A lot of medieval fantasy games have rations, sometimes referred to as "iron rations"...

Bread full of living bugs. Crunch, crunch.

I just googled it and I have to say that's quite a cool idea.

retainers, linkboys, teamsters etc all double as emergency rations fyi

Turtles live for a long time and require relatively little resources to keep alive, so you can just carry them around and kill one when you need some eats.

It get's tiresome after the third stinky day

Isn't that a good way to end up a wendigo or something?

only in Canada

Yup, live turtle, packed in a bag or some such. I doesn't run away, it doesn't make noise. Even if you don't feed it lasts for weeks. Just make sure it doesn't choke and stuff soaked rag in its mouth so it doesn't die of thirst. Perhaps it's cruel but it certainly works.
Back in the age of sail, ship crews were picking them off tropical islands by hundreds. Natural canned meat.

I'm trying to think of fantasy animal with similar properties.

>ash cake
Before I looked it up that sounded disgusting

Flour, oil and sugar have a pretty high shelf life. Protein would be a pain in the ass though.

>Protein would be a pain in the ass though.
eggs?

Theyd probably just break.

Beans?

Live pigs, with a large enough group. Keep a bunch on leashes/herded around, let them eat whatever plants they encounter. Keeps a source of meat with you. It's a conquistador thing.

you got that the other way around

Thou hast fallen into my trap.

None of the mentioned staff are people by union standards.

They have it good, you become a plain ol' ghoul elsewhere.

I'm surprised no one mentioned honey.

And unions are not people by any common sense standards. Your point?

Jerky... Beans... Fellow adventurers...

Though it seems protein rations are just about unnecessary in D&D - how often do you go for very long without having a random encounter that involves killing something you can cook?

My point is you can eat them without being a cannibal. I thought that was obvious, but then I remembered I'm on Veeky Forums.

>eat humans
>not become a cannibal
pick one.
it's not cannibalism if it's an elf

>can't read
>posts on Veeky Forums

it's not cannibalism if you're an elf

Rice, beans, flour, oats (or equivalent cereals), hard cheese, preserved meat (salted, dried, potted), honey, dried fruit, and whatever you can forage to round out your diet (leafy greens, roots, nuts). If you're in one place for longer than one night, hunt or fish. If you can't do that, set snares for small game (beware of fae).

AVOID BERRIES, unless you're really blocked up (a ration diet combined with riding all day will do that) or know your flora REAL good.

The real bitch of all that isn't packing the food, it's packing the cookware to make enough for everyone and finding enough variety/spices that you don't go insane from a month of the same shit for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

That said, there is NOTHING like fresh steak, cornbread and dutch oven beans'n'fat after a hard day's travel.

So you'd be a wendigo, but it's not legally binding?

Iron rations are food that will keep a man in fighting condition when other resources have run out. They do not include water and will require a lot of it to be digestible.

When you go campaigning you gather supplies as you go, there's just no other way. The logistics of supplying food over large distances are too prohibitive. You might hunt along the way, set snares at night, and fish when camping near a body of water. Raiding armies will live off of the winter stocks of the locals, regardless of allegiance.

So iron rations usually don't come out very often. They must therefore be very durable, and that means dry. Sugar or salt crystals will keep out even trace humidity. Then they're wrapped in waxed linens or sealed in a cask.

The content can vary from culture to culture. It could be vegan bars of nuts and seeds stuck together with syrup, or small game biltong, jerky, or cured sausage. Smoke dried fish filets will keep. But it could even be canned fruit jelly and hardtack.

If there's a cook or a veteran in your troupe you may even hope for a selection of cured meats and cheeses, pickled vegetables, and freshly baked bread.

>bringing rations

Aaaand with that I'm off to do some Redwall cooking.

Damn, I am hungered.

Enjoy!

Grain is what was carried. The longer the travel, the bigger the shit-ton of grain. Porridge, bread, then some porridge. In truth though, the medieval traveler didn't stray very far, by himself. He went from one village to the next, and at for lunch whatever was left from last-night's dinner at a farm-house.

If he had a large company, they would bring food. What says is utter nonsense. Anyone who thinks that explorers or campaigners fed themselves through hunting and foraging has never actually done any outdoor traveling. Know what you don't do after ten hours of riding and hiking? Go for a light hunt. And foraging isn't really a viable method of feeding yourself, away from a coast-line.

Explorers brought huge armies with shit-tons of food, and the butchers and bakers to prepare it. Anyone going in a small group brought shit-tons of grain (and probably starved to death). Or they had boats and wagons that they ventured out for a couple days from, but then went back to. Or they starved to death.

gimme da sase doc

I wonder what happened to that guy

Sauce is provided to everyone who browses Veeky Forums on a daily basis

Dungeon Meshi

Well there are the Amundsens, and there are the Lewis and Clarks. To make a blanket statement like that seems ill considered.

