Well now we know what Fighter was commissioning last comic. It should come as no surprise that he’s a fan of Dungeon Meshi. What self-respecting fantasy nut isn’t a little bit obsessed? He’s even taken the time to learn how to cook! But it should perhaps come as even less of a surprise that’s he’s used the opportunity to be a dick. I only hope that Wizard makes the face when she samples the tentacle cuisine. All in the name of good RP, after all!
When it comes to butchering monsters, we’re faced with a dearth of rules and guidance. Trained on a video games that instruct us to collect five bear asses and seventeen lizard nipples, it’s only natural for players to wonder what they can get from scavenged monster parts. The popularity of the aforementioned anime is going to feed back into the tabletop games that spawned it as well. That makes this an increasingly commonplace issue for the foreseeable future. The question is what to do about it.
Cooking monster parts, selling them off, or using them as magical reagents are all options on the table. It’s also a pleasant surprise when the party runs into NPCs who happen to need exactly what they’ve got. “You’re carrying around basilisk blood? Well hot damn! Let me brew up a batch of stone-to-flesh for you!” In all cases, the idea is to provide a little bonus for taking the initiative.
By the same token, I can tell you with authority what not to do. And that’s because I remember mishandling this very issue back in the day. It was Level 1 of my megadungeon. An alchemist player had slain a giant scorpion, and he asked if he could collect the venom for future use. Being young and dumb and trying to run a by-the-books campaign, I reasoned that I couldn’t just fork over 1d6 doses of large scorpion venom. That could upset the delicate balance of wealth by level. And ya know… heavens forbid. The effect was a frustrated player and an un-milked scorpion stinger. And with the benefit of hindsight and experience, that seems like a real shame. We ought to reward industrious players, even if it’s only with some gross-out cooking RP.
So for today’s discussion, what do you say we talk shop about monster parts? When your players are excited to do a bit of cutting and skinning, what can they expect to get out of the deal? A bit of gold? A magical boost? Or something more esoteric and interesting? Tell us your tale of critters cooked and parts purloined down in the comments!
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Honestly? I’m surprised Fighter reads / watches anything long enough to become a fan of it.
He has attention span only for dungeons.
A lot of my middle and high level NPC mages are always up for a bit of magic item manufacture. And I have (of course) lists of thing required. Want gauntlets of giant strength? Well get out there and kill the appropriate giant and bring me the skin from their hands and a gallon jug of their blood. Boots of speed? Skin and blood from a cheetah or quickling. Glove of Spider climbing, need at least 8 spinnerets and spider silk glands from giant spiders.
Included in that is also the skill of field dressing various creatures. Since acquiring new skills and training in them requires spending exp and (usually) spending money in my world (separate from the exp for levels), then you better hurry off and find someone to train you and have the gold to pay! You don’t want to end up with a whole square foot of useable dragon hide after skinning that green dragon would you?
3.0? Sounds fair.
Do the reagents discount the price, or are they straight up required?
They discount the price. If the mage/smith have the ingredients on hand, the players are going to be paying what they paid for the ingredient in the first place, plus a hefty markup.
My homebrew is based on AD&D and SPIs version of Dragonquest. So the skills come out of Dragonquest, plus the ones that are my game specific.
Depends on the parts and player creativity. But personal favourite has to be from the Warhammer Fantasy, our merry band of Norscan managed to fell a giant… well it is alot of meat and it’s large bones made nice gates, finger and toe nails shields, the skull became a lighthouse, if you saw two lights you knew tou were heading straight to port, and it’s skin made for a lot of leather work.
To be fair we cheated a little but GM was laughing his ass off at the horror of some of our players as me and one another were listing things we could do, so he let us carry on with the tests… lost a lot of materials including the teeth… man I really wanted a drum set made out of giant teeth and skin.
But like… How do you get a cymbal out of giant teeth drum kit?
Juat plain drums, think the japanese big drums, I forget the name.
Taiko drums?
Yeah those, thank you!
Just imagone it, big burly Khorne worshipping norse men beating the drums made of giants parts as they sacrifice thralls to the gods. Or put on chariots and beat the drums of war as the horde moves to south. Just GLORIOUS! again, shame we fumbled those craft checks.
I’ve played a few characters over the years who could be fairly described as “feral”, and played alongside a few more. So I’ve seen a few opponents (and I don’t limit that to “monsters”) become meals… my favourite lizardfolk was mildly infamous for eating several dwarves.
