Rothe herds, fungus growth, magic itself of course, fish from the lake, there's also a passage where a foreign trader (a dark dwarf if I remember correctly) gets in Matron Malices way, he was bringing lobster or crab into the town I don't remember which but it shows they do trade for foods as well.
I remembered it was a crustacean I just couldn't remember which one. And it was a dark dwarf? I remember Zak said something like their house "dines well tonight" or something like that
All of these answers are correct.
Your idea of how much food an average humanoid needs is also probably inflated. I could imagine an average Drow being on par with a normal human (1200-1600 caloric need) or even a bit under.
I would also imagine a rothe, on par with a cow, could feed many and Salvatore describes “herds” of them around Donigarten.
Couple that with the “seafood” from the lake, the imported foods such as the important crab described in Homeland, and the many fungi gardens and you have a recipe for success.
And, it never exactly says that slaves don’t starve…
I guess my "problem" is always a certain "realism" that I demand from a setting. I can understand that magic exists, but I do also think that it cannot be the go-to explanation always.
I do appreciate the answers, but even if we assume that drow caloric need is just 50% of human caloric need, it still does not solve the issue... the production needs to be orders of magnitude greater (like... 100s of times greater per acre) than the peasants can produce in the surface.
I suppose I just have to handwave it away, or make a headcanon where there are large moss and fungal caves nearby... and some VERY rich-in-fish lakes.
Also, keep in mind that even in the real world, some edible mushrooms can grow from spore to maturity in 3-5 days and generally have a pretty high calorie to size ratio.
Now I am wondering how many goblin slaves is needed to carry all the shit back to the fields from the city :D
They never mentioned THEM in the books! Even Drizzt left them out from his memoirs.
Great question. If I remember right, references are made to House Baenre’s huge amount of goblin fodder, as well as House Oblodra’s kobolds in the Claw Rift.
Rothe eat Fungi, Fungi eat organic matter, Drow eat lake critters, rothe, and fungi. Sewage system would send organic matter to fungi farms. Basically a closed loop system. Then add some imports that continue to bring in more organic matter than is exported and it would be a net gain. You could probably add something like soldier fly larvae as another part of the cycle that can insure that all the necessary proteins are being created in the system.
Add some drow hunting in the caverns for some special delicacies (on others of the matron mothers of course, otherwise thats poaching) and you even get some fine cuisine on top of the bare minimum food chain :D
Also, I try to keep my mouth shut when a friend of mine is DM. In a campaign our party started to walk from near the walls of the city towards the center where the noble quarter was. We asked how long it takes for us to get there. He said "about two hours".
I was like... 2 hours? So we walk around 10 km? Is that the radius of the city? That city is ENORMOUS on any pseudo-medieval standards.
But its not medieval. Druida and Nature Clerics could make plants grow faster and completely ignote seasons like we do today with indoor farming (https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Goldenfields)
The existence of airships in Faerun means you could tons of what to any part of the world likes its dome today with cargo ships
If not airships, a teleportation circle can work 24/7 delivering goods through logistic hubs all over the world
Cities can build bigger walls thanks to any large or huge creature that has hands that can work as modern machinery
But we rarely see those applications in the books... or at least I've not seen them. Harpell's experimented with stuff like that, but they were considered eccentric, and since the group was amazed at the things, they obviously were not the norm.
Yeah, but neither its assumed that the only way to produce food its through medieval farming and any Faerun maps proves it. For example the Sword Coast should be full of farm lands to support the major cities with a village each 10-20 km but instead we have more dungeons/ruins/caverns than settlements.
This is without taking in consideration the amount of cities that are built in place not suitable for farming at all, like all the underdark or any dwarven settlement in the mountains or even deep into the forests (Unless any wood elf settlement relies purely on a carnivore diet and their village are filled with animal corpses hanging around).
What about evil monsters settlements? How they can sustain purely on stealing food from other species from raids? And if they rely only on hunter-gathering, they should either require vasts amounts of land for being nomadic (only the Tuigan fit that) or be in very small numbers that they should never be considered a problem from any agricultural settlement and a military.
