Game Ideas Un limited: Food

  The recent Kevin Sorbo Hercules series liked to make anachronistic jokes, particularly through recurring characters.  One such gag revolved around a foreigner trying to develop a fast food franchise from a hand cart.  I thought the gag got old fast, and describing my viewing as sporadic would be overstating it.  But it does raise the issue of what characters eat, and particularly when they are in a hurry.

  It is difficult at times for players to understand the nature of what is available.  Going into the past, the popular sandwich was unknown before the mid seventeen hundreds.  Even then most food for most people was something you ate with bread, as bread was the staple that kept Europeans alive, if somewhat undernourished.  (Macaroni, rice, and beans were similar staple foods in other parts of the world.)  The rations which were eaten by adventurers were probably primarily a dry hard biscuit, which gives depths of meaning to the term iron rations.  Dried fruits and meats existed, but they were expensive foods and not a primary part of the diet for most people.

  But in fantasy games this is further complicated by the fact that we have fantasy races.  If we assume that our humans are eating chicken pot pie, what are our dwarfs and elves eating?  In this, our fantasy and science fiction games find common problems, because even if you assume all have the same metabolisms and nutritional requirements (both matters of dubious probability) you still must accept that there would be cultural differences, differences of taste in the psychological sense of that word (even if gustatory sensation is identical, which is also improbable) which should be considered.

  And so the dwarf bakery in the dwarfen quarter of the city of Rilstrick sells pastries unlike any from any part of this world.  Garlic cream is a popular filling, and clove buns are usually sold out by noon.  Similarly, my yazirian space pilot finishes his lunch with a bit of a chewy root high in a caffeine-like stimulant that keeps him awake long after he discards the fibrous residue when the mildly bitter flavor is gone.  Yet I wonder whether these are enough.  After all, they are merely analogs of human foods--pastries are pastries, and cream is cream, and adding garlic to the cream makes it sound strange; but I'm not certain I'd find such a food unpalatable myself.  The root is little more than a cross between coffee and chewing gum, given a natural origin to make it seem an ancient traditional food.

  On the other hand, what do I expect?  Dralasites were said to consume a fully liquid diet, fluids of great variety in color, flavor, and nutritional value.  But where do these fluids originate?  If they come from plants, how are the contained such that the dralasites could consume them as such?  When you recognize that just about everything that can be eaten, from insects to seaweed, is part of the diet of people somewhere in the world, you realize that anything your aliens eat is going to be like something eaten by humans somewhere.

  But this realization can be liberating.  Humans eat very few rocks (we do eat raw salt, which is a mineral).  Most of the things we eat are plants and animals.  Dwarfs and dralasites almost certainly also eat plants and animals.  For one thing, if a species truly survived by eating rocks, they would create a food shortage rather quickly, because rocks have a long replacement time.  So if we accept that our non-human creatures eat food which is like ours in origin and substance, but differs only in expression and combination, we find ways to use what we know to create the unusual.  Do dwarfs eat chili made from coffee beans and snake?  Are there tea leaves and hazelnuts in an elfin tossed salad?  Do Rilans make tea out of a leaf very like spinach in color and flavor?  And might the main course at the yazirian harvest thanksgiving feast be a baked vegetable not unlike a turnip the size of a pumpkin?

  We touched on this idea last year in Sense, and also suggested then that just as not all creatures would have the same sensation, it was possible that not all could eat the same foods.  It follows reasonably that not all would have the same nutritional requirements.  For one character race in one game I ran, I decreed that the creature, for reasons of size and strength, needed to eat considerably more than his fellows, and could only digest meat.  Others in the group, for what would be classed religious reasons, were vegetarians, and this meant that an effort had to be made to provide food for everyone, when not everyone could call the same things food.

  We started this article by asking what characters eat when they are in a hurry.  The fast food restaurants of our age are a recent phenomenon, virtually unknown even as recently as the 1950's; likely they are also a transient phenomenon, which will vanish from the world or at least decrease in importance as they are replaced by something else in the century ahead.  In the 1950's, one might have predicted the future in the form of the Automat, a cafeteria style restaurant in which much of the food appeared behind vending machine type windowed doors, and a few coins in a slot unlocked the door of choice.  Those have vanished from the world, replaced by counters and kids asking if you want a value meal, and these too will disappear in favor of something not yet imagined.

  Yet it is our task as game designers and referees to imagine such things, to grasp the details of the daily lives of our players' characters in such mundane pursuits as what they eat, when, and where, and how they get it.

  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.