Are potatoes in generic fantasy setting really that much of an issue?
>>92551746Yes,because even though it's a different world with different continents and different species, it should only have plants native to Eurasia.
>>92551746It is for people who count to potato.
>>92551746Unless the setting is LITTERALY ancient Europe, with an entire Germany and a France and everything, there is no reason to care if there is potatoes. It's such a midwit contrarian complaint.
I explicitly state that all food in my setting is made from potatoes, tomatoes, buffalo, and Florida alligator.
>>92551776E-even milk and cheese?
>>92551746>>92551763>>92551775There were potatoes in Lord of the Rings.
>>92551785You ever try Alligator Milk?
>>92551790Sauron was building ironclads in the Second Age, and the elves were stated to be trading with the west.
>>92551746>fat elf as an anime nowAnd this is the most I'll get from this thread, so thanks I guess.
People always get fired up with potatoes but then let tomatoes in European fantasy slide.
>>92551846You're the master of your own destiny, so if you keep forcing yourself to click on threads you don't like and then get upset about being in them, you have no one else to blame.
>>92551746I don't give a shit about what's "generic" in a hobby where I can do whatever the fuck I want.
>>92551746If you're doing a Generic European Fantasy Setting...You will have onions and lettuce and onions and cabbage and onions and nothing else.
>>92551862Vile heathen! No nightshades in Europe ever!
>>92551806I struggle to imagine how you'd make them lactate in the first place, but if anyone can figure that out, it has to be Florida.
>>92551746Even with potatoes, the Scots still managed to export enough food from their plantations in Ireland to trigger a famine.
>>92551746No. Unless your "fantasy" setting is literally medieval europe with magic, there's nothing wrong with having new world crops in it.
>>92551746Why do you want to introduce dystopic American corpocracy in a fantasy setting?
>>92551812retard, the elves CAME from the west, and brought potatoes with them. such magnificent vegetation can only be the last light of Ormal
>>92551937>No nightshades in Europe ever!*laughs in eggplants*
>>92552097>dystopicExtremely overused term.
>>92552176"Term" is extremely overused, you ought to find something else to say.
>>92552228The only thing current are pronouns.
>>92551746They should mean that crops are more efficient, and therefore there's more food, less famine, and larger populace.Though in a generic fantasy setting, things like healing magic are more likely to have an impact there. And if anything humanity being at constant war with monsters could really use the extra help in terms of food supply.
>>92551746As long as it is its own world and not like our past with fantasy elements. Potatoes in Arthurian legends or mythological Greece would stick out.
Real historical plants and animals in real historical/pseudohistorical settings.Anachronistic plants, animals, food, cultural traditions etc in faux-medieval fantasy settings.Absolute horseshit you made the fuck up for fun in true gonzo fantasy.
>>92551746Fat elf
>>92552580>literal airweight .357magRIP that dude's wrists but at least it wasn't .44
>>92551746No, no one fucking caresIf somebody is gonna waste their own time to cry about something that doesn't fucking matter, let them
>>92552748It could be just mithril plated.
>>92552416The fact that there are entire sections of the world left fallow because of monsters should completely throw off any attempt at making deductions using real world data. You could give everyone in the setting a matter replicator that produces happy meals on demand, it won't outweigh the fact that the entire eastern border of your kingdom is demarcated by a dragon's patrol route where only the most suicidal and lightly packed travelers dare tread. There will be no sprawl. Efficient food will not lead to a population explosion. The monsters will destroy any attempt to expand that isn't lead by a singularly powerful hero.
>>92553016Why? 1000 years ago is 4000 years into human civilization. If somewhere was left fallow by that point it was because it couldnt be farmed productively, but thats where potatoes shine. Yes they're more productive than wheat, but they grow best where its too cold and shitty for wheat in the first place. the grain they replace most directly is low yield stiff like oats. So you say large parts of the world would be abandoned, but why? You'd have 4000 years of potato empires battling to reclaim the coldest regions just as the grain empires fought for defensible riverlands in egypt and the middle east. The ancient celts wouldnt be building henges, they'd be building hanging gardens and colossi. So why, after 4000 years of even more potent empires with even more manpower to deploy, would any monster be left to challenge them?
>>92551806One can only wish
>>92553167Manpower doesn't solve monster problems.
>>925531675000 years ago, the fertile rivers were the places that 1000 years ago couldn't go because of the necropolises full of mummies who eat souls instead of potatoes. Your potato farmers going out to plant potatoes in the low nutrient soil find out that there weren't already potatoes growing there because of the giant worms that are attracted to footsteps. They go to grow wheat in the fertile zones and find goblins and orcs sitting there chewing on wild grass and berries. They didn't spread to every corner of the world to get to the point where their potato empire could grow exponentially.
