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  Do you remember a few weeks back when I buried that cat?

  This is the sequel.

  On the way back to work, I carried the shovel with me to the front deck.  I climbed over the rail rather than walk all the way around to the driveway side, and leaned the shovel up against it before going in the house.  There it sat for a day or so, until my wife complained.

  Now, maybe I should have expected her to complain, because leaving a shovel on the front deck really doesn’t fit her image of our home, especially when there isn’t going to be any snow for months.  I really shouldn’t do things like that; I’m a bit lazy, and a bit cluttered in my approach to life.  I suspect that even as I put the shovel there I knew, deep inside, that she was going to complain eventually, and I’d have to put it away.

  But she didn’t complain about the shovel.

  She complained about the dirt.

  Did you know that it’s very bad luck to have dirt from a grave on your front steps?  Did you know that that’s why you always go inside through the back door when you return from funerals?  Well, I didn’t.  I had no idea, and had never heard that (and I seem to recall coming in through the front door most of my adult life without too much concern for where I had been–and since she likes wandering through cemeteries reading headstones, I’m sure she’s carried grave dirt through the front door many times herself).  It wasn’t the shovel that bothered her:  I had to remove the dirt from the deck immediately and completely.

  Well, sweeping it away wasn’t so difficult.  And it got me thinking.  How many other weird superstitions are out there about which I know nothing?  How do they get started?  And are there ways to bring such bits of foolishness into my game worlds that will enhance the reality and enliven the game?

  And obviously I must think that there are, or I wouldn’t be writing about it now.

  But it seems to me that there are three problems to consider.  The first is, how do you create your own set of superstitions.  The second is how do you introduce them into your game world.  The third is what difference they make to the player characters.

  Superstitions typically seem haphazard in the extreme.  Generally when we encounter one we rarely have any idea how it came to be or even why it matters.  The more elaborate they are, the more they smell of charms and mysticism and the less sense they make.  So it’s good if they have that feeling in the game world.  On the other hand, no superstition ever started without a cause, and your superstitions will work better if you, at least, know that cause–even if nobody else does.

  Many superstitions spring from safety issues.  Walking under a ladder might not bring you bad luck, but if you do it often something is likely to fall from it and hit you.  A shattered mirror means tiny shards and slivers of sharp glass, usually in a bedroom or dressing room where you’re most likely to have bare feet with which to find them.  It’s rather easy to trip over a black cat in dim light, as it blends into the shadows easily.  And so we can invent wives’ tales around the safety issues in our games.  It’s bad luck to fire a sonic weapon in a natural cave.  It’s bad luck to draw water from a well if the side wall doesn’t reach the middle of your thighs.  It’s bad luck to use someone else’s diving tanks.  Turning minor safety issues into superstitions is a good start.

  Other superstitions spring from religious ideas, sometimes forgotten in the mists of time.  We "knock on wood" to assure the bad things we mention don’t happen because our Saxon ancestors worshipped the spirits of trees and we are appeasing those spirits.  You don’t "speak of the devil" because if he hears his name he’ll come, and he always brings trouble.  The Bible reports a man who sneezed seven times when demons were cast out of him, so when someone sneezes we say “God bless you” as the demons flee.  If you can develop the nuances of the religion in your game worlds, these can lead naturally to practices that make no sense now because they’re based on the understandings of the past.  Never pick crocuses, because they are the first efforts of the goddess Idun to bring spring back to the world–and this becomes, picking crocuses will stall the coming of spring.

  The most superstitious people in the world make up their own superstitions.  They base them on the correlation of unrelated details.  Athletes on winning streaks have been known to wear the same dirty socks game after game; those who lose have discarded entire outfits.  The girl who gets a compliment from a guy she really likes will wear those clothes again, including the lucky underwear he couldn’t see anyway.  Lucky charms, lucky coins, lucky dice are all associated with good events; and the unlucky are connected to the bad ones.  This can be a gold mine for superstitions.  Never have the harvest festival on Sunday (because the year it was on Sunday was the worst winter of their lives).  Don’t fish on this side of the river (because Robert’s son Thomas fell in there and drowned a hundred years ago).  Don’t write the chronicles with blue ink (because there was a batch of blue ink once that ran and blurred terribly, and the whole thing had to be rewritten).  The world can be filled with superstitions, if you give some time to them.

  But how do you bring them into the game?

  The hard way would be to give your players long lessons in the culture of their world, the things they would know just from growing up within it.  This might work for some players in some games–but it’s not the way I would approach it at all.  The closest I would get to that would be this.  If my player characters have different backgrounds, I would allow them to develop their own superstitions–things that were believed where they were raised.  So the dwarf or the Klingon might have some superstition about how weapons are tended, and the Bajoran or the elf some notion of inviting foul weather.  Then I’d let them decide their characters’ attitudes toward these–do they think they’re superstitious nonsense, old wives’ tales?  Do they believe them, and practice them in great detail?  Do they see them as bits of good ideas wrapped up in foolish trappings?  Even, do they outwardly call such things nonsense, but find themselves compelled to do them anyway?  All these things work, and it’s a fun way to include a few worthwhile quirks.

  But the bulk of your superstitions aren’t going to be things your players’ characters believe, but things that other characters believe.  But then you have another problem:  why are there so many superstitions that "everyone knows" except the player characters?

  The solution to that is displacement.  If there are no humans in the character party, they’re in an area populated by humans who have these weird ideas about the world; if everyone everywhere is human, then the player characters are foreigners who have come to this part of the world and found people who don’t think the way they do.  If neither of those things make sense, give the local area a large immigrant population, or place it near another settlement with an unrelated origin–if the Swedes in Swedesboro trade with the English at Englishtown, they are going to trade ideas as well.  The Swedish player characters are going to encounter those superstitious English no matter where they go; in fact, they’re going to find more and more Swedes practicing the nonsense espoused by the English.  Even cultural differences can be the necessary barrier:  if all the party members are nobility, it is the practice of the commoners that is so mystifying.

  But this doesn’t really tell us how they are affected by all this.  And that is something that is going to be instrumental in defining certain aspects of your game world.  The essential question is, are the superstitions true, or are they merely believed?  And to what degree does that belief cause them to interfere with the daily lives of the locals?  If everyone believes that the sun will only rise if a priest recites the morning prayer, then it’s not likely that they’ll miss that prayer–but if somehow the prayer is missed, will it shake the faith of the people when the sun rises anyway, or will it confirm their belief when it doesn’t?  It’s one thing to have superstitions which cause people to do things that seem quite silly for no reason, but it’s quite another if they’re right, if it really is bad luck to walk under a ladder, break a mirror, have a black cat cross your path–or leave dirt from a grave on your front steps.

  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.