Cookery in the DungeonVerse

I cook.

There is a process to it, and it doesn't readily apply itself to gaming. A game-accurate system would be just as many dice rolls as combat, and not very fun. I also read that creating a proper mini-game within an existing game requires using a different system of resolution than the main game. This is certainly true, how many video games have been enhanced by a fishing mini-game? There was also the Golden Saucer from FF7 where all of the prior mini-games are turned into arcade games inside a game, how meta! The one that I think got the most mileage out of me was one of the Tekken games had a bowling mini-game in it and I think my buddies and I spent more time bowling than fighting each other.

The thought I had was going to run on the Take 10 rule. If a character has a sufficient high skill and no threat of danger, they can take their time on a skill check and take an automatic 10 (out of 20) and easily accomplish any sort of regular or routine task. The elements of the Cooking Mini-Game are Scavenger Hunt, Collecting and Crafting Recipes (like magic spells), and Inventory Planning. Each element adds or takes away from the Take X number, or add dice for checks that cannot be cruised through.

To the Elements!!!

Cooking Implements

Quite simply this is the assemblage of the tools of the trade for cooking. It is unlikely for a single character to be expected to carry the entire cooking kit, as it could become quite heavy. The more pragmatic answer involves losing the entire cooking kit if the character carrying it falls into an abyss or is left behind in a trap.

None - improvised cooking gear using the character's weapons and armor. Gonna make soup in a helmet, stir fry inside the knight's round shield? Gross. -5 to max Take X.

Inferior Cooking Implements - Welcome to Cutthroat Kitchen, how well can you cook using only a skillet with a hole in it, a dagger, and a cook pot that's crumpled in on one side? -3 to max Take X.

Basic Cooking Implements - The bare minimum, a few tools, a few pots or pans, -2 to Take X 

Regular Cooking Implements - Nothing fancy, no bells or whistles, or basically what Samwise carried in his pack on the way to Mount Doom. Take X is the base level of 10

Good Cooking Gear - A good selection of cooking tools and implements, this probably is a bit heavy. +1 to Take X

Superior Cooking Gear - your cooking gear is the envy of career cooks, the modern equivalent being celebrity-endorsed cookware that costs a few hundred dollars, not for a set, but for each piece. Your skillet costs as much as your sword. +3 to Take X

Epic Cooking Gear - Delicious in Dungeon level, your adamantine wok doubles as a superior quality shield is you are willing to risk it. Epic cooking gear is made of exotic dungeon materials like adamantine, tarasceen steel, mithril, and the like. +5 to Take X

Legendary Cooking Gear - You own magical named cookware and its a bit weird isn't it, having the skillet version of Excaliber? +8 to Take X.

Dry Goods

In Oregon Trail terms, dry goods represent the dried and preserved foods that a group would carry with them so they could make food while they traveled. This was expected to be supplemented with opportunistic foraging and hunting, as well as access to water.

None - Are you completely unprepared? You have nothing? Can you even start a fire? -5 to Take X

Inferior Dry Goods - You bought iron rations, just iron rations, didn't you? -4 to Take X

Basic Dry Goods - congrats on remembering Oregon Trail, you've got salt, flour, lard, and bacon. you are not likely to end up recreating the Donner Party. -2 to Take X.

Good Dry Goods - hey look at you champ, you've got legumes, rice, flour, salt, a bit of sugar. Is that coffee? I'm proud of you. No mod to Take X

Superior Dry Goods - Different kinds of dry legumes, rice, flour, salt.. are these spices? You actually might enjoy dinner with your companions and might gain the confidence to try making your own recipes. +1 to Take X

Epic Dry Goods - A full stocked spice rack, selections of flours, beans, rice, and multiple kinds of cured meats, are these bouillon cubes, are you on vacation? +3 to Take X

Legendary Dry Goods - Are these dried Senzu beans? How did you get these? Ice peppers? Is this Lacrymose Dungeon Salt, you bastard!!! You are here on a cooking expedition, aren't you? +5 to Take X

Recipe

Recipes are spells, cooking is an alchemical process. Without some sort of guidance, a cook is flailing. Sure, there are culinary warlocks who have some otherworldly sense for what works and what doesn't, but that is going to be a character class and not a skill.

None - You have no idea what you are doing, Take X is reduced to Zero and you must roll dice, may the odds be in your favor.

Inferior Recipe - Cut up hot dogs and put them in baked beans to make Beenie-Weenies at home. Cut Take X in half.

Basic Recipe - Salt and pepper, put the meat in a hot skillet for a few minutes on each side, making sure it is cooked all the way. Pork chops anyone?

Good Recipe - Finish the steak with butter in the skillet, with a few sprigs of rosemary, serve with mushrooms sauteed in the skillet after removing the steaks. Roast potatoes on the side with butter and chives. Add 1 Bonus Die for exceptional success.

Superior Recipe - After cooking the steak, deglaze the pan with wine, reduce and season, creating a pan sauce. This is excellent served over the steak. If done with chicken instead, add onions and you've made Coq al Vin. Add 2 Bonus Dice for exceptional success.

Epic Recipe - Tomahawk ribeye with sauteed wild mushrooms and horseradish mashed potatoes, oh, and the red wine that went into the sauce pairs well with the steak. Garnish with salt with exceptional personal pizzaz. Add 3 Bonus Dice for exceptional success.

Legendary Recipe - the grandmaster chef has bequeathed you one of his secret recipes, and this is a good thing because if you prepare Chimera flesh wrong, you will kill everyone at the table. Add 5 Bonus Dice for exceptional success.

