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Leicontis
2010-03-12, 07:12 PM
I'm GMing a 3.5 campaign where the party are part of a colony expedition to an unexplored island, and a large portion of the colonists are farmers (in order to provide food for the expedition). Does anyone know of any rules for agriculture in D&D? I don't care if they're third-party or homebrew, but I figured I'd ask before patching together my own overcomplicated mess of a ruleset.

Oracle_Hunter
2010-03-12, 07:20 PM
...why are you making rules for this again? :smallconfused:

Dr Bwaa
2010-03-12, 07:24 PM
Because it's fun!

On topic, I don't know of any rules offhand, but there might be some in Cityscape or maaaaybe SBG? I haven't read those in a while, so I don't really remember what's in them. Besides that, my advice would be to look in setting-specific books that cover agricultural regions; there seems like a fair chance that relevant info might live there.

Oracle_Hunter
2010-03-12, 07:27 PM
Because it's fun!

On topic, I don't know of any rules offhand, but there might be some in Cityscape or maaaaybe SBG? I haven't read those in a while, so I don't really remember what's in them. Besides that, my advice would be to look in setting-specific books that cover agricultural regions; there seems like a fair chance that relevant info might live there.
Actually, I was more curious about what he hoped to achieve with these rules. Is he running a "Civilization" style game where he'll need 5 Food to produce 1 Settler, or what?

Nerd-o-rama
2010-03-12, 08:40 PM
Why would your characters and, consequently, your campaign care about specific rules for farming, beyond "if too many Commoners die, we're all going to starve to death out here"?

Ashiel
2010-03-12, 11:20 PM
Maybe try this add-in for D&D which is for use with dealing with resources and what-not: D&D Castle Sim (http://www.community3e.com/dn/dm_help/dndcastlesim.doc) by Community3E.

Alternatively the Fields of Blood - Book of War 3PP book (now out of print due to WotC's draconian d20 slapdowns) may be possible to find online or in a used bookstore, or perhaps as a pdf copy from someone who purchased the book from RPGNow before they were locked down. It's a really great book which deals with ruling kingdoms and having d20 warfare. Great stuff. :smallsmile:

Lysander
2010-03-12, 11:36 PM
This seems like the perfect time for handwaving. Why not just assume the farmers succeed as long as you accomplish certain missions like "kill the dire bats eating our cattle" and "fend off the ghost pirate ship"

Ormur
2010-03-12, 11:47 PM
I don't suppose you're looking for information about three field rotation and agricultural history?

Dr.Epic
2010-03-13, 12:43 AM
The only thing I know about agriculture in terms of D&D (and real life for that matter) is that there's a druid spell called plant growth and increases the number of crops you produce. Maybe include a druid among the farmers?

Devils_Advocate
2010-03-13, 01:26 AM
The thing most closely related to agriculture that I can find offhand is the Random Weather table. If you actually used this to determine the weather on a regular basis, it would be raining or snowing about a fifth of the time in a temperate climate. And you'd have to decide for yourself when this frequent precipitation starts and stops, because it doesn't deal with the duration of weather at all.

And I think that that may be a bit illustrative of how well the d20 system deals with this sort of thing. Personally, I think that it would be probably be best to just borrow some existing model of farming in the real world without even trying to translate it into d20 terms.

Incorporating the aforementioned plant growth spell would be easy: It just increases all of the crop yields within a half mile radius by one third for a year, so you just apply a simple multiplier to whatever figure you work out (for that much land or a for smaller piece of land that falls within such an area). It's a Plant domain spell, so clerics of agriculture can cast it as well as druids. I see druids being more concerned with wild nature, but they might still cast it for a village in exchange for the villagers leaving their forest alone. Anyway, given its area and duration, even one person who can only cast this once per day can do a lot.

Some brief research informs me that an acre is roughly the amount of land tillable by one man with one ox in one day. I did not know that.

hewhosaysfish
2010-03-13, 09:19 AM
You may find this (http://www.io.com/~sjohn/demog.htm) helpful.

EDIT: Ok, looking at my post, it seems kinda rude to just not drop that link out there and with no discussion of where it leads.

It's an article about "Medieval Demographics Made Easy" written specifically with use in DnD in mind. It discusses the ratios of land area, population of famrers, population of non-farmers, size of settlements, etc.

Oracle_Hunter
2010-03-14, 06:02 PM
You may find this (http://www.io.com/~sjohn/demog.htm) helpful.

EDIT: Ok, looking at my post, it seems kinda rude to just not drop that link out there and with no discussion of where it leads.

It's an article about "Medieval Demographics Made Easy" written specifically with use in DnD in mind. It discusses the ratios of land area, population of famrers, population of non-farmers, size of settlements, etc.
This guy is great for world-building in general.

I'm still really interested in hearing from the OP again - unless he just wants to add rules-for-the-sake-of-rules, we need to know more about his situation before a sensible proposal can be made.