[RPG] Food and adventuring gear for creatures of unusual sizes

creature-sizeequipmentfood-and-drinkpathfinder-1e

Currently preparing a Pathfinder campaign, and the party has a Large monstrous humanoid and a Tiny fey (created races). As a part of the campaign will be set far from civilization, everyone will need adventuring gear.

The thing is : most of it is designed for Medium creatures, a part of it doesn't even exist for Small creatures, and there is absolutely nothing for Large or Tiny characters.

Three types of gear are a problem in our case : food, tents/sleeping bags and saddles.

  • The create food and water spell says that a horse eats three times as much as a human, but no general rule seems to exist about food needs for creatures larger than Medium or smaller than Small (assuming that Small and Medium creatures have the same food needs).

  • Tents are designed to house a certain number of Medium creatures and there is no indication of how many creatures of other sizes can fit.

  • Saddles seem to be designed for horses and are too heavy for Medium mounts.

Are there rules that exist to fix the problems of food needs, tents and saddles for creatures other than Medium ?

Best Answer

The text on the Tents is specific about this.

Tents come in a variety of sizes and accommodate between one and 10 people. Two Small creatures count as a Medium creature, and one Large creature counts as two Medium creatures. Packing up a tent takes half as long as assembling it.

There is no specific rule for feeding creatures of exotic size, however this information can be extrapolated from the tent description and other rules such as the ones for trail ration and other food items that mention that the version designed for Small-Sized humanoids weights only 1/4 as the original, which should translate to 1/4 of the content. This also matches the text on enlarge eprson that says that 1 size category increase is "double height and quadruple weight".

For other effects related to size, there's a lot of effects that mention how to handle this, for example, the text on Feather Fall says:

The spell affects one or more Medium or smaller creatures (including gear and carried objects up to each creature’s maximum load) or objects, or the equivalent in larger creatures: a Large creature or object counts as two Medium creatures or objects, a Huge creature or object counts as four Medium creatures or objects, and so forth.

By this, tiny creatures would count as 1/4th the size of a medium one.

There's several other examples that use this "rule" for handling creatures of unusual size so it can help as a "hard and fast" one in case nothing better is specified.

As for feeding animals, you can use the "Feed" entry in Animals & Animal Gear of the equipment. The cost depends on the diet of the creature, but here's an example:

Consisting of various kinds of raw meat that have been jerked, smoked, or salted for preservation, a day’s worth of carnivore feed is adequate food for any Small or Medium meat-eating animal such as a tiger, bear, or dog. Larger carnivores might require up to 2 to 4 days’ worth of carnivore feed per day.

Finally, for the saddles, every creature that is not a "standard" riding animal like a Horse or Pony should use Exotic Saddles, which have a fixed prize.

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