Food Related Questions!


Advice


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Hey, it's me again. This is something that came up two days ago in our session. We have Ranger character Mjoll the Lioness ( i heard she took the name from Skyrim but i don't know where) Who is obsessed with food. She puts points into profession:cook every level and keeps all kinds of food items on hand. What is wierd is that apparently her dream is to Slaughter monsters of the world, Cook them and eat them and then write a cookbook about what monsters are edible and what they taste like, and then publish the book.

However, our DM is left a bit perplexed by the questions and actions of the character, so i decided to get her some help with these questions.

1: Under normal rules, food is simply something that prevents death. Is there any way to make it more interesting? Like getting benefits from good and tasty food?
2: Would eating Monsters, if they're sentient (like dragons) Be considered an evil act?
3: So far she has eaten (or at least tasted) A white dragon, A cockatrice, A hydra, A manticore and a troll (she threw up on the last one though). What effects would you give for eating these, what do you think monsters in general would taste like?

Any other advice would be appreciated! Thanks in advance!


1) sure, some house rule
2) up to your table
3) none, and taste like chicken ;)


1. That'll be third party. Like this!
2. Killing a sentient creature (for Pathfinder definitions of the word) for the purpose of eating them is definitely evil. Eating one that died of natural causes is probably taboo most places, and should involve permission prior to death (or via posthumous contact). The in-between stuff is sketchy at best.
3. A lot of the flavor of meat comes from the type of muscle, its age, and how much it was used. I'd put things on a chicken/pork/beef/fish plot, where "chicken" includes birds and reptiles, "pork" also extends to a lot of humanoids, "beef" handles other large mammals, and "fish" broadly covers non-mammal sea-life. Match creatures to the closest animal and look up what it tastes like. Hydra, for instance, would be a large snake- tough, bland, full of bones, and with a lot of variance on the necks depending on how recently they were grown. The body would be more like gator, so still chicken-like, but with a bit of fish and rabbit.

Shadow Lodge

The official PF position is that eating a sentient creature to gain magical power is an evil act. That said, eating for survival doesn't seem to count since Lizardfolk are described as cannibalistic and tend to be neutral. My position is that as long as you would have killed it anyway, eating it isn't evil.


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This actually comes up nearly every session.

It started with the Beginner Box saying Reefclaws were not only edible, but quite delicious!

I have since had to rule that if it doesn't have a poison entry in the stat block it's edible.

By the way, Ogre Sweetbreads are better than they sound. (As my daughter famously said "the secret ingredient is inbreeding!")


1)Pretty sure there are rules somewhere for magical elven cooking. Another option might be to reflavor the Brewmaster PRC.
2)By pathfinder morality yes its evil as canabalism is expanded to eating any sentient race. You can try and use the logic from Jungle Book where killing things to not eat or defend yourself is what is evil. Honestly a table issue as most alignment debates are
3)Next time the have a hydra ask for an int check. On success point out infinite meat and suggest capture :) I have never regretted doing it before


You could reskin eating parts of certain exotic creatures as the same as consuming a potion (and the effects mimic a spell that can be turned into a potion). If your group goes down this path then the GM should take into account that the creature's parts are part of any treasure haul.

If you are looking to require special preparation to be required for the body part to provide benefit i.e. a check is required to see if the meal has worked then you are probably looking at a houserule. The easiest would be to consider creating the meal the same as brewing a potion. However, as it is a Ranger who is the cook then the spell-list and restrictions are probably not that attractive. One option would be to allow the creature's part to be used in conjunction with Use Magic Device + Profession:cook to substitute the spell not being on the Ranger's spell list. The DC's should be high, to compensate for two skills being used together.


My take on it:

1) Eating sentients under any conditions is a highly questionable act.

2) Killing sentients to eat them is automatically evil.

3) It gets an automatic poison and disease check for every bite you take. Don't eat anything that has a poison or disease attack you're not immune to!

4) DR applies--you are not physically able to eat anything that you can't beat it's DR with natural weapons. If you need to be buffed to beat it's DR then you'll need to buff your teeth to eat it.

5) Likewise, you can't digest anything with an acid resistance higher than any natural acid attack you have.

6) A bite of an outer planar creature that is aligned is the equivalent of consuming a vial of holy (or other alignment) water of that alignment and if you are not yourself an aligned outer planar creature continued consumption will slowly shift your alignment towards that of what you are eating.

While there are closely guarded evil rituals for getting powers from consuming creatures you will otherwise not gain any special powers.


My opinion is, people need to not take it so seriously, let her have fun with her monstrous culinary journey.

