Dungeon Meshi for Dungeons and Dragons: Ape to Bear

 I was talking to a friend on twitter. This is my one internet friend I have who I met in person at a con. He wanted a supplement based on some Manga. Now, Manga is largely reactionary brain poison and this one is probably no exception. But that is what we like now. We love our little cartoons. We love our little Goku's and our 2,000 year old dragons that look like sexualized twelve-year-olds. We love it.

WE LOVE IT!!!

Because we love it I am taking all the monsters from the Blueholme™ Journeymanne™ rules and making a Dungeon Meshi Supplement for it. This is officially what all the monsters in Blueholme™ taste like unless Michael Thomas states otherwise.

 A

Apes: We got 3 sizes of apes. I remember seeing video as a kid of people eating a monkey’s brain. I remember the monkey still being alive. A quick google reveals that this is probably bullshit. So let’s not do Orientalism and save our PCs from prion disease.

Sometimes nobles will coerce peasants or serfs to eat ape brains raw. Then the Nobles keep the peasants on their lands as hermits and show them off at garden parties. The guests get to watch over the course of a few months the peasants go insane and then die.

The rest of the meat tastes tough and gamey. You are going to need to cook it slow with lots of extra fat.


Amazon: Oh boy. Should you eat women? Would you eat women?  Every bite of an Amazon you take gives you one misogyny point. Every time your character speaks you have to roll a d20 and if you don’t roll higher than your misogyny points you character complains about child support instead of saying what you intended them to say.

Also Angels look like these weird things.

Angel: Ok you want a high level adventure. Here is a high level adventure anyone that feeds a immortal being to other immortal beings without them finding out gets 20k experience per hd per God that does the eating.

Ants: I ate bugs once. They weren’t that good. Apparently ants tasted different depending on species but I read that big ants are bitter with a nutty taste. So giant ants would probably have a really bitter taste.

    probably soak in water and add an acid like lemon juice to remove the bitterness. or sugar curing.

B

Bandit: Let’s be real if you are running a world based with a  Feudal system. Then the bandits are probably the good guys. The nobles are bad. Kings are bad. There is no such thing as a good king if they were good they wouldn’t be kings grow up. But look if you want to eat the good guys go for it. Bandits taste like normal humans but every time you eat one there is a 20% chance you develop class consciousness and start crying, Unless you are a noble or an aristocrat.

Stop making basilisks look cool. The dumber they look the more humiliating it is to be killed by one.

Basilisk: Many cultures eat Lizards, very few eat lizard kings. The meat is delicious fried. The meat is succulent roasted as long as there is enough fat in the pan. Don’t forget to baste it. But watch out brave adventurer, you might acquire a taste for royalty. After eating the Basilisk save vs Gaze (We are using Blueholme™ rules here) or you are overcome with a desire to eat the rich and powerful. This desire can only be quelled by a bestow curse spell restoring your false class consciousness.

Bat: You want to eat some bats. You can’t eat bats. That’s how you start a Covid epidemic. Where have you been these past few years. Or maybe not who knows anymore who can we trust. When someone first tries to eat a bat flip a coin heads they become patient zero for the novel Coronavirus. Tails, and Covid comes from a lab and they are totally fine.

Bear: You can eat bear meat but you better thank the bear’s ghost first or you will get trichinosis. You also have a 1 in 6 chance of getting trichinosis if you don’t fully cook the meat. Make a stew. Michael Thomas should have put some more fatty monsters in his bestiary because once again we have a monster that is going to need some added fat in the recipe to make the meat tender. Or some acid. Unfortunately slimes are in the second half of the alphabet. But yeah spoilers: Slimes used in small quantities in recipes are going to make a lot of this tough meat tender.

Also FYI trichinosis will give you diarrhea and maybe kill you. Do not just cook this on a stick over the fire!

Night's Dark Terror Session: I Lost Track 1

 We're in a burning village. There are dog headed babies and dog-headed women running screaming. I don't know what's going on. I missed the last session. I have a magic mace now and a lot of people are dead. 

