title: Stringing together multiple OR/AND conditionals for if/else statements in Python
body: <p>I'm a newb and missing something super obvious here, but am unsure how to go about this the right way.  I'm writing a basic text adventure game for homework and want to string together multiple 'or' and 'and' conditionals without having to nest a bunch of if statements in each other or create a ton of conditional variables.  I know there has to be a way to do this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>inventory = ['some stuff', 'more stuff']
  next = raw_input('your move: ').lower()
  
  if 'this' or 'that' or 'whatever' in next and 'item' in inventory:
      print "Done"
  elif 'this' or 'that' or 'whatever' in next and 'item' not in inventory:
      print "you dont have the item."
  else:
      print "No."
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I've tried creating test programs for simple conditional testing, and everything seems to fall apart when I string together more than one 'or' conditional like that.  It always returns "True" when I string them together, even if NONE of the words are in the string. I've tried using parenthetical brackets to isolate parts, but it still fails.  There has got to be an easy way to do this that works.  I'm all ears, thank you.</p>