The Gaming Outpost

  The writer of the article was bemoaning the homogeneity of American cities.  He was sitting in some chain restaurant looking across the highway at a major department store flanked by gas stations, and realizing that there was nothing in sight that would tell him in which of these United States he was, let alone which city’s outskirts he now graced.

  I understood his point.  All Wal-Marts look pretty much the same.  Pathmarks are difficult to distinguish from each other.  Hearing that one of the new buildings in a burgeoning shopping district outside town was to be a Wawa, I was able to identify which partially constructed edifice it was by the framing around the front door.  I also recognized that another unfinished structure was destined to become a Walgreen’s, again based on the position and shape of the door.  Cracker Barrel’s restaurant shops are so similar that children often think they’re in the same one when they are hundreds of miles removed.  Appleby’s, Lone Star, Wendy’s, TGI Fridays, Red Lobster, Friendly’s, and perhaps hundreds of other chains appear everywhere, each sporting a recognizable façade from Maine to Hawaii.  There is this sameness to the country, at least in the buildings that dominate the roadsides.

  Perhaps the author is older than I.  I can’t remember a time when there were not such chains.  I still recognize the familiar roofs which once covered Howard Johnson’s, and the spires that topped A&P Supermarkets.  Yet I would have to agree that there is less diversity in the buildings we pass.  I read about a gas station that was uniquely designed by an architect to fit the landscape in Fountainhead (a work of fiction), but I don’t recall ever seeing one that didn’t look like thousands of others.  Sometimes the only way to know at which New Jersey Turnpike rest area I have stopped is to read the name over the door, and this despite the fact that each is dedicated to the memory of a different famous New Jersey citizen as diverse as Molly Pitcher, Woodrow Wilson, and Vince Lombardi.  There’s nothing particularly distinct about most places.

  I know that every city has its own features.  Ben Franklin is visible among the tops of buildings in Philadelphia.  San Francisco has the Golden Gate Bridge.  Even without the World Trade Center, New York’s skyline sports the distinctive Empire State and Chrysler Buildings.  These are remnants of an earlier time; but then, they are not so old, and to be identified with their home cities landmark features have to have been around for at least a few years.  So there are differences.  Yet there is still the homogeneity–McDonalds and Burger King, Motel Six and Holiday Inn, Home Depot and Seven Eleven, so many corporate offspring who clearly bear the visage of their parents.  The more places you visit, the more they all begin to look the same.

  I pondered this, and wondered why we would expect them to look different.  After all, if Acme has carefully analyzed what makes for the best shopping experience for their customers, wouldn’t we expect that anything which contributes to that would be duplicated in all its facilities?  The buildings all look the same in part because they convey brand identity, and in part because each company has determined the best design for its buildings, to be used wherever they appear.  The question really is why we should expect it to be otherwise.

  Yet it was otherwise, and perhaps not so long ago.  Buildings in New England, whether homes or stores or offices, were distinctly different from those on the Gulf Coast.  Different parts of the world, even different parts of the country, had recognizably different architecture.

  I knew immediately that this was something I had overlooked in my own world designs.  I never gave much thought to the general appearance of the buildings; they were just buildings.  One castle, in my perhaps sometimes more limited imagination, looked very like another.  Never mind that the photos of real castles on the wall calendar that graced our kitchen one year showed entirely distinct designs, the images in my head were all of gray granite with parapets and crenellated battlements.  I had seen Dutch roofs and sharply peaked roofs and lean-to roofs and flat roofs, and even understood the structural reasons for each, but my game world houses just had roofs, and only if someone asked.

  Thus when I asked myself why different parts of the country, and of the world, use to have different kinds of buildings, the answer came to me immediately.  The answer to this is very like that to the question addressed in Civil Planning.  Then we asked how to design roads that felt real, and considered the impact of geography and landmarks in the courses real roads follow.  In much the same way, architecture at one time reflected the local conditions under which the buildings were constructed.  It did so in three primary ways.

