Emergency Rations
While musing about Wizard’s recent escapades, I found myself drawn into my old “Character Ideas & Builds” document. It’s 57 pages worth of character concepts, running the gamut from one-to-twenty leveling plans all the way down to half-baked bullet points. One of these latter reads as follows:
- Half-orc barbarian / alchemist. Battle spatula. Adventures for exotic ingredients.
It was like smelling an old baseball glove you haven’t picked up in years. Or meeting your best friend from middle school. Or walking into your childhood bedroom. The memories came rushing back, and I recalled what I was on about.
My dude and his trusty battle spatula (a reflavored great club) would search the depths of the dungeon for weird monsters. The barbarian half brought animism to the table, gaining the strength of monsters by consuming them. The alchemist brought cookery, with ‘weird ingredients’ already simmering in that’s class’s proverbial cookpot. It was such a cool concept! It was highly original! I couldn’t wait to play!
And it wasn’t just Delicious in Dungeon. The longer I prowled my various Mage’s Forums, the more I saw the concept out in the wilds. Loads of hungry adventurers were scouring dungeons and eating monsters! No trail rations for these bad boys! Only Jell-O-tinous cubes and brazed owlbear steak. And not satisfied with these delicacies, they next turned their eyes to less dangerous ingredients.
“Can I eat my familiar?” they asked. “I know it disappears when it hits 0 Hit Points, but what if I just took a leg or something?”
From there it’s only a short hop to 5e lizardfolk eating party members before resurrecting them. “I was hungry! I only needed a finger or two to bring you back. Why are you complaining?”
And while all this weirdness is pretty weird, I have no doubt that it will pale in comparison to the horrors coming in the comments section. So put on your bibs and fire up the grill, Handbook-World! For today’s discussion: What is the weirdest thing you’ve eaten in-game?
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Pickled goblin eggs.
Spay and Neuter your pets as emergency food supply.
They’re a more sustainable food supply if you don’t.
Indeed. And I’m a little disturbed that that wasn’t more obvious to the forst poster
But goblins don’t… I mean, even if they did… Ew.
Okay, ludicrous opener aside, this was a bit of a joke throughout the campaign; when asked what kind of cargo a character was involved in ferrying, the player’s immediate response was pickled goblin eggs. Everyone was immediately taken with this idea and the awful question it posed about if it was actually eggs from goblins that had been pickled, and even if not, *did* goblins lay eggs in this setting? We kept bringing it up. The first player remained fervent at all opportunities that they were exactly as they sounded, goblin eggs which had been pickled, no matter how much it was insisted goblins did not lay eggs.
Eventually a friendly NPC from a trade caravan, among some enticing samples of his wares, produced a jar of pickled goblin eggs. Everyone died laughing. When asked, the merchant insisted they were genuine goblin’s eggs in brine, as the DM went on to describe that we could tell they were very definitely duck’s eggs that had been through an involved process, something like century eggs, and then pickled. It was unanimously decided that everybody loved them immensely.
A little closer to the topic at hand, though… Later, the party encountered a magic plate which would fill itself with a requested food if anyone asked. Someone asked for goblin eggs, hoping to receive more of them. Instead the plate was covered in a strange black mass made of little tiny things. The DM said it looked almost like caviar.
(My character did not give the requester the chance to eat it, which he was about to do otherwise.)
In the far east, eggs is a euphemism for testicles. Goblin eggs might mean goblin testicles.
Weirdest in-game meal? Myself.
Long version: Paranoia. Outdoors mission. No enough supplies for the trip, but Friend Computer was always willing to airdrop extra clones when we died. Plenty of good meat on clones and starving to death is double-plus unfun. However, we can’t go wasting valuable Computer property requesting extra clones for cannibalism, so we had to set up a rota of exectution-worthy treason, so we could convict and execute each other (no disintegrations) then eat them, calling in a new clone to carry on with the mission.
Yeah, I can totally see that happening in Paranoia. Both the “we can resupply personnel but not food” thing, and the solution…
On the player side, a bar hidden in a desert refuge served scorpion venom liquor. My character didn’t have any, but some of the others did. Apparently the numbing effect on the tongue eventually makes for good drinking?
On the GM side, I haven’t really had much in the way of chances to provide weird food—so at present, the strangest I’ve served is carrot pancakes, made by the aunt of the halfling rogue. I was tempted to have a Dwarven pastry made with an underground root that combined sweet and umami flavors, but that scene never really got to happen. I am still probably going to try making pancakes with some carrot flour added IRL before the party sets out for the final dungeon of the module, though, just as a fun little callback.