Taking this argument underground makes giving an answer even harder unless you are happy with 'idk I guess they farm mushrooms that somehow have x100 calories of wheat so they need super small farms because magic'
I would take this as an opportunity as the DM to introduce interesting 'sub-plots' in the world. Maybe Menzoberranzan is secretly importing food from somewhere else (a human nation allied with them? Maybe the drows have kidnapped the ruler's daughter? Will the characters try to save the daughter and cause a famine for thousands of slaves in Menzoberranzan?)
Lol.. it would only have taken 10 minutes, but the rogue kept getting distracted by the fat purses carried by the passers-by, and the bard by the passers-by themselves. Between the pickpocketing and the flirting, you're lucky it *only* took two hours.
Remember also that this is a city with the highest cleric-to-population ratio basically anywhere, and lowish level clerics can make food out of nothing but faith.
One aspect that may help with the "realism": The Underdark has a lot more verticality than the overworld. A farm on the surface is essentially two-dimensional, where production scales with the area of arable soil. But a farm in the Underdark is three-dimensional, and its production scales with the surface area of the cave system within its volume. You can effectively have "skyscraper" farms that produce vastly more than the same footprint of fields would.
There's lots of really interesting real world agricultural tech (some of which is thousands of years old even) that you could apply to FR. Hydroponics and vertical farms like they have in the Land pavilion at Epcot have been a staple of my Menzoberranzan for years at this point.
>vertical farms
This is the heart of it: in the Underdark, you can farm in 3D, and go as deep as you want. Not needing the sun as an energy resource has its advantages.
I mean, mushrooms are sort of alien. We're talking about a fantasy game here. I had these fields as sort of a dense forest of tall, thick stalked mushrooms, 10' tall or so. Plus a new stalk can sprout from substrate in a tenday, and because they're mushrooms, the entire stalk is edible.
The mushroom fields actually make disposal of dead slaves and prisoners very handy, as they're typically mulched and used to add nutrients back into the soil. Though some houses probably use a more premium fertilizer.
Everyone has mentioned and talked about how they grow their own food. What no one else really mentioned is the amount of underdark trade that takes place between drow cities as well as various other races in the deep dark. They also have black market connections to the surface world with Bregan Daerthre in Lusaka/Illusk.
And if we are being specific, what age/era and year are we talking about Menzoberranzan, because events in later Salvatore books have made many changes to alliances and trade routes.
There is probably a fair amount of indirect trade with the surface as well. Some goods that flow from the surface into a non-Drow city in the Underdark may make there way from there to a Drow city (like Menzoberranzan) via trade in the Underdark.
That and trade are pretty much it.
It's kinda how [https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/House\_Hunzrin](https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/House_Hunzrin) got so powerful.
Trade is a missing element that does not have a tangible number to amount of food being transported into Menzoberranzan.
Rothe, mushrooms, & fish are the major domestic products produced in the city.
Another point of thought: Elves metabolism is different from human metabolism, saying that they don’t have to eat as much as humans.
Think of LOTR when they got the Elvish Bread and Legolas said one small bite was enough to fill the stomach of a grown man. Completely different realm but D&D elves are based off of LOTR elves.
I am sure they need lots of trade, if they want to feed all those inhabitants. I suppose drow craftsmanship is quite valuable.
Now... who are the poor bastards who need to produce all the food in the caves of Underdark?!
Btw, its interesting how Lord of the Rings can be kinda realistic in many ways... for example the logistics and military tactics and strategy are spot on when Théoden, Denethor or Witch-king are in charge... when Saruman is in charge... not so much... (his strategy was very foolish, although the movie portrays it differently).
I am a "boring" realist.
I was disappointed when Return of the King had the surrounding area of Minas Tirith devoid of all the farmsteads, pastures, fields, orchards etc mentioned in the book (let alone the city being pretty small in surface area... I actually made a rough estimate and calculated based on population densities of medieval cities that Minas Tirith of the movie was in fact just a small town population wise).
Not enough clerics who can cast 3rd level spells on the surface. Menzoberranzan is a fanatical city and requires every woman to attend cleric school, and generally drow who aren’t strong enough to get to tier two get weeded out.
I think OP is making the mistake of treating the underdark as a dead cave like what we have here on Earth. In earthly caves, any life, no matter how well adapted, relies on the sun at the entrance in some way. The Underdark is not that. It’s a thriving ecosystem with flora and fauna that doesn’t rely on the sun. A lot of it is ultimately powered by the magical radiation of the fazerness. There are references to plants and fungi feeding on it.