Waste not, want not. :-)


I have to agree with the viewpoint that if you would have killed the monsters anyway, it should not matter if you eat them. They may be sentient, but hardly "human." If that makes any sense.

The ranger herself is CG in alignment. She doesn't seek out monsters just to eat them, but for the thrill of the hunt.cooking them and eating is a big bonus, of course.she is otherwise quite a nice person. Her motivation for the cookbook is to make sure nobody goes hungry, since her back story involves her family starving to death.

Besides, skinning a dragon and wearing that skin as armor is OK but eating is not?


As to the poison comments I have had rattle snake stew and it did taste like chicken (which is what we were told it was before we ate it).

In game I would allow some sort of skill roll to remove the poison glands, sacks, etc from some creatures so you could eat them with out suffering any problems.
Having said that I fully agree that some creatures should not be edible , taste good or should have special abilities/poisons/disease be able to be removed from them so you could eat them safely.

As to social problems eating creatures? I would play this by ear as a GM and my rulings could vary widely based on just how said "acts" were carried out and the tone of the PC at the time of carrying out said acts.

I have also played in a game and know of a few more in which "adventures" brought in their kills to a goblin fast food (FF) establishment for $$$ and then the FF location sold it to the populace to eat. It brought some comedy to the game as well as some $$ to us the PC's if we had a way to keep the kills fresh and the location needed said "meat" for their menu or one of there specials.

In general, if you are having fun and no one is offend and it is explained what might offend society in the game world, go for it. Have fun with it until it is not fun any more.

MDC


I have them make a survival check to remove the poison glands.


I'd say it's evil if it's sentient but harmless (or at least hasn't tried to harm you yet). Killing and eating a Red Dragon is fine, as they would've done the same to you. Killing and eating a Chromatic Dragon is evil, as they're generally Good-aligned.
More humanoid-ish shapes confuse the matter. I wouldn't eat most Fey creatures, as they're too close to humans in physiology. Or a Minotaur, for that matter. Magical Beasts confuse things even further, as they're more like animals, but with (near-) human intelligence.
So, my quick rules would be:
- No eating humanoid-ish creatures. If they have arms and legs, stand upright, no eating them. If you could potentially make offspring with them, don't do it (except for Dragons, and potentially some others I don't know about).
- No Good-aligned creatures, think hard about Neutral-aligned creatures.
- No eating of creatures with human intelligence, especially if they fall in the categories above. This is basically a Venn circle that cannot overlap with one of the other two circles. If they can speak, think about it. An Otyugh has basic intelligence, but the fact that it speaks makes me hesitate.

I'd say a Reefclaw is fine to eat (dumb, non-humanoid, neutral, pretty much like eating chicken), Trolls aren't, because they're too human-like. Exceptions undoubtedly exist that I haven't thought of right now.

As for eating the creatures, I'd say that if you eat some of its "essence," you'd gain a small fraction of its power while it's in your system. A White Dragon would give you some natural armour, or some Cold DR, or maybe a very small breath weapon. A Manticore would allow you to shoot a single spike. A Cockatrice would give a gaze attack that does a small amount of DEX damage, and so on. But only if it's prepared well (high Profession: Cook check, say, DC 25 or so, or scaling to CR) and the right parts are used. Just a small bonus for a character who has invested in a weird skill so she feels she's contributing.


Quentin, I think you meant to say metallic, not chromatic. And killing a metallic dragon just so you could eat it would be evil. On the other hand, if you had to kill that metallic dragon for another reason anyway (maybe it went crazy, or just decided to kill you all for some other reason) and then decided to eat it afterwards, that might be a non-evil act.

And as for loren's suggestion on DR, I would point out that DR usually comes from having a tough exterior, and probably doesn't apply once you get past the skin. Of course, that may not be true when dealing with outsiders or aberrations.

Speaking of aberrations, as a GM I would personally make a penalty happen if you ate one, because I refuse to believe that could possibly be good for you unless your species specifically eats them.


Thanks for the correction. I indeed meant metallic.

I think someone from design (JJ himself?) once said DR could also be described as the wound closing slightly, as a sort of one-time fast healing (mainly when dealing with Outsiders), but yeah, I'd agree that DR generally comes from a tough exterior and/or physiological makeup. A Yeti is cold-immune because he deals cold himself. Maybe the Yeti himself is cold, maybe he's just really well insulated.

As for aberrations, I guess it depends on the type you're eating. A Reeflcaw is pretty much a lobster, but anything that dwells in a sewer would need a thorough cleaning/frying before I'd want to eat it. And I don't want be be anywhere near a plate of grilled Gibbering Mouther. And I sure as hell don't trust anyone who claims to cook a mean Devil (or Demon) steak.

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