>>92553431What about man ass power? I bet those monster will die if enough men brapped on them
>>92553431Challenge accepted.
>>92553016>Efficient food will not lead to a population explosion. The monsters will destroy any attempt to expand that isn't lead by a singularly powerful hero.That's what I'm saying. It's very easy to just have it be the case where potatoes are helping to offset the extra harshness that monsters cause, thus leaving humanity back at square 1. Getting that one-in-a-million legendary hero has better odds when you've got more people.
>>92551790Well the elves must have brought them from the west.
>>92551790JRR Tolkien didn't know that steel was made out of iron until his 30s. He was a good teacher, a master at hating French, and decent at describing places. But knowledgeable about things he was not.
>His fantasy setting isn't South American themed
>>92555276Not everyone can be based.
>>92551746Ok but how do you pronounce it?
>>92556329Po-Tay-ToesBoil 'em mash 'em stick 'em in a stew.
>>92552797I believe he's implying the bullets are cast from mythril. Which I think would make them slightly shitty as bullets but I digress.
>>92556787Security Six is a model of revolver made by Ruger:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruger_Security-Six
What of corn and tomatoes?
>>92551746How spicy? Krynn spicy?
is the setting earth? then no you shouldn't have potatoes in medieval fantasy europe. if not, just have a starchy root staple crop who cares.
>>92551746>Are potatoes in generic fantasy setting really that much of an issue?Only to people too hung up on what others are doing to work on their own games.It's best to just ignore those types; what they have to say is less valuable than the people who go on and on about popularity.
>>92555276>Amazon vs the Highland NecrolordsPretty decent, eh.
>>92551746>tranime imageI dunno, ask /a/
>>92552627Kill yourself ND
>>92551862Because every fantasy Europe needs a Rome and it's impossible to imagine Italian food without tomatoes.
>>92551775Like Middle Earth and the Hyborian Age.
>>92551746No.Hell even if its explicitly europe, nightshade family is large and if there is any magic in the setting no reason why a variant wouldnt have evolved and been farmed for to develop into potato equivalents.After all we already did it IRL as europe had strawberries since neanderthal era, even if they still are pinky nail sized instead of entire thumb scale ones and the modern hybrids were selected for to mimic them but bigger, able to be farmed and more resilient to other weather conditions using other versions.
>>92560038That makes sense in an alternate world or future Europe.If its supposed to be a mythical past, the setting should then explain why those potato equivalents didn't still exist by the time of recorded history.
>potatoes>not popotos
>>92551746Why would I need potatoes in my famtasy setting, when I have totapoes, a starchy root vegetable that grows everywhere, doesn't become poisonous, and has an underlying after-flavor akin to black pepper?
>>92551746>UM ACKSHUALLY POTATOES WEREN'T COMMON IN MEDIEVAL TIMES UNTIL>a wizard did it
>>92551746I've never seen anyone complain about real life fruits and vegetables in a fantasy setting.
>>92551746>Magic world>Guns and potatoes break itThe Irish are a menace to the Tuatha De Danann
>>92563349magic is the single lamest excuse for plugging your plotholes
>>92551746It would be odd for someone to go out of their way to have a New World type continent, then have produce from it be in the Old World with no explanation of how they got there before contact.
>>92552580Source?
>>92560110If only there were some sort of historical precedent for something like disease wiping out a potato-like plant.
>>92551746NoThe trick is to extensively school and drill them until about the age of 30, where they can handle themselves from now on
>>92571707
>>92551746Only because in fantasy, everyone should totally eat monster meat exclusively.
>>92551973Florida Man hot tip: Only milk the male alligators.
>>92555173Imagine how different Middle Earth would feel as a Bronze Age setting.>numenorean orichalcum
>>92558170Apparently Roman food was more similar to modern Indian food than to modern Italian one.Tons of spices to cover the fact that you are eating rotten meat.
>>92574471Sometimes rotten meat was the spice.
>>92551776So...in your world, atoms are potatoes?
>>92574471>Tons of spices to cover the fact that you are eating rotten meat.People need to kill this meme along with the one where faggots think medieval euros didn't know the world was round.
>>92552580>smoke tobaccoHe's not smoking tobacco, he's smoking that pure THC cannabis
>>92551746When in doubt, a conqueror did it.
Unless it's a strictly historical setting, it's pretty easy to justify oversea shit being present in your equivalent of Europe/Asia/Africa/wherever. Just lean into Scandinavians travelling to Americas way before the age of exploration and make it into something more impactful than it was irl. Or even use one of the questionable theories like "Chinese were the first ones to sail to America" and just slap an arbitrary date on that event.Hell, depending on the timeline of your setting, you might just keep the Beringia land bridge and have Eurasia and Americas be connected from the get-go.
