Equipping the Team
Researching the Troubleshooter Loadout, 1980–1988 (Part One)
One of the problems that began to shape Negentropy during the preparation and play of Campaign 80 was deceptively simple: what should a Troubleshooter take into the future when there was no reliable way to know what that future would contain? The question eventually led to nearly a decade of research, from 1980 through 1988, as I talked with gamers, soldiers, survivalists, outdoorsmen, academics, and people whose experience with difficult environments was considerably more practical than my own. What began as a game-equipment question gradually became a study of logistics, because the Negentropy Cylinder imposed a physical limitation that could not be escaped simply by giving the characters more money, more experience, or a larger equipment table.
The problem grew directly from the games we were already playing. Dungeons & Dragons and Traveller were our principal examples, but they approached equipment from opposite directions, and neither provided a satisfactory model for what I wanted Negentropy to accomplish. Dungeons & Dragons, in its basic dungeon-crawl form, limited a character largely through what the character could afford and physically carry, while Traveller placed characters aboard spacecraft whose cargo capacity allowed an entirely different relationship with equipment. Campaign 80 required something between those extremes, because Troubleshooters possessed access to modern technology but had to place themselves and everything they intended to keep inside a Negentropy Cylinder before entering an unknown future.
What the Other Games Taught Me
The equipment problem in Dungeons & Dragons was immediately understandable because the character remained the fundamental transportation system. A player could purchase weapons, armor, rope, food, tools, torches, and whatever else the available money permitted, but eventually somebody had to carry all of it. Even when horses, carts, retainers, and pack animals entered play, the underlying problem remained recognizable: useful objects possessed weight and bulk, transportation required support, and travel forced the group to decide what deserved space in the load.
I had already encountered a more complicated version of that problem while developing Oasis, because its first major adventure required the players to cross the Great Irq with a caravan. The characters could transport considerably more equipment than a dungeon adventurer could put into a backpack, but the caravan itself became a logistical organism whose movement depended upon water. The important restriction was therefore not simply the weight of the cargo but the distance between reliable sources of fresh water, which tethered the caravan to geography and made transportation part of the world rather than a bookkeeping exercise placed above it.
Traveller presented almost the opposite problem because characters could begin with access to a spacecraft, often the familiar Type S Scout/Courier, and that immediately created an enormous mobile storage space compared with anything available to a fantasy adventurer. The game measured spacecraft by displacement tons, which led me into a long effort to understand what that measurement actually represented and how it related to the other rules governing spacecraft performance. I eventually understood the displacement ton as a measurement derived from the volume associated with liquid hydrogen, making it fundamentally a measure of enclosed volume rather than the ordinary weight of the spacecraft sitting on a scale.
That concept made intuitive sense when considering Traveller's jump drive, because the fictional technology could be understood as generating a field around the volume of the spacecraft when it made a jump. It became harder for me to reconcile with maneuver drives, however, because acceleration appeared to introduce the ordinary Newtonian problem of pushing mass. If I filled an existing cargo compartment with extremely dense material, the rules did not necessarily reduce the ship's acceleration, yet enlarging the pressure hull and increasing the ship's rated displacement could change its performance even when the added volume contained comparatively little mass.
The contradiction fascinated me because it illustrated something important about game design: a game system does not necessarily model the physical world directly, even when its terminology sounds scientific. Its numbers create an internal economy that tells players what they can do, and the important question is often whether that economy produces interesting decisions rather than whether every measurement survives an engineering analysis. Traveller eventually used the term displacement ton, or dTon, for roughly fourteen cubic meters of spacecraft volume, which meant that a relatively small cargo allocation represented an astonishing amount of room when compared with the equipment a person could carry by hand.
For the Traveller character, therefore, the practical limitation on equipment was usually a mixture of cost and available cargo volume rather than the physical burden of carrying everything personally. Once a player possessed a spacecraft, even a small cargo compartment could swallow equipment that would overwhelm a pedestrian expedition, and the ship continued carrying the character's accumulated technological civilization from planet to planet. That was precisely what I did not want the Negentropy Cylinder to provide.
