So at the end of my last campaign...

So at the end of my last campaign, three of my players achieved godhood and became part of a new pantheon of a newborn world after the destruction of their old one. The next campaign will be set in this new world, so I let each of them design the god their character would become, and allowed them to state a single fact about the setting. One of my players stated that food would be readily available to all through a herb or plant that contains everything a human needs to survive, which grows in abundance via his divine will.

Now I am not well versed in agriculture or history, so I come to you for advice, Veeky Forums. What kind of impact could such a thing have on a freshly made fantasy setting?

Civilization wouldn't be a thing.

People creating gardens of the plant and protecting them like hoards of gold.
And then scorching the surrounding areas to control food distribution.

Nobody would like the taste of that plant. Not because it tastes bad, but because it's so common that it gets boring.

It would also earn the position of the worst tasting thing that anybody eats. Because nobody would eat anything that tastes worse when they could eat it.

There would still be a demand for better tasting food.

It all boils down to taste and variation.

If this plant has multiple sub-species with different taste, especially if they are exclusive to the geographical region, trade would flourish.

If they taste the same I would imagine walled gardens, and depending on political system either equal access to them, or only for special class(food for poor if they taste horribly or bland, or for rich of they are tasty).

If they can't be farmed, and only grow naturally...
You have a perfect conflict. Civilization pushing natural barriers, with less and less of this plant available. Walled sanctuaries etc.

Also - can this plant be preserved? Or only eaten raw? This affects the trade to war ratio.

Does some nation deem it sacred? Maybe druids or tree hugging knife ears worship it?


if you hate your players make it dildo shaped, or flashlight shaped. With natural lube.

Tell your player no potatoes allowed

>Grows in abundance according to his divine will

There are massive population issues and his church controls the food supplies as divine arbiters of who gets to eat and who doesn't

If humans have everything they need, they'll just keep reproducing until they run out. Eventually finite space for all these people is gonna intercede.

Still, if you can come up with a reason to regularly cull this population, it's not.an issue

Unironically:

It would be like a rainforest. Fruit and veg grows everywhere year round so no need for farms. If it grows during the winter too then no need to develop food storage.

Like other anons have said the food itself would get boring unless (forgive me) they are "magically delicious". So cooking and variation would be essential.

Honestly perfect infinite food is such a world altering thing society itself would be alien. Populations would be massive too.

The immediate conflict I can think of for the world would be some some race/creature/society/religion against that god that either refuses to or is not able to consume the herb. It could be as simple as the environment they live on does not support it's growth and they are invading the "herblands" to resettle there.

You could also decide that the herb is a powerful drug when processed and there are groups that think thi side of it's nature make it evil and that it must be burned.

Shitload of stuff you could do with this. Also though I want to know what the other players god choices were.

Civilization would be interesting, to say the least. The simplest (read: least imaginative) answer is "everyone is a gardener/farmer of sorts unless they can afford the luxury of only eating rarer foods, homelessness sucks less, and travel is easier".

However if you wanna get creative you could destroy the very notion of economy with this.

>grows in abundance via his divine will
>scorching the surrounding areas to control food distribution

Congratulations, you just angered the God on whose goodwill your entire civilization subsists.

Yeah, civilization wouldn't form. Civilization is formed around agriculture, and if this mega food grows in divine abundance, growing it wouldn't be a problem, because it's everywhere. Nobody would really ever progress beyond a simple gatherer tribes.

Your campaign is fucking doomed OP.

Oh wow, that's true. I guess the rest of the pantheon would have to work together to ensure civilization is still a thing.

These are all great ideas to monkey's paw his statement to be sure, since his intention is to reduce the suffering of the people. A conflict of interest between a group that wants to restrict access to the plant and one that wants it to spread as god intended could make for some interesting plot.

Another player (who was a wizard/cleric) wants to create a magocracy in his name, you know the drill: Magically apt people are first rank citizens, propaganda against psionics, mandatory testing for magical potential in children etc. There's a third player, but he hasn't decided on a wish yet.

From the looks of it, Civilization on your new world wouldn't have been formed by the demands of agriculture, but instead by the magocracy; perhaps the first settlements formed in places of magical importance, which then over time lead to the magic-users leading the early societies.

Not a bad idea.
Considering the fact that creatures like dragons and other great predators exist, humanity might have come together around nodes of magical power, where they could defend themselves more easily.

Why tough? Maybe they just dont' give a fuck about civilization.

Well I guess they don't explicitly need civilization to achieve their goals, but it makes thing a lot easier on them.