On a related note, my past journeys have taken me to a rather fun 5e-focused site with some culinary ethnographies and “how to cook X monster” guides I enjoyed: https://www.eatingthedungeon.com/
Not sure how often it updates, but it is fun to read.
Thanks for the link! It’ll go well with the Monster Menu I picked up (at https://www.dmsguild.com/product/363235/The-Monster-Menu for the interested). However, currently weirdest thing our party’s eaten is probably from my secondary mini-adventure group. They’re currently exploring a collection of strange, magically altered islands (used to be a continent until a god got slapped through it in a god-on-god slapfight; now it’s an archipelago). They’re on one right now where just about everything is crystalline – fruits, vegetables, everything. So you end up with carrots with crunchy outsides and powdery fizzy insides – like a sherbet lemon except carrot-flavoured. One of the party wants to try making carrot cake with those.
Several dwarves, whole. Because the character was hungry. Well, that, and they were chanting and carrying on like cultists trying to summon something unpleasant. Or at least, something *more* unpleasant, since they already had my character and his friends to contend with.
And yes, this *was* a lizardfolk character, played in a high-level 3.5e game with monstrous characters. Not just a standard variety lizardfolk either… a black-scale, big and brutal, capable of going toe to toe with an adult dragon, and so not going to be slowed down by much… including the need to chew his meals. Fun guy.
Imagine needing to eat food
*Laughs in Leshy*
*Laughs in vegetarian*
This is one reason why Druid can’t leave her boyfriend and her animal companion unsupervised.
See, normally it’s the animal companion being used as emergency food by your party-members, not the other way around.
True, but Allie is cute. Terrifying, but cute.
The 69 position between the druid’s animal companion and boyfriend?
Lumberjack Explosion must be sweating profusely in the background.
Just last session, our group encountered a Ghoran (a race who has origins as being bred for food). We immediately started with the ‘do not eat the Ghoran’ jokes.
Nothing myself, but I did DM for a player who frequently ate his kills as a beast barbarian. Like a basilisk. Or pig goblins.
I think the record is a Dwarven bounty hunter who targeted githyanki specifically, ripped out their livers, and fermented them into a vile clear liquor. But I’ll be honest, I play a lot of weird characters and none of them eat normal food.
I think my favorite example was a lizardfolk paladin. He was completely a member of contemporary human society and worked as a baker, until a “baby god” decided to make itself known in a piece of toast the paladin cooked. The baker-turned-paladin was gamely along for this whole adventuring business and liked baking pancakes for the team every morning. Biting people, or even eating raw meat, really grossed him out and he vigorously brushed his teeth very time he had to do it. Very fun times.
Anything Tosh cooked. Again, homebrew. Cooking is one of the auxiliary skills that players roll for their characters along with Dancing and Singing. I’ve hung many a game session hook on those.
Tosh the Terrible was my husbands kinder and he had literally rolled an 01 (percentile – low bad) on his cooking. Trouble was, hubby played him as thinking he was a fantastic cook and was constantly badgering the party to let him cook for them. He poisoned the party on a regular basis. He tended to just wander the immediate area around their campsite to gather “ingredients” and never knew what was going into the pot. Mushrooms, snake skins, the weird little critter that wasn’t fast enough to get away, all things to feed to the rest of the group.
He also played him as having no sense of taste and usually just eating iron rations so the rest of the party could “enjoy” his creations. The dwarven cleric finally got tired of throwing purify on everything and threatened to stuff him and serve HIM as dinner, if he didn’t stop.
I’ll just leave this here:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_in_Dungeon
Know how I know you didn’t read today’s rant? 😛
I went to comments immediately after seeing comic.
in my defense. 😉
No soup for you!
Sobering soup does not work on some alcoholics.
Player side: I don’t know. One campaign, the Neutral Evil PC who was our party cook would sometimes pass notes to the DM, then serve up a delicious stew out of nowhere. When we’d ask where all this bounty came from, he’d just say things like “cave rabbit; it’s good for you. Shut up and dig in.”
On the DM side: I once had a *really* bad prepackaged module that I’d paid good money for and wanted to try to run at least once to justify the expense. To foil the assumed premise, instead of using four to six 10th level PCs as suggested, I pregenerated three 10 HD monsters, each with 10 HD of minions: a wemic/lamia hybrid with a 10th level human fighter thrall, a beholder with a pair of cyclopskin worshippers, and a “Lizard King” lizard man ruler with 20 caymas (tiny lizard kin from Red Steel) as henchmen and “emergency rations.” The player who got Lord Drull really leaned into the part. Whenever this uneasy alliance of monsters hit an obstacle or setback, he’d pull out a Twizzler and tear into it with extreme prejudice, then cross off another henchman from his character sheet.
http://spheresofpower.wikidot.com/willing-martyr
I’ll just leave this here. .
