Oysters & Oubliettes

A setting lives in the details. Tell me that its characters are as human as I am. I want to know what they eat and how it's expelled. Give me a whole a chapter about someone shitting their guts out (don't). Give me the small things so the large grow and grow. Redwall by Brian Jacques is right at the top. Perfectly cosy until the rats the rats the rats. W hat someone eats, how they eat and where they get their food from are oh so important. See also Honoré de Balzac. Bring the white gooseberry wine! Fetch me some rosemary, thyme, beechnuts and honey, quickly. And now, friends, he squeaked, waving a dandelion wildly with his tail, I, Hugo, will create a Grayling a la Redwall such as will melt in the mouth of mice. Fresh cream! I need lots of fresh cream. Bring some mint leaves, too Moby Dick . Lots about the mundanities of sailing and whaling but here's a few lines about whale brains that I flipped to. In the case of a small Sperm Whale the brains are accounted a fine dish....

     We’ve moved on from negative strength modifiers. Classes and backgrounds are for everyone and all. Rangers, woodcarvers, foragers, barber-surgeons; women have certainly performed these duties in the past but where are the midwives and fishwives; milk maids and bal maidens; laundresses and herring lasses— backgrounds that are explicitly feminine and of course hugely important to their communities.      What if by excluding backgrounds associated with women we're implicitly saying that the women of history weren't significant and aren't interesting enough to roleplay.    Most people rightfully throw away gender roles in their fantasy settings. I assume, right? But the roles that women had would still be necessary for societies to function.         A few months ago I submitted something to the femininomenon jam. Two backgrounds inspired by the above thoughts; fishwife and herring lass. Today I finished another, Mil...