  In our modern world, many of our buildings rely on steel construction; steel is seldom produced locally, but is imported from mills in such distant exotic places as Pittsburg, Pennsylvania.  Bricks and cinder blocks are frequently trucked in from elsewhere, and even lumber comes from far away for most of us.  Thus if we’re building something, it doesn’t much matter what materials we choose; we’ve got to ship them from wherever they are found to wherever we are building.

  This has not always been so.  It has never before been cost effective to import building materials for mundane construction as compared with using local materials, because transportation was a major expense.  Kings and princes, major religious orders, powerful financial institutions–the wealthy of the world relished the ostentation of erecting an edifice from such materials.  Those of ordinary means could not afford such extravagance.  Thus in most parts of the world, people built their homes and cities from the materials at hand.  The proliferation of forests around the world made wood a very popular material; there are many places, though, where wood is scarce.  Stone is abundant where mountains have been thrust up through the soil or glaciers have scraped the surface and retreated, and so is a common building material in such areas.  Those who have metals use them, sometimes merely as means of securing other materials, sometimes for roofing or even entire structures, if the technology to work with them is available.  Clay will make bricks; lime has long been used with sand and gravel for cement and concrete.  When more common and practical construction materials are more difficult to find, more unusual materials are put to use.  Eskimos built homes of ice.  Animal skins have been used for tents, as have woven fabrics.  Entire homes are made of thatch, grasses and other plants, and even in places having more durable materials for walls thatch has been used for insulated roofs.  In the dry grasslands of the Great Plains, simple sod homes were built, cutting the grass from the ground in rectangular mats and stacking them to form walls.

  Of course, the available materials have a tremendous influence on the form of the building.  It is relatively easy to make a sloping roof of wood.  It is a considerably greater challenge to do the same with stones or bricks.  Sod houses don’t generally have a second story.

  The sloping roof is an example of the second way in which local conditions impact building design.  Houses in the Middle East have had flat roofs for millennia; people used the roofs of their homes as extra living space three thousand years ago.  Yet in Europe and North America, flat roofs have been rare, with sloping roofs dominating and growing steeper in more northern regions.  This is a response to the climate.  Snow collecting on a roof during the winter strains the structural supports.  It will tend to tumble off a sloped roof, reducing the weight.  Meanwhile, the flat roof enables the homeowner to catch rainwater and drain it into barrels for use.  There are many ways in which climate impacts design.  Pilings are common in areas prone to flooding.  Even today at the New Jersey shore, some of the homes near the beaches stand on columns, or have garages beneath and living space above, so that rising waters might not reach the people.  Ancient nordic buildings had thick walls, small vents, and large fireplaces, often with a common sleeping area, all to retain heat against the frigid environment.  Tropical buildings have light screen-like walls and many windows to admit any trace of a cooling breeze.  Some places build to survive the most severe storms likely to occur.  In contrast, for centuries tropical islanders, faced with fairly frequent and devastating tropical storms against which there was little they could build to withstand the winds and surf, instead built homes they could abandon to the storm and then easily replace.

  Finally, local conditions affect building design through the lifestyles of the people.  Nomadic families build very temporary dwellings, either of a sort that can be packed and moved, or of a type that may be built from local materials swiftly at need and then abandoned when it’s time to leave.  Herdsman whose flocks must ever be moved to good grass are of this type, but so are hunters who follow the game and gatherers who move in and out of areas as seasonal changes bring rich crops or inclement weather.  Even some agricultural cultures are semi-nomadic, such as the ancient Egyptians who retreated each year to the high ground while the flooding Nile deposited the rich sediment in which their crops would thrive once the waters receded.

  In contrast, settled peoples usually build more permanent homes.  These are the norm in industrial areas, but agriculture and fishing lend themselves to more permanent settlements, trading is enhanced by fixed centers for commerce, and even hunting and husbandry can benefit from some small permanent settlements.