I read the first ability, assumed this was just a joke about intentionally killing an immortal familiar, and read the second ability.
Paizo is enabling our weirdest impulses and I am all for that.
It’s how you play Thor.
Before I truly understood D&D and honestly because I’d been distracted and hadn’t heard the monster description: otyugh. My character regretted it immediately.
the creature Paizo has to call Sewer Beast in their miniatures line :-p
On the one hand, originality is overrated.
On the other hand, the first D&D character I had in mind was somebody who had their spirit overloaded with eight “friends” and had an alignment of 1d8. It was only later that I found out Octan was the name LEGO uses for their gas stations.
Horse half of a centaur
Why not the bull half of the minotaur?
Trail jerky from the new lizard PC . . .
A people i made, the ralma, eat both normal food and souls. They need both. They also consider elf as a delicatessen and elf brains in particular are considered a dessert worth of nobles, kids and their emperor. They aren’t picking and also nibble on their human slaves when not using them as fertilizer. Granted they live inside a mountain and its caves so they get only slaves, mushrooms and fish to eat. On the souls side they just eat what they can get. Human, elves, demons and even the soul energy of the own ralma are fair trade. The only exception is another ralma when they are still alive. Except under specific circumstances like punishing traitors with death by dinner. They are fun guys, their indigo fanction sorcerers also like to get high with potions to enhance their consciousness and magic and other totally reasonable reasons to get high 😀
Changeling: The Lost actually has this premise as one of their prestige class, The Knights of the Knowledge of the Tongue (and yes, I too note the obvious perverted joke).
Delicious In Dungeon is really great, as it really takes a ‘realistic’ look at surviving on monsters, as well as what a dungeon ecology would be like. There are also a good number of stories where getting the food is the adventure. Like ‘Toriko’, a Shonen series all about gourmet hunters who search the world for rare foodstuffs, starring basically a monk/barbarian who refers to his attacks with his bare hands as ‘knife’ and ‘fork’ when dealing slashing or piercing damage respectively.
As for the weirdess thing… nothing really sticks out in my memory. I do know that there is a ‘full course’ for Thralls of Zuggtmoy that’d I love to make a character who could survive it.
Changeling love being cunning linguist.
Rise of the Runelords has this challenge in part one:
Drink a glass of “water” from a hagfish tank without throwing up and win some money.
But I guess since I didn’t win it doesn’t count as „eating“.
I’ve mentioned it before, but one of my groups had an Alchemist who was reflavored (ha) as a magic chef. He could breath fire by chewing magic peppers (archetype variant of the bomb ability). He never really did much with, uh, “locally-sourced” ingredients, though. Mostly he used extracts of Polypurpose Panacea to make beer.
One of my group’s players played a tiefling Oracle with the ghoul curse, which caused her to eat demon flesh for stat boosts. (We agreed that this was TECHNICALLY ethical.) Ironically, that PC was later eaten by a fiendish froghemoth. Another PC tried to Baleful Polymorph the froghemoth into a goldfish. This failed due to saving throw or spell resistance, but I ruled that if it had worked, the goldfish’d froghemoth would have ended up in the stomach of the very confused Oracle that had just been in its stomach.
In my Ancient Aliens campaign, one of the PCs is obsessed with finding as many goo tubes (flavored alien toothpaste) as he can, and they’ve had a lot of strange flavors, especially since they can’t read the labels. (“This tube tastes like pickled porcupine. Why do you know that?”) That same PC once licked some strange glowing goop they found on a tree, which turned out to be the glowsap of a star monarch. ( https://aonprd.com/MonsterDisplay.aspx?ItemName=Star%20Monarch ) Which causes arsenic poisoning if consumed. Probably shouldn’t have done that.
Raw sheep guts mixed with dirt
#justwarlockthings
Someone decided haggis didn’t sound disgusting enough.
Were you a wolf at the time?
No, fully humanoid.
For context, this was at very low levels, and we were investigating disappearing sheep in a small village
When we found that the dead sheep were being buried to eat later or something, my warlock patron basically said “It would be really funny if I made you want to eat that out of the dirt”
And it was in fact, really funny.
Heard of turducken? How about destrabolethducken? It was a Thayan tavern’s specialty dish in a game I played in once.
