The Adventure Cuisine Championship Post Mortem

This one is for Space Brother and Down to Earth Sister. 

It’s hard at this point to look back to how this module’s inception came about. It’s been years now. I know my wonderful wife, Ashe, and I had recently finished playing Adult Swim’s Battle Chef Brigade. I know it was well before HMHC……. But that’s about it? As a semi-reformed fat slob, I have a love of food and cooking. D&D is about killing monsters. Battle Chef Brigade is about killing monsters and eating them. So, why not? I guess? Honestly, I was just in the beginning of figuring this whole TTRPG creator thing out (which I still haven’t really figured out and I dunno if I ever will). It probably just came from the burning desire to play tabletop games with Ashe. That’s where all this came from really. 

I had the concept for Maliq di Infitisimo early on. There had to be a dynamite MC that would carry the rizz of the event, and a magnificent djinni with a purple afro felt right from the jump. Looking back, I think he was probably inspired by DJ Professor K from Jet Set Radio Future to some degree. Hella hyped about Bomb Rush, btw. IYKYK. I sat at a game cafe on a day off and sketched a bunch of celebrity judges I liked from Forgotten Realms lore and past contestant winners. Think something with the energy of MTV’s Celebrity DeathMatch, but with D&D characters that like .005% of the population of this doomed planet have even heard of. 

It felt right at the time. 

Then a bunch of nonsense work and life happened, blah blah blah. I feel like this one’s gonna end up rambly in the not so fun way. Other than knuckling the fuck down and getting the damn thing out, there are probably only three things really worth talking about: printing woes, the goddamn OGL debacle, and veganism. I’m going to tackle these in reverse order. 

Veganism, or How I Stopped Fearing Possibility Space and Love the Design. I never fucking tested this module before release. I tried to, many times, in fact, but the only test that ever happened was essentially run after release. One of the peeps I wanted in on the original game was a good fellow Queer named Joyce who I know from the local music scene. She used to manage a house venue in town that my pretentious metal band played a few times, and I really felt and still feel a kinship with her ride or die punk DIY soul. I definitely wanted her to play in this game with me- I wanted a game group full of Queer weirdos and still do. Anywho- I asked her if she would test the game with us and she happily agreed on one condition. She wanted to play a Vegan character. For those who don’t know me personally who are reading this (How did you get here??? What wrong turn did you take???) Ashe and I are vegetarian or what I sometimes deridingly refer to as vegan-lite. We mostly eat vegan food. We’ve done so for years. Yet, for some bullshit brainrot reason, I had not even considered how my own world view and lifestyle would work in the context of the game. I have a pretty anti-violence stance in regard to most real world situations, but my TTRPGs feature a lot of it. I suppose it’s one of those weird ideological suspensions of disbelief that I was unaware of in myself at the time. The question: How the FUCK does a Vegan even participate in the Adventure Cuisine Championship? It goes against the very premise. 

Step 1: Kill monster. 

Step 2: Cook monster into food. 

Step 3: Eat food. 

Step 4: ????? 

Step 5: Profit. 

Joyce’s answer: “I could just like convince certain monsters to give me what I need through kindness and whatnot.”

Ladies, Gentlemen, and other more distinguished guests who do not fit the gender binary, I can confirm that she’s a genius. This is how the entire character of Donovan Pierres came about. What kind of fantasy food character would abhor the violent nature of the event? Well, a vegan, would- badum tish. Luckily, I had invented a weird not-vampire who had never forcibly fed on another person in an earlier failed project who easily fit the bill. This was sort of a synthesis between a Forgotten Realms take on Tokyo Ghoul, and Vampire the Masquerade. Characters who are turned vampire can’t eat regular food because it turns to shit in their mouths, but ONLY if they’ve preyed on another person’s blood. Somewhere in FR lore, I once read that Strahd von Zarovich, the OG vampire and all vampires subsequent to him couldn’t stand in the light of day because of their sins. They literally burned in normalcy of day, because they lost their humanity not because of vampirism, but because of barbarism. What if there was a vampire who hadn’t forcibly taken blood, but successfully bartered for it from consenting parties? Sound familiar? Unfortunately, that playtest never came about for unrelated reasons, but I thank Joyce all the same for her brilliantly down to Earth insight. Moving on.

