I’ve been enthralled by the deep and atmospheric setting of Blades in the Dark, and loved the idea of the perpetual darkness as a setting detail, but this morning in the shower thought that classic question: “But what do they eat?”
What grows in this world with no sunlight?
There was intense discusdion of this before lead by Andrew Shields. But fot the love of the gods below, I cant find it.
Mushrooms??? A large variety of mushrooms.
About a quarter of the city is given over to “Radiant Energy farms and eeleries”. So I’d guess eels, supplemented with (for those who can afford them) carbs and veg’ grown under great demon-blood fuelled arc lights, and for the poorer citizens it’s mushroom grown in humid sheds, on the ashes from Bellweather, and suffocatingly warmed with great electroplasmic heaters). It’s right by Iron Hooks, so the farms are probably tended by chain gangs from the prison.
Daniel Ley Do you think each city has such large scale farming inside the shields? I’m guessing what can be produced in Doskvol isn’t going to go far in terms of exports. Presumably, livestock would need grains to raise as well (which could mean horses and ponies are extortionately expensive creatures to keep).
Are there alcohol making processors that wouldn’t require grown crops as part of it? Is the beer of the masses just some form of mushroom slop?
If all bodies are (supposedly) burned, wouldn’t that mean mushrooms won’t have much to grow from either?
https://plus.google.com/114451952512667903737/posts/G3HkEtPWm1y
That post is a gold mine of ideas. For me the key is to remember that the world of blades is no longer a world ruled by the laws of nature: I mean, even human beings (and many animals) need the sunlight to avoid serious pathologies.
Maybe the plants grow on electroplasmic energy, or blood, or ashes. Maybe the plants that survived the cataclysm just became eternal, and they give the seeds to grow the other plants…
Maybe the people of these world are not really human anymore (they just looks like humans).
Maybe the world itself it’s just the dark reflection of the world that was before.
Yeah, this stuff is all pretty tame compared to what potions leeches can whip up on short notice, and whisper rituals.
The fact that all characters have an Attune capacity indicates that everybody is affected by living in the ghost field, so… that’s my go-to source for no-prize explanations. =)
What do we breath in a world without sunlight = photosynthesis? Maybe the hawkers should invest in an oxygen farm? 😉
This is why they use goats. Goats can live on just about anything. Early on in my game I made an aesthetic decision about horses being a symbol of the nobility and the very very rich, and this certainly reinforces that notion, if they’re super rare and difficult or expensive to care for.
I may be in the minority, but I like night to be a lot darker than day. So I prefer to think daytime is just cloudy and dismal, but not pitch black. Plants can still grow, with difficulty — wild plants are anemic and animals are scarce, and cultivated plants need lots of alchemical supplements.
This is awesome.
…Maybe some nobles are beginning to practice cannibalism, like a twisted form of exclusive dinner for the social elite.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hp1dsGeJPM
…Maybe rats are being used as new chickens too. Rats are animals that can eat almost anything and with a fast reproductive cycle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeBt8_MMpU8
Another option are insects. In the Snow Piercer movie, poor people exclusively fed with a gelatin bar created from insects:
https://vimeo.com/116875590
So much fodder for the imagination there Miguel Angel
Maybe the constant cloud cover admits ultraviolet, allowing photosynthesis to proceed, but not doing a thing for human vision.
Maybe sunlight falling on the ocean elsewhere powers the growth of phytoplankton. Ocean currents and winds bring the plankton and oxygenated air by Duskwall, thus supporting local land- and sea-life.
I can’t find it at the moment but there was an interesting article I read about the plant life around Chernobyl adapting to partially photosynthesize radiation, so it’s entirely possibly that some plants grow off of the same ghostly energies that power elecctroplasm. There’s also geothermal activity and other such things. I consider day to be like a full moon night in the real worrld and since that’s when some plants prefer to bloom it stands to reason at least some plant life can live off it. Primitive florecent life for more rare and expensive food (apples, the fruit of kings!).
It’s all workable. The poor probably eat thick, nutrient rich sloop compared to middle and upper classes.
These are all good answers. Plus, Andrew Shields has written an essay for the book that will help inspire more thinking along these lines.
I’ve always liked the idea of plantations, out in the darkness, with fields of blue wheat dominated by tesla-coil like towers that zap everything taller than the wheat, except for the field workers that wear backpacks and belts that ground them for safety. Plantation workers are rarely there of their own free will and many are criminals, so the safety net isn’t super high and plenty still die while the plantation owners sit inside halls protected by their own lightning barriers, bartering their night-blue wheat grain for electroplasm.
The common person on the streets of the city tho? They don’t ever see blue-wheat bread or biscuits, they see eel sandwiches on pressed-kelp “bread”, rat-on-a-stick, or various forms of mushroom stew. The fruits grown in the orchards at the outskirts of the city is for the nobility that can afford it.
And there are whispers of tables laden with sun-grown delicacies, in this magistrate’s or that crimelord’s manse. Peaches and grass-fed beef and real grape wine. No one can agree on where such luxuries would come from; nonetheless, most people believe the rumours.
John Willson …There are rumors of a valley, high in the mountains of central Akoros, where the sun still shines; the ridges surrounding this alpine paradise are too high for the cloud cover to cross. To this day, only the Emperor himself and one other — a lowly shepherd — have been to the valley and left to tell the tale. Or so they say.
Craig Payne it helps develop empathy in the audience if the protagonists are similar to themselves, and basically everyone has to eat, so I’d assume something similar in the other cities. Unless everyone in Doskvol / The Shattered Isles is actually dead (they just don’t know it), and the world is some sort of purgatory or hell (and so when eating they’re just going through the motions). It would explain why the city is so full of misery, corruption and villains. In this scenario Bellweather actual releases the spirits to be reborn in the “real world”, the demons are the characters’ gaolers, and vice is just a self imposed set of bars. Even if this isn’t true it could be philosophy of a cult crew.
With feeding the fungi, perhaps the mushrooms feed on the ash enriched with other mulched residue dredged from the sewers and canals, and best left undiscussed?
I was actually considering some residents to by espousing the conspiracy theory of the world being purgatory the other day!
I think mostly I’m going to be posing these questions to the group for answers, but it helps to have some ideas (and rumours) to fall back on. I suspect I may be even able to lure one of the players into a series of long term projects to try to uncover the reality of the matter!