Campaign 80 and the Cylinder
By Campaign 80 the basic physical rule of Negentropy had already created the equipment problem that would remain with the game. Nothing arrived intact in the future unless it passed through a Negentropy Cylinder, which meant that a Troubleshooter could not simply assume that warehouses, vehicles, communications systems, ammunition supplies, repair facilities, or friendly governments would be waiting on the other side. The character entered with whatever the Project could place inside the Cylinder, and everything else had to be found, made, repaired, traded for, borrowed, improvised, or taken from the future world itself.
Our first solution was wonderfully crude: each player effectively received two large gym bags for whatever equipment was going through the Cylinder. If the player could plausibly get an object into those bags, the character could take it, which was easy to explain and required almost no additional rules. The simplicity worked well enough to begin playing, but it also exposed the deeper problem because a bag is a physical container rather than an equipment doctrine, and players naturally filled the available space with the objects that appeared most immediately powerful.
Weapons dominated those early choices. Nunchucks, a Smith & Wesson Model 29 .44 Magnum, an AK-47, an M16, and a Mini-14 all appeared among the things players wanted to carry, establishing an early pattern in which movies, magazines, personal enthusiasm, and the firearm that happened to be interesting that week strongly influenced the team's equipment. The choices were not irrational within the game, because an unknown future might certainly be dangerous, but repeated play made the weakness of the system obvious: telling players that they could take whatever fitted into two bags did not produce anything resembling the equipment choices of a professional expedition.
That realization changed the question I was asking. Instead of asking what equipment should appear on a game table, I began asking what an actual person would want if told that he or she was about to make a one-way trip into an unknown future, with no reliable knowledge of climate, government, population, technology, disease, transportation, language, or available supplies. The two gym bags became an interview question, and over the following years I began asking people outside gaming what they would put into them.
Talking to the Survivalists
In 1980 there were three military-surplus stores in the county that I remember as Suzie's, Pante's Town, and Army/Navy, and each provided some connection with the survivalist culture developing around surplus equipment, firearms, and expectations of social collapse. Pante's Town was especially accessible to me because it was located in Tyrone Square Mall, which already sat inside the geography of my teenage life. I could take the bus from Seminole Mall, where one of my games was played, to Tyrone Square, where gamers gathered around Waldenbooks; the trip also gave me access to the movies, Maas Brothers, and a bus connection onward toward Webb City, my grandparents, and gaming at Sunken Gardens.
That accidental overlap between gaming, family travel, shopping, and the local survivalist community made one of the area's larger and more approachable groups available for interviews. Stan and Ben helped introduce me to the group, and I eventually conducted more than twenty conversations centered upon essentially the same scenario: you are going into the future, you do not know where you will arrive or what conditions will exist, and everything you possess must fit into a couple of duffle bags.
The consistency of their first answer surprised me because almost everyone placed firearms at the center of the load. Food, books, navigation equipment, communications gear, specialized clothing, medical supplies, and ordinary personal possessions usually received much less attention, while weapons consumed an extraordinary portion of the available capacity. The reasoning behind the choice was more important to me than any particular gun, because these survivalists believed that sufficient armed superiority would allow them to obtain the food, tools, transportation, and other supplies they had chosen not to carry.
I later encountered people I would describe as preppers whose preparation emphasized household skills, stored food, repair, gardening, medicine, water, and the ability to live independently for an extended period, but the survivalists I interviewed in 1980 generally imagined a different problem. Their expected future involved an approaching event that would destroy ordinary society, kill an enormous part of the population, and leave the survivors competing violently for the remaining resources. The men I interviewed were older than I was, unmarried, strongly committed to their expectations, and sufficiently convinced that collapse was approaching that some had structured significant portions of their lives around preparing for it.
Their equipment choices reflected that expectation. A typical proposed weapon suite might contain a shotgun, a short rifle, a longer rifle, two or three pistols, and a .22 rifle intended largely for hunting, which created the very practical problem of carrying several long guns while still having hands available for everything else. I became almost more interested in their slings, cases, straps, harnesses, bags, and methods of arranging the weapons than in the particular firearms they chose, because they had already thought seriously about how one person could physically move with an otherwise absurd amount of armament.