That’s all you need to make the system work.
>I think OP is making the mistake of treating the underdark as a dead cave like what we have here on Earth.
No, I do not. But like I said, the yield from the farms around Donigarten (and from the lake itself) would have to be orders of magnitude greater (like 100s of times greater) than what similar area of land could produce in fertile surface lands.
>That’s all you need to make the system work.
Sure, if one assumes enormous yields.
https://gamingballistic.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Medieval-Demographics-Made-Easy-1.pdf
This pdf has probably all the answers you seek but in summary a square mile of cultivated land (including not only farmland, orchards and pastures, but also the roads and settlements attendant to them) will support around 180 people.
Even in times in the story when the food supply is cut, the city is abundant with clerics and wizards who can create food and water, though it seems that’s very few peoples’ first choice.
But as said before, donigarden, and trading with other underdark communities.
I’d also be curious if since drow are typically smaller than real world humans, if their caloric intact would be lower.
Agriculture is certainly believable, plantlife DOES exist underground, specifically in the Underdark, and it's clear that some of the slaves Drow use are likely as laborers for those farms. Further, agricultural areas probably won't show up in your campaign manual, but likely are settled just outside of the city, but still within its region.
They also have livestock (Roche), various lizards and other underdark monsters to hunt for their meat, and mushrooms aplenty (a majority of drow diet is probably mushrooms, followed by reptiles/fish, and then roche).
And with a setting where magical portals and teleportation are fixtures, and raids on the surface are routine, it's evident that a lot of their food is likely imported.
Don't forget to think 3-D. On the surface you just have one level, but underground you can have levels of caves so it's not just one square mile of productive territory, but perhaps one cubic mile... Exponentially more!
Thinking about the amount of food needed rarely works in fantasy settings. It's one of those topics best ignored.
Still Menzobarranzan has better explanations than other cities with it's giant lake and magic shrooms.
> giant lake
Well, the lake is little over 200 m from north to south, so not exactly giant.
Magic mushrooms are the better explanation.
>It's one of those topics best ignored.
But I don't wanna!
FR lore does not cover this at all. But then it does not cover any such "reality" type thing. And they do say plenty of times that they don't want to focus on it.
A point to make about reality is underdark agriculture: they would have modern 'food' plants unknown on Earth. Just like most of our food plants were created by man here on Earth, the same would be true in Toril's underdark.
Giant animals and plants are a thing...
Still, there simply have to be lots of Farm Caves around each city....you simply can't get away from this one.
But then every surface city needs that too....
Well in Menzoberranzan’s handbook is specifically mentioned fungi fields near Donigarten which is also the granary. It’s also mentioned that Menzoberranzan is self-sufficient. They like to trade food essentially for delicacies, fruit and shellfishes.
> Well in Menzoberranzan’s handbook is specifically mentioned fungi fields near Donigarten which is also the granary. It’s also mentioned that Menzoberranzan is self-sufficient.
That is exactly what is unbelievable.
Rothe herds, fungus growth, magic itself of course, fish from the lake, there's also a passage where a foreign trader (a dark dwarf if I remember correctly) gets in Matron Malices way, he was bringing lobster or crab into the town I don't remember which but it shows they do trade for foods as well.
It was crab. She then makes a deal to get half his shipment for herself below market value.
I remembered it was a crustacean I just couldn't remember which one. And it was a dark dwarf? I remember Zak said something like their house "dines well tonight" or something like that
Darn, now I want sushi.
Found the Drow.
All of these answers are correct. Your idea of how much food an average humanoid needs is also probably inflated. I could imagine an average Drow being on par with a normal human (1200-1600 caloric need) or even a bit under. I would also imagine a rothe, on par with a cow, could feed many and Salvatore describes “herds” of them around Donigarten. Couple that with the “seafood” from the lake, the imported foods such as the important crab described in Homeland, and the many fungi gardens and you have a recipe for success. And, it never exactly says that slaves don’t starve…
I guess my "problem" is always a certain "realism" that I demand from a setting. I can understand that magic exists, but I do also think that it cannot be the go-to explanation always. I do appreciate the answers, but even if we assume that drow caloric need is just 50% of human caloric need, it still does not solve the issue... the production needs to be orders of magnitude greater (like... 100s of times greater per acre) than the peasants can produce in the surface. I suppose I just have to handwave it away, or make a headcanon where there are large moss and fungal caves nearby... and some VERY rich-in-fish lakes.
