3.8. Scenery

| Chapter 3: Things |

| 3.8. Scenery

As we have just seen, making something "fixed in place" will prevent it from being picked up or moved. But it remains substantial enough to be described in its own paragraph of text when the player visits its location. This can be unfortunate if it has also been described already in the body of the main description for that location. For instance, if we wrote:

> The Orchard is a room. "Within this quadrille of pear trees, a single gnarled old oak remains as a memory of centuries past." The gnarled old oak tree is fixed in place in the Orchard.

This would end up describing the oak twice, once in the paragraph about the Orchard, then again in a list of things within it:

> Orchard
> Within this quadrille of pear trees, a single gnarled old oak remains as a memory of centuries past.

> You can see a gnarled old oak tree here.

We avoid this by making it "scenery" instead of "fixed in place":

> The gnarled old oak tree is scenery in the Orchard.

Any thing can be scenery, and this does not bar it from playing a part in the game: it simply means that it will be immobile and that it will not be described independently of its room. Being immobile, scenery should not be used for portable objects that are meant to be left out of the room description.

If a supporter is scenery, it may still be mentioned in the room description after all, but only as part of a paragraph about other items, such as

> On the teak table are a candlestick and a copy of the Financial Times.

If the player takes the candlestick and the Times, the teak table will disappear from mention. (Scenery containers do not behave in this way: their contents are assumed to be less immediately visible, and will be mentioned only if the player looks inside them.)

14
| Example Disenchantment Bay 2 Disenchantment Bay: creating some of the objects in the cabin's description. |
RB

15
| Example Replanting Changing the response when the player tries to take something that is scenery. |
RB

By default, "TAKE OAK" in the example above will produce the response "That's hardly portable." This is fine under many circumstances, but also a bit generic, so we might want to override it for a specific game. "Replanting" The Orchard is a room. "Within this quadrille of pear trees, a single gnarled old oak remains as a memory of centuries past." The gnarled old oak tree is scenery in the Orchard. Instead of taking some scenery: say "You lack the hulk-like strength." Test me with "take oak". Here we've used an "instead" rule; we will learn more about these in the section on actions. This allows us to define our own results for taking an object. Note: "scenery" is a property of an object (about which we will hear more later). So when we use it in rules, we can talk about "some scenery", "something that is scenery", or even "a scenery thing" -- the last one doesn't sound much like English, but is a more plausible construction with other adjectives.

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