http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-42157402

Interesting information you can use to justify placing a civilization or city in an area without a major river as a water supply...

Interesting
I'm not sure many times "magic" is not enough but it is good to know other options.
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(shrugs)  If this one team's research is accurate -- because how often does snazzy research aimed at getting media attention turn out to be wrong? -- it'd still be the only example of so much as a region managing without one.  (One example I use for such debates is this question: how many pre-Industrial Age cities in the United States were not founded on a navigable river or lake?  Answer: Indianapolis, and the founders thought the White River was navigable.)

As far as the threadbare "But there's magic" argument goes, I've got the full scale rant right here, but the short version is this: if you've got a city of 10,000 people, they need five thousand gallons of fresh water daily for drinking, and about fifty thousand gallons of fresh water for cooking, cleaning and industrial uses.  If your game system both permits an enchanting base numerous enough to do this (and that has to be in place before all those people live there), as well as the wizards who are battlemages, teachers, researchers, detectives, adventurers, court wizards, mages-for-hire and fussy old coots who just want to putter in their gardens and not be bothered instead of being full-time water supply enchanters, sure, whatever.

Other than that, might as well just stick with the handwavium.

Ravenswing, thank you for the numbers on water consumption.  I was just wondering the other day about the Decanter of Endless Water magic item and how many would be needed to provide a significant municipal water supply.  So it would seem to be about 5.5 gallons of water per person per day.


A Labyrinth Lord Decanter of Endless Water can achieve a geyser flow rate of 30 gallons per 10 second round. 6 rounds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day. So 30 gallons per round times 6 rounds per minute gives us 180 gallons per minute flow rate. There are 1440 minutes in a day. This yields 259200 gallons per day. At 5.5 gallons per person this yields 47127.27 people supplied with water per day from one decanter!  That's a lot of water! Roughly 6 feet by two feet by two feet, every minute.

Now we get to why the world isn't flooded with clean water from these things. In my games magic items are special rare treasures. There may only be one or two Decanters of Endless Water in the whole world. They may very well be lost in some unknown ruin, not supplying a city. Wizards have better things to do with their time than sit around crafting these things all day.

In my D&D games I also assume that magic using characters are a small percentage of the population, and the numbers get smaller as you go up the ladder of levels. So only a handful of wizards in the whole world who might have the ability to create such an item for you. Those wizards will also have the ability to say "NO!" and make it stick. If the king shows up with an army, that's what Fireball is for.

But if you do have one your castle can out last any siege.

Quote from: Headless;1010260But if you do have one your castle can out last any siege.

Sure, provided you have a Decanter of Endless Food as well.  Or that the besiegers don't have any nifty magics that can do nasty things to castle walls.

That being said, there's another reason why towns are founded on rivers: transport.  Commerce requires goods to come in and go out, and in pretty much any time before the 1930s, it's far faster and more efficient to do so by water.  Even today, with all-weather highways and fleets of trucks, something like 90% of the world's trade by bulk is water-borne.

Quote from: Dumarest;1010150http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-42157402

Interesting information you can use to justify placing a civilization or city in an area without a major river as a water supply...

City, perhaps. Civilization, no that doesn't seem to be what the article says (though it's not an area and civilization that I've read much at all about) since the Indus Valley or Harappan Civilization still had cities along the Indus River like say, Harrapa. There does seem to have been water from seasonal flooding for the cities in the area where scientists in the article did their new work. I don't think Mohenjo-Daro was on a river. I think it was already known that M-D was on a ridge in the midst of a flood plain so presumably there was a seasonal source of water for it too.

I like the idea of an ancient city that was flooded or washed away by the careless use of water magics like a decanter of endless water. You probably can't use just any old cork to stop up that decanter.

If magic (or gods) were real, then it wouldn't be rare.  Why would I dig a 100 foot well if I could just pray to Culligania, Goddess of Drinking Water? Why would a city make reservoirs and aqueducts if they could commission a decanter of endless water?

And magic-users would likely be far more productive if they follow a Thomas Edison research model than a lone wacko inventor in the woods style.


Transport is a big reason, though the death (at least in the US) of river travel has played a big role in why St. Louis is dying. Also sanitation. It's easy to dump waste and such in rivers than anything else and because of said gods, fantasy societies should have some basic knowledge of hygiene.

Quote from: JeremyR;1010334If magic (or gods) were real, then it wouldn't be rare.  Why would I dig a 100 foot well if I could just pray to Culligania, Goddess of Drinking Water? Why would a city make reservoirs and aqueducts if they could commission a decanter of endless water?

Well ... herewith another full rant on the subject, but the TL;DR version runs down some bulletpoints:

* You assume there IS a "goddess of drinking water."  I've yet to see one in any game setting;

* Speaking of game settings, in almost all of them, the cities look like any old pseudo-medieval fantasy city; the rural areas have farms and villages and things like any old pseudo-medieval fantasy fief. The shops depicted in these supplements don't have magical boxes where you insert a few gold and POP! WHIZ! a sword pops out; they have smithies where armorers pound them out on anvils. The farmers don't sit back and watch the priestess of the Earth Goddess de jour witch up some crops; they are depicted as sowing, growing and reaping in a fashion a 12th century Burgundian villein would recognize. The fantasy cities aren't fed by hordes of clerics casting Create Food or Goodberry; they're depicted with bakeries and butchers and grocers and stalls in open markets, all operating in a nice low-tech mundane way. People drink from fountains and wells, not from Decanters of Endless Whatever.  For the most part, despite people asserting that cities could have wizards providing for their every need, the writers, editors and creators of most D&D product lines don't act as if they really can.[/COLOR]

QuoteAnd magic-users would likely be far more productive if they follow a Thomas Edison research model than a lone wacko inventor in the woods style.