>>92552235poh-tah-toh
>>92576414Dude, no narking.
>>92574471The middle ages was full of sweet-sour cooking. You can probably date the point when sweet-sour became almost exclusively associated with chinese cooking in the west by tracing when vinegar got struck from recipes.
>>92581746Vinegar was use for preserving, so it's probably where it came from and by the time other forms of preserving became more common, vinegar was used less.
>>92581815Vinegar is a condiment and was used in like almost every other recipe back in the days.It being limited to salad, pickles and fish&chips is a very recent trend.
>>92552097The baronies in my campaign world function as agribiz megacorps but that's what it takes to feed (and control) a growing empire. Also serfs are contract based, neuveau riche Chavs.
>>92581950Sour wine / vinegar / apple cider stave off feeling of hunger. Or rather it slows down digestion and postpones your craving for next meal. It's one of the reasons why roman legionnaires were getting it in their rations.Downside is that if you overdo it, it's gonna give you peptic ulcers.
This sort of pedantry is one argument away from>Well akshually geography plays a massive role in the evolution of life and as the continents of this magical world are completely different from Earth there for the whole tree of life would most likely be differentIt is obvious to everyone(as shown by this thread) that outside of specific limitations(running a historic setting) it is a non-issue
>>92570585The wizard brought them back after trying to find the copper lode in Michigan that the Phonecians used prior to the bronze age collapse.
>>92574471No, they weren't.
>>92551746Not really, at least to me. I may be autistic enough to be conscious about it but not autistic enough to care.
>>92551746as >>92551775 says this and a bunch of related shit are complete pseud arguments. What you do and don't include in your setting should entirely be your decision because it's your setting and your game, but even beyond that, plebbit pseudointellectual "arguments" against certain technologies are retarded>New world crops/animals/etc.Unless your setting ALSO has a new world which is undiscovered/a novel discovery that also happens to have every new world resource, this is a complete non-argument >anachronistic technologyAgain, you could literally say that in your setting gunpowder was invented in the copper age if you so chose and that would be entirely plausible, especially in a world with magic. This "argument" is especially retarded when applied to things that a medieval person could easily make, even if they weren't invented (or at least popularized) IRL until later for various reasons. There's no technological barrier stopping a Renaissance (or even earlier) society from making a piano. This is especially frustrating when things that literally did exist and simply weren't popular are labelled anachronistic.Pretty much any version of this argument is blown out of the water with even the most basic level of interrogation and it's genuinely embarrassing that people parrot these in any context
>>92551746are they with graphene?
>>92551746Different people derive different kinds of pleasure from engaging with fantasy settings depending on their temperament and character. People may be defined into broad genres of what the Germans called Merkwelt, or "World-Sense," and this changes how they think of action, violence, or restraint. Highly visual people obviously perceive the world very differently from highly auditory people, or those who abstract events into subintonations. Some people think in the first person, others in the third. Some don't actually think at all.Given all of this, the question of whether or not they value verisimilitude in the presence of certain foodstuffs is kind of absurd. There are people who play tabletop games because they like imaging the rock concert that their fictional band (different fantasy) would sing about the exploits of a fictionalized version of the Party of fictional characters. Are you asking me if there is someone whose tabletop gaming experience is not complete if there are french fries in Antique Rome? Yes. There is such a person. Many, I would imagine. Many thousands, even.
>>92592649
>>92592944People whose engagement includes getting excessively aggressive about historical anachronisms in fantasy worlds that are not intended to be the real world are not people, and their opinions should be discarded.
>>92593198People who behave in excessive ways in general should are subject to additional scrutiny as by default, but that does not mean that this is an illegitimate thing to find displeasing in a fantasy setting. When people see a radical divergence from the world as it was or is, they expect to see those changes represented throughout the world, as you'd want to see, because the changes effecting the world is the reason you have the changes, that's what fantasy is, you don't want fantasy to be a backdrop in which you tell a non-fantastic story where everything is exactly the same as it was in the real world, it feels wasteful if deliberate, and clumsy and foolish if unintentional.This is why if you put potatoes on, you should think about what would change, and then just represent those changes. People can now grow very reliable food (barring a potato blight faith in begoragh) in pretty much any terrain, that's great, now you can have little potato farms in the hellish wasteland, someone's gotta protect those potato farmers from the potato goblins, who replace spuds with their own larval young, who then rise up and eat the farmers when they finish gestating. Which is better, just having potatos but everything else is exactly the same, or potato goblins? One took 30 seconds of thought instead of none, but one is an actual fantasy idea and the other is just that you can't imagine food without potatoes. That's the entire craft of worldbuilding, it's what you're supposed to do, not writing 500 page codices on all the weird sex positions of elves GREENWOOD.