And for that matter, my second-favourite lizardfolk was very much a harvester of poison glands and whatnot, though to call him an “alchemist” would be overstating it… very much a poison specialist, capable of brewing up all sorts of toxins from ingredients of his swampland home. But don’t let him do the cooking.
Heh. I like the idea of a lizard folk Dungeon Meshi fan club. U bet they’re always disappointed when humanoids get left off the menu.
I had a lizardfolk in a Ghosts of Saltmarsh campaign and if I had a copper piece for every time he didn’t get to eat a major character because it was poisoned to death, then I’d have 2cp. Which isn’t a lot, but weird that it happened twice.
Yeah, Saltmarsh is good for playing lizardfolk. The second character was actually from that campaign… a poison-dusk (a small and sneaky sub-race) from the vicinity of the Drowned Forest. No particular connection to the regular lizardfolk tribe who feature in the campaign, but being able to speak the lingo was handy.
Our last campaign saw us hunting and killing a lot of dragons… and I do mean a lot. I think by the end, at various levels of age and size, we ended up having killed over 20 (plus the big bad mama of dragons herself. Yes, that adventure).
Among the dragons there were other “lesser” kills that were made, and on the very first kill that it “made sense”, our barbarian character wanted trophies and meat from the monsters in question and for that game our DM came up with their own monster hunting tables and charts to accommodate us (based on monster exp and some other things, but mostly logic of what things you could get like skins/hide, bones, horns/antlers, talons and teeth, meat, and some more esoteric innards from some things).
It added to the game, but was also pretty gross when you stop to think that after almost every battle that we had the time and took the effort, there was a butchering session.
That aspect led to some interesting RP on its own, the idea that we had to take all this time to do what we were doing (there were also rolls involved in the task), and the blood and gore it caused made us a mess after which also led to more RP opportunities as we might encounter some group of families in a simple caravan after having slaughtered some beasts and they look at us in horror as the children cry at the sight…
I don’t see any real issue with the concept, the only thing to consider is how much can the group actually carry (we happened to have a bag of holding, but even those fill up fast when dealing with larger things like dragons, and we even had to leave behind multiple dragon hides in the later game before we fully had no time nor took the effort to do any of the butchering anymore as the campaign moved into higher gears) and of course what effect is butchering everything you come across having on both appearance and mentality of the characters doing the deed.
Interestingly, this current campaign, the situation and also the desire for the concept has not come up once. I think it can also depend on “what” you are killing all the time as to the idea of wanting to take some parts home in a jar. When most of your foes are humans, it tends to alter the thought process…
Cast Gentle Repose so you can delay the butchery. It shouldn’t work for all components but for things like hides, claws, teeth and such that generallly don’t need magical enchanting to be useful, it gives you a week without rot.
Oh and dead things are not creatures so Animate Obect works on them to give you 1 minute of the corpse being made mobile without any undeath, handy for Huge creatures that have the audacity to die somewhere hard to reach.
I’ve often wondered how often the first move in a fight ought to be, “I spend a move action to shrug out of my building backpack.” You don’t tend to see heroes in illustration fighting in the things, so maybe they just tear away for free when the action starts?
It is a full mechanic in the game Outward that you drop your pack before a fight because if you don’t it affects your attacks and defense abilities. There is a default button/key to press to do so, and when you hopefully win the battle, your pack is indicated on the map so you can return to it and pick it back up/reequip it.
Also in the game Kenshi, if you don’t drop your pack you will probably be affected negatively in stats during a fight as well and while there is no specific mechanic for the task, you are best served doing so.
Also, I have been enjoying more and more video games actually showing the backpacks in some form (and the better ones using them as actual storage and/or elements like Outward that you have to actively consider), because so few games used to even consider the idea.
I have, in the past, allowed players to harvest body parts and rare substances. I have also ruled that Open Lock and Disable Device are NOT the appropriate skills for this, Sleight of Hand is iffy, and with no ranks in Survival and the Wisdom of a brain-dead marmot, your chances of knowing what a venom sack looks like and how to get it out amount to random chance and a Dex check.
