How do normal farmers survive in countrysides filled to the brim with monsters?

How do giants not collapse under their own weight? How do gods exist but the world isn't immediately controlled by the strongest one? How come people don't immediately cremate any bones or corpses in a world where Undead exist?

Because these things create stories that can't be told otherwise. Pursuing perfect internal consistency is a fool's errand.

Humans have fortified blockhouse style communities, in the rural most areas. A highly active militia helps too.

It has the drawback of making rural areas very hard to govern and tax. Any revenue from rural areas is almost entirely voluntary, as these isolated and well defended com unites are likely to treat tax collectors like they would a rampaging band of monsters.

Cowboys?

Partially true superstition figured out by trial and error, tribute paid to political and theological overlords, close-knit communities, and avoiding the thickest wilderness.

>not guarding the potato farmers that ensure your livelihood

The benefit of potatoes is that they're underground, making them harder to pillage.

>How do normal farmers survive in countrysides filled to the brim with monsters?

About 90% of all monsters come in the form of high-pay-grade animals that really aren't interested in harassing farmers and their livestock unless something is wrong in their territory and they need to come down and risk bothering people. Chimeras, Dire Wolves, Dinosaurs, Wyverns, Drakes, Owlbears, Griffons, most of these creatures don't have any conscious vendetta against your average peasant unless it's been a hard winter or a dry summer and game is thin.
A Dire Wolf might come from the mountain during the summer or something and run off with an Ox or a Cow in his mouth because he had a shit year, something like that.

That leaves the 10% who actually 'do' want to fuck with normal farmers and it's mostly Fey. Fey are fucking assholes: Satyrs, Nymphs, Fairies, Dryads, Alraune, Redcaps, Bluecaps, Brownies, etc.. They're all immortal, love stealing shit, love raping (in the base of Fairies love raping children), and have no sense of right or wrong.
If anybody is going to fuck up a farmer's day it isn't going to be some cliched Griffon from the peek come to kill and eat his horse wot's been plowing his field for years and he can't afford another one.. It's gonna be a Nymph wot rapes and drowns his brother, a Dryad wot rapes and kills his crops, and finally Satyrs who'll tempt him into a life of raping.

Why is an adventurer's job to clean monsters? This should be the job of the knights: provide protection in exchange of food and a superior social status. DO YOUR DAMN JOB!

Standing armies, training the people to fight as best they can, and praying to the gods.
Otherwise, well, they don't. That's why most people have lots of kids, and why people get very good at rebuilding.

>the communal fortification gets possessed by fae

This is a question i always ask myself whenever i play Witcher. There is no fucking way anyone would live out in the country with half the shit that lives out there.

>How do giants not collapse under their own weight?
Because bipedal giants never exceed 10 ft in height, and the larger ones are semi-quadrupedal. (Alternatively, magic.)
>How do gods exist but the world isn't immediately controlled by the strongest one?
The gods may or may not exist. If they do, they don't appear to interact with the world often.
>How come people don't immediately cremate any bones or corpses in a world where Undead exist?
Because improper burial leads to spontaneous undead.

Internal consistency isn't hard by any stretch of the imagination. If you're too lazy to come up with a reason, don't make excuses.

>yes good, invest all your efforts into producing underground produce, they'll be safe there

t.dwarf

Why would anyone pillage a poisonous rat-vegetable?

but seriously, even bronze age communities the entire community would live in walled off areas to protect against roving bands of scene goths.

Hell, communal structures like longhouses did the same thing in northern europe and for plains indians.

Just replace goths with monsters and you're fine.

maybe the knights are le tired and cba to do it so they pay some tramps to deal with the problem instead?

I like to imagine skilled, hunters and trappers deal with them to earn a living and every so often when something really nasty shows up you get a medieval version of Jim Corbett called in by whoever’s in charge of protecting the area

Evidently CDPR increased the monster numbers by several dozen times what they are in the books and compressed space for game reasons to make it more interesting for players.
Which I can't really blame them for.
But it then books, witchers are a dying breed because *monsters* are a dying breed.

replace them with real goths

Glitterboys and other organizations.