I was in a campaign where my character was really into trying local foods, and we went to a lot of different places. So sometimes he’d be buying like, smoked cheeses or meat pies, or sampling a nice mead or cider; and sometimes what he got were like, rat-and-eel sausages that may or may not have been the magical version of irradiated in some half-destroyed swamp city, or roasted ankheg. It was honestly pretty fun portraying just this kind of spacey druid being like “hey, this is a nice flavor” because he just loved food. (I think at one point we killed, butchered, and ate an entire achaierai. Tasted like chicken, but lighter.)
My Undine Magus once ate some edible corals out of curiosity, acquired a bit of a taste for it. My current Elven Investigator in my 2e game’s rations are the equivalent of Roman Fruit Cake (turns out that originated as their rations) with peanut butter. It’s kind of fun to describe what your characters’ rations are and figure out their tastes, how frugal or extravagant they are, etc.
For a meal made of a monster, we played a bit of the Fists of the Ruby Phoenix AP and took our pound of flesh from a monstrous Fey bird that could cause confusion with its voice and led us on a chase. A less family friendly meal we did not indulge in was one crazy party member in Starfinder making Drow burgers (we refused to ever speak of it again in-universe and it was purely a spite thing instead of actually intended as a meal but… yeah).
I actually had the itch to do a wandering chef myself in 5e D&D, and Delicious in Dungeon only encouraged me. What stopped me was taking a look at the beastiary of that (and PF1e when I considered playing the concept there) and noticing a disconcertingly massive percentage of the possible menu involved creatures with 3+ Int, undead, constructs… so that concept went back in the folder.
I remember one time that everyone in the party except me was considering eating sahuagin caviar.
Pretty rough session for me. I know we like to joke about how adventurers just invade peaceful monsters’ lairs to murder and rob them, but it usually doesn’t feel like that’s what we’re doing. This time it did, even before we got to the nursery.
“Oh, we’re pirates, we gotta do bad things—” We started this adventure as slaves breaking free of our captors, there’s plenty of room for us to play Jack-Sparrow-type lovable rogues who don’t do anything worse than Team Rocket; you just want to play raiders.
I had a character swallow a handful of cursed swords that brainwashed whomever wields them once. My character had low-int, the Swallow Whole racial feature, and had just learned that sword-swallowing is a thing that people can do, so she had to try it.
Fortunately, the mind-affecting magic didn’t consider “literally being inside someone” as being wielded by them, so she was able to regurgitate all of them later (to my party member’s general dismay). It was such a successful strategy that my character started swallowing her coin pouch after that in case of cursed coins, at least until she tried to buy something and was subsequently kicked out of the shop.
Well I’ve never had the opportunity to have my own characters eat anything particularly weird. Though I did once run a game where the characters went to a drow city and I put a lot of detail into their options for dining experiences. Though it still wasn’t crazy weird. Just whatever I could think up that’d make sense, even if I was making up new options. (A lot of mushroom and fish based stuff and some other options mixed in.)
Are there any edible rocks in the Underdark? I feel like there ought to be something called mealstone down there.
As a matter of fact there is! It’s this extremely valuable and rare substance we call…..
……
……….
…………
…………….
Salt.
Underdark have lots of shrooms. The shroom only need light to align themselves, not for growth. They need the daekness to grow.
Mario, Peach, Toad, … are all mushrooms, so one mushroom eating another…
Mario isn’t a fungi, he’s a plumber.
/rimshot
Though, if Princess Peach isn’t human, it might just be a fungal that Mario is…
A living spider, through that might not count given that I coughed it up again (still living) later.
… I’m never casting Spider Climb without having Eschew Materials ever again
In the Starfinder Dead Suns campaign I played Arcalinte Soter in, we were on the planet Castrovel, following the trail of Dr. Olmehya Solstarni Wehir of House Raimar, Echo of Inshirsi’s Dream, an archaeologist who had information we needed but had been kidnapped. Our search led us to the Five Arches café, owned and operated by the android Uilee. Uilee’s hobby was inventing new dishes, which was problematic because as an android, she had no sense of taste. Arcalinte ordered some tea, but the only tea Uilee had was felheed tea, an indigestible liquid with mildly hallucinogenic qualities for undead. While it wasn’t toxic for the living, it does taste terrible, specifically like “a mix of turpentine and some kind of rotting plant matter”. Arcalinte, being the polite young man he was, drank it anyway.
