intensely it might be argued that the height/length and thickness may very well more than double. It might arguably, say, increase tenfold or more! Imagine a field of grassing growing to be such a movement hindrance, to get an idea of this...
On any case, production of goods beyond basic nourishment... Not only wood production would greatly benefit, but any plant fiber derived product: clothes, rope, cinnamon, vanille (spices in general could be incredibly boosted - and might have even bigger worldbuilding implications, considering how expensive spices are), paper, (some) perfumes...
Not only plant fiber stuff, but maybe flower and leaves derived materials should also factor into this. Then herbs, with their tees, medicines, glues and all sorts of important materials would by incredible abundant all of a sudden!
World changing indeed
Definitely makes the villain with access to Blight more impactful.
Having just read over the spell again, I'd rule that 1) It instills vitality in the plants themselves, and thus does not drain extra vitality from the earth/land itself. more than a normal crop would.. I would say that normal cycles of nitrogen-fixing crops/fallow fields are still required. 2) This says ALL PLANTS, which includes any weeds, so there would still be a need for at LEAST the normal number of folks pulling weeds and otherwise caring for crops. 3) It seems like seedlings grown in these areas could be transplanted 4) vertical farming makes perfect sense, at least as high as the farmers could build/reach.
Assuming the farmers are also hoping to harvest seeds for their next crop. The normal number of bees or other pollinators could furnish the same number of seeds as "usual" but if they wanted twice the seed yield, ALSO, they'd need twice as many bees. (I'd put these hives in the diamonds between the circular farms.) On the good side, this could possibly result in 2x as much honey. (And mead as a growth industry.)
On the other hand, farmers are going to need to contend with a larger number of "normal" animals who will go after the gardens (deer, rabbits, etc) AND a larger number of farm-raiding monsters. I can see ankhegs as a particular problem.
I also agree that using this spell in wild areas will be a great boon to the animals who live there. Oak forests are especially good for this as it will feed abundant semi-wild and wild pigs/boar and deer. Woodcutters will also be in favor of this.
Now what happens if you cast this spell in a swamp or a field of peat?
This is really interesting to think about! In my setting, magic users (apart from sorcerers and druids, it’s complicated) are almost always either wealthy themselves or sponsored by a wealthy person as most magic users require a diet containing a lot of red meats, which contain nutrients that increase resistance to magic’s natural toxicity. I think only the wealthiest nations in my setting could afford to have enough high enough level magic users to pull this off, but those nations would experience a huge population boom. I expect that there are isolated communities which contain a druid who may be able to do this outside of those nations, which may eventually become wealthy because of their ability to trade their excess food
Without plant domestication large-scale animal domestication becomes a pipe dream?
CLEARLY you've never heard of Pastoralism- which actually predates settled plant-based farming in much of the world, and is the organized tending of hers of horses, cattle, yak, and sheep.
Grain-fed herds are actually a much newer thing than large wandering grass-fed herds like this.
I'd always just accepted that Plant Growth was big circles for the longest time, but I was reminded recently that when it comes to spell AoEs, at least in D&D 5e, circles and AoE with radii are just squares, unlike the more complicated shapes of prior editions (or at least 3rd).
So if it's a square, that would basically mean it's a square mile (or cube when going 3D).
I like the idea of a druid circle whose focus is helping rural settlements to be as productive and efficient/integrated with the natural world as possible. Plant growth and move earth to enrich and shape farmland; wall of stone (maybe modified to be longer and lower) to create boundaries and barriers to keep wild beasts out and domesticated beasts in; and control weather to ensure droughts and floods are avoided. All of these things to keep settlements thriving without unnecessary damage to nature.
Farming us basically just as you described wise ones sift through the data weather patterns soil health soil pest loads etc and determine when to plant the planters plant the crops water weed and harvest them and those with technical skills maintain all equipment needed to keep the operation running
lol I've been driving my DM nuts with the subject of farming, plant yield, shelf life and the works. love that I found this video
I really enjoy these videos. You look at it from a very different angle and something that I never think about.
In this case, it's helpful but costly and not world breaking. It's a magical fertilizer but they don't have the tractors and machines we do. They also have a lot more to worry about than just a bad harvest. Things like an orc raid, a fiendish plague, a fey curse, or a wrathful dragon razing the farms. The economy of the world is slightly better but not up to modern day abilities.
I am so glad I’m not the only one who thought about this. I am currently working on a somewhat ridiculous project, but it is very entertaining for me as a veteran world Builder. I am developing a campaign setting that is so absurdly detailed that no questions should ever arise while wandering through The landscape. My intent with this is mostly for my edification, but it’s also so people can have a sandbox world that is fully developed that they can jump into. Details like this are precisely the type of thing that I am focusing on. I have designed the agricultural system of a village in such great detail that you could quickly build it in the real world and still see great deals of production from the system that I designed. This spell determined the position of the local earth mother shrine.
