In the Beginning, There was Man [Civilization Quest]

[Scia]

[X] River carrying meltwater south? Ideal time to catch fish like salmon to supplement the hunters. Practice your strange magic to help them.
--[X] but we do not have the right tools, so we shall have to make them. spears of lightest wood with split and sharpened tips and nets.

One question as the tribe is not doing that the first time, how secure are we in case of a flood because of a greater amount of melted ice+ heavy rains up the river?

 

[Malcolmo]

[X] River carrying meltwater south? Ideal time to catch fish like salmon to supplement the hunters. Practice your strange magic to help them.
--[X] but we do not have the right tools, so we shall have to make them. spears of lightest wood with split and sharpened tips and nets.

 

[enthalpy]

[X] River carrying meltwater south? Ideal time to catch fish like salmon to supplement the hunters. Practice your strange magic to help them.
[blockquote]Rolled 1d100 : 92, total 92[/blockquote]
[blockquote]Manpower Bonus 1d6 : 1, total 1[/blockquote]

[X] but we do not have the right tools, so we shall have to make them. spears of lightest wood with split and sharpened tips and nets.
[blockquote]Rolled 1d100 : 87, total 87[/blockquote]
[blockquote]Manpower Bonus 1d6 : 2, total 2[/blockquote]

[X] Exploration.
[blockquote]Rolled 1d100 : 53, total 53[/blockquote]
[blockquote]Manpower Bonus 1d6 : 4, total 4[/blockquote]

 

[enthalpy]

[X] River carrying meltwater southnorth? Ideal time to catch fish like salmon to supplement the hunters. Practice your strange magic to help them.
Rolled: 92 + 3 + 1 = 96: Major success

[X] but we do not have the right tools, so we shall have to make them. spears of lightest wood with split and sharpened tips and nets.
Rolled: 87 - 2 + 2 = 87: Major success

[X] Exploration.
Rolled: 53 + 10 + 4 = 67: Major success

Sorry about that - the forum software seems to have eaten the modifiers that I put on the rolls.

-----

Turn 2: Summer​

The first order of business, you decide, is exploration. You know very little of your new surroundings. In the past, your people have been content to sit still, only bothering to travel around when the food in the immediate locale runs out. If you can identify places where you might find food now, though, you won't have to worry about not starving later, whenever the immediately available sources run dry.

Soon enough, the parties that you send out to scout the immediate area return with news, both good and bad. Your campsite is flanked by a wide river on one side and dense, hilly forest on the other. They didn't push too far east for fear of losing their trail in the dim light under the forest canopy. They do report, though, that there is what appears to be a tall, forested mountain further to the east.

Downstream along the river, to the north, the river takes a sharp turn to the west. There, several large copses of what you recognize to be fruit-bearing trees grow by the forest's edge, a few miles from the river's banks. Although there's no fruit there now, they're will be in a few months, once the days grow shorter and the temperatures drop.

On the opposite bank of the river, in some places over a mile wide, the scouts spot what they guess is a large marsh, judging from the reeds and grasses that dot the area.

Perhaps the most important thing they find, though, relate to the massive schools of fish that you can see swimming upriver. There's a few decent fishing spots near your campsite, but there are areas of relatively shallow water by the riverbanks both to the north and south that would allow your fellow villagers to stand in the river and attempt to catch some of the fish that are currently migrating to lands unknown.

Eager to supplement the unsteady food supply gleaned from successful hunts, some of the members of your tribe take to the river to try to catch some of the bounty swimming by. At first, it doesn't go too well, even with you helping. Although you can catch a fish or two with your newfound abilities, the effort leaves you exhausted, and your fellows aren't too successful in their efforts.

That changes, though, when, after seeing yet another giant fish slip out of their grasp, someone comes upon the idea of using grass strings, woven together much like interlacing fingers. It takes quite a few tries to learn how to make a net out of woven grass that won't simply fall apart when left in water, not to mention withstand the shock of dozens of fish hitting the strings at the same time.

When it finally works, the net succeeds beyond your wildest dreams. You catch so much fish that your tribe simply cannot eat it all. Even after you take to throwing the excess catch back into the river, the refuse pile that you've constructed to the east of your campsite gets littered with rotting, half-eaten fish.

What do you do?

 

[Biigoh]

[X] See what OTHER uses this "net" can do!
- - [X] Like smaller ones to carry things by two or more people!
- - [X] Or sleeping on while strung up between two or more trees!