General cycle of the world:
-Gods spend energy to create world
-World grows and flourishes, creates energy.
-After X millennia, harvest energies, destroy world.
-Choose a mortal soul to be your successor.
-Give them most of the harvested powers to begin anew.

The gods are put into this position by an even higher power, who collects part of the harvested energy for an unknowable purpose.

Essentially, the world is a giant farm, and the gods are farmers. Consider civilization their fertilizer to create stronger souls.

All of you are missing the major point.

> a herb or plant that contains everything a human needs to survive

>everything a human needs to survive

Humans are not the dominant species in the setting. They are cattle. Just like cows, they feed on a plant that is plentiful across almost all biomes on the planet.

Make the players play a species that farms and feeds on the humans they keep corralled in fields where this plant grows naturally.

No need to make any changes to the setting aside from humans not being an apex species.

Oh, I see. It's pretty dark actually. I guess if their goal is making humans (whatever) reproduce they do need other... directives to give them.

There would be no need for farmers, or at least much less need. Considering how majority of population used to work on food production, this would mean a society with much more time and resources for higher pursuits.

Also, I'd like to congratulate the player who chose that. He sounds like a great, altruistic guy.

He is altruistic but short sighted.

As everyone else in this thread has stated, civilization would not be more advanced, it would be nonexistent. Civilization started with people working together to raise larger amounts of crops than could be scavenged for individually. Having grass be edible by humans means this never happens and humans have no need to ever advance beyond family based tribes.

Yeah. The crux of the last campaign was the players finding out this true nature of their world and deciding to either trust the gods, who believe that without this system there would be no world at all, or join up with the single rebellious god who wants to end the cycle forever. Obviously, they chose the former and were rewarded with their new positions.

He is. The wish is also partly because he played a character that knew starvation and poverty very intimately. But as said, he clearly did not fully consider the possible consequences.

>through a herb or plant that contains everything a human needs to survive

That's either a soy bean or a potato

It's still possible that civilization could form around another limiting factor. Food is out, so what about water? Shelter?

If I was doing it I'd start with a sweet potato. Need to make it synthesis a few other vitamins and richer in iron, but it's already 90% of the way there. You could cheat by creating a tuber with starchy, edible roots and vitamin rich greens and flowers.

Have a high population then strains on living space or other factors, like logistics or plumbing or whatever. Unlimited nutritious but not necessarily tasty food? Sounds like protein paste from a sci-fi dystopia.

But we're talking a brand new world here, are there potentially other factors that would drive civilization to form that isn't as readily available as food?

Sounds about right. Water would be the next big limiting factor, with a fresh water source needed to feed the city's drinking public drinking fountains and wash sewage away. Even if people are careful you are likely to need 5 to 10 gallons of water per person, per day, for drinking, cooking and sanitation.

After that the limit is surface area. People need light for a lot of reasons, so every home needs natural light, either a roof or wall shared with the outside. Each building with a courtyard to maximize space can only hold so much. You run out of realestate sooner or later.

Thats a nice Warhammer Fantasy: End Times you have there, OP
Why not continue taking queues from GW, and just continue with Age of Sigmar?

I actually know next to nothing about Warhammer.

>Warhammer created this trope

Why did cows not evolve intelligence and civilization?

The answer is they had so much food available to them that they didn't need to. Having a plant available world wide that serves the same role for humans means humans have no biological need to be more advanced than cows or goats.

That's a pretty gross oversimplification, ignoring the lack of protein intake to spur brain growth, but cows also have literally every other need taken care of as well. I know you have a hard-on to see OP turn humans into cattle, but just chill bro.

That's the point. The protein boost in our diets is what made us more intelligent. It was something extra added to our diets. That would not be part of a diet that has everything humans need.

>That would not be part of a diet that has everything humans need.
Go ahead and don't eat protein and tell me how long you live and how well.

Extreme population pressures has forced people from that world to attempt to colonize the moon.

However, the plant doesn't grow on the moon and the influence of the god's grows faint there.

Eldritch abominations hide in the cracks of the moon's surface.

Oh damn that's pretty good.
Maybe the abominations use this opportunity to launch an invasion and inadvertently reduce the population to a sustainable level, but now there's aliens to deal with.

Well, to be fair, the abundance of the plant would also render nomadic or pastoral lifestyles unnecessary— there’d be no need to move around in search of food. So it’s more accurate to say that the structure of societies just wouldn’t have a lot to do with food, which doesn’t actually rule out urbanization.