My favorite spell is plant growth for this exact reason. I imagine the kings men have a hundred or so casters all with plant growth, that go to all the farms and helped out. First they go to the budding sprouts and druid craft them to flower. Then spend 8 hours enriching the lands.
I think it's also worth noting, that while you would need SOMEOME somewhere to be able to cast this spell, they more than likely wouldn't travel much. Scrolls would take the danger out if the spell caster traveling around a world full of monsters, and even better yet you could make a daily charge staff. If you take into account if you can make a staff do this, someone could own the staff, be a normal person or some sort of low level magic user and do this.
You could always just use both uses of the spell. First, use the 8 hour enrichment to double the harvest of all plants planted on the land for a year. Then, every day, use the instant overgrowth to grow a large doubled harvest of new plants. This should work as the first use specifically targets the land, and the second specifically targets the plants. Though, even if that weren't the case, it'd still likely work. This way, a single farm could supply food for an entire empire with only one spell caster.
The Fey races would prefer a more traditional or natural enviroment, also unconcerned by overlap of the spell. But Humans, Dwarves and Halflings, even Giff, Myrmidons and other industrialized races would definitely take advantage of such things.
The farm fields would be circular but other than a well, possibly a pump, and irrigation systems, the only other structures on that land would be a comfortable spot for the caster to sit in the exact center. They would be laid out in a square or hex grid with roads between them. Housing (both people and livestock), produce storage, mills and secondary industries, would be built in the triangles and squares between the fields. The format used would be dependent upon natural terrain but given time both dwarves and humans have no problem reshaping that.
Thinking of Myrmidons and dwarves how does the spell effect things underground, if the effect is spherical both theses races would take that into account.
I'm obsessed with fantasy farming novels, so this is my favorite video yet.
Cast plant growth on a bunch of saplings on the rugular and you no longer have to worry about simple building materials ^^
I love this spell.
Nature Clerics (who often have very different ideals from regular druids could absolutely perform the germification technique you mentioned.
It fits well for a holy order to do it as well.
Talking about the dust bowl beinf flat got mw thinking. How can you flatten terrain? You can do it the hard way, with tools. Or tou can use another druid cantrip, Move Earth. Big flat areas are much easier to make
This frankly doesn't even scratch the surface, considering the possibility of magical plants. Infact, you could theoretically use magic to bioengineer new plants specialized to your needs and then empower them like this, if it can be done with fleshwarping people I'm sure plants are possible too.
I'd love to hear what could think up for Gentle Repose
I think this could be an interesting start to a campaign. A city is expanding into the forests surrounding it, there is a group of druids who don't like the deforestation involved in making the fields bigger. So as you suggested, they help the city by casting plant growth on the fields to increase the yield. This happens for about a decade, all while the city population gets bigger, and then there is a political shift, and the city leaders start expanding into the forests again and the druids withdraw their support. Now your party can start in a city with political problems, that's full of starving people where food is expensive, which is surrounded by pissed off forest creatures and druids.
After watching your videos I get the feeling that you'd absolutely love Eberron.
A better option than a druid or a bard may be a fey warlock. That could also lead to story plots of trying to appease the local fey in exchange for good harvests
ascendance of a bookworm, the topic
I basically made this a side quest in my strahd campaign and the players made it a huge thing.
For druids, the "empty land" issue of non-overlapping circles becomes a feature, not a bug. It makes the 21.5% of the land that goes unenchanted comparably worthless (and therefore safe from development).
you missed the opportunity in the thumbnail for "7.8/10 for too much walls"
That was the intended reference lol. I can't believe I got the number wrong... Wow.
@@Grungeon_Master understandable, D&D doesn't have too many decimals
the spell daylight last 8 hours as well when places on an item could you set up a mobile sun for your nursery during winter? Could the walls you build be high and counter days of no sun with daylight? What about the potential for underground nurseries 🤔 sorry dm thoughts love your ideas they're brilliant and changed the way I think about farms in my world building
I love videos that dive into subjects like communication, banking, agriculture and economics of fantasy worlds. I often wonder how spells like sending, animate dead, plant growth and arcane lock would change the quasi medieval western fantasy worlds we are all used to. Would they even be medieval anymore with spells like that? And would these spells become so integral to society that those who could cast them would come to state resources?