 

[Malcolmo]

[X] See what OTHER uses this "net" can do!
- - [X] Like smaller ones to carry things by two or more people!
- - [X] Or sleeping on while strung up between two or more trees!

 

[Vindictus]

[X] Nets are cool, but you need to find some way to take care of the surplus fish. Just throwing them to the dirt seems... Wasteful, disrespectful even.
-->[X] Rotten fish turn to icky, slushy muck. But perhaps if there wasn't any liquid in them, they couldn't do that?

 

[Guile]

[X] That segues nicely into agriculture. Bury the fish, plant something hardy. It'll be grown when you pass back by this way later in the year.

 

[Scia]

hmh anyone got a good writein for smoked fish to preserve the fish longer?

 

[Guile]

hmh anyone got a good writein for smoked fish to preserve the fish longer?

Click to shrink...

I'm afraid I don't really know anything about traditional smoke lodges except that they exist.

 

[6265]

[X] Cut down some not-fruit trees, ans use the wood to make better housing.

If we're gonna stay in one place, we need to both discover agriculture, and build shelters against the winter.

 

[Silversun17]

[X] See what OTHER uses this "net" can do!
- - [X] Like smaller ones to carry things by two or more people!
- - [X] Or sleeping on while strung up between two or more trees!
[x] bury the rotting fish a short walk from the camp away from the river.

we can use the fish to enrich the soil in some areas.

 

[Happerry]

[X] Nets are cool, but you need to find some way to take care of the surplus fish. Just throwing them to the dirt seems... Wasteful, disrespectful even.
-->[X] Rotten fish turn to icky, slushy muck. But perhaps if there wasn't any liquid in them, they couldn't do that?
[X] See what OTHER uses this "net" can do!
- - [X] Like smaller ones to carry things by two or more people!
- - [X] Or sleeping on while strung up between two or more trees!

 

[enthalpy]

[X] Nets are cool, but you need to find some way to take care of the surplus fish. Just throwing them to the dirt seems... Wasteful, disrespectful even.
-->[X] Rotten fish turn to icky, slushy muck. But perhaps if there wasn't any liquid in them, they couldn't do that?
[blockquote]Rolled 1d100-5 : 21 - 5, total 16[/blockquote]
[blockquote]Manpower 1d6 : 5, total 5[/blockquote]

[X] See what OTHER uses this "net" can do!
- - [X] Like smaller ones to carry things by two or more people!
[blockquote]Rolled 1d100+2 : 1 + 2, total 3[/blockquote]
- - [X] Or sleeping on while strung up between two or more trees!
[blockquote]Rolled 1d100-6 : 55 - 6, total 49[/blockquote]
[blockquote]Manpower 1d6 : 1, total 1[/blockquote]

 

[Moronis]

Wow. Thems are some very spiteful dice right there.

 

[enthalpy]

[X] Nets are cool, but you need to find some way to take care of the surplus fish. Just throwing them to the dirt seems... Wasteful, disrespectful even.
-->[X] Rotten fish turn to icky, slushy muck. But perhaps if there wasn't any liquid in them, they couldn't do that?
Rolled: 21 - 5 + 5 = 21: Failure

[X] See what OTHER uses this "net" can do!
- - [X] Like smaller ones to carry things by two or more people!
Rolled: 1 + 2 + 0 = 3: Critical failure

- - [X] Or sleeping on while strung up between two or more trees!
Rolled: 55 - 6 + 1 = 50: Minor success

Turn 3: Autumn​

From the idea of big nets holding fish, it's not too difficult to conceive of smaller nets carrying different things. Still, people question whether or not it will actually work. Something designed to catch fish, after all, might not work so well at catching other things, as it were. There's much discussion about it, but no one actually tries to implement it.

Finally, one particularly enterprising young man takes it upon herself to make a demonstration, making a middling-sized net big enough for two or more people to carry quite a bit of things between them. Everyone is suitably impressed until the the net snaps during the middle of his demonstration, dumping the collections of smooth river rocks that he and his assistant were carrying onto their feet. People are... less impressed afterwards, and after he admits that actually carrying things over a long distance with this probably wouldn't be too comfortable, everyone decides to let the idea drop.