Are you as tired of telling people who have no idea what the OGL is about the OGL as I am? For better or more probably for worse, I have found myself in the role of TTRPG Ambassador Supreme for my local area. I suppose it has to do with the fact that I treat all art as equal despite the medium, a radical stance, I know. If it wasn’t readily apparent by this stupid thing you’re reading (again, if you don’t know me personally how did you find this???) I think a lot about Tabletop Roleplaying Games. In my local community, I’ve kind of become “That D&D Guy.” I was chill af about this until Wizards decided they wanted to shit their own ass about 3rd party publishing. Now I am not so chill about it. The fact that the term D&D is effectively still synonymous with TTRPG is a metaphorical mobster cinder block pulling the medium to the bottom of the ocean. TL;DR: While I was working on The Adventure Cuisine Championship, Wizards decided that all of the 3rd party and indie scene’s D&D content actually belonged to Hasbro’s council of corporate ghouls from the beginning of time until the sun finally blows up the mother fucking Earth. Yes, seriously. All Your Base Are Belong To Us. Spoiler alert, [EVERYBODY DISLIKED THAT].

The select and astute 2 people reading this will have connected the dots. If I include Forgotten Realms characters in my game, I have to license my game with Wizards. If I even so much as write “compatible with Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition.” I have to license my game with Wizards. If I even THINK about the Forgotten Realms, I owe WOTC a quarter. I had a crisis of faith. Do I continue to support my corporate overlords or do I rework a bunch of my game so that it functions without the “World’s Most Popular Roleplaying Game.” TL;DR2 Electric Bugaloo: I did rework all that shit, but then WOTC got slammed with universal criticism and MORE IMPORTANTLY a ridiculously large amount of people canceled their D&D Beyond subscriptions. The corporate ghouls became frightened about their precious profits to the point in which they walked their nonsense back and MORE IMPORTANTLY made the System Reference Document (SRD) Creative Commons (CC). [EVERYBODY LIKED THAT]. I did in fact license my game with WOTC, so that I could put it up for sale on DriveThruRPG. It has since sold like 3 copies there. Moving on.

Lastly, printing woes- or here’s how I am a layout and publishing n00b. First and foremost, if you bought a physical copy of ACC, I have to thank you and apologize to you. Folks like you, make the indie publishing world even possible, even when the creators are pretentious hacks who don’t know what they’re doing (like me). The OG print run of ACC is rife with printing errors that I could do nothing about. The printer I used (which shall remain unnamed here, cause Momma Missy didn’t raise no snitch) fucked me pretty hard. 

I worked out what I wanted with one of their guys, and even approved a print proof that I thought looked pretty good. The print run was not what I approved. Since the printer only finished the books THE DAY BEFORE the convention I was taking them to, I couldn’t find the time to pick them up when the shop was open. My wonderful better half, Ashe, who holds the vague and catastrophous humanoid shape you see before you together, picked them up while I was at work. She of course is a well adjusted adult, and isn’t as immediately distrustful of everyone and everything like I am. She didn’t think to thumb through every single sodding page of one of the books before taking them home. I, and by extension, everyone who bought one of these wretched books were dealt a raw deal. Word to the wise: make sure you or whoever picks up your product knows it well enough to check whether or not it's a good product. Though the printer fucked me here, I consider this one to be solely on me. Y’all, forreal I’m sorry. 

As for the game book itself, I’d say I’m pretty proud of it. Other than the fonts and borders used (which were licensed from a digital retailer), everything seen in the book was generated by me. The writing, game design, backgrounds, art assets, illustrations, and layout was all me. This is pretty much a one-man-show. I had a lot of people look at it, and talk to me about it, but the real work was all me. At the end of the day, that’s gotta be worth something. 

Thank you to a particular Space Brother for motivating me to write this one. Thanks to everyone else for reading. I’ll have the post mortem for Kessler Syndrome out sometime soon.

Cheers,

Wilderwhim