  Finally, in some places defense is necessary, against animals or people.  This means that at least some of the buildings must be fortified in whatever way fits this people’s approach to mutual defense.  The walled cities of ancient Mediterranean area kingdoms are echoed in the mott and bailey castles of feudal Europe and again in the stockade fenced forts of the American West.  Not every culture builds such defenses.  Not every culture perceives value in them, and they do not always have value.  Castle walls of granite were of little use once cannon started tearing them down faster than the trebuchet ever could.  Stockade fences were useful only because native Americans didn’t have artillery.

  Thus when we build our imaginary towns, we should recognize that each may be unique.  We should ask ourselves first what materials are conveniently available for construction; second, against what sort of conditions these buildings must stand; and third, whether lifestyles will make a difference in what is built.  Grass huts and stone fortresses are built by very different people in very different places for very different reasons, and understanding this place and these people will point to a particular kind of building for each settlement you devise.

  Next week, something different.

—–

M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.

  To begin, I should mention that this is not an article about your typical dungeon crawl, nor about the motivations behind those simple adventures.  This is the second approach to the design of a quest, in our miniseries concerning good adventure design techniques.  A Treasure Hunt is again a type of game that is played at camps and youth group retreats and in similar venues, which forms a good model for a quest-oriented adventure and proves to be distinct from the Flag Captures model already examined.

  A treasure hunt is a particularly linear form of adventure.  The players are expected to follow the prescribed route rather closely.  Perhaps again a description of the popular game which illustrates the concept will show how this works.

  It is again a team versus team competition in its natural form, but this can be ignored for the purposes of designing the quest.  Each team, or as an adventure model the one team, is given a clue, written on paper, which if properly understood will lead them to some unique place where, with a bit of searching, they should find the next clue.  This will in turn lead them to the next place, and the next clue, and eventually by following the clues from one to the next they will reach the end, the object of the quest, the McGuffin.

  Note that the clues are not more than that; they are clues.  You don’t find a slip of paper that says, “Go to the mess hall for the next clue”; you find instead something like “Builds strong bodies twelve ways” or “Satisfaction is found here thrice a day”.  As the team reaches each location, the new clue gives them something to ponder, something to unravel.  Once they’ve solved the clue, they’re off to find the next one.

  This creates the opportunity for the team to be misled.  The clue might not be so clear as to point to one place unequivocally.  Sometimes the team will wind up in the wrong place, and realize after some searching that the next clue is not there, and they are off the track.  Sometimes they will see the uncertainty immediately, and will hedge their bets by dividing their efforts to cover multiple possibilities.  Builds strong bodies twelve ways might be the mess hall, but it might be the gym or the recreation hall, if there is one, and if you’re not sure which it is you might save time by checking both at once.

  Converting this to an adventure design is not so difficult, although it does require some careful preparation.

  A mystery investigation can be set up this way.  The heroes begin with a clue that takes them to the nightclub.  The waitress remembers the taxi driver, so they have to go to the cab company to find out how to reach him.  Finding him at home, they learn where he took the guy he picked up at the nightclub.  Reaching that location, they pick up the fact that it’s a meeting place for a certain gang.  Each step in the investigation points them to the next; they don’t know where the end will be, nor where they will have to stop along the way, but they know that they’re after something, in this case the truth.

  Doctor Who‘s Key to Time series had some elements of this approach.  The Doctor and Romana must gather the six pieces of the key, and as each piece is gathered they gain knowledge of the location of the next to continue their quest for the whole.  Similarly, a quest can be designed such that several items must be collected, and in collecting each it becomes possible to gain information concerning the location of the next.  Blake’s 7 did much the same over several episodes in which Blake was attempting to locate Star One, the central computer system that controlled all automated systems in the galaxy, knowledge of which was thought to be nonexistent.  With each stop he found not the information he sought but a lead to where he might yet find it.

  A similar adventure can be devised around the pursuit of a person.  The person left this location and said to forward his mail to that one.  From that location, he was bound north toward a certain outpost.  He was at the outpost, but left to find the native tribes in the hills to the west.  The natives met him, and sent him on his way.  The amount of information may vary as he continues his travels, but the attentive players should be able to keep to the trail.