Surprisingly, though, the young man keeps at it, depite the complete lack of support. One day, you return to the campsite to find that he's made another net, a larger one this time, stringing it up between two middling-sized trees that grow near the campsite. He invites you to try lying on the thing, and you quickly find that it's surprisingly comfortable.

While it certainly feels better than sleeping on the ground, everyone still remembers the incident from before, and while it's nice for resting in the middle of the day, people are reluctant to actually sleep in them, for fear that the net will snap and dump them on the ground. Combined with the fact that no one really has the time to tie a net that large by hand just so they can sleep a bit more comfortably, adoption of the "hammock," as he calls it, is slow, and it doesn't really catch on.

-----

With your newly-developed food surplus, you quickly find yourself running into problems that you've never had before. Namely, the problem of all the half-eaten fish slowly collecting on the refuse pile. To put it bluntly, they stink. The rotting corpses let out an awful stench, one that's strong enough that it draws scavengers from all around. Not to mention, of course, that it feels a bit... wrong, for lack of a better explanation, to let all of that potential food go to waste.

Maybe if you dried the fish out, they might last longer?

The few attempts you make don't succeed at all. All immersing pieces of fish in an open flame does is cause it to burn on the outside withouth drying the inside, and the end result is that you waste quite a bit of perfectly good, edible fish. Sticking them near the fire, on the other hand, has its own set of issues. Too close, and you run into the same problems as simply sticking the fish into the fire had. Too far away, and the fish doesn't really dry out at all. There is a middle ground that seems to yield decent results, all things told, but the error inherent in the process, on top of the fact that the fire is only really big enough to dry out one fish's worth of food at once means that the entire process is hideously inefficient, both in terms of food preserved to food used, and in terms of effort required to properly preserve the stuff.

Still, the small successes point to the existence of some way you can potentially make this work. The only problem, of course, is that you don't actually know what that is.

Until then, you decide to simply avoid the problem by covering the discarded material with soil, to prevent the smell from getting out. It's only partially effective, but, you suppose, something is better than nothing.

The long days of summer gradually draw to a close, and the turning of the leaves and the first chilly morning herald the arrival of a new season. The groves of trees you marked earlier have finally borne fruit, yielding dozens of small, green-and-red, sour fruit. Dozens of other plants have ripened as well, and the yellows and reds of the forest some distance away from your campsite make for a beautiful sight.

It brings with it a sense of urgency, as well. You have some time to make preparations, but unless you can store enough food for the winter or find a food source that will survive the snows, you'll need to lead your tribe south again, as usual.

Not that that seems particularly palatable, either. This last campsite has been almost perfect, and it would be a shame to have to start over somewhere else next year. You can try to find your way back here, of course, but there's no guarantees on that count.

[ ] What do you do?

 

[Latewave]

[X]Go West Young Tribe.
Aka migrate.

[X]Research. Think of how to make better clothing

 

[Bloodshifter]

Yea Forgot to check this!

[X]go West
-Leave Spiteful Smelly Fish Spirits!

[X] look for other forms of sustainable Food besides Fish.

 

[Carrnage]

[X]go West
-Leave Spiteful Smelly Fish Spirits!

[X] look for other forms of sustainable Food besides Fish.

 

[Bloodshifter]

I feel the need to add that... the Subtext is mostly stupid flavor induced by our bad roll with Fish Guts. The dead haunt our tribe for not eating them entiely of course!

 

[enthalpy]

[X]Go West Young Tribe.
[blockquote]Rolled 1d100-4 : 82 - 4, total 78[/blockquote]
[blockquote]Manpower 1d6 : 5, total 5[/blockquote]

[X]Research. Think of how to make better clothing
[blockquote]Rolled 1d100+4 : 47 + 4, total 51[/blockquote]
[blockquote]Manpower 1d6 : 4, total 4[/blockquote]

[X] look for other forms of sustainable Food besides Fish.
[blockquote]Rolled 1d100-15 : 53 - 15, total 38[/blockquote]

[blockquote]Event 1d100 : 89, total 89[/blockquote]

 

[Bloodshifter]

Good!
good
uhh
crap? or Yes!?

sums up those rolls pretty well.

 

[Happerry]

And we should follow the river west, so when it's time to come back we can just follow the river back to where we were.

 

[Bloodshifter]

And we should follow the river west, so when it's time to come back we can just follow the river back to where we were.

Click to shrink...

My thoughts exactly.

Kinda hoping to wander into a Herd of Cows or something.