Possibly.  But it seems they don't, and modern-day industrial models haven't yet reached FRPGs.

QuoteTransport is a big reason, though the death (at least in the US) of river travel has played a big role in why St. Louis is dying. Also sanitation. It's easy to dump waste and such in rivers than anything else and because of said gods, fantasy societies should have some basic knowledge of hygiene.

21st century Earth has more than a little basic knowledge of hygiene and causation, and between the millstones of overcrowding, politics, economics, corruption, sloth, NIMBYism and "apres moi, le deluge," that doesn't stop the annual burning of Indonesian and Brazilian forests, asshats calling renewable energy a "liberal plot," the Ganges from being an open sewer, and all manner of depredations worldwide.  Presuming that FRPG deities are really giving "Do not pollute" lectures to their adherents (and that's something I haven't seen either in setting books), I doubt it'd work any better.

Glorantha (and I would assume a number of other settings) has numerous water deities at least some of which do have magics for providing water or for making existing water potable. Glorantha as a setting may be an outlier, but finding and getting water has been a thing at least since the predecessor board games White Bear, Red Moon and Nomad Gods (set in the arid region of Prax) which came out before Runequest and Cults of Prax were published. And I believe the God Learners in Second Age Glorantha did have factories that stamped out magic swords.

Sure ... but Glorantha IS an outlier for the importance it places on religion and the depth with which it develops it.  Even so, there's a big difference between "priests of water gods have the ability to cast spells to purify/create water" and "there are enough of said priests casting such spells often enough (to the exclusion of all other pastoral, religious and social duties priests normally have) to provide the fresh water needs of a city."

I've yet to see a game system mechanically allowing it, or a published game setting beyond extreme outliers like Eberron or Spelljammer reflecting such ubiquitous magics.  Again, if a GM wants to handwave it all and declare that just somehow, magically, large cities can flourish in the desert all the same, sure, whatever, but let's leave plausibility out of the equation.

Quote from: Bren;1010326City, perhaps. .

Cities you can definitely do. There are almost always exceptions to rules, and cities can survive on hidden sources of water (underground, seasonal, etc). I think the key is you can justify a city that isn't by a major river on a map (especially if the people in the setting have something like Aqueduct technology). Cisterns, water conduits, dams, wells, etc. Geographic features like Wadi. The Nabataeans were particularly good at this stuff (just look at a place like Petra). Also a lot of game maps assume there are features present that are not displayed (if you wanted a realistic map of river ways, the whole thing would be riddled with them and you probably wouldn't have  a lot of room for the other stuff). So even if the game map doesn't show a major river, I usually assume, unless otherwise stated, there is some source of water (most likely a river or stream) that explains the population living there.

The issue of a city located far from a major surface water source, especially in a world with magic, isn't really drinking water. A number of machanisms, both mundane and magical, have been demonstrated in this thread by which a city can be supplied with its needs for potable water.  The issue, as brought up by JeremyR is access to transportation and trade.  That is the main reason so many real world settlements before the advent of the railroad and the motorcar were located on seacoast, lakeshores and riverbanks. Water is a very easy highway to conduct trade over.

There are ways around this, but in most cases people will just settle wear it is easier.

As for pseudo-medieval vs magi-tech settings, even the wizards of Harry Potter choose to live a primitive lifestyle. Just think how beneficial simple cell phones would have been in resolving many of the plot points in those books...  Must be something about wizard magic that makes people luddites.

Quote from: DavetheLost;1010405The issue of a city located far from a major surface water source, especially in a world with magic, isn't really drinking water. A number of machanisms, both mundane and magical, have been demonstrated in this thread by which a city can be supplied with its needs for potable water.  The issue, as brought up by JeremyR is access to transportation and trade.  That is the main reason so many real world settlements before the advent of the railroad and the motorcar were located on seacoast, lakeshores and riverbanks. Water is a very easy highway to conduct trade over.
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Sure, but you can still have cities that engage in overland trade and survive on the methods described. No one is denying that cities will generally be built where trade can be conducted by water. But exceptions exist, and overland trade was a real thing. Much of the Silk Road was overland for example (it was a mix of water routes as well, but there were cities on the overland routes). Most cities should probably be on obvious sources of water, but I don't think all have to be in a fantasy campaign.

Sure. Flying carpets would seem to me to be a great way to conduct trade. Fly above most of the hazards of land travel.  Plenty of flight/levitation spells.  Why not flying ships?
And caravans are a common adventure trope.

If your city has access to a trade route, and a way to have potable water and food, it can be anywhere. In a fantasy game all three of these are much easier to meet than in the real world.