Crops……   So.

Crops……   So.

Crops……   So.. with the sun being how it is in Duskwall… how do you guys like to envision crops?  I’m mostly on board with the “don’t expect realism here” line in the quickstart, but I still find it hard to envision plants living without sunlight.  So, how do you guys like to think about it?  Logistics brainstorming!

29 thoughts on “Crops……   So.”

  2. This question was asked in our game too. The answer?

    Electroplasmically controlled ‘greenhouses’ not unlike the Victorian predilection for the same.

    These are heavily guarded and fresh vegetables are the purvey of the rich and powerful, the common folk subsist on mushrooms and the  algae that grows in the canals of duskwall.

  3. I’m thinking of varieties of plants with black leaves that absorb the infra-red light that passes through the clouds.  That might be a bit too sci-fi for some people’s tastes though 😛

  6. I remember reading somewhere about the vegetation on a planet that orbited a red dwarf, where the strongest wavelength was in the ultraviolet.  So that kind of description was getting my mind working.

  8. Plus a bounty of meat, algae, and kelp from the sea. 

    Perhaps there are radiant fish whose “light” feeds underwater plant growths. And perhaps the greenhouses have roofs and walls that are actually tanks, and these glowing radiant fish live in them, providing the light for what grows within as they lazily drift and pulse in hypnotic patterns in their glass prisons.

  10. For added efficiency, perhaps what makes fish “radiant” is electroplasm tangled with their nervous system. So perhaps the bright scientists of Duskwall figured out how to CREATE radiant creatures, and insert the elements into octopi, squids, anemones, as well as various fish. And when they die, the electroplasm must be managed as with a human death.

    If you can’t figure out how that could go gloriously wrong, you aren’t trying. =)

  11. I have no sun. Just 6 Moons, glowing in pale dead light. Thats why my players choose to call themselfs “The Seventh Moon”

    So thats also teh reason I did not depict all as green hounted forests but a more dry and wastelands like enviroment with harsh conditions and weird sturdy plants.

  13. Nathan Roberts I would suspect that the electroplasm would streak through your system, find the most stubborn death there, and give it a whisper in your mind, or the ability to drive the body when you are unconscious. 

    So, scientist/exorcists get involved in flattening out your energy signature so you’re alone in there.

    But nobody ever really comes out of that just exactly the same. And sometimes the body’s native host isn’t the one that survives the purge. =)

  14. (If you are a Whisper, maybe your day job was to root out “echoes” from those who ingested too much electroplasm and manifested other personalities.)

  15. (The concept of ingesting electroplasm and manifesting whispers also provides useful lasting effect clock ideas for overloaded Whispers and other miscreants who fiddle around with electroplasm more than they should, especially if they’ve been playing long enough to carry the deaths of some really nasty enemies in their shadows.)

  17. If you run with the “radiant” idea of using ectoplasm to fuel food growth, then you could have a rare bush or stalk (or maybe small tree) that was radiant that was planted at intervals in fields to nourish crops. Controlling the radiant shrub would mean controlling the farming enterprise, to a great extent.

    Then treat the radiant plant as a source of drugs for Whispers; they smoke part of it, chew part of it, brew part of it, ferment part of it, etc.

    THEN you make a blight that affects them, that is currently causing food shortages.

    The rhetoric surrounding the process of radiant plants and animals could be reflective of how electroplasm is the gateway, where death energy and life energy cross and recross–just as food is the gateway, where the death of some things means the life of others.

  19. Christopher Meid From enterprising industrialists who combine the abilities of alchemists, Whispers, and agronomists to add catalysts to the plants and animals that draw in latent electroplasm then process and release it.

    A thoroughly unnatural, unholy practice inspired by the most monstrous creatures of the deep and refined by the brightest human minds.

  25. Initial reaction strained all suspension of disbelief, but then again I always worry too much about boring details like that.

    Bounty of the Sea, after noticing that the map is pretty much all coastal cities and thought there must be a reason.  Whatever the world might lack in farm culture it will have to make up for with nets, traps, and trawlers.  Who knows what is going on below the surface anyway?

  26. Would the burning of bodies and rarity of other plant life mean that mushrooms and funghi are problematic to grow also? And algae would also need sunlight to exist, wouldn’t it?

    Not trying to be a downer: just trying to identify some of the questions that would help round out the setting (which very often seems to stem from “What do they eat?”). I’m quite content with the electroplasm greenhouses, but this would presumably also lead to the costs of keeping livestock to be extremely high, and almost all alcohol being an extravagance only affordable by the wealthy.

  27. Craig Payne Human bodies must be burned, but not animals, or wood, or sea creatures, so there’s still plenty for fungus to grow on. Animals are fed the lowest and roughest food, and they pass on enough nutrients for creative fungus to thrive. 

    If the realism is a problem, you can just favor fungus that has a sensitivity and can take nourishment from the overcharged ghost field.

    As for algae, you could fuel it from the energy rolling off leviathans, so where they pass there are clots and islands of filth that then provide nutrition for other less toxic materials. Or, you could take inspiration from undersea heat vents that bloom with energy, and either put in heat vents or cluster them around vents where the ghost field condenses down and releases a raw and unrefined plasm along cracks in the sea floor.

    I would think poor people could only afford eel, clams, and fish (and other cheap and gross sea creatures.) Well-to-do might afford chickens and pigs and goats. The wealthy get all sorts of meat, because they’re wealthy. =)

    As for alcohol, if history has taught us anything, humans will ferment and drink anything that could possibly be fermented and drunk. Through trial and error, they will weaponize any substance to assault their consciousness and liver. What does that look like in Doskvol? Have some fun with it! Distill a liquor from materials found in giant spider abdomens mixed with canal water. Specially treated spores make hallucinogenic wine. And so on. 

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