Ingredients

Possibly the most decisive part of cookery, the previous three entries are supporting in nature, and without ingredients, your characters should be getting ready for bread and bacon, bacon and bread, and those delightful iron rations. Gaining these ingredients requires Foraging (as a skill) to find passive food sources. This is a good place to find fresh herbs, edible plants, fruits, an so forth. In a dungeon, foraging is more difficult since they tend to be underground, and that means lots of mushrooms, gastropods, insects, and other unpalatable fare. Hunting is also included, with characters taking time to go find mundane animals to snare or kill. This is fresh meat, but requires bleeding, cleaning, and butchering. Canny cooks will butcher all they can, cook what they can, and then smoke the rest to replenish dry goods. Hardtack and jerky can go a long way between good ingredient hauls. The last and most interesting angle is harvesting monsters for their edible parts.

None - came up empty, looks like it's biscuits and boiled beans.

Inferior Ingredients - You might have been better off killing and cooking the Carrion Eater giant grubs rather than running them off of what they were eating. You can probably cover up the spoiled taste with salt and spices, but you won't be able to hide it in the morning when the entire team has gastric distress. Those wilted green mushrooms might be poisonous, but maybe if you soak them first ... 

Basic Ingredients - a brace of coneys will do fine, and we found some sunchokes and those are almost like taters, precious.

Good Ingredients - bagged a deer did you?  And wild carrots, my good man, did you find a bottle of wine too?

Superior Ingredients - A trove of fresh vegetables like onions, peppers, and wild spices, and a basic dungeon monster that isn't horrific or humanoid, well done. The party will remember this meal if they survive all the way home. Gain a status bonus for an hour.

Epic Ingredients - Produce taken from dangerous flora, advanced dungeon monsters, and spices that border on magical. They will be talking about this in the future and after retirement, the old gang will get together on occasion just so you can cook this one again. Gain a status bonus for 24 hours.

Legendary Ingredients - The hard about eating a dragon isn't so much cooking it, the hard part is getting to the parts that aren't scorched from its death, and not still encased in armor. Like the ortolan, this meal is so sumptuous in its ingredients that you must cover your head lest the gods see your culinary indulgence. Likely a meal like this is a once in a lifetime event. Gain a permanent stat boost.

Player Input

There are five things the player can do in this process, the most key one is playing the description game. The other four are being cognizant of HEAT, SPICE, ACID, and FAT.

None - the player has nothing to add, no bonus dice. No effort, no reward.

Inferior - I don't know much about cooking man, but like we cut the Vaporeon up and cook it in the skillet? (Heat mentioned) +1 Die

Basic - I'm no cook, but if we chop up that cockatrice, that's like a chicken isn't it? Bread it in flour and fry it? Can we do that? (Heat, fat, technique mentioned +2/+3 dice added

Good - A crabman is still a crab so we flip the corpse over on top of a big fire we build and cook it inside its shell and let the barbarian break it open with his hammer. We have butter, and I mean that's New England, right? I think that was a Fallout Recipe? (Technique, innovation, fat, disturbing, and funny) +3/+4 dice added.

Superior - You know, the gorgon in 2e is just a cow in Colossus cosplay, use the pole axe like a can-opener and we make gorgon-bull steak bulgogi, we've got onions and we dont have to make biscuits with the flour every time, right?  Flatbread? (technique, innovation, non-obvious solutions, spices, baking) +4/+5 dice

Epic - So I take the crystal wok we got from the elves and start chopping the ranger's foraged goods into it while the fighter cleans the peryton, I instruct him to remove the liver carefully. Peryton foie gras is really expensive back at the castle and we can't afford it there. This is a fortune's worth of the stuff. Sear it off with wine and herbs, oh, did anyone pick citrus in their supplies, this needs lemon juice. Oh, we're calling lemons Puju fruit? Fine, whatever (Really getting into it, butchering, heat, spice, salt, acid) +5/+6 dice

Legendary - your player knows how to cook better than you do. You should probably let them run the cooking mini-game section of the campaign. A good sign is if they can quote Gordon Ramsay, Delicious in Dungeon, and have strong opinions about olive oil versus butter, or share cooking memes on social media. Bonus, if someone comes up with something that sounds interesting, they might make it for the next game session.

Cookery Notes

On a fundamental level, cooking can be disturbing. This is easy to overlook as modern cooking by far an large usually only involves opening cans and boxes and prepackaged prepared protein. A news report said that today fewer than 15% of home cooks use whole or bone in protein in their cooking. That means people aren't doing things like frying chicken, or using a whole chicken in their cooking. When I went grocery shopping the store only had 5 whole chickens in the meat counter and I live in a town of 14,000 people. The bin holding the frozen chicken nuggets and frozen boneless skinless chicken breast was the size of a truck trailer. Butchering an animal is a messy process. In more primitive cooking and high cuisine, the difference between the most choice cuts and the offal (unwanted or low value innards) is a matter of perspective. The liver and thyroid glands (sweetbreads yo) are considered very high on the desirable list. The intestines, stomach, and other parts not so much.

In a survival scenario where calories and nutrients are going to be few and far between, everyone is going to be looking at a paleo/keto diet. The most calorically valuable parts of a carcass are the blood rich organs like the liver and the kidneys. The highest calorie density is in the skin. These are also the first parts to spoil and rot, while the muscle tissue requires the most work to cook, and digest, and also lasts the longest when left out.  A proper butcher and cook is going to look like a serial killer as a take an animal apart and start sorting out the choice cuts, the parts they are going to keep, what is going to be smoked and dried, and what is going to be discarded as far from the party as possible.

Time to get cooking!

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