The Mini-14 and AK-47 appeared repeatedly, while the M16 inspired considerably less affection and was often dismissed with the old "Mattel rifle" insult. The Mini-14 benefited from its conceptual association with the M14, which several members of the group regarded with considerable respect, while the H&K G3 also had dedicated supporters. Unlike many of my Campaign 80 players, however, these men generally had direct experience with the firearms they intended to depend upon, so their preferences emerged from actual shooting as well as advertising, reputation, politics, or popular culture.
It was during these conversations that I first encountered what I came to think of as the politics of rifles, in which the choice of a weapon expressed an anticipated political future as much as a technical preference. Several members believed that a Soviet invasion of the United States was plausible because they regarded American democracy as incapable of standing against a disciplined dictatorship, and some therefore considered the AK-47 advantageous because Soviet ammunition and equipment might dominate the occupied country. A few were learning Russian, and some could already speak it, because they imagined Russian becoming the future lingua franca of North America.
I never found that particular prediction persuasive, but the conversations produced one idea that survived into my thinking about the Project: sending a person into an unknown future with only one language seemed needlessly restrictive. Even if Russian was not the correct answer, language represented another kind of equipment, one carried in the person rather than in the bags, and a professional organization preparing people for uncertain societies should exploit every form of capability that consumed no cargo space at all.
The survivalists ultimately contributed less to the professional Troubleshooter loadout than I initially expected, although they contributed considerably to my thinking about collapse, violence, and what people imagine they will need when institutions disappear. I also gained opportunities to fire weapons I had previously known mainly through books and conversation, including the M14 and Mini-14, while the AK-47 proved less effortless to shoot well than its almost devotional reputation within parts of the group suggested.
A Different Answer from the Miccosukee
One of the most useful contrasts came when I had an opportunity at a Miccosukee fair to put essentially the same two-duffle-bag question to a college anthropologist and a Miccosukee elder. Their answers approached survival from an entirely different direction because they concentrated upon living in difficult terrain rather than controlling other survivors. Both assumed that a firearm had a legitimate place in the equipment, particularly where alligators or other dangerous animals might be encountered, but neither treated weapons as the foundation upon which every other need could be solved.
A 12-gauge pump or single-barrel shotgun was considered sufficient for most of the dangerous-animal problem, leaving most of the available space for equipment that could produce necessities repeatedly rather than provide a single immediate capability. They discussed a full-tang fixed-blade knife, a small hand saw or machete, stainless-steel pots that could serve in water treatment and fiber processing, a tarp, mosquito netting, rope, a fiber spinner, sewing equipment, fishing line, wool blankets, and the tools needed for friction fire. Their answer treated clothing, shelter, cordage, repair, water, food acquisition, and fiber work as systems that could be maintained rather than as consumable supplies that would eventually disappear.
The most striking suggestion was transportation. If sufficient space could be found, they would devote some of it to a canoe that could be assembled after arrival, or at least to the aluminum required to build one. That answer changed the scale of the problem because a canoe was not simply another object placed into the duffle bags; it was a machine for multiplying everything the team could subsequently carry, gather, transport, and reach.
This was the beginning of the equipment philosophy that eventually became much more important to Negentropy than the original question of which gun a Troubleshooter should carry. A professional expedition entering an unknown future could not afford to fill its limited transport capacity with objects chosen only for their immediate power. The best equipment often created additional capability after arrival: a pot made unsafe water usable, a sewing kit repaired clothing and produced new equipment, rope solved dozens of unrelated problems, a cutting tool converted local material into shelter or fuel, and a canoe transformed rivers and wetlands from obstacles into transportation routes.
Between 1980 and 1988, the two-duffle-bag problem therefore expanded into the larger research project behind Equipping the Team. The Negentropy Cylinder supplied the hard boundary, while the people I interviewed supplied different answers about what human beings considered essential when forced to imagine themselves separated from civilization. Some trusted weapons, some trusted skills, some trusted tools, and some tried to create systems that would allow one scarce object to perform several jobs. Those disagreements eventually became more valuable than any single packing list, because they forced the game to confront the question that still governs Troubleshooter logistics: when you cannot know the future, you must decide which pieces of the present give you the greatest ability to deal with whatever you find there.