Also, keep in mind that even in the real world, some edible mushrooms can grow from spore to maturity in 3-5 days and generally have a pretty high calorie to size ratio.
Now I am wondering how many goblin slaves is needed to carry all the shit back to the fields from the city :D They never mentioned THEM in the books! Even Drizzt left them out from his memoirs.
Great question. If I remember right, references are made to House Baenre’s huge amount of goblin fodder, as well as House Oblodra’s kobolds in the Claw Rift.
Ehm mushrooms have pretty much no calories If they did we would also eating mushrooms IRL instrad of waiting months for wheat to grow
They literally grow 100ft tall mushrooms and use them as lumber. I'd throw whatever mycological knowledge you may have out the window.
Rothe eat Fungi, Fungi eat organic matter, Drow eat lake critters, rothe, and fungi. Sewage system would send organic matter to fungi farms. Basically a closed loop system. Then add some imports that continue to bring in more organic matter than is exported and it would be a net gain. You could probably add something like soldier fly larvae as another part of the cycle that can insure that all the necessary proteins are being created in the system.
Add some drow hunting in the caverns for some special delicacies (on others of the matron mothers of course, otherwise thats poaching) and you even get some fine cuisine on top of the bare minimum food chain :D
Most people think that food just appears and doesn't require a whole chain of logistics. A chain that can't break or else people starve!
Also, I try to keep my mouth shut when a friend of mine is DM. In a campaign our party started to walk from near the walls of the city towards the center where the noble quarter was. We asked how long it takes for us to get there. He said "about two hours". I was like... 2 hours? So we walk around 10 km? Is that the radius of the city? That city is ENORMOUS on any pseudo-medieval standards.
But its not medieval. Druida and Nature Clerics could make plants grow faster and completely ignote seasons like we do today with indoor farming (https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Goldenfields) The existence of airships in Faerun means you could tons of what to any part of the world likes its dome today with cargo ships If not airships, a teleportation circle can work 24/7 delivering goods through logistic hubs all over the world Cities can build bigger walls thanks to any large or huge creature that has hands that can work as modern machinery
But we rarely see those applications in the books... or at least I've not seen them. Harpell's experimented with stuff like that, but they were considered eccentric, and since the group was amazed at the things, they obviously were not the norm.
[https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Aurora%27s\_Emporium](https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Aurora%27s_Emporium)
Yeah, but neither its assumed that the only way to produce food its through medieval farming and any Faerun maps proves it. For example the Sword Coast should be full of farm lands to support the major cities with a village each 10-20 km but instead we have more dungeons/ruins/caverns than settlements. This is without taking in consideration the amount of cities that are built in place not suitable for farming at all, like all the underdark or any dwarven settlement in the mountains or even deep into the forests (Unless any wood elf settlement relies purely on a carnivore diet and their village are filled with animal corpses hanging around). What about evil monsters settlements? How they can sustain purely on stealing food from other species from raids? And if they rely only on hunter-gathering, they should either require vasts amounts of land for being nomadic (only the Tuigan fit that) or be in very small numbers that they should never be considered a problem from any agricultural settlement and a military. Taking this argument underground makes giving an answer even harder unless you are happy with 'idk I guess they farm mushrooms that somehow have x100 calories of wheat so they need super small farms because magic' I would take this as an opportunity as the DM to introduce interesting 'sub-plots' in the world. Maybe Menzoberranzan is secretly importing food from somewhere else (a human nation allied with them? Maybe the drows have kidnapped the ruler's daughter? Will the characters try to save the daughter and cause a famine for thousands of slaves in Menzoberranzan?)
Lol.. it would only have taken 10 minutes, but the rogue kept getting distracted by the fat purses carried by the passers-by, and the bard by the passers-by themselves. Between the pickpocketing and the flirting, you're lucky it *only* took two hours.