I was thinking of campaigning like a crusader, invader, or raider. Non perishable food was a huge issue, as evidenced by scurvy. You couldn't just buy cans and have them carried by a vehicle. That's steam age stuff.

Not that user: by "campaigning", I'm assuming he means taking your army afield. And while yes, you did have a prodigious supply train, you also produced quite a bit of your food stock by forage and plunder. There's just too much moving flesh to supply it by wagon train. You start running into a problem that looks like the rocket equation, where transporting enough food to feed over a certain mass of men takes so much grain for the horses that you're adding fuel haulers to haul fuel for the fuel haulers.

Which is the reason a well supplied garrison or keep often had an advantage in a seige situation. If you have the food stock you could wait for help.

But on the flip side you also had to wait for help while your enemy may be able to get a supply train going.

Crusaders just traveled from one town to the next. There were specific routes that were taken, and the town along them all got rich off the travelers.

Raiders didn't "forage." They simply stole. No sizeable army can meaningfully hunt or forage. Along a well-provisioned coast, tribal people were able to keep a few dozen fed by constantly moving.

>To make a blanket statement like that seems ill considered.
It's not. Lewis and Clark made it via DM-fiat.

Plunder yes. Forage no. That's what the whole "agriculture" thing is all about. You cannot keep a group of 400 alive off forage. And if you can, it is only by having all of them work, every day, at doing virtually nothing else. And armies can't hunt. There is nothing to hunt, when hundreds people are nearby.

This is why a Northwest Passage was so important to the British. It took an explorer who learned the ways of the natives, who survived with a knife, an ax, and a rifle on the Northern rivers and in the boreal forest, to pass from today's East coast of Canada to the Pacific.

He' still right about hunting and foraging. Both are very time- and labor-intensive activities that yield few calories per square mile. A company of sixty men could live decently enough by hunting and foraging, if they had a large temperate forest all to themselves and nothing better to do all year. Ten thousand men moving in a straight line from point A to point B? They'll catch a boar and some deer and that will go to the toffs. A largeish medieval army would have to stretch itself widthwise across half of Europe in order to feed off the land and remain fighting fit.

>No! An army cannot live like adventurers!
Who claimed they could?

Of course you won't live off the land if you are pressed on marching or travel in an army. But before public transport there's just 3 ways to go: forage, get from locals, or bring. And you won't be able to carry more than a week.

Consider what your argument is.

>Who claimed they could?
The people in the comments that I helpfully linked my responses to.

>Consider what your argument is.
Historical.

Honey, it can't spoil....might attract bears, but being an adventurer does that anyway

>Historical
...not really though? I mean you have dismissed 3 historical references and provide none yourself. At this point you are Virtualoptim.

Pemican packaged in rawhide was known to last almost a year.

Honey is devoid of nutritional value.

Crusaders bought food. Raiders stole food. What was your third "historical" source for the claim that large groups hunted and foraged to feed themselves?

Nobody did, is the thing. Find another straw man to beat on.

If Dragon Tortoises are a thing, an army could have a couple captured and drag them along on campaign.

Really? Because...
>When you go campaigning you gather supplies as you go, there's just no other way.
>I was thinking of campaigning like a crusader, invader, or raider
>Not that user: by "campaigning", I'm assuming he means taking your army afield. And while yes, you did have a prodigious supply train, you also produced quite a bit of your food stock by forage and plunder.
>before public transport there's just 3 ways to go: forage, get from locals, or bring. And you won't be able to carry more than a week.

You seem to have lost an argument, then claimed you were discussing something else the entire time.

I was thinking, does Mimic have flesh on the inside?

>Honey is devoid of nutritional value.
Bitch please, people can survive on just rice and water for months.

Rice has carbs. Honey is pure sugar.

You're right that you can live weeks off it, because you can actually survive weeks without any food at all. If you did try eating sugar every day while starving, though, your nervous system would fall apart faster than if you simply starved.

Mimics are largely muscle, but also contain "fleshy organs." It seems like they might be edible. But might also be a bad idea to eat, because their cells are filled with super-glue. Ask Ed Greenwood--it's a true fact.

Bring out some bally good scoff and tucker, wot wot!

But seriously, Redwall cooking was always feast stuff. It was never travel food.

I've been running diet of rice & potatoes for aprox. 3 months at one point, lost like 10 pounds but other that than I observed no ill effects.

Potatoes are hella nutritious. Can't live off just them forevs, but for a long time.

