![]() ![]() Even if we imagine someone crashing on a plane, heatstroke or dehydration will probably kill them before anything can be done. It was a race against time, and no one would have gone through with the journey if WW1 wasn't being fought, and the gold wasn't available. Thomas Edward Lawrence ("of Arabia") rather famously carried 22000 or so British sovereigns from well to well in a stretch of particularly inhospital desert. ![]() The single biggest issue will be lack of supplies, especially water, and heat during the journey. This is a very challenging place to run a survival game. The deep Sahara also lacks large predators. ![]() No people means no intelligent antagonists. Because it's so hostile to human life, due to the lack of water, there aren't other people around. The deeper parts of the Sahara are a reach of dry desert, hostile to human life. Traversing the Sahara or diving into the depths of the Amazon are a bit different from traveling or settling other areas. These are very social games, and can be a lot of fun if you structure them correctly. In a silk road game, bandits are a real problem, but equally challenging are tax collectors and countries which have interests in preserving, profiting from, or disrupting trade. The antagonist in the settlement of Greenland won't necessarily be snow and ice, it could just as easily be NPCs who refuse to prepare properly, or who have different ideas about how society should be run. They can have survival elements, but fundamentally they're games about politics and economics and culture. Now, if you wanted to do a historical game based on the settlement of Greenland, or traveling the silk road, these aren't really survival games. But, on the same token, avoiding bad weather or conditions, patching up injuries, these things are covered by a couple different skills and dice rolls. Likewise, violence isn't usually a solution to broken legs or sickness. PCs can't kill the weather, they can't shoot a landslide and hope to stop it. Survival games that lack a core antagonist are harder. ![]() The constant threat of injury means resources matter and PCs tend to care about their stuff, especially if their stuff is divided into easily trackable units (e.g., 1 day of food for 1 person, 1 day of water for 1 person, etc). Running low on water? Well, there's a grocery store in range where you might find some. So, one of the reasons "zombie" games work is because zombies provide interesting choices in a survival setting.
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