"oh, what's that noise. Yelling? hmmm. Let's go towards it. Oh look a shack with a prisoner in it. I guess it was ok to massacre this entire village then. They had a prisoner. That means they're evil." The prisoner is an ugly elf with a stupid name. He is in a loin cloth. We give him a cape and ask him about his backstory. He conveniently has amnesia. He finds some leather armor but I want to remember him in his cape and loin cloth. 

Next we return to the other village. The village of people we don't kill. The people there look like short squat Joe Rogans. There is another class of people there not pictured who all look like Patton Oswalt or something probably. It is 3 am or so but we have to investigate a crime. The suspect is a blog god. He is accused of killing 3 Joe Rogans and destroying a gate. We were planning on killing the blob god anyway and stealing his treasure anyway so this is a good justification, a Causus Belli if you will.

First we have to go on a quest that involves shitting in a pond (British modules were really weird). At the pond we find out that the Joe Rogan's are racist against our goblins. We pull a bunch of their podcasts but continue working with them. 

Next we go to, I don't know wherever we are supposed to be going. It is H3 on the map or something and you know what? I am not going to talk about what happened. I don't want to encourage copy cat behavior. Instead I am going to focus on t he victims. Three Beautiful Goblins cut down in the prime for their lives.

Never Forget

First there was guy in a vest. He leaves behind his goblin comrades and had dreams to be a chef. He was always there to help a comrade with a joke or a smile. His vest was cool and he had plans to put some patches on it when he got back to commemorate his adventure.

Next there was monacle and scarf guy. He loved pickles and was kind to animals.

Finally there was female guy. The only woman in the group she was able to hold her own in male dominated environment and really earned the respect of the guys. Not that she should have had to fight as hard as she did to earn that respect. She was a real trailblazer, who was snuffed out before her time. I guess she lived her life like a candle in the wind. She was a light against the darkness even though it was dangerous for he to even exist in the spaces she occupied.

Fleshing out Portown After a Trip to the Coast

I really think that there is a place on the Zenopus Archives where he talks about how Port Town was based on some Coastal town in Northern California. I have now been to such a town, Mendocino California.  I wandered the coast looking for places where smugglers would meet. late at night and trade goods away from the eyes of the law.  Of course there were sea caves but there were also small islets that only existed when the tide was low.

Near the deepest part of the Cove you can see a cave entrance. These were up and down the coast. It's easy to imagine them being deep and leading to an underground smuggler's lair. Or imagine the water washing all the way under the graveyard and taking the bodies away. The lost souls are washed out to sea. They become angry and crawl to shore reanimated by a hatred for the living.

Perhaps not far away enough for meeting at night to exchange contraband but there were numerous islets like this ready to plunge beneath the sea when the tied came in.

Of Course there were also arches and sea caves were giant crabs or whatever could hide out. I am thinking sirens that call out to lost children. There was also a colony of bees living in the rocks. They were not as exciting as sirens but they were real and I had to avoid them to get to the outcropping I wanted to get to.

Clearly the home of a giant lobster who feeds on the kelp in the bay

Come closer child let me sing to you.

Also you could have an encounter with some seabirds that lead you to some treasure in their nest like a locket.

There was this spooky tree with dead limbs covered in moss or something. I would put this in the graveyard in Portown and have smugglers meet here to negotiate with ghouls on moonless nights.

Finally people had carved skulls and faces into the sandstone on the cliff. I could imagine a hidden sandstone altar carved in a hard to reach place or just that the citizens of Portown carve the faces of their sailors that die at sea into the sides of the cliffs. Imagine a sandstone relief to those lost at sea stretching all the way back to the founding of Portown. What clues and secrets would be embedded there?

Night's Dark Terror Sessions 9 &10: Tower of the Abusive Narcissist

Imagine spending the better part of a session listening to the cleric talk to some stupid wolves that have nothing to do with anything. That is what it is like to play D&D with me.

 

 Session 9: Talking to Wolves and killing a Cow.