Maybe circular plant feilds and the "deadzones" are where livestock go
I had thought about this and came at it from a different angle. The immortal sorcerer king who ruled the most powerful kingdom, and his wood elf druid wife, would once a year tour the kingdom with druids, clerics and bards, casting spells on the farmland to improve its yield, to refresh the soil, to purify the land. The king would take off all his fine clothes, smear dirt on his face and pretend to be a no one, and spend a few weeks sleeping on the ground to improve the lives of his subjects. and never ask for food in return, for he had plenty.
No one went to war with this kingdom, because everyone nearby knew that when famine struck them, this kingdom would feed you, even if they hated you. Magical learning was widely shared education encouraged, because every farmer knew that one of their kids might learn the magic needed to bolster the community, druid groves were safe, because when threatened, an army of farmers would run through the woods to protect druid enclaves in return for their kindness.
It sounds like a utopia, and it is. Which makes it the perfect target for the newly formed lord of famine and pestilence who was the main antagonist. What chaos is off the table when the well fed, trusting, compassionate folk of this kingdom suddenly know the gnawing if hunger? Become the lynchpin of plenty, and the forces of evil hold nothing back. For when you collapse, so does everyone else.
( This was also so all the players who chose peasant backgrounds could play spell casters. My favorite was the apple Alchemist and his moonshine flame sprayer, and 'extra sour apple' poison bombs )
Idea: the plant growth spell's second effect creates fertilizer using the nitrogen in the air, rather like with the Haber-Bosch process. Therefore, it's not blessing the plants that are within range during the casting of the spell, but blessing the dirt in which the plants will grow. Also, you forgot that Nature clerics can cast plant growth, too. And only the Lore bard can get it by level 6 (all other bards would need to wait until they hit level 10!).
Holo from spice and Wolf basically functioned to bless the land. Periodically, but not constantly, because of fear of draining the lands resources. The villagers were upset and called her fickle for season that didn't do as well but still better than their neighbors.
The thing I would immediately start with is looking to China. Rice farming both produces a lot of surplus and requires a lot more top-down management to do correctly (deciding which fields to flood when, terracing, etc). This would mean that we may not see feudalism in the European sense not evolve at all, favoring instead an imperial bureaucracy with casters under the employ (and extreme protection) of the state to make their rounds on a centrally-planned schedule.
We would also see more, larger cities but may _not_ see an industrial revolution as human labor not involved in farming would be plentiful enough to not need to invest in more powerful industrial machinery beyond what could be powered by wind and water (much like we saw in our history with China developing a lot of technology but never truly industrializing.
Such a focus on centralized power and absence of a warrior-aristocracy would also lend itself well to well-regulated national-scope adventurer guilds to deal with problems below the army scale (and to keep from having to awarding land and titles to those who are out killing monsters, thus keeping the power of the state centralized).
Those at the top may still be called "kings" but the centralization of power we would see would be more like China than an early European feudal system (though late-period absolute monarchies would also be close to the mark).
Those are some really cool ideas
I imagine that Protect Food and Drink would make this even more impactful. it might not get rid of all forms of decay that can affect food while in storage, but getting rid of diseases and poisons would cover a lot of the damage.
something you havent considered is the yield of different farming methods. your circular farm makes some sense but with the limitation on land use the spell causes might lend itself to the cultivation of food forests and other methods of agriculture much denser than traditional grain. the spell being provided primarily by druids would contribute even more. also dnd world necessarily being so hostile they need powerful adventurers making your food production as compact and defensible as possible would make sense. imagine instead of your circle farms of still rural populations you end up with circular towns densely populated but also densely forested filled to the brim with life and ringed with massive walls made from the abundant lumber the town supplies but also with a living barrier of huge trees grown packed in together and knitted together as they grow, just like permaculture food forests are done in drier climates.
and you could say it would be vulnerable to fire but large living trees do not burn easily. they need a lot of dry fallen fuel for the fire to get hot enough to burn them, detritus that would be collected and put to use by the town. also densely packed managed forests like permaculture makes retain an incredible amount of water in the air ground and biomass of the forest making it much harder for a fire to catch.
Thanks for the breakdown, this will certainly shape my worlds.
Imagine being the farmer who forgot when the druid was coming by and didn't de-weed properly in time.
Wow this makes rice cultiation even more like rice cultivation once rice pull and replanting is inventing. It also makes potatoes more like rice politicaly.
This kind of shared power, tribal dynamic, Is incredibly rare. There’s a reason chieftains existed, tribal strongman, who gets advice from elders and religious leaders and the like but they lead the tribe
The comparison of a mage and an excavator in the video on Mold Earth and this one on Plant Growth has me thinking about whether there might be a way to reshape the earth into some kind of terraced farming arrangement to either maximize spell efficiency, prevent the AoE from going past desired boundaries and into neighbour's lands, or some other advantage.