One of the encounters that I remember well from my last group's
Forgotten Realms campaign occured in orc-occupied Teshwave, where the party met up with the orc leader at dinner time. Aside from my memory of our party's barbarian presenting the halfing (with a chain around his neck) as a pet, the other thing that's stuck with me was the meal the orcs were having — lizardman haunch with brown sauce (we never did find out exactly what the "brown sauce" was, and I'm not sure we really wanted to). The point is, as I sat down to review
Athenaeum Arcane: Menu Items from
Ronin Arts, I thought to myself, "Why do I care about food in a fantasy role-playing game? It's never made a difference to my groups." And then I remembered the lizardman haunch with brown sauce, and how it, more than some of the plots and NPCs, stuck with the group, popping up in in-game conversations here and there.
The PDF itself, 10-pages long with a full color cover, presents twelve menu items and two sample inns. Layout, as usual for Ronin Arts, is clean and functional (although the grey borders that I've found in the other two
Athenaeum Arcane products are still here, and I'm not exactly sure what purpose they serve). The cover art, by Theodore Wing III, is nicely done, but I'm not sure what a man in a turban with mystical energy leaking from his eyes really has to do with food in gaming.
The two sample inns, the Cheerful Nymph and the Golden Coin, are both detailed very quickly, with a little flavor text follwed by a list of workers (name, gender, race, class/level, and hit points are given — I could have done without class/level and hit points and would have liked to see alignment included, as it's useful for shorthand motivations and reactions for a stock NPC). No maps are included, although the flavor text describes the layout quickly — the Cheerful Nymph, for example, has long, cafeteria/mess hall style tables that the customers share with strangers, while the Golden Coin has tables with curtains hung around them for privacy. This shorthand works well in place of a map, giving a solid idea as to how the place might look without casting that image in iron (after all, how often do you really need a map of an inn or tavern to be provided for you?).
Each of the twelve menu items is given a name, two in-character descriptions (one common, one fine), two sources for the descriptions (again, one common and one fine), prices, and special notes. I like the inclusion of descriptions and NPCs with each dish — it'd make using them that much easier and automatically gives the GM a server with some depth and personality. That said, the description for the common inn frequently uses heavy dialect ("We take one o' 'em ol' bread pockets..."), something I could have done without, as the dialogue would be easier to read without it, particularly if I were trying to read it and change it on the fly. The special notes, also, when used, are nice, particularly for some of the more unusual meals, such as druid's delight, which is made of violet fungus and can be poisonous if cooked improperly.
In and of themselves, the meals presented are fine and thorough. You'll know exactly what your PCs are eating with the descriptions here. I was a bit twitchy about flash-roasted wyvern steaks, which, when possible, are cooked using a
fireball spell — it's hard for me to suspend my disbelief here, as (aside from thinking that "a
fireball is not a toy") this is far, far too high magic for me and seems rather dangerous to do in an inn (do they prep it off site, out of town and then run it back to the inn for the final touches?). Also, kitty of the sea was a rather silly name, especially given its real world echoes.
The real strength of the product is in the descriptions and special notes, where little nuggets like the Icy Raven pub can be found, or potential substitutions can be found — for instance, a lower quality establishment might serve adventurers sea bass and call it kitty of the sea (which is made from sea cat) or the mutton in Merdeck's magnificent mutton stew might be replaced with horsemeat. At other times, the NPCs given are neat and useful, such as Trendon, an elf druid working off a fine at The Friendly Sip. In the end, this is where the product works best for me. Would I use the meals? Probably. Would I use the NPCs and inns? Definitely.