Plus, most farmers are good enough at shooting to give most monsters a run for their money

>Entire community takes up juggling to entertain possessed blockhouse

Because the farmers are monsters and the countryside needs protection from them!

Most monsters are still more or less animals, any injury they get from fighting can become infected which can kill them. By aggressively hunting them, monsters learn to stay clear of human settlements unless they are desperate.

I think its mainly common sense things like:
trial and error for picking a low monster traffic spot
utilizing local witches/shamans/etc to get warding totems and trinkets
having some kids/farmhands who are decent with a pitchfork
lots of hiding inside as soon as its dark out, lots of waving torches around and shouting at anything vaguely scary
reliance on local lords for protection or random adventurers if taxation is threatened

>By aggressively hunting them, monsters learn to stay clear of human settlements

Thats a dick move humans; monsters are adorable

That sounds like something a monster would say.

I think that should be the norm for how the characters get involved in shit.
>The farmers got together to slay the monster
>They tried, and failed and lost some people in the process. So they called their lord.
>The lord and his men tried to slay the monster
>They tried and failed and lost some people in the process. So they put up recruitment posters looking for monster hunters.

Welp, this old gal does em, usually. I 'aint the best shot, but she don't have to hit to make em start runnin. Usually the noise spooks em. Sometimes I call up Clarke or Junior to help out, when it's not worth postin a bounty.

If the monsters get too many or too big, I make sure to keep a few bits a treasure, so's I can post a bounty. Most of those 'venturin sort are more in it for the XP anyhow. Long as I get it posted and estimate the level right, they're all too happy to help.

Historically, knights were really, really, really bad at "doing their damn job". They raided and pillaged more than they protected or avenged. Even when they were in protecting mode they ate all your meat and drank all your good wine and mead, plus impregnated most of the local girls.

real knights a shit

There's not a lot of very inhabited wide open countryside. It's a dangerous world so city states are the main social structure

Real everything a shit.
That's why people play fantasy bro.

Right and you can scale it as need be or adjust for flavor of the culture or monsters. Generally though when it comes to successful wilderness farms you can safely apply the ex-soldier turned farmer trope. The farmers don't need to be action heroes they just need to know their way around a few bows and spears. Have a common sense plan.

>Pursuing perfect internal consistency is a fool's errand.
>So therefore my response to any attempt to explore or discuss internal consistency in a fantasy setting is to trot out this obvious and ultimately pointless nugget and sit back, feeling smug and superior while having actually accomplished nothing.
Well, I suppose that at least you didn't point out that "it depends on the setting", so you're not the most useless of faggots.

Feed up with the last peasant uprising, they are busy keeping their investment in sheeps instead. Much more profitable than stinky peasants and their farmlands. The social contract has collapsed.

They don't. Easy question

t. Pesant

>How do normal farmers survive in countrysides filled to the brim with monsters?
By being thougher than the monsters. In a world where the countryside is filled to the brim with monsters, it takes a special kind of motherfucker to voluntarily live outside of the cities.

>How do normal farmers survive in countrysides filled to the brim with monsters?

The same way they historically did in countrysides filled to the brim with wolves, lions, tigers, bears, brigands, nomad bands, and other dangers, you fucking assclown.

Communal fields and pasturage surrounding a village with a wall or palisade.

>Full plate
You know that by that time gendarmes were a thing, right? Rich commoners who saw how profitable looting was and decided to get in on it? Kings eventually learned to love 'em because unlike bitch-ass knights they don't play games. You pay them to mess up a motherfucker, they mess up a motherfucker. No feudal 4D chess involved.

