theme for a fantasy campaign

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by whswhs

What if they have horses, but there are no large mobile animals that can usefully be hunted on horseback?

Then I guess you herd horses for food.

Or is this massively unlikely?

I can't think why it should be. The distribution of domesticable medium-sized herbivores indicated by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel seems to have no pattern to it, any more than does the distribution of large-seeded grasses.

Certainly the elves are the most logical to cultivate olives; in a Mediterranean area it's a common tree. I'll have to review Risk and Survival in Ancient Greece to see what other crops are available. Vines are possible for elves, certainly, but I could also see them as something halflings might grow. The grape seemingly was first domesticated in the Near East, probably along rivers, as it requires 700 mm of water from rain or irrigation. And the Bible has "under your own vine and your own fig tree."

Yes, but on the other hand a lot of that area was originally forested and would not have been deforested if the elves got into it before the goats. And I think that in connection with your theme here both grafting and the planting of plantations look like Elvish Art, while tilling and cultivation of annual crops are emerging as the halfing schtick.

As to ghouls, another option for them might be "firestick farming." Set fire to trees on the edge of your desert and you have a lot of dead animals to eat, and a period of high primary productivity while herbs recolonize the emptied land.

I don't suppose that you have read The Future Eaters, by Tim Flannery? Flannery suggests that the Ur-Aborigines who colonise Australia about 56,000 years ago accidentally converted 90% of Australia from dry woodland to desert and semi-desert. It wasn't because of their firestick farming; lightning, for example, starts enough fires in Australia to keep the fuel load near equilibrium. What they did was to kill and eat the herbivores (supporting a human population explosion), which allowed the fuel load to rise from 1–2 tonnes per hectare (which won't support fire hot enough to kill trees and buried seeds) to 10–20 tonnes per hectare (which will support sterilising wildfire). The reason that nearly all of the vegetation in mainland Australia is fire-tolerant is that the fire-tolerant stuff radiated and spread into vacant niches after the entire continent burned down ca. 54,000 years ago. Flannery speculates that the human population may have fallen from about half a million to about 80 thousand in the aftermath of than event.