For better or worse I'm going with the plot continuation that sees my lunchtime players abandoned out in the desert by the baddies.  (Thanks to Jeffrey for the brilliant 'handout' on salvaging parts from an air/raft!)

I'm going to try and use the Keith brothers' _The Desert Environment_ rules which uses 'Endurance Loss Points' which you get for movement/heat/lack of water etc and then you subtract from the normal Endurance.  So far so good I can cope with that.

However, on page 10 it says "If at the end of any period of time, the character's total accumulation of ELPs *equals* that character's Endurance stat, that stat is reduced by 1."

The bit I'm struggling with is "at the end of any period of time".  Now, I maybe have my stupid head on, but it seems to me that it makes a difference whether you tot these up hourly or four-hourly or daily or whatever.  If I save them all to the end of the day, they can do (get away with?) much more than, say if I do them hourly.  So am I missing something?

While I'm here, I'm also puzzled by what ELPs they'd get for staying in the same place.  I won't try and replicate the various tables on p.8 and 9 so this won't make much sense without the book, but you get ELPs for moving over various terrain types - so they don't apply.  You get them for every 5 degrees over 30 degrees C (but I'm keeping the temp at 32 degrees +/- 2 to keep it survivable).  (You also get them for every 5 deg below 10 deg C).  You get 1 per hour for staying in the shade.  You get them for lack of food, lack of water and moving at a slow run.  But what if you're just staying still in the direct sun?  

I've created a map similar in size, scale and scope to the one in _Duneraiders_ (A4/US letter, 1 hex = 10 km, 50 hexes x 40 hexes) but that seems to me to be rather too large for the ELP, crawling through the desert, gasping for water scenario.  So I've also produced one that's 1 hex = 1 km and about 10 x 10 hexes) centred on where they've been abandoned.  A few possible water sources and some critters and (very minimal) vegetation of course.  (Jeff may be pleased eventually).  They might or might not hit them.  I'm NOT mapping any more on the grounds I've no idea which way they'll go - if they move at all - and I'm *supposed* to be making up these lunchtime games as I go.  (But they keep giving me two or three weeks between games and my brain gets buzzing...)

Of course there's a bit of me that's tempted to do away with all this and just tell a fun story, but I thought I'd give these rules a go and see what the effect is - although I still seem to be making up pretty much everything in any case.  It still seems to be slightly cheating to wait until they really are on their last gasp and then have the tribesman encounter I have take place!

Also, is it ok to feel ridiculosly pleased that in every session to date - while they've been running around town chasing this case of who knows what - that I've introduced the hour with a world map, then a map of the continent they're on with the desert clearly marked in bright yellow and then continued 'zooming in' by putting  a city map on top; had a couple of tribesman (https://eleonoramignoli.com/tag/tuareg/) sitting in the back at a bar brawl at one point, and have the dying chap on the front of _The Desert Environment_ as a little image clipped to the front of my referee's screen from when I had the idea.  So there's no excuse for them not to have a clue about the whole desert bit and which direction might be best.  It's almost like I planned it!

tc