Background colour for the game... and a whole lot of potatoes

[ReHerakhte]

I watched the following video based on a recommendation from a Twilight: 2000 thread and actually enjoyed it as much as I found it informative and useful for games like Twilight: 2000.
I quickly began to have thoughts about the particular growing method used and it seemed like a really useful way for the Proles (and even those Mikes who might be struggling) in DC to supplement what food they could get.
The couple in the video use the Ruth Stout gardening method. It requires very little hard work, not a lot of water and nothing much more than your seed crop and old hay/grass.

Basically, you sow your seed crop on top of the soil in your garden area, place a small layer of soil over the seed crop (and it seems that for some crops even this stage is not necessary), then cover the lot with a thick layer of mulch (such as old hay, grass etc. etc.). After that you wait for them to grow and then harvest at the appropriate time. It's not perfect, the mulch typically does not have enough nitrogen for good plant growth but as long as you're aware of that and use a good supplement, that's about as much extra work as you need.
I can imagine this being a good method for those citizens who do not want to rely on the megacorps for their food and for those who simply cannot afford to buy as much food as they actually require.

Back To Reality channel - 337lbs of potatoes: www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlratwBT5OI
Ruth Stout gardening method: http://www.bigblogofgardening.com/growi ... ut-method/

[Morthrai]

A minor part of the background for DCIII included this kind of independent growing. Window boxes, rooftop plots and guerilla gardening all yielding produce with any surplus traded at the street market which was a location we had in mind as a place for scenarios to begin - the DC equivalent of the D&D "You all end up at the tavern" trope

Of course, fresh fruit & veggies could also be bartered for black market items...

[ReHerakhte]

I think we had some threads about world background/colour back then but it was quite a while back so I don't really remember without checking. I really like the idea of that sort of street level focus as a way to get PCs adventuring together in the beginning. As far as I recall, there's never really been any way to get a group of PCs together in DC that wasn't either a hand-wave or a contrivance such as "you get contacted by an old friend" and as much as I loathe the whole "you all meet in a tavern" trope from D&D, at the very least, it was a logical enough place (in both a real world and a game world sense) for the PCs to meet each other for the first time.

Many games don't seem to have that. Sure there's a bunch where the PCs are members of some organization or other and they get assigned to a team but there's a number of popular games that don't have a good logic to how the PCs come together to go adventuring together.
It's easy enough to have the PCs already know each other but it's a contrivance I'm not particularly fond of. It's easy enough to have them from the same neighbourhood or village but that often violates game world logic or again, just seems contrived.
So I quite like the idea of the street market as the meeting ground as a way to avoid this, it's the method I'm most likely to use if I can get another DC campaign started.
I'd mentioned before that I really liked the M2k/DC combined adventure "Things Got Weirder" and had expressed a desire to run that as an intro to DC but it too expects that the PCs already know each other (they are a mercenary team after all).

So I'm thinking something along the lines of a different introductory adventure and then "Things Got Weirder" as probably the third adventure. In the meantime, the PCs would be getting better acquainted with the street market and thus each other and the players would be getting better acquainted with the DC world.
The street market can convey so much background for the world setting, a place where Proles and Mikes (and maybe even a few Gnomes) can rub shoulders, a place where street talk & gossip can cover up more covert conversations, a place that security and/or police are not likely to bother with overly muchif nothing is done to grab their attention, a place to get "hard to find" items.
There's so much the Referee can convey in that one setting as a microcosm of the larger world (can you tell the idea is really starting to grab my attention!), so whenever I can get another game happening, all that remains now that the idea has been introduced to me, is for me to describe it all properly to the players!

So cheers Lee for the info

[Morthrai]

So cheers Lee for the info

No worries, it's clearly got some wheels turning in your brain which is always good!