>How do normal farmers survive in countrysides filled to the brim with monsters?
A number of ways:
>children are taught sling, spear, bow, atlatl
>homes have a fortified location that can be defended, even if it's just a basement.
>farming communities have a fort that can be retreated to/ defended that also functions as a town/ marketplace.
>local militia
>rangers/ hunters
>Adventurers/ monster hunters

You don't really even need to do the ex-soldier trope. If they've been there a generation or two, then they obviously know enough to survive there.

There's this idea that anyone who isn't a player character is incompetent. I think a lot of the misconception comes from dnd treating "commoners" as 2hp monster fodder.

no one asked you pointdexter. go infovomit somewhere else.

By the nine divines, they keep to the roads.

Good fences

>How do giants not collapse under their own weight?
Magic facilitates and allows for more impractical and creative designs in nature. They do because they can, same as any natural environment.

>How do gods exist but the world isn't immediately controlled by the strongest one?
When they are, they do, but most aren't unanimously more powerful or stronger than one another. They all have their own unique strategies, strengths, morals, practices, etc, that don't lend into convenient scaling power levels.

>How come people don't immediately cremate any bones or corpses in a world where Undead exist?
Have you ever built a cremation pyre or tried to cremate a dead body? It takes a LOT of CONSTANT high heat that is difficult to achieve only using wood or what have you- it's also expensive, expensive, at least, to your average peasant who's going to be dying. And even then we're talking not just cooking them down to jerky or a skeleton, but right down to ash, because you can still animate a skeleton/jerky man.
Ritual burial is cheaper and is basically out of sight, out of mind: that blessing the priest/druid put on your father's grave will last at least 100 years....It's either that or you toss his body out to be eaten by animals.

If you care about internal consistency they don't
If you don't care then they survive because the only time the monsters attack is when the PC party is nearby

No, you got it all wrong, general appeasement and total submission is the best and only safe way to deal with monsters. Hell, thats how i got my wife.

People don't like playing as knights anymore.

presumably because they've got terrible taste

>provide protection
>actually buying that excuse
I mean, in the sense that organized criminals provide "protection" to the businesses they extort, sure.

A knights' actual job was providing military service and levies to his lord, in exchange for land and peasants. That is a different thing from keeping the people safe like some kind of armored superhero.

Most of the question has been answered. A combination of the farms being fortified - with the most outlying being more so. Combined with local centralized fortifications for retreat. Remember as well that ‘family’ here would not be dad mom and a child. But a couple of generations with uncles and brothers all around.

Those are the historical answers.

In a fantasy setting you can add local rangers and druids providing warning and deterrence.

But much of the problem here is found in wondering monster tables. Which would imply no normal person could survive. Here we should remember that those tables are for player characters and not npcs that live boring lives.

Kek

If you don't wanted to get infojizzed on, maybe you shouldn't have posted on Veeky Forums

Where do you think all these old wives' tales about setting out milk for spirits, not looking too deep into wine kegs and not walking under ladders come from? Over a few generations farmers figure out generally what rituals you need to appease monsters, and the offerings you need to give to convince the more benevolent (or at least less blatantly predatory) monsters to keep the others in check. And it usually works until something happens to disrupt that; a new monster moves into town and displaces some of the others, people forget to put out their offerings, or a band of adventurers accidentally desecrates something important. Sometimes the system fails, but more often than not, they rarely do.

knights are like cops
They have no obligation to save you; just a mandate to uphold the bidding of the state

Private security and the right to bear arms

folk traditions that serve to placate the horrors through worship and sacrifice.

Potatoes, in MY medieval setting?
Get out.

This.

Monsters are like sharks, dangerous predators yes. But they dont like the taste of human flesh.
One nibble out of curiousity then they will leave you alone.

it's fantasy you sperg
how else would you explain the country having 30% of their peasants murdered every year by goblins and monsters and still having enough people around to run it?

>Being afraid of fairies
Let's play "spot the Eternal Anglo".

Are you an idiot? Part of holding land is defending it. Yeah, I'm just going to let all my farmers fucking die because I don't like food. I just fight people.