  Well designed, the treasure hunt itself provides incentives at each step along the way in the form of gaining the next clue.  The players should at least feel that they are on the right track, even if that confirmation comes from someone attempting to stop them–as all the detective shows remind us, that means we are getting close to the truth and someone doesn’t like it.  Having “one more piece of the puzzle” is itself a reward.  Should the players somehow fail to reach their ultimate goal, they will console themselves with the fact that they played the game well and reached many of the intervening goals.  Staying on the trail is itself an objective, a success not to be undervalued.

  What happens if the players lose the trail?  Hopefully they have the ability to back up to the previous clue and rethink where they should have gone.  If the clue is so weak that it really doesn’t lead anywhere, the referee may consider finding a way to add another clue.  If the clue is there but the players missed it, they may have to return and look again.

  Some adventures that are very like dungeon crawls follow this design.  Each stage of the journey ends in a place, perhaps a room, in which something must be solved to point the direction for the next leg of the journey.  In this design, the only side paths that exist are those that might be wrongly chosen at those critical junctures, which will shortly reveal themselves to have been wrong, sending the party back to that place from which they must again consider the options, costing them at least some time, possibly significantly more.  Gandalf’s trek with the Fellowship of the Ring through the Mines of Moriah had some of these features, made evident when he would stop to examine various paths attempting to determine which they should take, although we are not always told the clues.

  Given that with this technique the clues usually will not be little slips of paper that say, “This is the next clue”, it is wise to place several clues at each location.  This has the twin advantages, first that if they miss one clue they might still work out the next location, and second that the clue you thought obvious might not be, but the other clue might click with them.  If there is to be a single critical clue at any location, it is important that it be both discoverable and decipherable, that is, the players must be able to spot it and they must be able to determine what it means.  Also, given that the clues are rarely labeled as such, the less evident the clue is the more obvious it must be.  It’s all right to make the players ponder what the clue means if it’s staring them right in the face.  If they have to search for the clue, it had better be clear to them that it is the clue when they find it.  In Blake’s 7 Blake expected that the coordinates of Star One would be imprinted on a data card, and so he was making every effort to examine the few data cards that were worn by the royal family of the tribe on this primitive planet.  These were all fake, leaving him in a quandary.  He found the information, though, revealed through a triggered post-hypnotic suggestion implanted in the mind of the court jester, stated very clearly as the desired information as soon as it was discovered.  Conversely, in an earlier murder mystery episode, Kerr Avon held the solution to the murder in his hand within the first few minutes after the crime was discovered, and knew that this was something important, but spent the rest of the episode attempting to solve the mystery unaware that the solution was in his hand.  You can hide the clue either by making it difficult to find or by making it difficult to recognize, but if you do both the players are likely to falter.  Either they must recognize it when they see it, or they must be guaranteed to see it if they won’t immediately recognize it.

  The adventure may be enhanced by applying pressure to complete it.  In the Treasure Hunt game, this pressure derives from the fact that it is a race, that someone else is trying to get through all of their clues and reach the finish first.  Including an adversary on the same trail can make an interesting challenge, although the referee must play fairly.  Many quests of this design have a time limit, a deadline by which they must be successful, whether this is a fixed time or a race to beat an event that could happen abruptly (for example, the prince is dying and we need to find the cure).  Time pressure can also be applied if there is reason for the clues to deteriorate with time, as there might be with a mystery investigation, or if the quarry is on the move and so might escape if they don’t catch up with him.  These can be combined in interesting ways, such as a quarry who is on the move and does not know that he’s carrying the bomb that is going to kill him in three days if we don’t catch him.

  Ultimately, the players should reach something that is obviously the goal.  It may be that this is the moment at which they finally reach what they set out to get; it may be instead that this is when they discover what it was they had been seeking from the beginning.  If they have been pursuing a person, they might now say, “You’re under arrest in the name of the King,” or perhaps, “Doctor Livingstone, I presume?”  It will be the conclusion of the quest, the journey’s end.  They have reached the treasure.