I don’t feel like a lot happened this session because my character spent like half an hour talking to some wolves. That’s my bad. That one is definitely on me. The wolf conversation was largely fruitless

Then we went to Lake Titicaca where the bad guy is. He is a wizard and he wants this tapestry thing. We accidentally rescue the guy we were supposed to rescue. Or maybe that was what we were trying to do. I can’t remember.

This guy we were trying to rescue was all “go after the evil wizard and take his treasure!” we were all “Dude you look terrible, you have been tortured, get your priorities straight we are taking you home!”

We killed this guy. It was no big deal

Anyway we made a new goblin friend named Jithers. We killed a bunch of stuff in front of him. Including the hobgoblin who we were hoping would help us kill the rapey horse man. At first we were trying to get a job working in his posse but he wouldn’t let us join because he was racist.

Anyway Jithers had a lot of trauma related issues we hoped to work through in the next session.

Session 10: Raised by Narcissists

Jithers had a really hard go of it. Through our continued talks with Jithers  we were able to lay out the whole pattern of abuse. The evil wizard had classic Borderline Personality Disorder with serious narcissistic tendencies. Jithers had developed a really unhealthy attachment.

We told Jithers that he could come live on a horse farm and animal therapy. We offered him a way out but he just wasn’t ready to take it. I think this evil wizard character has been built up into an omnipotent godlike character in his mind to the point where Jithers cannot imagine himself as a separate distinct entity.

So, we left Jithers and took the guy we rescued, who was wondering why his homestead was now being marketed as a therapy retreat for goblins.

When we found our horses they were being dry humped by evil baboons. So we started humping those baboons back to establish alpha dominance. Long story short; it worked. As we humped the baboons into submission we gazed back to the evil wizards tower and saw Jithers gazing out the window at us. It was a really gut wrenching experience.

Just thinking about life after a hard day humping and being humped.

On an unrelated note, one of the other players couldn’t be there so he let someone else control your character. This is really dangerous not because your character will die but because when you get back your character will be into some weird stuff. Oso the fighters new thing is pissing on everything. He pissed on a baboon. HE pissed on the wizard’s tower. He pissed on the dead wizard. Spoiler: we kill the wizard.

Oso wrote a long letter to the evil wizard in his pee telling him that we had the thingy he was looking for and to come and get it. Then we went home to the goblin therapy horse farm and got ready. We did like an A-Team montage. There was this whole battle. Then the wizard came and it was scary for a bit but I guess he didn’t know fireball so we all lived. After he was dead Oso pissed on him and then we had to loot his body after it was covered in Oso’s urine. Oops.

I know it is gauche to bring you weird fetishes into the game but I swear we are not into pee stuff (that I know of) so it is ok. Besides, this is More Calvin and Hobbes bumper sticker peeing than sex peeing.

Night's Dark Terror Session 8: Grooming Horses the Bad Way

TSR UK, You should be ashamed.

Bytor Goldenbeard was horrified.

 Last session I said we would have to kill more stuff in the petrified forest lair of the Wolfsex goblins or whatever they are called. We did. We slaughtered them. We did it for money; money we have no hope of spending. We did it just to look at the money We did it just because we could. I felt debased.

Little did Yutnib and company know that standing in that den of goblins covered in goblin viscera breathing in goblin blood and feces and sweat, that was as clean as they were going to feel all session.

They had to talk to Loshad again. The party had hit a dead end. The trail leading to the guy we were looking for had run cold. It turns out Loshad had known about the human trafficking operation the whole time and had just neglected to tell us. He had been letting us run around like assholes.  We came crawling back to him begging him to tell us how to save the people that had been kidnapped by this ancient cult or something (I am not exactly sure what is going on honestly).

Loshad refused unless we did him a favor. He wanted us to kill a werewolf. We asked why. I wish we had not asked why. So it turned out that Loshad had been ‘in love’ with this horse. A regular horse not a magic talking horse. This horse was the property of a woman who became a werewolf (through no fault of her own near as we can tell). As a werewolf she ate the horse that was Loshad’s “lover.”