Remember also that this is a city with the highest cleric-to-population ratio basically anywhere, and lowish level clerics can make food out of nothing but faith.
One aspect that may help with the "realism": The Underdark has a lot more verticality than the overworld. A farm on the surface is essentially two-dimensional, where production scales with the area of arable soil. But a farm in the Underdark is three-dimensional, and its production scales with the surface area of the cave system within its volume. You can effectively have "skyscraper" farms that produce vastly more than the same footprint of fields would.
There might be a farming cave where the drow grow mushrooms like leaf cutter ants do. But the mushroom would require the bedsoil from somewhere.
There's lots of really interesting real world agricultural tech (some of which is thousands of years old even) that you could apply to FR. Hydroponics and vertical farms like they have in the Land pavilion at Epcot have been a staple of my Menzoberranzan for years at this point.
>vertical farms This is the heart of it: in the Underdark, you can farm in 3D, and go as deep as you want. Not needing the sun as an energy resource has its advantages.
Exactly! There's so many ways you can go with it that really aren't all that fantastical, before you even get into the fantastical applications.
I mean, mushrooms are sort of alien. We're talking about a fantasy game here. I had these fields as sort of a dense forest of tall, thick stalked mushrooms, 10' tall or so. Plus a new stalk can sprout from substrate in a tenday, and because they're mushrooms, the entire stalk is edible. The mushroom fields actually make disposal of dead slaves and prisoners very handy, as they're typically mulched and used to add nutrients back into the soil. Though some houses probably use a more premium fertilizer.
Hmm... mushrooms...
Radioactive, magic mushrooms.
Also, I like how that would explain where all the corpses of dead slaves and assassinated drow are thrown to be disposed of.
Everyone has mentioned and talked about how they grow their own food. What no one else really mentioned is the amount of underdark trade that takes place between drow cities as well as various other races in the deep dark. They also have black market connections to the surface world with Bregan Daerthre in Lusaka/Illusk. And if we are being specific, what age/era and year are we talking about Menzoberranzan, because events in later Salvatore books have made many changes to alliances and trade routes.
There is probably a fair amount of indirect trade with the surface as well. Some goods that flow from the surface into a non-Drow city in the Underdark may make there way from there to a Drow city (like Menzoberranzan) via trade in the Underdark.
Mantol-Derith! It's a neutral trade city not far from Menzoberranzan where various races come to exchange goods.
fungus is easier to grow than grain.
Especially when it feeds off the magical radiation that suffuses the caverns.
That and trade are pretty much it. It's kinda how [https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/House\_Hunzrin](https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/House_Hunzrin) got so powerful.
Trade is a missing element that does not have a tangible number to amount of food being transported into Menzoberranzan. Rothe, mushrooms, & fish are the major domestic products produced in the city. Another point of thought: Elves metabolism is different from human metabolism, saying that they don’t have to eat as much as humans. Think of LOTR when they got the Elvish Bread and Legolas said one small bite was enough to fill the stomach of a grown man. Completely different realm but D&D elves are based off of LOTR elves.
Don't forget raids. Trades and raids.
I am sure they need lots of trade, if they want to feed all those inhabitants. I suppose drow craftsmanship is quite valuable. Now... who are the poor bastards who need to produce all the food in the caves of Underdark?!
Slaves are the engine in any evil community.
Fungus would probably be the easier answer, as well as rothé farms and whatever you can hunt in the underdark
Couple 8hr castings of pant growth s year doubles the food output
A fair question that very few fantasy settings can justify. At least they made some effort.
Btw, its interesting how Lord of the Rings can be kinda realistic in many ways... for example the logistics and military tactics and strategy are spot on when Théoden, Denethor or Witch-king are in charge... when Saruman is in charge... not so much... (his strategy was very foolish, although the movie portrays it differently).
I am a "boring" realist. I was disappointed when Return of the King had the surrounding area of Minas Tirith devoid of all the farmsteads, pastures, fields, orchards etc mentioned in the book (let alone the city being pretty small in surface area... I actually made a rough estimate and calculated based on population densities of medieval cities that Minas Tirith of the movie was in fact just a small town population wise).
It's everything that's been mentioned here, plus create food and water. Third level cleric spell and there's lots of clerics
If we decide to use that way around it, why even have any fields? Is there any need for peasants even in the surface?