>how else would you explain the country having 30% of their peasants murdered every year by goblins and monsters and still having enough people around to run it?
Because the 70% that survive adapt, overcome, evolve. The great 'famines' everyone fears are just an evolutionary bottleneck, and the survivors will only come out bigger, stronger, thougher and meaner. In the end you get a bunch of XBOXHUEG farmers fucking up goblins for shits and giggles and turning their skins into fashionable little heads to protect their faces from the sun while farming.

Honestly potatoes might be a good excuse for why population density is at medieval norms, with the additional threats like roving monsters.

It's funny you should post those two while advocating being a gentle femdom mommy gf soyboy, since The Will and Dead Waifu got along so well due to their constantly challenging each other.

1. population density of alaska
2. plains are motly safe, but forests and mountains and swamps are full of monsters

This guy gets it

Most monsters have personality flaws you can exploit in order to avoid physical conflict. The Hag just wants to be told shes pretty and get a taste of man flesh, if you know what i mean, every once in a while; no werecreature turns down a good grooming with heavy stroking; etc.

Building walls around the village just like any settlement on the frontier would

Don't get your history from FATAL or ASOIAF, retard. Knights could be assholes, but you do realize medieval people were people too right? Like, if a knight did that sort of thing, people at the time would have been like "whoa dude wtf." The fact chivalry existed shows that, even though knights didn't live up to it, such behavior was not considered morally acceptable.

Feudalism was a set legal agreements. Peasants had shit rights, but they still had rights. Knights and lords had obligations to them just as they had obligations to their lords.

>potatoes

What is this mythical food of the future? From another continent to the west? You mean Asia? That's to the east. Oh wait, you're one of those heretical sphere earthers!

The farmwives are duty-bound to walk out to the boundary trench and perform the peasants' warding ritual while urinating into it each time the urge strikes them. This makes the village less noticeable to spooks and animals, and over time can even actively repel them if the trench is filled and renewed with enough wifespiss.
Glad I could help.

Earth-chan is NOT flat!

>Voluntarily

Settlements start off as small, hunted and harried tribes, with every man and the odd woman a warrior. People barely survive by being a little better at critical thinking than the beasts, along with using tradition; whilsts many of the beasts are as smart as men, few keep even an oral history.

Eventually, a tribe that survives might find a prosperous area, and sets up a permanent town. The absolute first thing they must do to feel safe is set up a log wall. They can live in tents inside the wall until its done. Alternately, and often more successfully, they live in and re fortify the ruins of a civilization long gone. Smooth, seemless stone patched up with roughly hewn logs tied together with crude ropes.

Once settled and farming starts, civilization will eventuallly begin to kick in. For a while all will train AND farm, except maybe the hetman and his family, but eventually some bad turns will mean that farmers will want to sometimes skip training to deal with problems. As the walls hold, farmers may see less and less importance in training, and strong warriors will need to pick up the slack. As farmers get less skilled in war, when the bad times come they will lose relevance in tribal discussions, being unblooded. eventually, they will transition to an underclass.

Our Hetman and his warriors become crude kings and knights, growing in power as the farmers diminish. As time goes on wood is replaced or buffered with stone and as people dedicate their lives to it, war becomes an art. The Beasts are still a problem, the foul gods that spawned them giving them the advantage, but children that stay in the walls are relatively safe.

>2. plains are motly safe, but forests and mountains and swamps are full of monsters

'Mostly' safe might be a little misleading.
It's more like you can clearly see everything coming at you, so you've got a bit of a warning since as a tall, upright, humanoid you can look over the tall grass.

If you're in an open plain you're most likely going to be able to see something like an Allosaurus or a 'small' horde of Zombies as much as 20 or even 40 minutes before they actually reach you; giving you plenty of time to consciously roll for initiative and think of a plan for survival. Keep in mind, something like a Griffon WOULD be able to SEE you for fucking miles and a Bulette can HEAR your little foot steps, so that advantage is kind of off the table when it comes to those types of creatures.

