Cuisine is More Important than War

Cuisine is more important to your game world than war - pretty bold statement, right?  Look, we get it.  Half of you clicked because you want to see how stupid we really are.  Give us half a chance!  This is not some touchy-feely thing about role-playing.  It is legitimately about figuring out if you’re close to ready with your game world!

So in terms of world building - what does cuisine mean?  Well, it means you’re done.  This is why:  By determining the cuisine of a place, you have figured out what they’re eating.  There are only two ways to get food to a region:  grow it or import it.  So, by knowing what they eat, you know what they grow.  By knowing what they grow, you know what the climate is, and you might even know something about the geology.  If not the geology, then you probably have an understanding of the terrain, including things like the frequency of rivers, streams and creeks, or maybe swamps or deserts.

Or if they import it, then you should know where it is coming from.  Knowing what is on the caravans or merchant ships or river barges sets up the trade and economy of the world.  Knowing the trade routes sets up the economy of the place.

If you’re thinking about it this way, then knowing what the cuisine is, proves that you legitimately have gotten to the point where you understand your world, or at least this region of it!

But there’s no reason that you cannot work backwards from cuisine.  Go ahead - figure out the cuisine.  Match it against some Earth-style culture.  Then figure out, what you need to make that work.

We mentioned that cuisine means you know what they’re growing - that includes livestock.  If the main meat of the region is beef, then they probably need to have huge open prairies.  If the main fruit of the region is oranges, then you’re looking at a region that is more tropical and less temperate.  Either way you come at this, you can easily just lay out the foods that are appropriate to this terrain and climate or you can lay out the terrain and climate that are appropriate to this food.

When it comes to trade, no one is going to put a huge cargo of tomatoes on a ship and then send them across the sea.  They’ll be rotten by the time they get there.  You do have to be a little practical about this whole thing.  Focus on things like spices, but remember things we take for granted were rare.  Salt, sugar, black pepper, cinnamon - these are all pretty common trade goods, and it would make perfect sense to move them around to where they aren’t naturally common.

Later in our All About Cuisine edition, we’re going to not only get into some of the cuisines in detail, but we’re also going to give a full grid of the main foods under each type.  So by showing the primary sources of meat, grains, fruit, veggies, and dairy in each of the regions of Fletnern, we’re going to give you a mess of examples about the hows and whys these things work together.

And why can we do that?  Because we’ve been working on Fletnern for over three dozen years.  Don’t get all frustrated if you’re not there yet.  You’ll never truly be done developing your world, but if you’ve got the cuisines worked out - you are definitely ready for players!

This post was written as part of the upcoming The Headwater Hills aka All About Famine & Agriculture, the latest in our Small Bites editions.  Each Small Bites book looks deeply at one subject, a character archetype, a race/monster, a style of questing, or some other role-playing/world building subject.  This one is showcasing all sorts of ways to use magic in different ways, including some that might resemble technology and/or machinery.

We hope we’re getting you interested.  If you want to see the World Walker edition for FREE!! click the link here.  If we’ve hooked you and you want to get the full 53 pages of content in the Game Masters’ edition, click here.