  Next week, something different.

—–

M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.

  I’ve always wanted to fight a desperate battle against incredible odds.

  These words of Navigator First Class Grigg in The Last Starfighter capture a dream of many an adventurer:  the wish to face an incredible horde of the enemy, and bring them to their knees.  Whether it is Aragorn and his two companions pursuing an orc war party, or a dozen cowboys fighting a hundred bandits, or Ali Baba outwitting forty thieves, there is something glorious about such a battle, no matter how you win, and even if you lose.

  On the other side of the screen, there is an equal desire for such scenes.  What referee has not wished to bring the enemy down in force against the player characters at some turn, to run that battle that will go down in memory as the night they faced that incredible horde?  Whether they killed them all, escaped with their lives, or died nobly in the thick of the fight hardly seems to matter.  It is just being there that will be remembered.  Remember the Alamo.  There were no survivors there, but every man of the one hundred eighty-nine slain is thought a hero, and the tale is told still today.  Santa Ana declared it a “glorious victory” for his side, but his own lieutenant was quoted to the effect of, “One more such glorious victory, and we’re finished.”  Nick Champion did not survive the siege at the K C Ranch, but in single-handedly holding an army of fifty gunmen at bay most of the day he gave opportunity for the sheriff to be alerted and to organize a posse to trap the attackers and end the Johnson County War.  What of the Light Brigade, immortalized in Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem, six hundred forty-seven British light cavalry who rode horses and wielded sabers against Russian cannon flanking on three sides, who dealt serious damage to the artillerists and returned with three hundred ninety still able to continue the fight another day in the Crimean war?  At Agincourt Henry V didn’t know his badly outnumbered British cavalry had defeated the French until they sent word of their defeat to him.  Grigg was right.  It makes for a great moment of glory, no matter how it ends.

  The problem, in most games, is that the creation and organization of such an army is more work than the average referee can manage in a week of lunch hours; and most of us have better things to do with our lunch hours, such as, for example, eat lunch.  How can you effectively create and run such a force without having it consume your life for several months in advance?

  There are several tricks of the trade that can be used to good effect in this regard.

  For those of you whose facility with computers permits their use for your own purposes, as opposed to merely doing what others have decided to facilitate, it’s rather simple to create a program that generates large numbers of individual creatures.  (I’ve done it, so it must be pretty simple.)  Even Basic has a random number generator, by which such variable values as damage points, weapon choice, and pocket change can be generated, written to a matrix, and fed to a document quite easily, producing hundreds of individual enemies who can be ticked off one at a time from printouts.  Fanfold paper is wonderful for this, if you’ve got it.  I keep the framework of such a program on my drive, and modify it at need when I’m running certain games that require such variation in creatures.

  However, despite the perception that gamers and computer programmers are all the same group, the majority of readers probably are not so computer literate as to be able to create such a program and probably don’t have the programming tools on their computers to do so; and those who are and do most likely are sufficiently capable that they can create such a program without such meager help as I might offer.  We can discuss it in the forums for anyone who wants to attempt it who has questions, but in the main this is not going to be the best solution for most gamers.  Fortunately, it is not the only solution.

  It may seem as if each one of four hundred goblins would be a unique individual.  After all, following the old Monster Manual statistics, each one has at least one and not more than seven hit points, each carries one of seven different weapon combinations (sword and pole arm, sword and sling, sword and spear, sling only, morning star only, pole arm only, or spear only), and each has at least three but not more than eighteen silver coins in whatever passes for its pockets.  That’s seven hundred eighty four different possible combinations for ordinary goblins (not including the obligatory additional extraordinary leader types that appear with such great numbers), for which the probability of appearance of any one type varies greatly.  Yet how likely are the players to notice that this particular goblin who has fifteen silver coins in his pocket happens to be the same as that goblin who also had fifteen silver coins, also had five hit points, and also carried a sword and sling?  If you created twenty different goblins and used each of them twenty times, probably no one would know the difference.