I think only like 20% of men-at-arms were knights by the time full plate was invented. I'd have to double check that figure but it was definitely a minority either way.

folk mysticism and Sinister pagan traditions go nicely together. The country folk and farmers chose a side, and it is not the PCs.

>this happens so often that a committee is formed to handle these affairs in an orderly manner
>eventually general tasks other than monster hunting are needed and fall under no one else's category of work other than the committee's
>demand and tradition causes them to split off from the government and form a guild when new rule eventually takes over
>a guild for people with the adventurous spirit to take on tasks that no one else will

Maybe the Fey, in response to these little rituals and offerings, look after the farmer and his land and chase off anything nasty for him

Yep. Most fey that are comfortable in human habitation prefer it over dinky woods and old mole tunnels, so they'll act within reason to protect a household that caters to their whims from death and destruction.

Terrain advantages like guard towers and other high ground

The Will has a STR of like 28 and is a high level PCC; your typical farmer cant say the same

So, if a giant comes along and wants a foot rub you rub its feet

Eventually civilization fully kicks in; an emerging merchant class as expanding populations and specalist techniques require a mans full dedication rather than partial attention. The farmers that feed society, if they are not themselves wealthy land owners are among the lowest of society, just a hairs breath above criminals. The warriors have skill and arms that make any form of rebellion on the part of peasants entirely laughable. The Merchant class are skilled, educated and most importantly wealthy, whereas the perception is that any idiot could be a farmer. Walls can only expand so much, and so as the merchant class expands the farming class is pushed out of the walls, back into the wilds. Older, more respected land owning families will perhaps keep their tenements, leaving the city gates each day, perhaps paying a toll as they go. Its worth it, because the lands are still wild.

Each farmstead must independantly become a fort. Without the time and skill for stone masonry, the majority of farmers gather their homes together in small huddles like little towns and surround them with sharpened logs like their ancestors did. They will do their best to defend these crude compounds with sling and bow but lighting the signal fire and praying the knights respond is their real hope. A few knights will slay beasts our of a sense of duty or for the honor, demanding little more than the beasts head or heads to mount somewhere. Other, and perhaps most will take whatever they damned please as payment, though severe excess may warrant a lords displeasure, or lose them face in among their commrades.

Of course war is now also perhaps a greater threat than the beasts of the wood. Cannon and stone thrower make short work of any rude peasant fort, so when the army is in town the best option farmers have is to keep their door open, flee into the woods or bare any disgrace the soldiers heap upon them.

>Settlements start off as small, hunted and harried tribes, with every man and the odd woman a warrior. People barely survive by being a little better at critical thinking than the beasts, along with using tradition; whilsts many of the beasts are as smart as men, few keep even an oral history.

With that said, it might behoove us to mention that if we go back long enough we'll be talking about Cavemen and CAVEMEN at least have the advantage of basically being physically superior to even your average medieval soldier if albeit significantly less armed and armored than one. Cavemen were clever, adaptable, powerful, people who's physical strength and pain tolerance was more in line with animals than our 'contemporary man'.

If anything, actually, you could use the excuse of, "being a Caveman was easy living" (since you could just apply some barbarism to a Drake or a Dire-something and eat for MONTHS) to maybe explain why the Elves or whatever other ancient civilization was able to flourish and go uncontested or something for so long- and perhaps it wasn't until Monsters began to thin out due to some catastrophe that fantasy people became fantasy farmers.

What makes you think that animals have a greater pain tolerance than people, headcanon?

Or you just call the Robot Nobility to murder some waifus.
Man, it's always feet and giantesses with you femdom cucks

>What makes you think that animals have a greater pain tolerance than people, headcanon?

Personal observation.

top tier bro science

That and smug lolis

You don't really understand the whole reduced mental capacity part and its effect on behavior, do you?

>bringing a loli vampire to deal with your troll problem
I don't see this ending well.

Are you guys seriously telling me that this shepherd could take on a gang of centaurs?