>>92593389Sophistic pandering to autards is never the right thing to do.
>>92551746>Are potatoes in generic fantasy setting really that much of an issue?maybe
>>92574471> Tons of spices to cover the fact that you are eating rotten meat.Whoever said this is a retard. This meme needs to die. They barely even ate meat in India, and when they did they killed the animal on the spot and cooked it shortly thereafter. There's literally thousands of completely vegetarian curries, and guess what, they still have tons of spices. It's called using what you have nearby and having a sense of taste, anon.
>>92551746The only reason we're all aware of such a silly topic is because soulless people exist, who hate fiction and don't understand or have any imagination. These people can vote, but they don't understand what a "setting" is so all fantasy is literally the same to them. It's kinda funny for us to joke about I guess but I think it's kinda sad when you realize how common these people are. I don't think these people actually care about verisimilitude when they point out a historical inaccuracy in a fictional setting.
>>92593755throwing fistful of curry into everything is opposite of having a sense of taste
>>92593590>>92551746There are ways of dealing with that.Yes, I know the other one is the aunt.
>>92597307No one's fault but your own that you don't like it, anon.
>>92597307You don't understand what curry is.
>>92600309Retard probably thinks anyone unironically uses curry powder.
>>92552692she's just big boned
>>92552235es-pee-you-dee
>>92551746it depends - is the setting medieval Earth or closely related (alternative history, fantasy Europe, etc.)? Yeah, it's an issue - but it can be explained by changing the history or using teleporting or summoning spells in a not exactly historical setting. The setting is Generic Kingdom in Magical Fantasialand? No issue at all, giant bean plants, goose that lays golden eggs, golden apples, flying whales, deathshrieks from mandragora etc. are more a problem. Well, I'm off, need to find a fairy plant doctor - after shaking the tree in my garden no fairy appeared. Perhaps the roots are disconnected from the ley lines?
>>92616549>giant bean plants, goose that lays golden eggsthose are from fantasy Europe thoughever
>>92600320Not everyone thinks mustard is too spicy, anon.
>open thread >no fat bitches >it's just retards arguing >close thread
>>92617049shit is not a spice, jeet
>>92617473Your food would stop tasting like that if you spiced it a bit more, anon.
>>92551746>Are potatoes in generic fantasy setting really that much of an issue?The intelligent thing I'm going to say is what people actually get wrong about potatoes in fantasy settings is that it would dramatically increase populations and change how those societies functioned.Potatoes more or less solve hunger as a problem when they're introduced into societies as a staple because of how dependable, productive, caloric-per-acre, and low-maintenance, they are as a crop compared to something like grains and rice. Potatoes are also really amazing at enabling more totalitarian, abusive, dehumanizing, systems of governance because you can just shove people onto small useless plots of land and they'll still be able to feed themselves. Just at a glance, potatoes would allow places to circumvent some of the issues with rampant monster populations cited by these Anons: >>92552416 >>92553016 Potatoes would give communities of every size and shape MASSIVE food security (a potatoe field can only truly be destroyed if it's dug up. It can be burned, trampled, and it'll still produce/re-seed) and make monster-life more practical.
>>92619199potatoes are not evil, anonjews are
>>92551746Not at all.
>>92619199Any monoculture is inherently vulnerable to pests and diseases. They may not hit often but when they do they hit extra hard because the whole harvest fails.
>>92617473That's rich coming from the only race with an excess of coprophiles. Maybe Germans and Nords are so used to eating shit because they can't distinguish it from their "cuisine"?
>>92551746>I-Is that a starch? That grows underneath the earth?! Cut into long, thin slices?!! Deep-fried in olive oil?!!! Served with crushed tomatoes?!!!!>AAAAAHHHH I'M GOING INSANE SAVE ME JARED DIAMOND!
>>92621710>Any monoculture is inherently vulnerable to pests and diseases. They may not hit often but when they do they hit extra hard because the whole harvest fails.It can happen, absolutely, it's just infinitely more of a modern problem due to how inbred our own produce has become. If our hypothetical fantasy people had been growing tubers since day one it would stand to reason they would have hundreds of different breeds & varieties of potatoes. Pic related is a handful of different potatoe breeds grown in Peru. Furthermore, beans would also probably be a bigger deal for similar reasons - hardy, not very fussy, can get brutalized a bit and keep growing, etc.
>>92552097Prussians brought potatoes to Middle Earth.
