PREMISE: Work in the Prepared Foods Department at a Grocery Store.
Slice meats, spill grease, and sneak pizza.
Content Warning: service industry capitalism, alcohol
Based on my time working in prep foods at everyone's least favorite over-priced grocery store. Prepared Foods tries to take Jason Tocci's sci-fi action game system, 2400, and make it decidedly neither sci-fi nor action.
Prepared Foods includes tables for generating store-wide and department-wide disasters, interactions with customers and leadership, and various things that could go wrong at each prep foods station (hot bar, pizza + sandwich, deli counter, and dish). It also includes a guide for making characters, procedures for running an 8 hour closing shift, and guide for the Department Manager [DM] on how to run scenarios of repetitive work and minor problems.
Though Prepared Foods is based on real experiences of working in food service, it's also to some degree a fantasy, and suggests against bringing into play some of the worst parts of work under capitalism, like injury, harassment, and bigotry. This is doubly true since the game is set before the pandemic. Though I've provided some guide lines to help groups set boundaries, I really recommend seeking out more robust safety tools [like Script Change on which the standard 24XX play guide is based] especially if your group wants to engage with any of the above realities.
Prepared Foods is also inspired by Blake M. Stone's Dish Pit Witches and Jared Sinclair's What's So Cool About Outer Space? and is dedicated to everyone I worked with in prep.
No comments:
Post a Comment