We were all repulsed. This guy wanted us to kill a sentient being because this sentient being killed a non sentient being for food. Also he was having sex with the non sentient being. We wanted to slay this pervert right there but we could not because he was the only one who knew where the spooky city of whatever it is we are trying to find is.

Naturally the party was disgusted. Some were disgusted because this horse guy was disguising himself as a regular horse to have sex with horses. Others were disgusted because we spent ninety minutes or so discussing the ethics of a half horse half man taking the shape of a regular horse to have sex with horses instead of continuing on with the adventure.

Regardless I think we all agree we need to kill

this creepy rapey horseman. 

Nights Dark Terror Interlude: Stolen Content

The dungeon master no doubt about to go insane from isolation recreated some scenes from our last session with his dolls.

We were fighting some goblins in a petrified forest. The dm and I made those big petrified trees about a year or so ago out of poster tube and coffee grounds.  The smaller logs are dowel with coffee grounds. 

He got minis to play Frostgrave with me but I fled to California so he is all alone. If anyone is in the Philadelphia area and wants to play Frostgrave reach out. It will probably give him the motivation to base his minis.

 Maybe one day we will get to play in person again instead of over roll20 or zoom.

Night's Dark Terror Session Report: Hate the Police and See Through All Time and Space

Hobgoblins.

 Session 6: Hate the Police

This session we do some more nonsense in the cave with the orcs and rescue this gnome we were supposed to rescue last time.

He knows what he did.

More importantly my cleric memorized speak with animals because I have never had a character memorize that spell ever. Obviously, I talk to my horse.  Uh oh Turns out the creepy horse guy from before his name is just the Russian word for horse has been up to some funny business with our horses!

We confront him later when he is trying fine us for riding our horses too long. He tells us he is prepared to issue a citation for Horsey Negligence.  We tell him that we know that he is a perverted corrupt half-horse horse cop.  He rides (or I guess he just runs cause he is the horse)  away and we start looking for his archenemy, who is this wolf who breathes cold breath or something (I don’t know it doesn’t really sound that scary to me).

Vlack the Spooky Hobgoblin has a magic wolf and bat friends. He is really into watching us sleep. We chase after him to figure out what his deal was  and he got very confrontational so you know he is up to something weird.

Vlack has bat friends

Anyway we find the wolf and this hobgoblin guy riding it and they are totally unreasonable. They do not want to chase down the horse abuser. Instead we fight him (turns out cold wolf breath only does like 1d6 damage or something so no big deal).

Also I talk to some bats. and the magic user, Io charmed a hobgoblin and we named him “Hob Lowe”.

Hob Lowe our charmed goblin also seems to have very limited knowledge about his life before he became charmed. He can tell us very little about what he was doing with the main bad guy Vlack the spooky Hobgoblin.

Session 7: Seeing through all Time and Space

We had to cross a stream filled with piranhas, which was pretty classic.

was a real turning point for Bytor Goldenbeard, our stout and hearty dwarf. You see, Yutnib the cleric (that’s my guy( who is a girl)) was plotting a way to kill or subjugate the horseman fro his continued transgressions against defenseless horses. Bytor asks “wait is this all real, with the citations and horses?”

The snake guys had a cool snake statue outside their house.
Here is Scrud Pud posing with it.

 Yutnib insists that it is real but now it seems like we are living in a fractured unreality. How can we say which part of our shared unreality is ’real’ and which isn’t? When we were joking about the horse guy being a sexual predator was that a joke. Did the fact that the players playing the characters and the dm all seemed to buy into and laugh at the joke make it a real part of our shared reality?

Inside the snake boy house there was some really cool graffiti by the wolf boys. We asked the snake boys if they wanted revenge but they wanted to die instead.

Can we undo it? Are Yutnib and Bytor now living in parallel unrealities where the horse guy both is and isn’t a pervy cop? Is one of our characters having a schizoid embolism? Are both? Will the walls of unreality come crashing down around us? Are we now playing Philip K. Dick & Dragons? Are we playing two different games? What is the nature of this game we are playing?

we also did  some stuff actually related to what the module is actually about. So we kill a bunch of stuff.

Hob Lowe died in a daring raid on the wolf boys