You can tell a lot about the way a culture will develop when you figure out what they eat. Since most fantasy-era RPG’s are set in a quasi-medieval setting with established town centers, the important food factor is what sort of grain the people are eating. Agrarianism is a prerequisite for stable settlements, and once the locals are harvesting grain, you have the luxury to develop other ideas, and the necessity of a system of supervision and food distribution that doesn’t exist in a hunter/gatherer setting where everyone’s primary duty is to get enough food to feed themselves every day. In a very real sense, the actual base economic unit of the preindustrial society is not the coin, but the bushel of grain.

The first thing influenced by food is how many people can be supported given a certain amount of arable land, and how much of the population must be dedicated to farming. A primary crop of wheat can support a certain population per acre, barley a different number, oats different again, etc. Because game designers tend to be unimaginative, they tend to use wheat as the primary crop if they’ve even bothered to think that hard about it. A general, historically accurate figure is that each wheat farmer produces enough food for himself, his 3 non-farming dependents (who don’t get as much food as the farmer), plus 10% surplus, taking into account the amount of grain you need in reserve for replanting. This means that for every non-farmer (adventurer, politician, soldier, etc.) in town, there must be 10 farmers raising wheat. This figure reflects the best technology available in a preindustrial society prior to the late 18th century, where advances in erosion control and fertilizers increased yields. The sort of technology we are talking about here is the kind you would expect to see in a fantasy quasi-medieval society: heavy plows and the wooden horse collar. Wheat farming has the considerable advantage of encouraging draft animals and horsemanship with increased hay and feed production, which in turn leads to cavalry. Each farmer generally works about 7 acres of wheat, and assuming your society is using a three-field system, each farmer would require about 10 acres, including the land that is left fallow that year (generally used for grazing while the land replenishes itself). Using a rough conversion of acreage to square miles (640 to 1), each square mile of wheat will thus support 64 farmers and their families plus 6.4 non-farmers. A typical farming village in old England of about 180 people thus requires 3 square miles of arable farmland, which is in keeping with the fact that such villages typically existed about 2-3 miles apart.

However, if you are trying to design a civilization that has relatively tight borders and supports a gigantic number of people, you have to either say they trade for their food from less populated farm regions (raising the cost of living for everyone in the city) or say there is a very high-yield cro

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