>Raiding armies will live off of the winter stocks of the locals, regardless of allegiance.
You seem to have conveniently omitted one sentence.

Trolls.

Whatever you need to tell yourself, user. I'm sure none of those statements about large groups surviving off forage were meant to imply that large groups could survive off forage. My bad.

Does it matter? Players never track the fucking things.

I just make them spend x gold everyday based on their lifestyle to cover their daily food , shelter if in town etc as gold is the only thing players bother tracking. It's unlikely they'll run out of food using this rule unless they run out of gold but at least it lets me include rations in the game and maybe one of them will get smart and realise it's much cheaper to buy and track the rations.

We should get dumbing down the Internet into the Olympics. You would have raided Rio, with supplies or without.

Maybe if you boil it long enough...

Doesn't the meat taste really foul?

I think they turn to rocks in your stomach

It wasn't invented im real life until the 20th century, but dehydrated eggs can be made at very low tech. Just saying.

youtu.be/ppiWt9jvQh4

Potatoes and Irish butter, THAT you can live off of forever.

No, really.

Some people like realistic camping simulation.

Dragon Tortoises are notoriously un-docile.

Your fantasy world could easily have 2-ton tortoises, walking domesticated vegetable-spirts, or some kind of fucking edible Pokemon... such creatures don't usually get listed in the Monster Manual, so you have to make them up yourself.

Real Adventurer's just chew on bars of iron for sustenance.

What are you, some kind of pussy? Eat your iron boy, its good iron, don't go wasting it.
Don't wanna hear you crying about being "so hungry" when we're ballsdeep in the abyss.

It really depends on how anal the players are, as well as how much they want to roleplay "living it up."

If you wanna be slightly less gritty, try bannock. Just gotta carry flour, baking powder, and some raisins or chestnuts and you'll have delicious bread every day

What this guy said.

So damn good. I usually do carrot and coriander soup with fresh bread when I want to get all rustic, but if I'm in a feasting mood...

wonderlandrecipes.com/2014/09/11/deeper-n-ever-turnip-n-tater-n-beetroot-pie/

If the question was about armies then an entirely new paradigm applies. Explorers and adventurers most definitely fed themselves off of hunting. You don't hunt every time you stop, you hunt when you're resting for a couple days so you have time to hang the meat (because otherwise you're going to get ridiculously sick). Fresh meat, well covered, doesn't keep for weeks, but it'll stay edible for days. You want to save your non-perishables for when there's no game.

And there is no such thing as a 'light hunt'. Even a deer is a bitch to dress, quarter, and haul (and that's if you're good enough to kill it quick and not have to follow a blood trail for hours, not easy when you're bow hunting).

youtube.com/watch?v=CmqTHrAeuf0

to clarify, it's great in a cast iron skillet. Not a problem when I'm canoeing, since an extra couple pounds is just some ballast. If you wanted, you could carve a board from a log, then slap the dough on it and prop it up facing your fire.

If you open your mouth so much sunlight can shine into your digestive system.

A griddle is worth the weight. The back of a shovel will do in a pinch.

See:
youtube.com/user/jastownsendandson

Basically the go-to resource for pre-modern frontier/military cooking.

>I'm trying to think of fantasy animal with similar properties.
Using turtles as "natural canned meat" is already pretty fantastical.

I'd probably just have a wizard or a sailor or something take a live turtle out of a sack during mealtime and get ready to to cook it for dinner. He could even have a bunch of baby turtles to make into snacks. Kinda fucked up, but in principle not that different from the way people treat chickens and other domestic animals bred for slaughter.

>5 dozen eggs = Gaston eating sixty goddamn eggs a day
I'm glad I'm not the only one who immediately thought of this.

I can't even remember what they ate when they traveled. Anyway, the whole universe got me down by being too vegetarian.

>open your mouth so much sunlight can shine into your digestive system.

The good animals had fish now and again, and the vermin had poultry or even occasionally were cannibals or eating other sentient creatures, like the wolverines or some reptiles.

That stupid cocksucker you were replying to was a fucking idiot. He's acting as if hunter-gatherer societies never existed, rather than being the majority of human history. Both my grandparents on my father's side were from places where you had to hunt to survive the winter, and that was in the twentieth fucking century. Survival by foraging isn't what you do if you can avoid it (you sure as fuck have food if you can), but it is something that can and does work.

Climbing expeditions in the Himalayas will bring along a few goats following the same logic.

I don't think packing goats in a bag is such a great idea...

What the fuck do you think sugar is if not a carb

It has electrolytes.

It's what plants crave!

Maybe he's American. They don't have sugar.

If we don't have sugar, then what's the big container of white powder in my pantry?