Recent content by talien

This is great! We covered the other two in other articles (and came to the same conclusions, I believe), but I believe you solved the mystery of the owlbear inspiration. Totsaurus definitely looks like a solid candidate!

I recently had the opportunity to catch up with Fenway Jones, Founder and Executive Director of Jasper's Game Day, events that raise funds and awareness all year round for suicide prevention with the power of community and RPG games like Dungeons and Dragons. A Focus on Mental Health Fenway...

In Jon Peterson’s Playing at the World, he correctly pointed out that Dungeons & Dragons, despite being known as the first role-playing game, didn’t actually explain how to role-play. His follow-up, The Elusive Shift, explains how RPGs came to define themselves. Anyone familiar with Jon’s...

Every time I see the title of the article I have a heart-stopping moment where my brain double-confirms I spelled it right...

This issue kicked off a series of "adventures" in which everyone played evil characters so that we could justify the anti-paladin's inclusion. Cue the assassins, backstabbing thieves, and necromancers. The characters would then just kill each other at a moment's notice over the slightest...

The Heroes' Feast Cookbook has so many recipes that you can mix and match as you see fit, and in this case we decided to skip ahead to a dessert perfect for Valentine's Day: Meal's End. Meal's End Found in the elven recipe section, Meal's End is not specifically part of any Dungeons & Dragon's...

We've been going meal by meal in page order (although we will break that streak starting with the next article which is appropriate for a Valentine's Day dessert to debut this Friday). We'll definitely get to the Miner's Pie. There's considerably discussion of dwarven palates and what they eat...

Meat. Pies. Meat in a pie. What could go wrong? A Brief History of Meat Pies Meat pies hearken back to 9500 BC, when ancient Egyptians made meat pies of barley, honey, oat, rye, and wheat. Greeks and Romans had their own variants, but the term didn't come into popular usage until the 14th...

I love this idea. One of the things I try to incorporate into my adventures is that a proficiency in a tool should be relevant to the game. Cook's Utensils would be something I imagine you could use as a substitute material component, with the requirement that food needs to be eaten to create...

We're on to our third recipe from the Heroes' Feast Cookbook for Dungeons & Dragons and it's a turkey dinner. There's some compromises the book makes to make it suitable for a tavern's menu, but in a fantasy world the meal lends itself to a fantasy version of Thanksgiving. The Real Life Meal...

We've made the stew, the braised beef, and the turkey legs. So far all the food was delicious, but not all of them are suitable for a group of players without some serious preparation (the braised beef took a lot of time and the turkey legs required multiple ovens going at once).

Yes, on Monday I post about grappling with the turkey recipe from Heroes' Feast which was kind of a mess.

I was a contributor to the original campaign setting, will be curious if what I wrote carries over (it was fluff, not stats).

We recently made braised beef from The Heroes' Feast cookbook, which purports to translate fantasy dishes into real life recipes. Which brings up the question: what if your world's cattle aren't like Earth's? Amphail Braised Beef This is our second attempt at a recipe from the Heroes Feast...

I love this! To your point, I think telling a culture's story through food is a great shortcut for DMs to help PCs experience their world. I did this in my game last night, including reskinning healing potions which are perhaps the easiest to make feel different but are still very relevant to...