Fantasy Demographics

[Xeviat]

Watermills will probably be the more simple solution.

Since everyone here has their thinking caps on, I need to figure out how much food continental shelf regions of the ocean would provide in comparison to farmlands. Again, by medieval farming standards, a square mile of land supports 180 people (this doesn't mean a square mile of farm, but a square mile including farms and villages and such).

I say coastal continental shelf because I'm under the impression that deep ocean is pretty barren of fish-life. One of the races I'm working on is primarily aquatic (they can breath underwater, their babies have to live entirely in water, and they eat primarily fish). They're advanced enough to know how to raise fish "farms", but I can't really find any information on how much food coasts and lakes provide compared to farmlands.

[Nomadic]

And a steam engine requires fire, which requires even more oxygen and makes even more smoke...

Well I take it the fans will be near the surface in order to draw in fresh air and expel waste air. In this case you just have to have smoke shafts leading from the boilers to the outside.

[Polycarp]

I say coastal continental shelf because I'm under the impression that deep ocean is pretty barren of fish-life. One of the races I'm working on is primarily aquatic (they can breath underwater, their babies have to live entirely in water, and they eat primarily fish). They're advanced enough to know how to raise fish "farms", but I can't really find any information on how much food coasts and lakes provide compared to farmlands.

I imagine that's because there's never been a real life situation in which a community relied on farmed fish as a staple food.  Fish farms can be pretty densely packed depending on the fish, and you might be able to get statistics in terms of tonnage, but even then it's hard to say how much of that is edible and how much is byproduct.  Real fish farms also require a lot of food and produce a lot of environmentally hazardous waste, which a people that actually lived in the same water would likely be sensitive to.  I would imagine the ecosystem wouldn't be able to handle anything too dense.

If you're not fixed on a carnivorous race, you might consider seaweed farming, something the Japanese have done for a long time by using nets, stakes, and other surfaces like that to attract seaweed growth.  I'm not sure that's as productive as a real fish farm but it won't fill the water with fish crap, and has more of an agricultural feel to it.

[Cheomesh]

Ancient Greece.

M.

[Polycarp]

Though many people ate fish in ancient Greece, especially those along the coast, it was hardly a staple - wheat was.  There's a distinct difference between eating a lot of something and it being the foundation of the diet, as Xeviat is suggesting for fish.

In addition, the Greeks didn't farm fish as far as I know.  The Romans did, but it was fairly low-intensity stuff like stocking ponds, not a real aquacultural operation meant to sustain a population of exclusive fish-eaters.

[Xeviat]

Yeah, I need their food to be mostly from the water. They do have coastal settlements, but those settlements can only go so far from the water. I also wanted them to have boat-towns.

I hadn't thought of the waste issues of fish farms. Is fish waste useful for fertilizer? Because they could use solid blockades for the fish rather than just nets to section off the farms, then they could use the fish-pooed water to grow seaweed in.

I'll wiki fish farms, and then I'll look through my cookbooks and see if there's any info on the percentage of meat to waste you get out of a fish (though I imagine they'd have recipes for the fish organs and might even have found use for fish bones ... mmmmmm calcium).

[Xeviat]

According to wikipedia, modern fish farms raise 50,000 fish in a 2-acre (8,100 m2) area. 1 acre = 0.0015625, so 640 acres is a square mile gets you 16 million fish in a square mile of farmland. I'm pretty sure that size of a farm wouldn't be feasible, but if it were spaced out it could be fine. Salmon are long lived, so they're probably a bad fish to use; the articles I'm finding say they take 1 to 5 years in the ocean to reach sexual maturity, and that's after living 3 years or so in streams. But, a salmon nets about 50% it's weight in meat, so that can probably be used as a baseline.

Wow, that's complicated ... what I go through to find believable numbers.

[Ghostman]

How do you imagine them to be preparing their food? Fire won't burn underwater, which obviously makes cooking kind of difficult. They could do it on the coasts, but relying on that would cause trouble should they ever lose control over the beaches and get pushed back to the sea by land-dwellers. And fetching firewood might also be problematic if the coasts become deforested for any reason.

On the other hand, you could build some interesting plots from such troubles...

[Nomadic]

Another thought is perhaps their digestive system is tailored towards being able to eat raw fish.