The PC in question rolled a one on both, cut himself on the giant snake tooth, and required another save vs. poison. In the end he satisfied himself with slowly sawing the head from the big snake with his dagger and stubbornly carrying the pungent and decapitated skull with him through mountain and swamp until his teammates, needing something to test the ferocity of the pretty fish in a river, threw it in (with the expected results). https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/video/capybara-swims-above-piranhas-and-is-devoured-news-footage/556943099
Now that’s using your head! :3
You want to harvest monster part I’m damn well letting you. Food? Alchemy? Armor? The possibilities are endless. You want tips? Do I have the post for you.
https://coinsandscrolls.blogspot.com/2017/07/monster-menu-all-part-1-eating-ad.html
If only I had possessed this information in my younger, more benighted years!
Take everything you can carry, somebody will buy it.
I like to throw a point into every skill, even if it just cancels out the penalty from a low ability score , anything can be RP’d, even (or especially) a bumbling attempt by someone who knows a bit of the theory with woefully inadequate practical experience who just might havea flash of insight (a nat 20) and maybe get it right 🙂 A drastic failure still means a chance to play it out though and the DM can make a lot of fun for a lot of people (including themselves) with a borderline pass or fail.
I wonder if Wizard would characterize Fighter’s cooking attempts as “a lot of fun?”
Oddly enough, one of the systems I’m playing actually does have rules for cooking monster bits.
Probably because said system took heavy influence from Breath of the Wild.
Any link to the system in question? Would be interesting to see how it handles the question.
I’ve always wanted to play a traveling chef character in D&D or Pathfinder, but have always been held back by one thing: the rarity of non-animal, non-construct, non-undead entries in the monster manual with lower than 3 int. Making a meal out of fully aware (if not particularly bright) critters (many of which in fact beat the average human int of 10, at that!) rubs me the wrong way.
To address the question: When playing a certain Pathfinder module in 1e, I gave my pc craft (leather) after the defeat of the session 1 villain and, more importantly, his gator. My character- like all others run in the module- had plenty of reason to despise the man, so making a full leather ensemble (studded leather and a whip) from the croc with its hide covering the crafting costs was just the perfect way to spite him.
Letting players use the materials to get a discount on making something properly is fair pool, I say; in the scorpion poison example, if it was a big concern that it might unbalance things, I’d ask for a craft check to make sure the venom was treated and stored in a way that let it ‘keep’ maybe (give them an amount depending on how well they roll), and note that selling it would be off the table at any location or vendor ‘above board’.
If they got it, it would be pretty cool as you mentioned, and if they tried to get tricky by selling it, that could become a small side event unto itself as they get more acquainted with the criminal underground.
If it’s something really unique, like using the once-enchanted metal from a Golem to make armor, I’d give them something neat but flavorful (the ability for the armor to animate, letting it act like it has a shield with a hand free? The ability to book it out of dodge if the wearer is unconscious and in mortal peril?) as a nod.
Me too, bro. Me too. It’s right up there with “the all bard party” as one of those always-wanted-to-do-it concepts.
Do you remember the Spare Parts comic?Why limit yourself only to monsters? Make thins out of people too 😀
Kytons and Tzimisce approve XD
We’re closing in on 900 comics. They begin to run together.
Think of it this way: dragons eat people all the time. Why shouldn’t people eat them back?
Hear, hear!
One of my early games had a lot of dragons in it. We started harvesting the meat and scales to sell. We made a LOT of money. We sold so much that we ended up crashing the market!
lol. I guess crashing the market is one way to mitigate over-harvesting.
Yeah, the NPCs eventually just stopped buying the meat because they had too much of it. The skins still sold a bit, but not much. We did use some of the skins to make dragonscale armor.
omg she looks like a Christmas tree she’s *so* pretty
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93lrosBEW-Q
That was the base concept for a character of mine. It was the Fate system, so if you can make a good story out of it, it should be allowed. The campaign was a dragon-slaying expedition and I was an Alchemist searching for potent reagents. Eventually we recovered some crystal dragon crystals which I had previously determined had some sort of warmth/cold capabilities. I then proceeded to max roll my highest skill (Alchemy). Long story short, the world we’re in now has magical refrigeration, and I am the only producer.
IMO this is where you start getting to spread the loot out in unusual ways. Your party just beat a difficult encounter, but its an animal or a monster where it makes no sense to have it carrying around bags of gold or items? Great, gimme a roll to harvest it’s bits. You get 10 copper’s worth of meat and 5 silver’s worth of teeth off the carcass.
Gimme a cooking check during downtime to salt and smoke the meat, and that can count as trail rations.