  The convenience of this method may be enhanced by creating your goblins in small groups, three to six in each group, and then combining the groups in different ways.  For example, the first group might contain three goblins with swords, one of which has a pole arm, one a sling, and one a spear.  This could be put with the second group, consisting of four which include a morning star, a pole arm, and two spears.  The third group might have two slings, a sword and pole arm, a sword and spear, a pole arm, and a spear.  Combining this last group of six with either of the other two will give a different set on the field, and disguise the fact that you’re using the same combinations of goblins repeatedly.

  If you prefer, you can create those twenty different goblins solely on the basis of hit points and pocket change, and print twenty pages of these (the Word Processor is your friend), each with a different heading indicating what weapons are used by this group.  You can then organize homogenous groups, such as the rock throwers in a unit of all slings or a phalanx of spears holding the line on one flank; or mix-and-match combinations, such as a well-defended slings unit with pole arms in the front rank to hold attackers at bay.  Simply use one mark to indicate that the third goblin on this page is already in a unit, and another to indicate that it’s dead.

  I assure you that your players won’t notice the similarities, perhaps not even if you tell them; and if you do tell them, they probably won’t care.

  Multiverser uses a different technique for such creatures and characters.  We refer to them as One Each characters.  The notion here, as with mooks in some games, is that the differences between the individual members of such hordes are not significant to play, and they may be treated as identical.  The difference between One Each adversaries and mooks is that the former may individually be quite formidable, opponents of considerable power, as long as it is acceptable for them to be identical.  Thus you could have a unit of one each giants, or one each mechanoids, each of which is functionally the same in terms of game stats.  Create one, and you have them all.  Mooks function similarly, except that these are generally cannon fodder, assumed to be insignificant in their abilities to harm the heroes beyond delaying their progress and consuming their resources.  It’s a practical way to deal with large numbers of opponents, by making the differences between them unimportant.

  Sometimes you can split the difference between prepared individual creatures and uniform mooks.  Consider an army of three hundred fifty kobolds.  By the book (that is, the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons™ Monster Manual) you have thirty-five of each of short sword and spear, short sword only, and spear only; seventy with axe; one hundred five armed with spiked wooden clubs; maybe seventeen with short sword and javelin and another fifty-three with two to three javelins each.  But kobolds never have more than four hit points, and long swords, the favored weapon of many adventurers, do an average of four and a half points of damage before bonuses.  Thus it’s reasonable to suppose in advance that the number of hit points for any individual kobold isn’t going to matter for at least half those in the battle.  Rather than rolling all the hit points before combat begins, keep a four-sided die handy.  If the damage done by the attacker is less than four points, roll the other die to see whether this particular kobold is one who can survive such an attack.  (For experience purposes, assume that the average hit points of all kobolds is two and a half, and thus three hundred fifty kobolds have eight hundred seventy five hit points between them.  This also saves you the trouble of adding up all those individual hit points to get the total.)

  Now that you have your armies, what do you do with them?  That is, just because you’ve created a thousand opponents in five different types doesn’t mean you’re in a position to roll hit rolls for each of them on each round of combat.  You’re in for a long slow battle if you handle it that way.  What are the alternatives?  That raises a lot more issues; but then, it’s probably more than can be covered in this article, so we’ll leave it for the moment and return to it another time.

  Next week, something different.

—–

M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.

  I just threw away several pounds of potatoes.  I have a lot of trouble with potatoes.  I’ll buy a bag intending to make them, because I enjoy them; but then I’ll put it in the cabinet, and by the time I get back to it enough of them have gone bad that I don’t want to deal with them.  Sometimes I’ll have the sense to make a batch of potatoes from the bag as soon as I bring it home (although who wants the hassle of making potatoes immediately after the hassle of buying groceries?), and sometimes I’ll rummage through the mess to salvage what is still edible, but I’m always sending potatoes to the trash.

