Quote:
Originally Posted by Inky
One possibility I'm picturing is that it requires some kind of ambient magic, possibly generated by living things such as the forest trees, which is used up by casting the spell but renews itself over the course of a day (or other length of time if that gives interesting results). That would put a limit on how much you could create at a time. Depending on the parameters, you might end up with a spell that would make food no problem to a traveller (who'd be moving to a fresh patch of forest every day), but make hardly any difference to a town.
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The town could well have people roughly akin to farmers, who venture into the surrounding area to turn the ambient mana into food and then bring it back. You essentially replace cultivated fields with wild forest (or whatever is most conducive to generating the appropriate flavor of mana), but still require a certain amount of surrounding land to support the city. A traveler's first clue that he is getting near a city may be a sharp drop in the local mana level.
Quote:
Originally Posted by kirbwarrior
In fact in GURPS this might lean better on being a modified Snatcher. Limited to a small amount (only enough for a family, or even only enough for one person) means that it would be awkward to feed a lot of people because you'd have to wait for them to finish the food. Combined with my idea that it might take upwards of half an hour to do this, it would mean that food is readily available but not easy to distribute.
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The rule from
Ritual Path Magic is that magically-conjured food needs to last at least 3 days to provide sustenance. That's looking at things a bit more scientifically, however (that's roughly how long something takes to go from snack to stool) - the metaphysics of your setting may well decide once something has been "consumed" (at whatever point of the eating+digestion process you set that - RPM appears to set it at "the waste has left your body") it's now a part of you, and thus no longer under the dominion of the person who conjured it up - which also means their limit is reset, so they can make more.