Except adventurers, obviously … Karameikos is the first campaign setting for Dungeons and Dragons (D&D), and the setting in which my new skype campaign occurs. Karameikos is described in the TSR supplement The Grand Duchy of Karameikos, which gives information about the major towns of the region and the major personalities living in them.
This book makes clear that the major town in Karameikos is Specularum, a town of 50,000 people that may have grown significantly in recent times. It also identifies at least two major high level clerics in this town: Olliver Jowett, an 18th level Cleric, and Aleksyev Nikelnevich, an 11th level Cleric. There are other powerful clerics described in the book but their location is not specified. Olliver and Aleksyev’s stats are given in the book, and they both have Cure Serious Wounds, Cure Disease and Raise Dead memorized, though Olliver could memorize 4x Raise Dead if he really wanted.
I have previously posted here about post-scarcity fantasy, and how it would be extremely cost-effective for clerics in the middle ages to intervene in child birth to save lives. I previously used the AD&D rule book to establish populations of Clerics, but now I have access to the ultimate Canonical text, a definitive world description from the original rules. What are the implications of this world description for my theories about post-scarcity fantasy?
First of all, let us gather some statistics. It’s impossible to know the true birth and death rates in the middle ages, but there are estimates from 17th century Britain that give birth rates of about 30 per 1000 population, and death rates of about 25 per 1000 population. Based on these, we can expect about 3.5 deaths per day, and about 4 births per day, some of which will be of high risk to the mother.
Based on the presence of just Olliver and Aleksyev in Specularum, we can expect that 2 of these 3.5 deaths could be prevented every day by simply walking over to the place they occurred and casting Raise Dead. If we assume that at least 2 of these deaths are caused by disease – a not unreasonable assumption in the middle ages – then two more deaths could be prevented by application of the Cure Disease spell.
Just these two clerics could ensure that no one ever died in Specularum.
They could improve their job by using the Commune spell to learn some basic techniques to improve childbirth and medical procedures. “Why do women die in childbirth” would be a very useful commune question – Olliver can ask one question a day. Presumably once in a year he could get around to this question. Olliver has a 4th level assistant with Cure Light Wounds who could attend 2 births every day and cast this spell to prevent major injuries (ordinary commoners have 1d6 hit points so presumably this spell would completely reverse the damage done on them and/or their children). This would occasionally prevent the need for Raise Dead spells, though between them Olliver and Aleksyenev have enough Raise Dead spells to simply negate every death in the town.
It seems pretty clear to me that based on the canonical textbook, there is no death in the world of Dungeons and Dragons. The only people who die in Dungeons and Dragons are adventurers – we toil in the depths, risking our lives every moment, while overhead a utopian society pursues its life of perfect peace and eternal harmony.
Why are we doing this again?
May 1, 2016 at 8:44 am
“Why are we doing this again?”
For two reasons:
1. Levelling up clerics isn’t a risk free enterprise [1]. Heroes need to go into dungeons and slaughter the monsters living peacefully there in order that childhood mortality can be averted. It’s a “Good of the many” thing with the heroes (and uncounted dead monsters) being the few. Morally, if not numerically, in the case of the monsters.
2. The mortality rate over time would still be 99.999999% [3]. Only by delving into the depths can heroes return with precious potions of longevity [4], delaying the hand of the reaper for 10 years each time.
[1] Unless they go around being a kind hearted, selfless servant of the people and gods all day to get role-playing bonus xp [2]. And who has the patience to do that?
[2] Cyclopedia pg 127 allows for 1/20 of your required xp for the level for good role-playing per session. If we assume a session is an in game day (it took me approx. 1/2 a day to kill 40% of the party last session) then you could get a level a month and still stop the holy acting for 30% of the month.
[3] A tiny fraction of people make it to level 30+, then Immortality. But it’s vanishing small. That said, imagine the effect it has on the average lifespan projection…
[4] You ask where do these potions come from? Can’t they be made in town? You may as well ask by the coins are over an ounce each (1 coin = 1/10 pound) or how on earth an economy with so much gold in it can function when it appears half the planet is made of gold. Some things aren’t meant to be know by anyone till they hit level 36 and gain Immortality. [5]
[5] Now I really want to continue the campaign until the party ascends into Cthulhu-dom.
May 1, 2016 at 12:47 pm
I also noticed the 1/20 xp for role-playing thing. If you assume that healing people for nothing is an act of role-playing for a good cleric, then as you say, every 20 days Olliver will get another level, and will be immortal within 2 years. Also in this post I haven’t made any assumptions about the number of lower level clerics – I think we can assume that the distribution of clerics at or below 9th level is pyramidical (due to the doubling of xp required for level advancement in this range) then we could assume one lvl 11 cleric=2 lvl 10, 4 lvl 9, 8 lvl 8, etc. So there should be enough Raise Dead spells in the community to ensure now cleric needs to cast more than 1/day, and enough Heal and Remove Disease spells that no one will ever die of disease, including, obviously, cancer. Given this – and even assuming no one uses a commune spell to identify relatively asymptomatic diseases like hypertension – then we should expect the mortality rate to be cut to way less than 1 person per day, which guarantees that the higher level clerics will only need to use their spells on infant mortality. Given this, the only possible cause of death in Specularum would be old age, which clerics have no cure for. This means that life expectancy at age x would effectively be 100-x. Compare this with Japan today, where female life expectancy at birth is 87 years. I think it’s safe to say that in this environment and without access to contraception, Specularum would have a significantly larger population than 50,000…
May 3, 2016 at 2:23 pm
I built my game-world around the assumption that magic was in practical use. The general population lives long, healthy, comfortable lives, with population control and environmental issues enforced by living nature (pollute the stream and the water spirits get nasty). Adventurers are the impatient young, preferring a slim chance of getting very rich quickly to a boring life doing industrial magic, crafting practical items or minding traffic.
May 4, 2016 at 6:31 pm
The 4th and 5th edition D&D appear to have realised that the lack of scarcity (and characters who are too likely to be GMPCs) was taking some of the fun of the settings, hence their movement towards the “points of light” theme and trying to put the spotlight back on the characters.
I don’t really know how well it held up after the core books. It’s been a while since I read a new setting book for any edition.