  I have similar problems with most fresh produce–carrots, celery, and lettuce particularly, but I’ve had broccoli go to flower and cauliflower go to rust in my refrigerator.  It has come to the point that I don’t buy fresh anything.  It’s too disheartening to toss out the strawberries I would have loved to eat but never found time to clean, or the peaches I was saving until I could get some heavy cream.  Produce is such a mess when it spoils anyway, and despite my practiced skills at cooking, organizing refrigerators and pantries seems to be outside my abilities.  So I generally pass through the produce aisle without looking, unless there’s something I know I’m going to use when I get home, or rarely if there’s something the kids will devour if they see it on the table.

  This doesn’t save me, though.  I don’t make all the purchase decisions.  Others in the household who do not understand the hazards of fresh fruits and vegetables are constantly putting them in the shopping cart and bringing them home.  I try to convey to these people that I will not be responsible for the preparation of such foods, nor for their disposal, but I’m pretty sure there’s a cantaloupe in the refrigerator even now that has passed its unlabeled expiration date long enough ago as to make removal of it problematic.  I wait in the most probably vain hope that someone will take responsibility for this, but soon it shall fall to me once more, and I shall be scraping up goo which can’t elope because it’s wedded to my refrigerator shelves.

  Of course, it isn’t just fruits and vegetables that spoil.  I keep my dinner meats frozen until I need them, thawing them early only if I need to marinate or otherwise prepare them overnight.  Still, I’ve had lunchmeat go bad.  Leftovers get discarded left and right, as many of them are ignored by hungry scroungers who would prefer chips and cookies over mashed potatoes and cold roast chicken.  Sometimes I can’t keep milk in the house, and sometimes I wind up pouring it down the drain.  Much the same can be said of bread, which sometimes vanishes as if trained by the local ninja clan and sometimes winds up adopting heavy military woodland camouflage, too moldy even to consider tossing to the ducks.

  The reason for this constant losing battle against spoilage is evident, if we consider it.  Anything we can eat can be eaten by other creatures; whether those creatures are mice gnawing through boxes and bags to reach food we’ve put away, bugs trying to crawl into our hiding places, or microscopic organisms devouring the sugars and proteins in our intended dinners and replacing them with toxic waste products, they are intent on finding food, and we have the food.  Thus we compete with mice and molds and microorganisms for our grub, and they have to win at least some of the time.

  This effort to protect our food from spoilage involves a fair amount of our modern technology.  We have frozen foods and canned foods, bakery products with preservatives, refrigerated transports, and vacuum sealed plastic and metal packages.  Efforts are constantly underway to cause food to last just a little longer before it is unfit for human consumption.  Even so, our packaging is marked with expiration dates, freshness dates, and last dates of sale, telling us that nothing we buy will keep for very long.  Even the Twinkie™, rumored to have enough preservatives to survive the Millennium, actually doesn’t last longer than half a year, according to its manufacturer.

  The problem was complicated historically by the lack of such technologies.  Preservatives are by and large twentieth century discoveries, the long term effects of which we’re still evaluating.  Refrigeration was developed at the dawn of the twentieth century, perfected by Australian and New Zealand sheep producers seeking ways to ship their abundant mutton to starving British ports half way around the world (a story we recounted briefly a few years back in discussing Edison).  Canning was developed to support Napoleon’s armies in Italy; it was he who said that an army travels on its stomach, and who made solving the food delivery problem a priority.  The answer came in the form of soup boiled and stored in wax-sealed wine bottles which kept not forever but long enough to deliver it to the men.  The next wave in preservation seems to lie in genetic engineering, creating new versions of old products that are resistant to their most virulent enemies.  We can only wonder whether quatrotriticale could have been made indigestible to tribbles and yet still be nutritious for humans.  That seems to be the efforts of current practice.  I understand that the engineered L-sugar, an artificial sweetener which was a mirror image of the sugar molecule completely indigestible to human dieters, was found to be a potent medium for bacterial growth as it passed through the digestive tract, so we can’t all digest the same foods effectively.  Perhaps there is promise here, but unless they reengineer our own digestive systems we’re probably going to continue sharing our food with something that doesn’t fully understand the concept of sharing.