“And with the benefit of hindsight and experience, that seems like a real shame. We ought to reward industrious players, even if it’s only with some gross-out cooking RP.”
You don’t just give it to them, you make them roll for it. Did they have the skill to milk a dead scorpion? Or harvest it’s poison sack? Or handle the poison safely? Failure by fiat is indeed terrible, but failure diue to being unskilled can be hilarious… for the GM and the rest of the party.
I have a Samurai in which I dumped Str&Dex, and went all in on Wis&Con(charisma with what was left over) using Shillelagh(from Magic Initiate) and Mithral heavy armor (ring mail if mithral isn’t available) to bypass the need for Dexterity and Strength.
I had him set up as “retired” major-domo, who had acted as his master’s right hand for diplomatic missives, bodyguard, and personal chef. only made it to level 8-12 range, but he was headed to be able to make something like 15 attacks in a round, almost 250HP, and a +20 Persuasion, which could be leveraged on a diplomat check to non-magically charm someone over the course of a minute of conversation. He was a perfect personification of that “Old gentleman that kicks way more ass than seems possible” anime trope.
He also made great travel rations, shame that I never got a chance to do any real field cooking since we were mostly operating in city limits.
Dungeon Meshi is great for dungeon biome design and survival tactics. It also provides a great concept for gathering parts, as most of them need to be processed to be useful. Rather than trying to balance “you got X thing immediately” it becomes “you have # number of resources that you can work on each day to try to get X thing, too low of a roll may ruin the resource”
Goblin Slayer is great for pushing low level mobs being a danger due to the threat they pose to others (as well as ambush and terrain tactics, aka tucker’s kobolds) rather than needing a “bigger monster” for every increase in level to directly combat the players.
Yes, okay, there’s the rape content that turns off a lot of people, completely understandable, but it’s kind of essential to establish goblins as being a threat of such ingrained maliciousness that they warrant being wiped out on sight.
There’s a limit to what D&D games you can run if you feed into the idea that every creature is completely rational and doesn’t really want to fight if they don’t need to. I had a party that tried to operate on this assumption and combat was thoroughly frustrating because the DM was clearly set for a fight, but wasn’t quite willing to just go “no, I’m a short-sighted goblin, I don’t care if you make a convincing argument for starting a farming coalition, I still feel it’s easier to attack you and take your stuff, forcing you to fight all of us in order to survive” = RP Time:20%, Combat Time:30%, Player attempting to kumbaya the start of battle away:50%
Sousou no Frieren is great for anyone playing an elf or other long-lived race, and wants to actually home in on how alien the thought processes are compared to a shorter-lifespan race.
“Growing Tired of the Lazy High Elf Life After 120 Years” is a manga that also revolves around this concept, though through the filter of an isekai, so the story isn’t nearly as deep as Frieren’s.
There’s a manga called “Life in Another World as a Housekeeping Mage” which is great for inspiring more thought going into cantrips used to address the grind of camping in wilderness.
There’s a hentai called Ishuzoku reviewers, which is about a bunch of guys reviewing interspecies brothels, but once you get past the sexual content (I dunno, rub one out or something) it actually is a very interesting exploration of how the different reproductive aspects (or lack) would affect their dispositions and interests, as well as what would be involved in overcoming hurdles to make those connections.
Goblins (webcomic) is one of the few that I still read anymore and is great for conceptualizing “behind the scenes” stories that establish setting, or just simply having a game revolving around playing “npc monsters”
Order of the Stick (another webcomic) is great for just general D&D storytelling.
If it wasn’t for the fact that Fighter is most likely only doing it to gross out Wizard, I’d be very impressed with him. He got outside of his wheelhouse of only tuning in to murder things and even helped to create a roleplay that didn’t require a fade to black. Hell, I’ll still say good for him even though he IS being a dick. It’s a step in (more or less) the right direction. Plus I’ll give Fighter’s player credit for watching a good show.
When my group take parts from monsters, we generally take things for aesthetics (feathers for decorations, dragon skin for armor etc) and less for mechanical benefit as it’s time consuming and puts more on the DM to prepare.
This is perhaps the most praise Fighter has ever received.
It probably won’t happen again, but for problematic PCs like Fighter, you gotta take the little victories where you can and encourage them to try and be better. Otherwise why the hell would you allow them to stay at the table?
I conditioned my party to collectively groan, whenever we slay some monster with teeth/claws/interesting skull-shape, that my goliath fighter does not have in his collection….yet.