[EvilElitest]

It depends on what kind of magic there is in the system. Some systems, like 3E D&D, have spells for everything; if someone in the world would use it, there's a spell for it. In 4E D&D, though, non-combat spells were turned into Rituals and only the ones that are used by players were published: a "water the plants and watch them grow" ritual wasn't released.

I, for one, think magic would probably be similar in ends to modern day breeding of crops/farm animals and modern day pest control. It would push the maximum arability of the land up, and you might be able to squeeze a few more people per square mile of farmland.

When it comes to 4E you still have a problem about how everybody has spells at there disposal.  
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[EvilElitest]

Building off my last point, if you have magic at your hands you can live in some crazy locations with almost any sort of life style
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[Xeviat]

When it comes to 4E you still have a problem about how everybody has spells at there disposal.  
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Not sure what you mean by this. Only Ritual casters have access to spells. NPCs only get training in one skill, which means only scientists and priests are going to have access to the feat (since you need training in Arcana or Religion to take the feat). I suspect characters trained in Nature will be able to take it come PHB2, since druids and shaman would likely want rituals.

But that's fine. Societies would probably research rituals to call rain or drive away pests or spur their crops to grow faster/larger. People pray for these things all the time; that's the difference between fantasy worlds and reality: in fantasy settings, you can prove that the prayers work (while such things are left to faith in reality).

As for my aquatic race and cooking, I never intended them to live entirely underwater. But, them eating raw meat almost exclusively sounds just fine: I'm a sushi lover, and as long as they're eating fresh fish I see no problem with it being raw. I figure they'd have potent digestive bacteria and enzymes to protect them from disease and parasites in the fish. I also figure they'll salt cure fish they want to preserve.

I'm going to start a separate thread for the "scientific" discussion of my race. I'll post it tonight, as I've got to head out for a late Valentine's date.

[Polycarp]

According to wikipedia, modern fish farms raise 50,000 fish in a 2-acre (8,100 m2) area. 1 acre = 0.0015625, so 640 acres is a square mile gets you 16 million fish in a square mile of farmland. I'm pretty sure that size of a farm wouldn't be feasible, but if it were spaced out it could be fine. Salmon are long lived, so they're probably a bad fish to use; the articles I'm finding say they take 1 to 5 years in the ocean to reach sexual maturity, and that's after living 3 years or so in streams. But, a salmon nets about 50% it's weight in meat, so that can probably be used as a baseline.

Much like a modern feed lot, modern fish farms require a lot of heavy-duty antibiotics and/or vaccinations to function.  Fish in such close quarters rub against each other and get a lot of sores and infections; if you kept cattle in feed lot conditions without modern technology, they'd probably all die of disease in short order, and the same is true of fish farms.

Salmon are a bad fish to use mostly because they're predators; it's far easier to feed vegetarian fish.  You would have to catch other fish in order to feed the salmon, which somewhat defeats the purpose of a subsistence fish farm.  You're better off raising carp (seriously) or another fish that doesn't eat other fish.

You could block off fish farms in order to keep the waste from getting into the general environment, but waste concentration in the water like that would probably kill the fish.  There are serious modern-day concerns about concentrated fish waste and its effects on the surrounding environment, creating algal blooms and things like that.  I would guess, however, if your fish farms were significantly less concentrated than modern ones (which they would have to be anyway) and located in areas with reasonably strong currents to disperse the waste, it wouldn't be too much of a problem.  Still, your mer-people (or whatever) might think of them as "noxious" areas, kind of like how humans don't like feed lots, paper mills, or rendering plants (or other places with a horrid stench).

[EvilElitest]

No, because in a 4E all of the PC classes are distinct powerful beings who can do absurd things on a regular basis.  Like for example, the mages ability to reuse there abilities between combat.  So unless they in the middle of a fight, the 4E mages can be just as crazy in terms of high power magic totally changing of the society.  It would be just as powerful in terms of world changing events as 3E, the classes are just as powerful

2E might be a little use more accurate
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[Bill Volk]

I thought that the PC classes in 4e are extremely rare parts of the population. So even if your city has ten or twelve PCs who can shoot off a flaming burst every six seconds or a force orb every five minutes, good luck convincing or forcing them to hang around in a mill using magic to keep a steam engine warm or something. After all, they're PCs and you're not.

However, you might have a whole little class of magewrights who can prestidigitate and maybe cast first-level rituals, like in Eberron, but they would be most useful in the service sector and wouldn't go a long way toward keeping a society running.