  Prior to canning, long-term food preservation relied essentially on making food unpalatable to the competition.  Salted and dried meats don’t support microorganisms well.  Cheeses are in one sense already spoiled, converted by milk in a controlled spoilage process and then sealed in wax to protect it against other contaminants.  Dried fruits similarly have long shelf lives, as do many nuts.  Wine and beer contain alcohol, a poison which our large bodies are able to contain in doses which kill most infectious organisms, and thus safer to drink than the water in many parts of the world.  (And to add the voice of experience, don’t drink the soda, either–it is usually made from the water.)

  Some foods were protected by containers which were at least resistant to the primary pests who would be interested.  Earthen jars and eventually metal and glass canisters kept mice and bugs out of flour, although some cookbooks still instruct that flour be sifted together with other ingredients (a throwback to the days when it was not possible to keep flour without having bugs in it).  Cedar chests tended to discourage many insects, although these don’t entirely discourage rodents.  Despite these efforts, food was in many ways the most important consideration in long journeys.  You were going to have to find ways to supplement it, because you couldn’t carry enough to feed you the entire distance and you couldn’t keep what you could carry fresh and safe for that time.

  This, then, is the problem:  how do the player characters carry sufficient food for their adventures?

  Many games bypass this problem; it’s not particularly interesting, in some minds, to worry about the mundane aspects.  If you buy the right amount of rations, you’re covered.  If something spoils, you use your freshen food spell or your antitoxin solution to bring it back to edible.  For such play styles, food is a problem that is not permitted to get in the way.  That’s fine.  Not all games are made more interesting by all ideas.

  However, I’ve had good luck in a couple of settings with the use of food spoilage as a complication.  When food spoils, suddenly meals are rationed, tempers are short, morale is low–there are many consequences that can spring from this simple problem.

  Of course, if you introduce this problem, you should have some idea of why the food spoiled.  Characters usually take precautions against such things.  Did they pick up something contaminated at their last provisions stop, such as fruit secretly harboring worms?  (There is a type of worm that begins as an egg in a blossom and ultimately eats its way out of an apple, so there could be such a problem.)  Did the precautions fail, whether a refrigeration unit shut down or a container cracked or someone left a lid open on a box?  Some players will look for the cause and address it, or at least take precautions against that particular problem in the future.  Knowing the problem also helps the referee determine what else is affected.  Botulism from improperly canned foods can be deadly without being particularly detectable, but it tends to deform the cans, sometimes causing them to burst.  Understanding what sort of spoilage can occur and what the symptoms of it are is an important starting point.

  The focus of the problem should quickly move to how to deal with the shortage.  Sometimes the only possibility is to stretch the food that remains as far as it will go; the effects this has on the characters should be carefully considered.  Altering plans to pick up food at some known civilized outpost, or taking steps to collect more food at the cost of slowing the journey (hunting, fishing, and foraging are all time consuming activities) are also options.  In some games, truly creative players will find ways to solve the problem which are unexpected, and referees should give room for these.

  Thought should be given to how severe a problem to allow.  Some groups might be very comfortable facing the disasters of the Donner Party, but many players will not want to have to make that kind of choice.  In some games, this may become a challenge to be beaten, while others may see it as a Lifeboat-style test of their ethical principles.  If you’re going to make it a serious problem, consider carefully how the players are likely to approach it, and whether they will all be comfortable with each other’s answers.

  The aftermath of the food shortage can be interesting as well.  A problem of this magnitude can be the foundation for a bonding between characters that is stronger than family.  It could instead become the wedge that drives them apart forever.  If the latter is the case, you may have to start new characters in a new game after it’s resolved.  That will obviously be the case if the half-orc has eaten all the elves, but it might be so in less drastic outcomes.

  Again, it’s important to consider how severe the problem will be permitted to become, and how the players will respond to it.  It can be a fascinating direction for the adventure to take, handled well by everyone.  It can be a game breaker if it goes badly.

  Next week, something different.

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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.