Roleplaying games – and stories in general – can take place on many different scales.
Perhaps the most basic level that any game can be based around is the simple fact of survival. Making enough money to get by, hunting for food, surviving the presence of predators, dealing with poison and disease, the effects of the weather, natural disasters and so forth.
Gor has many wild spaces, from the depths of the Tahari desert to the tangled arborial regions of the Northern Forests and the jungles of The Interior. The great plains and the storm-tossed ocean offer other challenging landscapes, as does the frozen north. Outside of the cities, even in the villages and farms, life is much less certain or safe.
In the books some of the best examples of this kind of ‘survival level’ scenario are found explicitly in the destruction of Ar’s army in the Vosk Delta and implicitly in the way the beggars and She-Urts have to survive on the streets in Schendi and Port Kar.
The ability to hunt and to know what plants can be safely eaten, where to find clean water, are much more valuable skills on Gor than in many game settings.
If I were running a survival scenario I would boil down each day to rolls to provide enough food and water, and to one significant or interesting encounter per day as a way to bring more roleplaying and drama into it without boring everyone by covering every detail. Perhaps a wild tharlarion lurks in the swamp, or they find tracks from an escaped slave. Perhaps they’re being tracked by bandits, or there’s a mass hatching of nasty, stinging flies in a pool. A ‘case in point’ to differentiate one day from another.
Postmortem Studios 