Kobolds live in... caves?

>>51079052
Because D&D has a hard on for underground murdermazes that it calls 'ruins' and 'dungeons' despite them having no logical reason to exist. Having this obsession it therefore needs to put creatures int he underground places, but needs them to be bigger than a mole so it fudges the math to get it to work.

>>51079099
Don't get me wrong, I love underground stuff too. Dwarf kingdoms are my jam, but I also love world building and every time it gets to populating a mountainous region... I have trouble conceiving of reasons WHY there would be, say, kobolds in that cave network. It just seems like such a sub-optimal living environment for large communities of medium sized creatures.

Sure snakes and shit can survive because they need to each one lizard twice a month, but a whole tribe of kobolds? WHERE are they finding all the food to sustain themselves?

For that instances, how the fuck to dwarves feed their underground kingdoms? Am I supposed to believe they feed thousands of individuals with cave lichen?

>>51079052
>How to large tribes survive in caves / underground in regards to food acquisition?
Most of them are either not large tribes (12-15 people isn't large and can survive off scavenging local resources while staying on the move, much like similar surface-dwellers do) or use agriculture, same as surface-dwellers. In most fantasy settings, the underground cavern systems are similar to above-ground environments, just the details change. Instead of grain, it's moss. Instead of cows, it's oversized vermin. Etc.

>How does an underground dwelling race manage to feed all of its people?
See above. Short answer: agriculture.

>Why not move out of the caves into the surrounding countryside where food and materials would be more readily available?
Competition from other surface-dwellers. Adaptations to underground living that become unusable above ground. Potential lack of resources (if you're adapted to lick dew from stalactites/stalagmites and eat cavern moss, surface foods may not be edible to you, much like how mosses and fungus's aren't really edible to modern humans)

>Certainly if you can forge weapons, you can build a shelter.
Why bother when you're adapted for caverns and caverns are their own shelter. There's no weather in caves, no changing of the seasons, so you don't have to worry about abundance dropping off at some point. Your agriculture works year-round, which is likely not the case above-ground.

This is basically autism, yes. If you can accept that basic conditions can be different in fantasy settings, you can accept that stuff lives under ground.

>>51079052
I usually mess with this. Generally, here are farming towns, scouting parties, sheep trails, etc. that supply the main city or dungeon located underground for defense.The main reason Kobolds live underground? Defense, privacy, and the feeling of safety. They go out and about all the time, but they bed underground at night. It's basically the exact same thing as human cities, just more rock.

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>>51079222
I admit to the autism. I'm sure most DMs have quirks they get caught on but:

Moss that grows underground (not roots, less water uptake, no energy from sunlight) is in much smaller quantities than actual grain fields. I could see maybe individuals surviving underground if they have a large enough area to themselves, but feeding even a few dozen would quickly raise a lot of questions.

I can easily get behind caves working as shelter as a plus, but the lack of food always bothers me. I mean even if you say: "There are giant dire-moles that are hunted", the fuck do those eat?

This is all solved by saying the venture out into the surrounding lands to either maintain conventional farms or hunt conventional game.

I just see things like pic related and wonder: "Literally fucking how are all these things alive if they're supposedly multiple days travel underground?"

>>51079159
Same here but equally yeah it makes no sense. Dwarves are actually the worst, mining requires loads of resources and space. Where does the spoil go? Where are the smelters and refineries set up?

>>51079159
The only real conclusion you can come to is most "underground" dwellers have significant surface presence as well and engage in farming. Perhaps in secret valleys and depressions deep in the mountains. The only other way is through extensive trade with multiple food rich neighbors.

>>51079537
The secret valleys is a good solution, in my opinion, provided you're working in a setting without enough technology to make flight common (else it's hard to believe such fertile valleys nestled within a mountain range would remain "secret" for long).

If nothing else, at least this thread is confirming that I'm not the only one that sees large communities of purely subterranean civilizations as, if not somewhat preposterous, possessed of moderate hand waving.

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>>51079052
Well, don't they raid areas outside the cave thus drawing the ire of other races who hire adventurers to clear them out?
The caves usually let out in some wilderness area like a forest too so you can assume they hunt and forage around aside from fantasy cave-edibles like mushrooms and giant bugs.
Plenty of animals make their homes in caves for shelter and kobolds are fairly skilled miners and trap makers but relatively weak so a small rock opening is much more defensible and less invadable by big predators. On the point of their place in the fantasy food chain, they're not only weak but small scrawny creatures so it may not take the most to keep them fed.

Out in the open, their traps take more effort for and are mor avoidable and their community is more exposed to other monsters or competing stronger goblinoids like orcs and bugbears or even just pissed off villagers.

>>51079052
You're pictures no a hole in the ground with one or two entrances, and this may be true for small clans of kobolds that number around a dozen. But huge kobold groups that number in the three digits have massive, sprawling underground lairs with dozens of entrances, exits, multiple hubs and smaller clans making up the group as a whole. While there are hundreds of kobolds, the fishing group numbers twenty and spends most of their day, as you guessed, fishing a river that runs a few hundred feet from their closest exit. They barter the fish for other food, clothes, and metallurgy from the smithing group, which stole the tools from a human settlement years ago and learned to make crude works of metal. The fighting group is very close with this group, obviously, and the fishing group mentions how a bear is attacking some of their members when visiting the smiths. The Warriors lie on the other side of the lair, on the other side of the mountain their lair snakes through (to be close to the human settlement for raiding) but the smith passes along the fisher's problems. Kobolds love more fish so they send some of their men to kill the bear, take the hide to the skinners and the meat home along with some fish. The hide will keep the fishers warm as they sit in the cold come winter.

See the pattern? Kobold lairs expand as they expand. A kobold lair housing several hundred will have several sources of food, most of it legitimate, and groups will take on specialized roles. They start to resemble a spaced out human village.

>>51079433
>Moss that grows underground (not roots, less water uptake, no energy from sunlight) is in much smaller quantities than actual grain fields.
If you can imagine all these fantasy monsters in the first place it shouldn't be too much of a leap to imagine fanatasy moss and fungus that is more nutritious or propogates at an accelerated rate.
Real life caves do have imput from the outside to sustain life generally in the form of water moving biological matter into the cave or it being brought in by animals like bats. Whole cave ecosystems are built off a foundation of bat shit.

>>51079238
There's a gem of truth in this. During vietnam we had a hell of a time just finding viet cong bases because most of them were underground. You could easily keep thousands of acres of land in hidden gardens, hunting grounds, and even pastures simply because nobody realizes you're there.

I actually want to do a story about a dude in modern times wakes up as a kobold in D&D. Figured it would be funny.