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The World Before Breakfast

Posted by u/lofgren777 on r/worldbuilding

Original post via Teddit

“David tucked into his plate of fried eggs and potatoes.”

Wait, potatoes? Potatoes are a new world crop. We’ve already got a barely-disguised Germanic pantheon and Semitic naming conventions. Do we need a whole new continent for the potatoes? What are the people there like? We’ll need a first contact story. Or maybe there are no people there. Maybe there are dragons there. But if there are no people there, why are there potatoes? What about corn? What about chocolate? Do dragons farm?

Or are we just going to have the potatoes and corn and wheat all growing together forever? What about tomatoes? If they have tomatoes, do they have pizza? It’s just bread and cheese and tomato sauce, and we already said they have bread and cheese. If they’ve had tomatoes since ancient times, no way they don’t have pizza. If the evil emperor who worships the undead sun god also eats pizza, isn’t that just the pope?

Fuck it, say bread. Rolls? Slices? Crusty or fluffy? Peasants eating bread means a milling industry. If the town’s not big enough to support a baker, bread would be a major daily chore for even a bustling household. How’s a single guy getting bread? Does the family next door share theirs with him? Does the woman of the house make the bread or the oldest kid? Is it good bread? Does he get the stale rolls from yesterday or does she actually give him fresh ones? Does breaking bread have the same symbolic value in this world as ours? If she gives him bread, are they “companions” now? Is she just super nice, or is this a sex thing? Is he pinching his neighbor’s loaf, if you know what I mean and I think you do?

Fuck it, say beans. Refried? Stewed? Nobody’s cooking beans from scratch first thing in the morning, that’s for sure, so does he just have them sitting on the hearth all the time? Did he wake up at dawn to put the beans on? Why would a single guy cook himself a giant pot of beans? He’d be eating beans for days. It would be economical though. But if he’s that poor, what’s he doing eating eggs? Maybe he bought the eggs and the beans from the inn. But if the town is big enough to have an inn, it’s big enough to have a baker. How is he living alone if there are so many people? But if he had roommates, it would make more sense to cook beans than get bread from a baker, so if there is a baker, then he would eat beans. Potato is the only thing that makes sense for a guy who lives alone, without getting sidetracked with the whole bread-neighbor-sex-thing.

Also, this way I can have somebody get kidnapped by pirates in book 2.

Five hours later, after working out the discovery of the New World, the expanding ramifications of disastrous first contact with the shapeshifting geomancers who live there, the unrelenting plagues that crossed the oceans each way, the nascent progress of colonial expansion, the history of sophisticated timekeeping devices from the application of the jeweler’s finesse to the miller’s gearworks in the newly invented steampunk city of Broggia, and a significant upgrade to the world’s mapmaking technology...

“David tucked into his plate of fried eggs and potatoes.”

Hell yeah, that’s solid gold genius right there. We can already smell the HBOMax series. Potatoes? Yeah, we went there. Who else is bold enough to drop potatoes, and all that they imply, right into the middle of a medieval pastiche fantasy world like it’s no big...

[Link to clip from Lord of the Rings]

RICE IT IS.