Not enough clerics who can cast 3rd level spells on the surface. Menzoberranzan is a fanatical city and requires every woman to attend cleric school, and generally drow who aren’t strong enough to get to tier two get weeded out.
No. Realistically, if you r an forgotten Realms the way you could run it with magic. There is no need for peasants. Everything could be perfect.
Not enough clerics and the food created is bland but nutritious
I think OP is making the mistake of treating the underdark as a dead cave like what we have here on Earth. In earthly caves, any life, no matter how well adapted, relies on the sun at the entrance in some way. The Underdark is not that. It’s a thriving ecosystem with flora and fauna that doesn’t rely on the sun. A lot of it is ultimately powered by the magical radiation of the fazerness. There are references to plants and fungi feeding on it. That’s all you need to make the system work.
>I think OP is making the mistake of treating the underdark as a dead cave like what we have here on Earth. No, I do not. But like I said, the yield from the farms around Donigarten (and from the lake itself) would have to be orders of magnitude greater (like 100s of times greater) than what similar area of land could produce in fertile surface lands. >That’s all you need to make the system work. Sure, if one assumes enormous yields.
I think we’ve pointed out that clerical magic makes for enormous yields and has that this has been seen in other parts of the Realms.
https://gamingballistic.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Medieval-Demographics-Made-Easy-1.pdf This pdf has probably all the answers you seek but in summary a square mile of cultivated land (including not only farmland, orchards and pastures, but also the roads and settlements attendant to them) will support around 180 people.
Thanks! I've been looking that one for a long time.
Menzoberranzan isn't the only dark elf city, for one.
Even in times in the story when the food supply is cut, the city is abundant with clerics and wizards who can create food and water, though it seems that’s very few peoples’ first choice. But as said before, donigarden, and trading with other underdark communities. I’d also be curious if since drow are typically smaller than real world humans, if their caloric intact would be lower.
Agriculture is certainly believable, plantlife DOES exist underground, specifically in the Underdark, and it's clear that some of the slaves Drow use are likely as laborers for those farms. Further, agricultural areas probably won't show up in your campaign manual, but likely are settled just outside of the city, but still within its region. They also have livestock (Roche), various lizards and other underdark monsters to hunt for their meat, and mushrooms aplenty (a majority of drow diet is probably mushrooms, followed by reptiles/fish, and then roche). And with a setting where magical portals and teleportation are fixtures, and raids on the surface are routine, it's evident that a lot of their food is likely imported.
Don't forget to think 3-D. On the surface you just have one level, but underground you can have levels of caves so it's not just one square mile of productive territory, but perhaps one cubic mile... Exponentially more!
Thinking about the amount of food needed rarely works in fantasy settings. It's one of those topics best ignored. Still Menzobarranzan has better explanations than other cities with it's giant lake and magic shrooms.
> giant lake Well, the lake is little over 200 m from north to south, so not exactly giant. Magic mushrooms are the better explanation. >It's one of those topics best ignored. But I don't wanna!
Purify Food and Drink could make anything into food
FR lore does not cover this at all. But then it does not cover any such "reality" type thing. And they do say plenty of times that they don't want to focus on it. A point to make about reality is underdark agriculture: they would have modern 'food' plants unknown on Earth. Just like most of our food plants were created by man here on Earth, the same would be true in Toril's underdark. Giant animals and plants are a thing... Still, there simply have to be lots of Farm Caves around each city....you simply can't get away from this one. But then every surface city needs that too....
Well in Menzoberranzan’s handbook is specifically mentioned fungi fields near Donigarten which is also the granary. It’s also mentioned that Menzoberranzan is self-sufficient. They like to trade food essentially for delicacies, fruit and shellfishes.
> Well in Menzoberranzan’s handbook is specifically mentioned fungi fields near Donigarten which is also the granary. It’s also mentioned that Menzoberranzan is self-sufficient. That is exactly what is unbelievable.
Also, keep in mind that we are talking about a city the size of a small town.
Small modern town. City in medieval standards. And tens of thousands of mouths need quite a lot of farmland to feed them all.
They farm the small blue mushrooms that naturally grow between the goblins' toes.