Uilee was eager for us to try a special she’d invented, roast squallwing with bluebell compote and taggit oil dressing, and we quickly learned while there WERE menus at the Five Arches, they were more for show than anything, as Uilee preferred to push her culinary experiments on her customers, meaning most regulars to the place knew to just order drinks. We declined, but wanting to be polite to Uilee Arcalinte ordered a spinach omelet with wheat toast in homage to The Emperor’s New Groove. This is what the GM described being delivered:
“Uilee comes back with Arc’s earlier order of a spinach omelet with toast… or rather, something that bears only the vaguest resemblance to that dish. Broad dark-green leaves dominate the plate with some bright red gelatinous substance nestled in the center of them. To the side, a couple of slides of perfectly ordinary looking wheat toast.”
Once Arcalinte actually took a taste, it was…actually fine. The gelatinous substance tasted similar to scrambled eggs with a lot of pepper, and when combined with the leaves and toast it more or less tasted exactly like what Arcalinte ordered, so he enjoyed it, even as the rest of the party was shocked at his willingness to consume such an odd-looking creation.
Raw Behir haunch. I was caring for four growing Dire Wolves at the time and we weren’t exactly flush with cash.
Ah Excel Saga. One of my favorite shows.
I’m sure if it were made today some moron would completely ignore the fact that it was made in Japan and accuse the bits about Menchi of being racist against asians.
I had an unused idea about a restaurant run by poison-immune demons in the abyss that would use mustard gas instead of mustard
Weirdest? Probably cursed items and anything else that needed to be ‘gone forever’.
So I played a Gangrel Circle of the Crone member in a LARP and was known as “The Crone’s Teeth”, or “Teeth” for short. It was a title, the character’s actual name was Micheal ‘Mick’ Belkar, a personality mashup of Sgt Michael Belker (https://www.writeups.org/michael-belker-biter-hill-street-blues/) and Belkar (from OotS). Anyway, he was the “Monster” of the Circle, he was the tough, the heavy, the kneebreaker. If the Circle needed someone dealt with, they sent him (even after he took over the local circle, he had the Maiden play the face to the other vamps in town, while he ‘took care of business’).
So he’d managed to ‘level up’ his Feeding the Crone ritual such that anything he ate while manifesting the ability would be destroyed, not just blood. So of course he ate anything that needed to ‘just go away’. Most notably a few cursed items, one holy relic, and almost every ‘bad guy’ that made trouble for his Circle.
I don’t think familiars, steeds, etc. leave corpses when killed. You could arguably eat them alive, but then there’s the question of when it poofs. Does tearing off a chunk of them kill that chunk and cause it to poof? Do the chunks poof when the source body dies? Either way ask your DM, but in the former scenario eating them is impossible.
Over in the Abyssal book of Exalted 2e, there’s a great image of a zombie cow walking table to table, letting villains help themselves to a choice cut for yakiniku.
That probably depends on the Game System. Pathfinder has them as natural animals that have a bond with the Spellcaster, while you would I believe be correct for 5e D&D where they are summoned creatures.
Fighter and Cleric have crossed lines this day. …Wizard too since her reason to not eat the poor cute little zombied rat is only that he is unsanitary.
Couldn’t they go raid the candy people and eat them? No one really likes the candied apple kids with their noodle hose arms, pie cut eyes, golly-gee-willickers wholesome schtick! AND THEY TASTE GOOD! ;p
…though this might be a good time for Scabby to remember that wand he stole.
Drow Liver. Basically was playing a barbarian/rogue/clown/professor/thespian. ONE of his gimmicks was leaning hard into misunderstandings and esoterica of turn of the century academia. So relying on papers published on prestige and speculation rather than field work and scientific rigor (Why the bugbear raised in the academy was a bear totem, thought his people worshiped bears before he met them).
Any student of forgotten realms know A LOT of monsters consider elves the tastiest, the reasons were debated endlessly in academic circles. Well seeing as it was dungeon of the mad mage, I had made a deal with a goblin chef the next elf brought in would be prepared.
DM thought I was going for Hanibal Lecter (I was a clown not monster dangit) not what I was going for but I did have high grade wine as old loot knocking around. Me and the chef determined it wasn’t…great. But concluded that might be due to how much poison a drow ingests as part of their daily diet (based on the writings of sir snob “I’ve totally been to the underdark trust me guys”).
I had to retire Professor Bone when I was saddled as the new forever DM.
Almost forgot to mention was doing the epicurean bit taken to the extreme ala Darwin eating a species of turtle into extinction.
Half of some kind of undead spellcaster in the basement of some abandoned house in Ghosts of Saltmarsh. Lizardfolk pc.