Equipping a fantasy adventurer

submitted by Cornfed from self.Fantasy

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[–][deleted] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

You can go without food for a long time

If you're chilling at home, yeah. Other health issues aside, you can look at someone as having a bank of 3500 calories they have available to spend for every lb of weight they have above starvation, but basal metabolism is eating up 2-2.5k of that every day also.

And that's not the only issue, below 1200 calories or a without a certain amount of fat, and our hormones stop functioning correctly.

Also refeeding syndrome, which is really unpleasant if not fatal. Once you go as little as two weeks without calories, eating again can make you very sick.

And blood sugar levels. People get light headed without food.

I didn't mean to go on so much about this one point and now I have to run, I'll try to address more of your reply later.

[–]Cornfed[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

I've gone more than two weeks without food. I'm actually 4 days into a fast now. Yes it can cause problems but they can be managed. Suffice to say, probably you could hunt for food when you couldn't buy food. On the average fantasy quest, would your character really have to go that long without food he wasn't carrying? We are presumably assuming he is not already emaciated or diabetic or whatever.

[–][deleted] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Are you active? I'm not sure how active I could be during long fasts. I did a 3 month, limited liquid calorie diet with multivitamins but a lot of that was sitting around and I had excess weight to burn. But then I've also gone two weeks without any calories when I had oral surgery and became very ill when eating again. I didn't think not eating for two weeks while my mouth healed was a big deal until it was.

On the average fantasy quest

A 3 day journey to a dungeon, explore it, kill all kobolds and to get back to town hauling a ton of loot. You gotta figure that's at least a week. I guess you could just endure the hardship as long as nothing went wrong.

In style though I think you'd want to mount an expedition with teams of horses, carts, and underlings to die in the dungeon.

[–]Cornfed[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I'm fairly active, although I'm going to curtail my workouts a bit. I imagine heavy labour or adventuring on an empty stomach would be a bit of a challenge, but we could assume that the average fantasy hero would be a bit younger and tougher than me. Of course you would want an army behind you, but most quests assume that is not possible or desirable. Anyway - a week. You gorge yourself, carry some biltong to chew on, catch the odd opportunistic meal. No big deal.