I’ve really been enjoying Delicious in Dungeon on Netflix. I have not read any of the manga, and probably won’t, to be honest. Much of the humor comes from the actors’ performances. I especially like the gravelly-voiced forager dwarf Senchi, with his perfectly round eyes and armored Tevas, using a giant black iron wok for a shield.
It’s sort of a one-joke show, but they’re really leaning into that one joke, to such an extent that it becomes world-building. This was the main inspiration for my newest Arden Vul character, Cap Doffer, the Goblin Gourmet.
The very next weekend, I ran across not one but two RPG-themed cookbooks.
Heroes’ Feast: Flavors of the Multiverse, a licensed D&D product published by Ten Speed Press; and
The Witcher: the Official Cookbook, by the same publisher, seemingly inspired by a fan project called The Witcher Kitchen.
Heroes’ Feast is the cheesier of the two, with a framing story starring the party from the cover of the book, bouncing between worlds, each of which has a chapter devoted to examples of its cuisine. It says ridiculous things like:
Owlbear milk can be a bit hard to find in these parts, but not buttermilk, which has a similar tang and texture.
Their cranky and stingy goblin narrator, Squirladax, a foppish bard in a feathered hat, can’t hold a scented candle to my own creation, though I have to admit he will undoubtedly earn his creators a lot more treasure than mine will.
Here’s my first Adventure Log for that campaign.
Spider Legs with Garlic
1) Kill some giant spiders. Try not to get bitten. Crossbows are good for this.
If you do get bitten, have a cleric handy.
If you don’t have a cleric handy, scream real loud.*
2) Burn the stinging hairs off the spiders with fire.
3) Chop the legs off (the spiders, not your companions, just to be clear) and roast them — again, with fire. Regular old fire, not crazy magic wizard fire, which is much too hot.
4) While the legs are roasting, soak as much garlic as you can find in two flasks of oil (preferably olive, but any plant-based oil will do). Crush the garlic first, so the juices leak out faster.
5) Use the garlic-infused oil as dipping sauce. Double-dipping is fine, because garlic kills everything.
You can also jab a crossbow bolt into the venom glands, if you’re into that.
Serves fifteen.
*In this case our screams caught the attention of a larger and far more magical party that called itself Lost & Found. Balthazar the Blue considered himself their leader. There was a goodly amount of eye-rolling around that statement, though. They stayed for supper and even translated some glyphs off one of the obelisks for us.
After the healings and un-poisonings, of course.
Other Geeky Goings-On
Hoard of the Dragon Queen
Librarian Camille Silva-Couch has got a biweekly 5e game that alternates with the anime club for a couple hours in an after-work time slot. I made two characters, both Dragonborn (for no reason other than that I’ve never played one) but due to my mother’s funeral and the GM being sick for a couple of weeks, I haven’t actually made it to one yet. She did bid me say:
Just also mention that all seats are filled up currently but if they want to be put on the email list for updates, resources, and slots for future campaigns they can email me at 21316@greensboro-nc.gov!
What the Hell?!? Con 2024
The Guilford Yachting Club is planning (to use the term loosely) this year’s WtH Con for March 15-16 at Guilford College. I wrote about 2022 here.
I plan to be there, peddling my little wares, and possibly running Blades in the Dark. Let me know if you’d like to be a part of that demo / experiment.
Eventually I hope to use that system for a return to Middle-Earth’s Strayhold,
and maybe even a longer campaign in the ruined city of Tharbad.
Marvel Multiverse RPG
Oh, Marvel. Trying yet again with a new system. I flipped through the book enough to see that it brings forward many of the concepts from the original TSR Marvel Superheroes, like Karma. There’s no improving on the old Universal Table, though.
The first and longest campaign I ever ran was during the two years I spent in Lexington between college and graduate school. It was a New Mutants style game set during the period while the X-Men were off world in the galactic empire of the Shi’ar aboard the space pirate / rebel ship Starjammer. Almost weekly for almost two years, probably 70+ sessions of 3-4 hours each. Good times.
Y’know, as a speculative nerd-lore aside, I have to imagine that Chris Claremont’s mashup of super-heroes and space opera was a direct inspiration for Spelljammer, the D&D mashup of sword & sorcery and space opera. I’ve never seen anyone admit that, though. It could be that both were independent memetic mutations of the real-life nautical term windjammer. In any case, our subcultural rule of thumb was that anything involving flying ships would inevitably be bad, and we avoided that setting like the proverbial space plague.
Just to wrap it back around, Heroes’ Feast uses a spelljammer to hop between different D&D worlds so they can sample the different cuisines. Because using portals would be silly.