Famine is one of those words that can easily get a visceral reaction. A lot of people know the feeling of being hungry, whether they have missed a meal or several, it can be painful. So when everyone is feeling that times are tough, it brings society down and opens people up to desperate thoughts.

We talked about in the live chat that Famine can be a direct campaign arc. Regardless of the source, it is a problem that is fixable in the short term or long term and the characters have the ability to find and resolve it. But it is possible that famine is only a backdrop of the game.

Maybe you are playing a survivalist style game where resource management is a big part. With food shortage everywhere that is not solvable, makes for a different kind of game. The farmland is not producing, the lakes are drying up. The wild game is moving away or disappearing. This is how the game starts. There are games out there that have a dying world. Games like Mork Borg or Vast Grimm. In these games/worlds the problem is so massive there is no fixing it. You are struggling to survive. If you pull that concept into a D&D world what kind of game would that be? Have the deities left or is something greater blocking their power? Perhaps the last few clerics hold all of the gods’ power. Whatever is destroying the world is causing each person to find a way to survive for as long as they can. Is there a safe haven away from the end of the world? If so, how do you find it and how do you get there?

Resource management is not the only way to go about this style of game. Not having food after a fashion could result in levels of exhaustion or just some flat minuses. The food could be scarce and if not found that particular day then the penalties could occur. In games like this you would have to remove spells like goodberry and create food and water as they completely break the consequences, or you leave them in and that resource gets used for that purpose. Perhaps they spend more time feeding others trying to stabilize the health of everyone they can. It honestly can and should be however you want to play it out. One of the games I have in my Ideas document, while not quite a famine, does rely heavily on the characters having to find their food and resources and form a foundation of a home or settlement in an unforgiving world. So kind of close to this idea.